2 ms·

I don't think things are this simple though. Spaces that attempt to either have no moderation, end up over-representing those who hit up against moderation else

I don't think things are this simple though. Spaces that attempt to either have no moderation, end up over-representing those who hit up against moderation elsewhere. Having moderation requires having an opinion, and the opinion ultimately becomes the product.

mellosouls 2y ago
Undoubtedly it's a difficult task, but I think there are degrees to which you can at least have a decent go at good faith moderation (eg see HN) and the article is appealing to a perspective that that good faith isn't there.
dartos 2y ago
A search engine isn’t really a space though, it’s a tool. It’s not a social network. The job of a search engine is to return relevant (by some metric) results given a query string, not to show you posts you’ll agree with or which the authors of the search engine find tasteful. You might say that the relevance metric is a kind of bias, and you’re not wrong, but those biases can usually be empirically measured and understood, unlike the biases of unmoderated people in social networks.
- danpalmer 2y ago
  I would indeed say that relevance measurement is the bias. You can build a bad search engine with simple rules like TFIDF, but pretty much anything more than that needs opinion and bias. For example, if there's a content farm that rips off content from another site, assuming you don't want to show both the original and the farmed content (which would be a bad search engine by most people's metrics), you need an opinion on which the original was. Sometimes you might know for sure, but often you won't. Even if you do know who the original was, you need the opinion that the original is better than the copy. When you have content farms providing summarised versions, now you need an opinion on whether summarised content has value instead of/alongside the original – summaries do provide value, but how much? None of this gets to politics or the legal requirements for handling things like hate speech or other content that is illegal in some/all regions, and you've already got essentially editorial control being exerted. Social media moderation and search engine results are fundamentally the same problem, it's just that the base interaction is a search rather than viewing a following feed or viewing a video.
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    Yes, exactly. If a group of anarchists puts up spammy websites optimized for TF-IDF, blocking or downranking them suddenly means you are biased against anarchists. The flip side is that history is littered with examples of rules which seem neutral on their face but which have very biased intentions. For example “literacy tests” for voting, or poll taxes.

mellosouls 2y ago

Undoubtedly it's a difficult task, but I think there are degrees to which you can at least have a decent go at good faith moderation (eg see HN) and the article is appealing to a perspective that that good faith isn't there.

dartos 2y ago

A search engine isn’t really a space though, it’s a tool. It’s not a social network. The job of a search engine is to return relevant (by some metric) results given a query string, not to show you posts you’ll agree with or which the authors of the search engine find tasteful. You might say that the relevance metric is a kind of bias, and you’re not wrong, but those biases can usually be empirically measured and understood, unlike the biases of unmoderated people in social networks.

danpalmer 2y ago
I would indeed say that relevance measurement is the bias. You can build a bad search engine with simple rules like TFIDF, but pretty much anything more than that needs opinion and bias. For example, if there's a content farm that rips off content from another site, assuming you don't want to show both the original and the farmed content (which would be a bad search engine by most people's metrics), you need an opinion on which the original was. Sometimes you might know for sure, but often you won't. Even if you do know who the original was, you need the opinion that the original is better than the copy. When you have content farms providing summarised versions, now you need an opinion on whether summarised content has value instead of/alongside the original – summaries do provide value, but how much? None of this gets to politics or the legal requirements for handling things like hate speech or other content that is illegal in some/all regions, and you've already got essentially editorial control being exerted. Social media moderation and search engine results are fundamentally the same problem, it's just that the base interaction is a search rather than viewing a following feed or viewing a video.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  Yes, exactly. If a group of anarchists puts up spammy websites optimized for TF-IDF, blocking or downranking them suddenly means you are biased against anarchists. The flip side is that history is littered with examples of rules which seem neutral on their face but which have very biased intentions. For example “literacy tests” for voting, or poll taxes.