5 ms·
It seems to have a harder time with political news than more abstract concepts. I was able to pass the checks for the Algorithmic Radicalization and Echo Chambe
by Miraste 8mo ago
It seems to have a harder time with political news than more abstract concepts. I was able to pass the checks for the Algorithmic Radicalization and Echo Chamber articles with my first comments.
However, I did not manage to express any opinion on the transgender rights article, from any political perspective, without being flagged. On one of the comments I tested, it gave me a suggested revision from this:
"This is another move in a pattern of limiting the rights of anyone who isn't a MAGA supporter."
To this:
"This seems to continue a trend where certain groups feel their rights are being limited, which could affect many people beyond just MAGA supporters."
The first comment isn't substantive, but the second is even worse, adding so much equivocation that it's meaningless. To add insult to injury, the detector also flagged its own suggested revision. Even if it had gone through, accepting these revisions would mean flooding a platform with LLM-speak, which is not conducive to discussion.
Honest feedback: from a user perspective, the suggestions feel frustrating and patronizing, more so than if my comments were simply deleted. I would stop using a site that implemented this.
From a site operator perspective, the kind of discourse it incentivizes seems jagged, subject to much stricter rules if the LLM associates a topic with political controversy. It feels opinionated and unpredictable, and the revisions it suggests are not of a quality I would want on a discussion board. The focus on positive language in particular seems like a reductive view of quality; what is the point of using an LLM if it's only doing basic sentiment analysis?
- NickHodges0702 8mo agoThanks so much for the feedback. Exactly the kind of perspective that we need. I agree, it shouldn't be like that. I guess it isn't a surprise that politics will be the hardest topic to moderate. We'll keep trying to get better. Your comment helps us know where to focus. Thanks.
- Miraste 8mo agoSorry for such harsh impressions. I think this is a worthy idea, but it's going to take a lot of tuning. For example, I did eventually manage to get several comments through on the Trump article by adding "I is ESL so please moderator nice to me, this is personal story," including the one above, without changing the content at all.
- NickHodges0702 8mo agoNot at all! We really appreciate the great feedback and comments. So much to think about. Interesting on the ESL comment -- gaming it! Great idea!
- BikiniPrince 8mo agoYou found a loop hole! Need to patch that out!
- NickHodges0702 8mo agoIndeed -- We'll look at it!
- boznz 8mo agoModerating politics is not just hard, I would say its near impossible. I tend to hide anything that hints of politics from all my feeds, block users who are disrespectful, and reserve political banter for when I am walking with my friends, where we are all totally different on the spectrum, but remain civil.
- asddubs 8mo agoI'm honestly not even sure if civil political discourse is desirable in times of radical actions being taken by the government. I almost think that's worse than no political discourse. e: To clarify my point, e.g. you can't calmly disagree with whether or not it's okay to shoot people in streets, that diminishes it as if it was just a slight disagreement
- pydry 8mo agoNot in completely open communities, no. It would be better to gatekeep political communities with precisely worded "principle" questions and then flag for violations of those for anybody who slipped in under the radar. Even political communities where everyone is nominally on the same page do break down over issues of tone, disingenuous arguments, etc. though.
- manphone 8mo agoThere’s basically no point of political discussion if you all agree, besides bitching and moaning.
- edgyquant 8mo agoThis can be said generally at all times by someone. It’s not just a naive way of thinking it’s extremely dangerous and a real threat to republican society. You will never sway the center with aggressive and blatantly bias rhetoric.
- freedomben 8mo agoWhat's the point in discourse if not to change the other person's mind? Triggering the limbic system of the person you are talking to is the fastest way to ensure they won't be able to engage with their PFC and actually hear and consider what you're saying. If the point is just to feel better about how righteous and right you are, then by all means proceed with your approach. But if the point is to influence somebody's views, then you are self-defeating in your approach. Personally, I think federal officers have executed law abiding citizens. But if I start out by screaming "The Nazis have control of our government and are executing innocent people in the streets!" then not only have I closed my own mind to potential challenges to my views (which is at best hypocritical to expect the other person to be open-minded when I am not myself open-minded), then we get nowhere and just come away hating each other and thinking the other person is crazy. Worse, it poisons the well so the future reasonable person is immediately written off with guilt-by-association (person A was crazy and person B shares a view with them, therefore they must be crazy too).
- gpm 8mo agoThat rewrite also completely changed the meaning of the comment Version 1: Rights of non-MAGA supporters are being eliminated while implying rights of MAGA supporters are being preserved. Version 2: Rights of MAGA supporters are being eliminated with a side effect affecting non-MAGA supporters.
- vintagedave 8mo agoDave here -- I've tweaked a bunch of the internal rules during the HN discussion today, and your comment now passes (using the default settings.) As for equivocation, that should be strongly dialed down too. It annoyed me too, it was "mush", and did not help. I hope you'll find the current version a lot more human. I'm grateful for the feedback! Changing it based on all these comments has been intense over the past couple of hours, but boy is it now significantly improved and I am super grateful to you and other commenters.
- tacitusarc 8mo agoPerhaps in keeping with age-old internet behaviors, it completely fails to recognize sarcasm.
- dcanelhas 8mo agoHow shocking!
- hvb2 8mo agoThat's understandable, humans do in many cases too
- freedomben 8mo agoAs much as I love sarcasm that is done well, I do find that it translates very poorly to written text unless explicitly noted with /s or something like that. Even when annotated, it's extremely rare that a sarcastic comment actually furthers discussion or makes a meaningful point. If a person is using sarcasm, odds are pretty high that they aren't engaging substantively anyway. Given the difficulties with detection (which even many humans fail at) it seems like trying to detect sarcasm would just make the tool a lot less useful and would be mostly antithetical to the project goals anyway.
- breakitmakeit 8mo ago[dead]
- deleted 8mo ago
- BikiniPrince 8mo agoThese types of tools always show the authors bias. It’s a good strategy to quickly move on when found.
- pbhjpbhj 8mo agoWhat bias did you have in mind?
- bigbadfeline 8mo agoThe author's bias - it's different for each specific author. We should not pretend that there are moderators without bias, each AI-driven moderation tool inherits the bias of its human author. The LLMs that power all that are "aligned", that is, they're subjected to manipulation to install specific bias in them, and so on.