7 ms·

Asymmetric Content Moderation in Search Markets: The Case of Adult Websites

86 points by amadeuspagel 1y ago

motolov 1y ago
Interesting abstract. I can see similar concepts applied to eg govt regulation, censorship, etc (only one side monitoring, other sides absorb content of the monitored) BTW, it looks like your PDF is missing figures/illustrations/etc (there is placeholder text) Not sure if this was a publishing tech issue or if missed in authoring
- nh23423fefe 1y ago
  i left reddit because i was tired of mods destroying communities (with "moderation" which is really just shitty curation by your shitty taste) porn consumption is even more demanding. if you want "that release" you dont really care about the 2257
- Freak_NL 1y ago
  The whole document looks weirdly formatted, but you can click the red numeral in the placeholder text for the tables and figures to jump to the appendix where it is. Not sure if this approach is intentional. It's certainly weird. You would think that with a decent LaTeX template academic papers would look reproducibly good, but for some reason some (many?) institutions and authors choose weakly justified convention over typographically sound formatting optimised for actual reading. The font choice (not too bad, but not pleasant either), the outsized leading which competes with the paragraph spacing. Look at how badly the references section on page xxviii scans. The word missing from the abstract is 'PornHub', of course. They're not just studying “a dominant online platform”. The fact that it is PornHub seems relevant enough not to hide it in the abstract to me.
  - mcphage 1y ago
    > The word missing from the abstract is 'PornHub', of course. They're not just studying “a dominant online platform”. The fact that it is PornHub seems relevant enough not to hide it in the abstract to me. The fact that it was PornHub is mentioned repeatedly in the paper itself. Leaving it out of the abstract seems fair—they picked PornHub because it was a site that deleted 80% of their content, not because they're specifically interested in studying PornHub. And, they study several of MindGeek's sites, not just PornHub exclusively.
    - Freak_NL 1y ago
      Sure, but omitting it is like having a study about 'a dominant social medium' and not mentioning that it is Facebook or X in the abstract (or a study about radicalisation of young men focusing on 'an anonymous imageboard' and not putting 4chan or whatever in the abstract). These are for the most part unique beasts, not interchangeable venues. It is relevant information for anyone scanning through dozens of abstracts on the topics addressed.
  - gwern 1y ago
    This always frustrates me about paper abstracts. Whether it's economics or AI, everyone seems to make a point of being as vague as possible, when it would sometimes take 1 tiny word to clarify it hugely . You'll see paper abstracts talk about how they analyze "an important and widely deployed commercial family of large language models (LLMs)" and then you have to skim 10 pages before you finally find out that they mean 'GPT'. I don't think the authors are even doing it maliciously or deliberately, because it's like how students or kids struggle to write anything. It's just a fallback when you're struggling to condense it and have gotten lost in your forest. Like how you can ask someone, "OK, that's all great, but what did you do? What are you trying to say here?" "Oh, I Xed the Y with Z." "There you go. That's your abstract."
- bschne 1y ago
  I also find this annoying, but it‘s common practice to do this while a draft is still being worked on and not yet getting submitted to a journal (SSRN is ≈ SocSci Arxiv)
  - tough 1y ago
    Why isn't there a global-like open platform for science like ArXiv?
    - bschne 1y ago
      path dependency with fields having developed their own early on I guess?
      - tough 1y ago
        so are these like other fields don't use LaTeX but other formatting? I can see for example if its' mostly word documents from source on that area of science maybe there's no point on arxiv like pipeline that builds from source. wondering if it will ever converge there, like a wikipedia only about science/research but of all areas
        pmyteh 1y ago
        Some of it is formatting, some of it is just field dependent. SSRN is commercial and "good enough" for many people. It (at least used to) advertise itself as a social network for social science academics. There's also SocArXiv[0] and others, which are purer extensions of the arxiv model. Part of the issue is that the arxiv doesn't want every discipline in science, so a certain amount of duplication is necessary. [0]: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv
- dkga 1y ago
  This is how some people in economics format their papers due to how some top journals require manuscripts to be. Source: I'm an economist (although I personally prefer to place figs/tables where they are supposed to be).
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
readthenotes1 1y ago
"What do you do?" Study porn
- dkga 1y ago
  A: "I can't believe I caught you in that website!" B: "It's for research, really!"
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/tabs https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/tabs
- arkh 1y ago
  > Study porn At least they're not studying how to gobble data on everyone to sell ads with a 3 letter agencies backdoor.
frankfrank13 1y ago
> Our findings highlight how asymmetric exposure to content moderation shocks can reshape market competition, drive consumers toward less regulated spaces, and alter substitution patterns across platforms. Or at least one very specific market and platform
ssalka 1y ago
> The shift did not take place immediately. Within six months, traffic at smaller, less regulated sites had grown by 55%, and at larger sites by 10%, with point estimates implying that the traffic was entirely diverted to competing firms. This suggests that regulating only the largest platforms may push traffic to fringe sites and less controlled spaces. This rings true to me, especially in the recent context of AI adopters looking for uncensored alternatives. This frame of thinking can be applied not only to models, i.e. many move away from OpenAI/ChatGPT in search of less restricted models, as well as being applied to sites providing AI resources. Just the other day, CivitAI (the current leader for distributing custom checkpoints, LoRAs for image-centric models) announced it was taking a much more heavy-handed approach to moderation due to pressure from Mastercard/Visa. Its users are simply outraged, and many I think will be leaving in search of a safe haven for their models/gens going forward.
- krige 1y ago
  Why are Mastercard/Visa even trying to police this? It's not the first time (Japan got famously hit by them hard), what is this puritan stranglehold.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Because otherwise they end up with criminal charges. Civil cases that result in monetary damages is one thing but executives going to jail is something they actually don't want to have happen.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      This, incidentally, is the actual reason we need to decentralize the payments infrastructure. Because they can do this to not just porn -- something they're formally not allowed to prohibit -- but to anything else, behind closed doors, by leaning on the centralized payment intermediaries to censor whatever they don't like.
      - throwaway290 1y ago
bigbacaloa 1y ago
[dead]
trod1234 1y ago
This study is an example of how you don't do science. It fails to define critical term definitions, and uses such terms in contextual scopes that depending on the scope meant may contradict itself, with the context absent (i.e. welfare). Fails to account for impactful actions that occurred in the same time period (i.e. internal catalog search changes, external search changes, and other changes related to requirements of all large businesses doing business in the US related to FOSTA-SESTA Act 2018). Fails to vet data collection methodology or identify limitations of the dataset (Similarweb, bad data in bad data out). Most people searching for porn use protection, fails to address collection methodology shortcomings when data collection is thwarted. It is also entirely unclear how the study controls for duplicate signals. Fails by inserting value-based statements and asserting false narratives or flawed reasoning (a null hypothesis without alternatives, in a stochastic environment), also without proper basis, (i.e. the loss of 80% content and drastic changes in site discoverability/usability in aggregate). There are a few phrasings, coupled with the poor methodology, that make me think this paper/study was in large part generated by AI, potentially as a pre-fabricated narrative (soft-propaganda). The reasoning does not follow logically, and fails at obvious points where an AI would fail. On its face, this doesn't look like a sound study.
belorn 1y ago
For a content platform it seems natural that a sharp reduction in content by 80% would reduce the number of visitors. I wonder how this would play out if spotify or youtube removed 80% of their catalogs. I am reminded of how people said that spotify "won" over music piracy by simply being more convenient. Remove 80% of the music there, and my bet is that music piracy would see a massive upswing, together with legal competitors. 50% reduction in users do not sound unthinkable.
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  > Remove 80% of the music there, and my bet is that music piracy would see a massive upswing, together with legal competitors. There's some shows I want to go back and re-watch, but they're no longer on Netflix and out of print on physical media. I'm tempted to put my eye patch on and say "yo-ho-ho," but there's just so much content that I don't even have time to watch. > and my bet is that music piracy would see a massive upswing Which makes me suspect that if Spotify dropped 80% of its content, it really depends on which 80% gets dropped. There's just so much content available now that content that's not in major streaming platforms might just get forgotten.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    The special case of PH here was that it was close to the ""uncensored"" platform people claim to want: they used to allow anyone to upload anything, so most of their material was a huge pirate archive. Of course if you're not checking uploads then some of them are going to be CSAM. It's not unreasonable that if you're going to host nudity you have a positive legal and moral obligation to ensure that everyone depicted is a consenting adult who has consented to those images being shown on that site.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 1y ago
      You have that duty if there's nudity or not.
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
rsynnott 1y ago
Huh. I remember that happening, but I'm very surprised that they lost significant traffic over it; I'd have assumed that porn was, if not fungible, pretty bloody close to it, and, well, they still have a lot of porn.
perkins222 1y ago
[flagged]

86 points by amadeuspagel 1y ago

Interesting abstract. I can see similar concepts applied to eg govt regulation, censorship, etc (only one side monitoring, other sides absorb content of the monitored) BTW, it looks like your PDF is missing figures/illustrations/etc (there is placeholder text) Not sure if this was a publishing tech issue or if missed in authoring

nh23423fefe 1y ago
i left reddit because i was tired of mods destroying communities (with "moderation" which is really just shitty curation by your shitty taste) porn consumption is even more demanding. if you want "that release" you dont really care about the 2257
Freak_NL 1y ago
The whole document looks weirdly formatted, but you can click the red numeral in the placeholder text for the tables and figures to jump to the appendix where it is. Not sure if this approach is intentional. It's certainly weird. You would think that with a decent LaTeX template academic papers would look reproducibly good, but for some reason some (many?) institutions and authors choose weakly justified convention over typographically sound formatting optimised for actual reading. The font choice (not too bad, but not pleasant either), the outsized leading which competes with the paragraph spacing. Look at how badly the references section on page xxviii scans. The word missing from the abstract is 'PornHub', of course. They're not just studying “a dominant online platform”. The fact that it is PornHub seems relevant enough not to hide it in the abstract to me.
- mcphage 1y ago
  > The word missing from the abstract is 'PornHub', of course. They're not just studying “a dominant online platform”. The fact that it is PornHub seems relevant enough not to hide it in the abstract to me. The fact that it was PornHub is mentioned repeatedly in the paper itself. Leaving it out of the abstract seems fair—they picked PornHub because it was a site that deleted 80% of their content, not because they're specifically interested in studying PornHub. And, they study several of MindGeek's sites, not just PornHub exclusively.
  - Freak_NL 1y ago
    Sure, but omitting it is like having a study about 'a dominant social medium' and not mentioning that it is Facebook or X in the abstract (or a study about radicalisation of young men focusing on 'an anonymous imageboard' and not putting 4chan or whatever in the abstract). These are for the most part unique beasts, not interchangeable venues. It is relevant information for anyone scanning through dozens of abstracts on the topics addressed.
- gwern 1y ago
  This always frustrates me about paper abstracts. Whether it's economics or AI, everyone seems to make a point of being as vague as possible, when it would sometimes take 1 tiny word to clarify it hugely . You'll see paper abstracts talk about how they analyze "an important and widely deployed commercial family of large language models (LLMs)" and then you have to skim 10 pages before you finally find out that they mean 'GPT'. I don't think the authors are even doing it maliciously or deliberately, because it's like how students or kids struggle to write anything. It's just a fallback when you're struggling to condense it and have gotten lost in your forest. Like how you can ask someone, "OK, that's all great, but what did you do? What are you trying to say here?" "Oh, I Xed the Y with Z." "There you go. That's your abstract."
bschne 1y ago
I also find this annoying, but it‘s common practice to do this while a draft is still being worked on and not yet getting submitted to a journal (SSRN is ≈ SocSci Arxiv)
- tough 1y ago
  Why isn't there a global-like open platform for science like ArXiv?
  - bschne 1y ago
    path dependency with fields having developed their own early on I guess?
    - tough 1y ago
      so are these like other fields don't use LaTeX but other formatting? I can see for example if its' mostly word documents from source on that area of science maybe there's no point on arxiv like pipeline that builds from source. wondering if it will ever converge there, like a wikipedia only about science/research but of all areas
      - pmyteh 1y ago
        Some of it is formatting, some of it is just field dependent. SSRN is commercial and "good enough" for many people. It (at least used to) advertise itself as a social network for social science academics. There's also SocArXiv[0] and others, which are purer extensions of the arxiv model. Part of the issue is that the arxiv doesn't want every discipline in science, so a certain amount of duplication is necessary. [0]: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv
dkga 1y ago
This is how some people in economics format their papers due to how some top journals require manuscripts to be. Source: I'm an economist (although I personally prefer to place figs/tables where they are supposed to be).

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

readthenotes1 1y ago

"What do you do?" Study porn

dkga 1y ago
A: "I can't believe I caught you in that website!" B: "It's for research, really!"
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/tabs https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/tabs
arkh 1y ago
> Study porn At least they're not studying how to gobble data on everyone to sell ads with a 3 letter agencies backdoor.

frankfrank13 1y ago

> Our findings highlight how asymmetric exposure to content moderation shocks can reshape market competition, drive consumers toward less regulated spaces, and alter substitution patterns across platforms. Or at least one very specific market and platform

ssalka 1y ago

> The shift did not take place immediately. Within six months, traffic at smaller, less regulated sites had grown by 55%, and at larger sites by 10%, with point estimates implying that the traffic was entirely diverted to competing firms. This suggests that regulating only the largest platforms may push traffic to fringe sites and less controlled spaces. This rings true to me, especially in the recent context of AI adopters looking for uncensored alternatives. This frame of thinking can be applied not only to models, i.e. many move away from OpenAI/ChatGPT in search of less restricted models, as well as being applied to sites providing AI resources. Just the other day, CivitAI (the current leader for distributing custom checkpoints, LoRAs for image-centric models) announced it was taking a much more heavy-handed approach to moderation due to pressure from Mastercard/Visa. Its users are simply outraged, and many I think will be leaving in search of a safe haven for their models/gens going forward.

krige 1y ago
Why are Mastercard/Visa even trying to police this? It's not the first time (Japan got famously hit by them hard), what is this puritan stranglehold.
- fragmede 1y ago
  Because otherwise they end up with criminal charges. Civil cases that result in monetary damages is one thing but executives going to jail is something they actually don't want to have happen.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    This, incidentally, is the actual reason we need to decentralize the payments infrastructure. Because they can do this to not just porn -- something they're formally not allowed to prohibit -- but to anything else, behind closed doors, by leaning on the centralized payment intermediaries to censor whatever they don't like.
    - throwaway290 1y ago

bigbacaloa 1y ago

[dead]

trod1234 1y ago

This study is an example of how you don't do science. It fails to define critical term definitions, and uses such terms in contextual scopes that depending on the scope meant may contradict itself, with the context absent (i.e. welfare). Fails to account for impactful actions that occurred in the same time period (i.e. internal catalog search changes, external search changes, and other changes related to requirements of all large businesses doing business in the US related to FOSTA-SESTA Act 2018). Fails to vet data collection methodology or identify limitations of the dataset (Similarweb, bad data in bad data out). Most people searching for porn use protection, fails to address collection methodology shortcomings when data collection is thwarted. It is also entirely unclear how the study controls for duplicate signals. Fails by inserting value-based statements and asserting false narratives or flawed reasoning (a null hypothesis without alternatives, in a stochastic environment), also without proper basis, (i.e. the loss of 80% content and drastic changes in site discoverability/usability in aggregate). There are a few phrasings, coupled with the poor methodology, that make me think this paper/study was in large part generated by AI, potentially as a pre-fabricated narrative (soft-propaganda). The reasoning does not follow logically, and fails at obvious points where an AI would fail. On its face, this doesn't look like a sound study.

belorn 1y ago

For a content platform it seems natural that a sharp reduction in content by 80% would reduce the number of visitors. I wonder how this would play out if spotify or youtube removed 80% of their catalogs. I am reminded of how people said that spotify "won" over music piracy by simply being more convenient. Remove 80% of the music there, and my bet is that music piracy would see a massive upswing, together with legal competitors. 50% reduction in users do not sound unthinkable.

gwbas1c 1y ago
> Remove 80% of the music there, and my bet is that music piracy would see a massive upswing, together with legal competitors. There's some shows I want to go back and re-watch, but they're no longer on Netflix and out of print on physical media. I'm tempted to put my eye patch on and say "yo-ho-ho," but there's just so much content that I don't even have time to watch. > and my bet is that music piracy would see a massive upswing Which makes me suspect that if Spotify dropped 80% of its content, it really depends on which 80% gets dropped. There's just so much content available now that content that's not in major streaming platforms might just get forgotten.
- pjc50 1y ago
  The special case of PH here was that it was close to the ""uncensored"" platform people claim to want: they used to allow anyone to upload anything, so most of their material was a huge pirate archive. Of course if you're not checking uploads then some of them are going to be CSAM. It's not unreasonable that if you're going to host nudity you have a positive legal and moral obligation to ensure that everyone depicted is a consenting adult who has consented to those images being shown on that site.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 1y ago
    You have that duty if there's nudity or not.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago

rsynnott 1y ago

Huh. I remember that happening, but I'm very surprised that they lost significant traffic over it; I'd have assumed that porn was, if not fungible, pretty bloody close to it, and, well, they still have a lot of porn.

perkins222 1y ago

[flagged]