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The tech isn't the challenge with something like Reddit, even the comically inept Reddit leadership could figure it out after all. The difficult part is findin

The tech isn't the challenge with something like Reddit, even the comically inept Reddit leadership could figure it out after all. The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all the filth that tries to be posted. Only if they have a solution for that can try going their own way.

gaudat 3y ago
What happened with reddit is imo the mods affect the site's direction moreso than the administration or the devs. This is what happens when you put profit and cancerous growth above cultivating a community.
- witchesindublin 3y ago
  I really doubt that the entire moderation team of all the subreddits were capable of sweeping the entire right wing and most moderates of Reddit independently, and without pushback from international users who knew the moderation wouldn't be culturally sensitive. It had to have been centrally planned.
  - Levitz 3y ago
    There is admin intervention for sure, but I'm not sure if it's ideological or just advertiser appeasement. The removal of r/waterniggas (a sub about staying hydrated) seems absurd ideologically, even with that name.
    - gsinclair 3y ago
      Why on earth was there a sub about staying hydrated? Just drink some water, for crying out loud.
  - pokerface_86 3y ago
    don’t a couple power mods control the vast majority of the popular subreddits?
- wesapien 3y ago
  this is what happens when you let the patients manage the hospital. similar to what's happening in politics. the left and right extremists dictate the narratives. i can only dream when moderates gain some balls and put each extremes into their place. the moderates should be cultivating the culture.
tornato7 3y ago
It became a lot more possible this year to start doing AI content moderation. It won't be perfect, of course, but human mods are probably worse. and yes, I've used content moderation AIs in the past (like Google's Perspective API) and they're not really usable. OpenAI moderation endpoint, embeddings classification, or even just gpt3.5-turbo would work marvelously.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Have you tested this on a small scale?
  - Implicated 3y ago
    I have a reddit post database with ~6 million unique post titles and through various manual means I've identified ~100,000 of these post titles that _are_ spam. First, I parsed the posts for the most common phrases at varying lengths, hand identifying 3,730 individual strings that I felt indicated spam within the post title, post body, reddit username, reddit user description or comment bodies. These strings are then checked against new or updated records and things are flagged as spam as needed. It's been weeks since I've had to manually intervene and identify more spam strings - that's not to say I won't need to eventually as trends and techniques change (or, as it happens - reddit's api changes), but this was a fantastically successful means for identifying and analyzing obvious spam. Beyond the above, I used what was a relatively simple approach to identify similar post titles to those that were determined to be spam for a "if you thought that was spam then you'll probably think this is too..." type feature that was very effective. If reddit's api changes weren't happening I'd have already started training an ML model/NN or whatever chatGPT told me was the best one to use in order to classify these objects from the existing data. Ironically, all of this was in order to offer moderation bots to subreddits to help handle the spam problem. I started with scraping the API to play with meilisearch as a search engine but was just awestruck at the amount of _obvious_ spam that was getting through automod/reddit's own spam filtering (if there is any?) before being published/available via the API. I just didn't want to store all the metadata I was generating for all the spam posts and couldn't depend on reddit to police the issues on their end. Now they're still unable to get a handle on spam - but also cutting off the developers trying to help them.
scarab92 3y ago
Several popular reddit clients could team up, launch the site but require a small monthly subscription fee (which these clients already collect). Even $1 per month is enough to keep a lot of the outrage junkies out and you can use the revenue to pay for moderation of the smaller group of power users that remain.
cortesoft 3y ago
It isn't just mods, it's a community in general. If no one else is posting and commenting, no one wants to visit.
StanislavPetrov 3y ago
>The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all the filth that tries to be posted. The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all submissions and comments that conflict with the narrative being pushed by the establishment. Hacker News is great because many of the comments are substantive, thought-provoking and don't read like State Department press releases or obvious corporate astroturfing.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
pyuser583 3y ago
Honestly I think the tech is an issue. Most web development is downloading. Social networks have massive uploading and frequent changes. Twitter literally invented microservices because of this.
- preommr 3y ago
  > Twitter literally invented microservices because of this. Service-oriented architecture: Am I just a joke to you?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

gaudat 3y ago

What happened with reddit is imo the mods affect the site's direction moreso than the administration or the devs. This is what happens when you put profit and cancerous growth above cultivating a community.

witchesindublin 3y ago
I really doubt that the entire moderation team of all the subreddits were capable of sweeping the entire right wing and most moderates of Reddit independently, and without pushback from international users who knew the moderation wouldn't be culturally sensitive. It had to have been centrally planned.
- Levitz 3y ago
  There is admin intervention for sure, but I'm not sure if it's ideological or just advertiser appeasement. The removal of r/waterniggas (a sub about staying hydrated) seems absurd ideologically, even with that name.
  - gsinclair 3y ago
    Why on earth was there a sub about staying hydrated? Just drink some water, for crying out loud.
- pokerface_86 3y ago
  don’t a couple power mods control the vast majority of the popular subreddits?
wesapien 3y ago
this is what happens when you let the patients manage the hospital. similar to what's happening in politics. the left and right extremists dictate the narratives. i can only dream when moderates gain some balls and put each extremes into their place. the moderates should be cultivating the culture.

tornato7 3y ago

It became a lot more possible this year to start doing AI content moderation. It won't be perfect, of course, but human mods are probably worse. and yes, I've used content moderation AIs in the past (like Google's Perspective API) and they're not really usable. OpenAI moderation endpoint, embeddings classification, or even just gpt3.5-turbo would work marvelously.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
Have you tested this on a small scale?
- Implicated 3y ago
  I have a reddit post database with ~6 million unique post titles and through various manual means I've identified ~100,000 of these post titles that _are_ spam. First, I parsed the posts for the most common phrases at varying lengths, hand identifying 3,730 individual strings that I felt indicated spam within the post title, post body, reddit username, reddit user description or comment bodies. These strings are then checked against new or updated records and things are flagged as spam as needed. It's been weeks since I've had to manually intervene and identify more spam strings - that's not to say I won't need to eventually as trends and techniques change (or, as it happens - reddit's api changes), but this was a fantastically successful means for identifying and analyzing obvious spam. Beyond the above, I used what was a relatively simple approach to identify similar post titles to those that were determined to be spam for a "if you thought that was spam then you'll probably think this is too..." type feature that was very effective. If reddit's api changes weren't happening I'd have already started training an ML model/NN or whatever chatGPT told me was the best one to use in order to classify these objects from the existing data. Ironically, all of this was in order to offer moderation bots to subreddits to help handle the spam problem. I started with scraping the API to play with meilisearch as a search engine but was just awestruck at the amount of _obvious_ spam that was getting through automod/reddit's own spam filtering (if there is any?) before being published/available via the API. I just didn't want to store all the metadata I was generating for all the spam posts and couldn't depend on reddit to police the issues on their end. Now they're still unable to get a handle on spam - but also cutting off the developers trying to help them.

scarab92 3y ago

Several popular reddit clients could team up, launch the site but require a small monthly subscription fee (which these clients already collect). Even $1 per month is enough to keep a lot of the outrage junkies out and you can use the revenue to pay for moderation of the smaller group of power users that remain.

cortesoft 3y ago

It isn't just mods, it's a community in general. If no one else is posting and commenting, no one wants to visit.

StanislavPetrov 3y ago

>The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all the filth that tries to be posted. The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all submissions and comments that conflict with the narrative being pushed by the establishment. Hacker News is great because many of the comments are substantive, thought-provoking and don't read like State Department press releases or obvious corporate astroturfing.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

pyuser583 3y ago

Honestly I think the tech is an issue. Most web development is downloading. Social networks have massive uploading and frequent changes. Twitter literally invented microservices because of this.

preommr 3y ago
> Twitter literally invented microservices because of this. Service-oriented architecture: Am I just a joke to you?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]