[HN Gopher] Decentralised content moderation
___________________________________________________________________
Decentralised content moderation
Author : AstroNoise58
Score : 104 points
Date : 2021-01-14 13:39 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (martin.kleppmann.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (martin.kleppmann.com)
| colllectorof wrote:
| It's pretty obvious that the tech crowd right now is so
| intoxicated by its own groupthink that these attempts to come up
| with "solutions" are going to have awful results. You don't even
| know what the problem really is.
|
| _" I fear that many decentralised web projects are designed for
| censorship resistance not so much because they deliberately want
| to become hubs for neo-nazis, but rather out of a kind of naive
| utopian belief that more speech is always better. But I think we
| have learnt in the last decade that this is not the case."_
|
| What you should have learned in the last decade is that social
| networks designed around virality, engagement and "influencing"
| are awful for the society in the long run. But somehow now the
| conversation has turned away from that and towards "better
| moderation".
|
| Engage your brain. Read Marshall McLuhan. The design of a medium
| is far more important than how it is moderated.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| Solidly agree on all points, just wanted to plug a podcast
| favorite of mine, Philosophize This!, for a less daunting
| introduction to McLuhan's ideas [1] than "go read a couple
| hundred pages of fairly dense media theory books."*
|
| 1. https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/episode-149-on-
| medi...
|
| * Of course, I enjoyed the podcast episode so much that I did
| end up going on to read The Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium Is
| the Massage [sic], and wholeheartedly recommend both.
| totemandtoken wrote:
| Philosophize this is great. If you were a fan of McLuhan, you
| should read L.M. Sarcasas. His blog
| (https://thefrailestthing.com/) was how I was introduced to
| McLuhan, Postman, and other philosophers of media and
| technology. He has unfortunately shuttered that blog, but he
| has a substack newsletter thing that talks about similar
| things: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/people/18104
| 37-l-m-...
| gfodor wrote:
| It can be both. It seems obvious that a thing like Twitter
| ought to exist. The social system details, I'd agree, are full
| of unforced errors that lead to terrible outcomes. But the
| centralization is a real problem too. We can try to fix both.
| amscanne wrote:
| It's not obvious to me. I have a fantasy that people will
| return to thoughtful, long-form blogging and stop trying to
| impale each other on witty 280 character tweets.
| gfodor wrote:
| The essential element of twitter is asymmetric following +
| broadcast at global scale and penetration. Beyond that, I
| think the social system details are wide open.
| shockeychap wrote:
| I would add that, broadly speaking, any online system that
| tries to engage and involve _everybody_ will always become
| toxic. Forums like those of HN work, in part, because they 're
| not trying to attract everybody, only those who will contribute
| thoughtfully and meaningfully.
| timdaub wrote:
| > The design of a medium is far more important than how it is
| moderated
|
| IMO this is a great point. Social medias as they exist today
| are broken because they have been engineered on the assumption
| to make money on ads. Making money on ads works by engineering
| around virality, engagement and influencing.
|
| Another thing that McLuhan teaches though is that actually the
| (social) media is the message. And ultimately this lead to a
| Viking dude standing in the US capitol.
|
| Now, that whole situation was awful. But it was also hilarious.
| In social media, this was barely a meme that lived on for a few
| hours. Whereas within the ancient system of democracy, an
| intrusion into the parlament is breaking some sacret rules. And
| there, surely the incident will cast long winding consequences.
|
| To cut to the chase: Social media outcomes have to be viewed
| wearing a social media hat. Same for real-life. In this case,
| gladly. Another great case were this was true was Kony 2012,
| where essentially all the Slacktivism lead to nothing.
| youdontlisten wrote:
| > 'Social medias as they exist today are broken because they
| have been engineered on the assumption to make money on ads.
| '
|
| No, actually, they are created by _intelligence agencies_ ,
| for the sole purpose of gathering intelligence on everyone in
| the world. Full stop.
|
| Facebook was founded the very same day the DARPA LifeLog
| project was 'abandoned.' Look it up.
|
| The 'ad' stuff is just the nonsense they use to 'explain' how
| these companies somehow sprang up out of nothing overnight
| and continue to persist today, supposedly by selling billions
| of dollars of advertising, while you or I couldn't figure out
| how to even keep the lights turned on selling ads.
|
| All of the 'brokenness' of 'social' media, and of society in
| general, isn't by accident. It's all by design.
| abathur wrote:
| They are separate problems.
|
| Engagement is still roughly "our" problem, because ad-driven
| ~media are externalizing the costs of engagement on society.
| This is where the Upton Sinclair quote fits.
|
| Moderation is still roughly the platform's problem because it
| comes with liabilities they can't readily externalize.
| Engagement certainly overlaps with this, but most of these
| liabilities exist regardless of engagement.
| Steltek wrote:
| Engagement _is_ moderation! When FB chooses what to show you,
| it's already moderating things but simply using a different
| value system. The're a pushback on "censorship" today but
| censorship has been happening for years.
| abathur wrote:
| We may be playing semantics games, here?
|
| Mechanisms that optimize for increased engagement via
| dynamic suggestions for a user's feed or ~related content
| are _not_ moderation (unless, perhaps, the algorithmic
| petting zoo is the only way to use the service).
|
| This is exactly why I'm drawing a distinction.
|
| Many of a platform's legal and civil liabilities for user-
| submitted content are poorly correlated with how many
| people see it and whether it is promoted by The Algorithm
| (though the chance it gets _noticed_ probably correlates).
| This is ~compliance work.
|
| Their reputational liabilities are a little more correlated
| with whether or not anyone is actually encountering the
| content (and more about how the content is affecting
| people, than its legality). This is ~PR work.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| And Neil Postman's book, Technopoly
|
| Book Review: Technopoly
| https://scott.london/reviews/postman.html
|
| Interview with Neil Postman - Technopoly
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbAPtGYiRvg
| easterncalculus wrote:
| Exactly. Shifting the blame from trending pages to posters is
| just a way to blame users for opinions instead of platforms
| that spread them as fact. These websites want to be the problem
| and the solution.
| crmrc114 wrote:
| "What you should have learned in the last decade is that social
| networks designed around virality, engagement and "influencing"
| are awful for the society in the long run."
|
| Yes, and don't forget the 24 hour news cycle with its focus on
| getting outrage and attention through fear. I did not know who
| Marshall McLuhan was until now- thanks for the tip!
| ardy42 wrote:
| > Yes, and don't forget the 24 hour news cycle with its focus
| on getting outrage and attention through fear.
|
| Yeah, social media is just one in a series of possibly
| misguided techno-social "innovations," and it probably won't
| be the last.
|
| My understanding is that groups like the Amish don't reject
| technology outright, but adopt it selectively based on its
| effects on their society (and will even roll back things
| they've adopted if they're not working out). Wider society
| probably would benefit from a dose of that kind of wisdom
| right now, after decades of decades of "because we
| can"-driven "innovation."
| jl2718 wrote:
| They also force all 17-year-olds to go live with and as
| 'the English' for two years and then decide whether they
| want to go back, and what things should be brought back
| with them.
| swirepe wrote:
| > My understanding is that groups like the Amish don't
| reject technology outright, but adopt it selectively based
| on its effects on their society
|
| I can see how this would work for new things invented
| outside the Amish community. How does this work for new
| Amish inventions? How do they judge an effect a thing will
| have on society while they are still building that thing?
| ssivark wrote:
| Thanks for hitting the nail on the head. The problems we have
| are manufactured by the structure of the medium (BigCorp social
| media optimizing engagement at scale) that we cling to.
|
| For those looking for a relatively accessible introduction to
| McLuhan's ideas, check out his book "The medium is the
| message/massage". It's fairly short, and with illustrations,
| quite readable. I think it has more concrete examples than
| "Understanding media" which is a more abstract & denser read.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| It's worth remembering that content moderation is an activity
| which causes people mental illness right now, because it's so
| unrelentingly awful. Attempts to decentralize this are going to
| be met with the problem that people _don 't want_ to be exposed
| to a stream of pedophilia, animal abuse, murderous racism and
| terrorist content and asked to score it for awfulness.
| totemandtoken wrote:
| This point should be upvoted more. Decentralized moderation
| means decentralized pain. You can run standard philosophic
| thought experiments about "utility monsters" but at the end of
| the day a lot of online content causes real harm, not just to
| the direct victims but to the spectators. We'd need something
| like decentralized therapy in tandem with this type of
| moderation for it to even be considered remotely ethical, and
| even then I'm very skeptical.
| okokok___ wrote:
| I agree, I think people underestimate the need to incentivize
| moderators. This is why I think some kind of cryptocurrency
| based solution to moderation is necessary.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| Moderators don't just need incentives. They need therapy and
| support and monitoring and breaks and ideally, pre-vetting
| for strong mental health and no pre-existing bees in their
| bonnet.
|
| I worry that just making it a way to earn bitcoins risks it
| becoming one more way for poor people to scrape together
| pennies at the cost of giving themselves PTSD.
| okokok___ wrote:
| good point. It's almost like mechanical turk but for
| moderation.
| iamsb wrote:
| My suggestion is to not indulge in any content moderation which
| is not illegal. Only take down content which is required by a
| court order. Limit use of automated content moderation only for
| easy to solve cases like child pornography.
|
| Why?
|
| It is fairly clear at this point that content moderation at
| internet scale is not possible. Why? A. Using other users to flag
| dangerous content is not working. Which users do you trust to
| bestow this power with? How do remove this power from them? How
| do you control it becoming a digital lynch mob? Can you have
| users across political, gender, other dimensions All mostly not
| solvable problems.
|
| B. Is it possible to use machine learning? To some extent. But
| any machine learning algorithm will have inherent bias, because
| test data will also be produced by biased individuals. Also
| people will eventually figure out how to get around those
| algorithms as well.
|
| The causality between content published on the internet and
| action in real world is not immediate. It is not like someone is
| sitting in a crowded place and shouting fire causing a stampede.
| As there is a sufficient delay between speech and action, we can
| say that the medium the speech is published in is not the primary
| cause of the action, even if there is link. Chances of direct
| linkage are fairly rare and police/law should be able to deal
| with those.
|
| Content moderation, at least the way Twitter has been trying to
| do, has not been effective, created lot of ways for mobs to
| enforce censorship, and there is absolutely no real word positive
| impact of this censorship is. Only use of this moderation and
| censorship has been for right to claim victimhood and gain more
| viewer/readership to be honest.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| So it would be OK for a kids TV show website to have Viagra ads
| on it?
|
| Edit: I mean spam.
| protomyth wrote:
| That would be a stupid waste of money for an advertiser.
| Maybe ad networks are really the problem.
| iamsb wrote:
| I am only commenting on this in the context of community
| standards and user generated content and should not be
| extrapolated to all content in all other contexts.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| Sorry, I meant spam. If anyone can post a comment, and only
| "illegal" comments can be removed, that would surely allow
| a lot of email-style spam.
| iamsb wrote:
| That is a fair question/comment. In my original comment
| "Limit use of automated content moderation only for easy
| to solve cases like child pornography." . It is
| reasonable to extent that list beyond just child
| pornography. I did not intend to give impression than
| this list is exhaustive.
|
| In case of spam - Emails do show you spam emails, just
| hide them behind a spam folder. So instead of outright
| removal, it is possible to use similar techniques. And
| let users decide whether they ever want to see spam
| comments.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| > It is reasonable to extent that list beyond just child
| pornography.
|
| Seems like you're just back to square one there.
|
| You're making a list of unacceptable content. Whatever
| you put on there, someone's going to disagree.
|
| Whether it's automated or not probably isn't the issue.
|
| I see a lot of comment sections ruined by the typical bot
| spam (e.g. "I earn $5000 a minute working from home for
| Google").
| Pfhreak wrote:
| You realize that the approach you suggest pushes out a
| different set of people, right?
|
| For example, a soldier with PTSD may want an environment that
| moderates content. Or a journalist with epilepsy may want a
| platform where people don't spam her with gifs designed to
| trigger epilepsy when she says something critical of a game
| release.
| iamsb wrote:
| I understand. Most of those can be achieved using privacy and
| sharing settings though and does not necessarily require
| content moderation.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Doesn't that require the active cooperation of bad actors?
| Sure, you can create a filter to hide all posts tagged with
| "epilepsy-trigger", but that doesn't help if the poster
| deliberately omits that tag. Allowing users to tag other
| people's posts patches this issue, but opens up the system
| for abuse by incorrect tagging. (E.g. Queer-friendly
| posters being flagged and demonetized after being
| maliciously tagged as "sexual content".)
|
| At some point, there needs to be trusted moderation.
| md2020 wrote:
| I'd point out that child sexual abuse content is not an "easy
| to solve case". The extent to which Facebook, Google, and more
| recently, Zoom look the other way on this issue is horrifying
| and it seems to be a very hard problem due to the laws
| surrounding the handling of such material. I'm not faulting the
| laws, I just think this is an inherently hard issue to crack
| down on. Gabriel Dance and Michael Keller at the NYT did some
| very high quality reporting on this whole issue in 2019
| (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-
| sex-...).
| iamsb wrote:
| That link is pay/auth-walled for me, but I do get your point.
| Perhaps easy to solve was underestimate the technical problem
| as I was more thinking in terms of political problems. From
| that perspective no one, other than pedophiles themselves,
| disagrees with removing that kind of content. But completely
| agree on tech side of it.
| nathias wrote:
| There is absolutely no difficulty, if you don't want censorship,
| just have a button that hides content you personally don't want
| and leave that decision to all individual users. What others wish
| to see or not is not your decision to make, and if some of them
| are illegal that should be a job for the police not some ego-
| triping janny.
| tdjsnelling wrote:
| Totally agree. Why should someone else I've never met decide
| what I can and can't see? Leave that decision up to the
| individual user, and they can tailor their own experience as
| they desire. Allow them to filter out particular words,
| phrases, other users and so on.
| jrexilius wrote:
| Good piece. This line articulates the problem well: "without
| objectivity and consistency, moderation can easily degenerate
| into a situation where one group of people forces their opinions
| on everyone else, like them or not." And it gets to the core of
| the problem. Objectivity and consistency are extremely difficult
| to scale and maintain over time. They require constant
| reinforcement from environment, context, and culture.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| The central problem here is in what circumstances free people
| should give up the right to decide what information they can
| consume. This is not a question that can be answered easily but
| without first accepting it as the central issue we are not
| going to make meaningful progress.
| nindalf wrote:
| That's part of it. The other part is that free people say
| they don't want to see illegal content (child exploitation
| imagery, terrorism, scams, sale of opioids etc). The platform
| needs to moderate to remove that. Then the same users also
| say they don't want to see legal but distasteful (in their
| opinion) content like pornography, spam and so on. The
| platform then has to remove that as well.
|
| For most part platforms take decisions that will suit the
| majority of users.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Well, that should be solvable by giving people much better
| tools to manage their personal information intake. The crux
| of the problem is figuring out when it is OK to decide for
| them what they can or cannot see.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| I don't want to see "legal but distasteful" content (and I
| would also add: annoying, boring, stupid, etc.)... and what
| I mean is that I don't want it to be shown to me... but I
| am okay if other people show it to each other.
|
| So instead of some global moderator (whether it be one
| person, or some complicated "democratic" process) deciding
| globally what is okay and what is not, I want many bubbles
| that can enforce their own rules, and the option to choose
| the bubbles I like. Then I will only be concerned about how
| to make the user interface as convenient as possible, so
| that the options are not only hypothetically there, but
| actually easy to use also by non-tech users.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| That approach would not address the, in my opinion, valid
| concerns about speech that is harmful to society overall.
| There is a real problem here with disinformation and
| incitement to violence. I do not know that letting the
| self-virtuous tech sector decide what is or not allowed
| is the answer, but the problem is real.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Censorship resistance means that anybody can say anything,
| without suffering consequences.
|
| I can't even get to the heart of the poster's argument. That's
| because the shitty state of all current social media software
| defines "anybody" as:
|
| * a single user making statements in earnest
|
| * a contractor tacitly working on behalf of some company
|
| * an employee or contractor working on behalf of a nation state
|
| * a botnet controlled by a company or nation state
|
| It's so bad that you can witness the failure in realtime on, say,
| Reddit. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has skimmed comments
| and thought, "Gee, that's a surprisingly reaction from lots of
| respondents." Then go back even 30 minutes later and the
| overwhelming reaction is now the opposite, with many comments in
| the interim about new or suspicious accounts and lots of
| moderation of the initial astroturfing effort.
|
| Those of us who have some idea of the scope of the problem
| (hopefully) become skeptical enough to resist rabbit-holes. But
| if you have no idea of the scope (or even the problem itself),
| you can easily get caught in a vicious cycle of being fed a diet
| of propaganda that is perhaps 80% outright fake news.
|
| As long as the state of the art remains this shitty (and there
| are _plenty_ of monetary incentives for it to remain this way),
| what 's the point of smearing that mendacity across a federated
| system?
| gfodor wrote:
| You can cut off a large part of abuse by just creating a
| financial based incentive. Pay to gain access, and access can be
| revoked at which point you need to repay (perhaps on a
| progressive scale - ie the more you are banned, the harder it is
| to get back in.) Your identity confers a reputation level that
| influences filters so what you post is seen more often, so there
| is value in your account and you don't want to lose it. The SA
| forums did this and it helped immensely with keeping out spam
| (though not a silver bullet.)
|
| Any system where any rando can post any random thing with no
| gates is going to be much more of a slog to moderate than one
| where there are several gates that imply the person is acting in
| good faith.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I've been thinking hard about decentralized content moderation,
| especially around chatrooms, for years. More specifically because
| I'm building a large, chatroom-like service for TV.
|
| I think it's evident from Facebook, Twitter, et al that human
| moderation of very dynamic situations is incredibly hard, maybe
| even impossible.
|
| I've been brewing up strategies of letting the community itself
| moderate because a machine really cannot "see" what content is
| good or bad, re: context.
|
| While I think that community moderation will inevitably lead to
| bubbles, it's a better and more organic tradeoff than letting a
| centralized service dictate what is and isn't "good".
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| The problem is obviously that people very often do not want
| what they say they want.
|
| When a man says he supports freedom of speech, he isn't
| thinking about the speech that he wishes to limit as he finds
| it so abhorrent, and where that line lies differs from one man
| to the other.
|
| Such initiatives fail, as even when men come together and admit
| they allow for the most abhorrent of opinions to be censored,
| they seldom realize that each and every one of them has a very
| different idea of what that is.
| shuntress wrote:
| Do women have this problem as well?
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I'm sure you understand both how subsets work and what I
| intended to convey, no matter how much you dislike how the
| English language descriptively works.
| shuntress wrote:
| Do you mean to convey that women are a subset of men and
| therefor since your statement applies to all men that it
| also applies to all women?
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| That is the usage of the word "man", so noted in every
| dictionary, and backed up by millennia of descriptive
| usage.
|
| I'm quite sure you know that too, to be honest. It is
| something that every English speaker knows, but some act
| as if they not, because they do not like the actual
| descriptive, and historical usage of that word.
|
| From _Merriam-Webster_ : (1): an
| individual human especially : an adult male
| human
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/man
| shuntress wrote:
| I do not see it that way.
|
| But, fair enough. If it has always been that way we
| should keep it that way.
| skinkestek wrote:
| IIRC and AFAIK it comes from old norse, madr which used
| to mean human.
|
| They had separate words for female madr and male madr.
|
| Lately it has been a popular conspiracy that this is
| because "patriarchy" but the real reason is probably as
| mundane as simplifications over centuries.
| shuntress wrote:
| Obviously the evolution of the english language is so
| long-running and complex that no group could have
| conspired to implement a deliberate change such as this
| for whatever reason.
|
| With that said, please consider this:
|
| What type of societal structure would be likely to merge
| the words for "human" and "male" while leaving the word
| for "female" separate?
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _What type of societal structure would be likely to
| merge the words for "human" and "male" while leaving the
| word for "female" separate?_
|
| The origin of the secondarily developed semantic meaning
| of "man" as a "male adult human" is simply because when a
| man be anything other than an adult male, speakers are
| statistically more likely to emphatically note it in some
| way.
|
| Exactly what you did by asking "what of the women?" when
| it is quite clear from context to anyone what "man" means
| in this context. "woman" is an overtly marked phrase
| compared to "man" that arises from a need felt by some
| speakers to explicitly mark it when a person be female,
| but not when it be a male.
|
| A similar situation is that white U.S.A. residents are
| often called "Americans" but for other colors overtly
| marked phrases such as "African-American" or "Asian-
| American" are common in parlance, which, due to this
| behavior, eventually gives further currency to the term
| "American" as developing a secondary meaning of
| "specifically white American".
| skinkestek wrote:
| Would you mind telling us if knowing all this is related
| to your work or if you've cared to learn it just for fun
| or something?
|
| (Totally understand if you don't want to.)
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| My relationship with historical linguistics, and
| linguistics in general is that I consider it both
| interesting and pseudoscientific -- I will also admit
| that my dislike for the discipline might be colored by my
| negative experiences in conversing with linguists on a
| personal level. My interest is otherwise nonprofessional
| though I minored in it in university.
|
| Especially linguistic psychology is to be taken with a
| grain of salt -- what I said about how unmarked forms of
| words acquire secondary meanings is certainly the
| consensus in that field, but it is not as if it were ever
| established empirically, nor could it; it is simply an
| idea that appeals to the intuition and there is nothing
| obviously wrong with it.
| [deleted]
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| No, Old Norse "madr" and English "man" have a common
| ancestor in the reconstructed common Germanic stem
| *"mann-"; neither was loaned from the other.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-
| Germanic...
|
| Further analysis upward is more tentative:
| hypothetically, the word could share a common ancestry
| with the Latin stem "ment-" for "mind" which would make
| the semantic origin of *"mann-" to be quite obvious. It
| is likely related to the Sanskrit stem "manu-" which
| indeed means either "thinking" when used adjectivially,
| and "human" when used substantively.
|
| Old English certainly did not loan it from Old Norse and
| the Old English form of the word "mann", reflects what
| would be expected if it descended directly from common
| Germanic.
|
| The Old English words for "male" and "female" were "wer"
| and "wif" respectively; Old English "wifmann", as in
| "female human" is what gave rise to modern English
| "woman", and "wer" almost completely died out and only
| survives in "werewolf" and "world", the latter a
| simplification of *"wer-old", as in "a male's lifetime",
| undergoing significant semantic shift. "wif" is of course
| also the origin of modern English "wife", but had no
| implication of marriage in Old English.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Burns to be wrong but I learned something :-)
| edoceo wrote:
| "men" in the OG post above meant: all humans. As in "it
| is the nature of man". As "mankind". Man/men can be used
| as for two meanings. One is Males and the other is All
| Humans
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| It, as many words can, can be used for more than that.
| From the top of my head alone:
|
| - a member of the _Homo sapiens_ species.
|
| - a member of the _Homo_ genus
|
| - a male member of any of the two above
|
| - a male adult member of any of the two above
|
| - a brave member of any of the two above
|
| - a soldier
|
| - a commoner
|
| - any vaguely humanoidly shaped being
|
| The word is certainly not special in that regard; I could
| give a similar list of "Russia" or "chess" for instance
| -- but seemingly this word sometimes faces objection when
| the meaning the objector desires not be the one used, and
| I find that it is invariably a difference of gender lines
| in meaning if that be the case, and that it is rooted in
| gender politics.
|
| I have never seen such wilfull denial of descriptive
| usage of the word "chess" and objections when it is used
| to, for instance, mean the entire family of games that
| descend from a common ancestor, or when it is used by
| metaphor for any exercise in great tactical planning.
|
| The original meaning of the word "man" was the first I
| gave, all others arose by narrowing or widening it by
| analogy, much as what happened with "chess".
| edoceo wrote:
| Yes
| enumjorge wrote:
| Case in point, alt-right communities who champion "free
| speech" like Parler and in Reddit often ban people who
| express opinions they disagree with.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I was honestly more so thinking about holocaust denial
| which some consider to abhorrent but others within the line
| of acceptability.
|
| As in, the things that, some wish, were banned by law.
|
| I don't think many of the _reddit_ moderators so notorious
| for wanting an echo chamber would advocate it be criminally
| illegal.
| youdontlisten wrote:
| Case in point, alt-left communities who champion "free
| speech" like Hacker News often _shadowban_ people who
| express opinions they disagree with, especially if it 's
| said in the wrong 'tone' of voice--direct aggression rather
| than passive aggressiveness, which is the preferred
| atmosphere here.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I'm always suspicious when specifically "left" or "right"
| or any other specific political colors are mentioned as
| such with regards to censorship -- it reeks of not being
| objective.
|
| It is a problem of all mankind, not any particular
| political color; the only color above it are of course
| specifically the free speech advocates.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Indeed, Parler banned lots of speech. Especially breasts.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| How do you deal with the problem that the content the current
| community promotes isn't necessarily the content that is best
| for your product in the long run (what if they are very
| dismissive of new members, hampering growth?), or even legal?
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Per TV show, it's not one big chat room, however there is a
| default "general" room that is use to that effect. It's very
| much like Slack/Discord channels. Users are able to
| essentially create topic rooms within a show.
|
| Think of each TV show as it's own Discord server and within
| the show are user-generated topic rooms.
|
| My hope is that users basically self-silo into topic rooms
| that interest them in regards to whatever show their
| watching.
|
| For example: the Yankees are playing the Marlins. Users can
| create a #yankees room, a #marlins room, a #umpire room, etc
| to create chat rooms around a given topic in regards to
| whatever they're watching. In each room, a user has the
| ability to block, filter words, etc...so they can tailor
| their chat experience in whatever way they want while
| watching any given show.
| yulaow wrote:
| Honestly after seeing the state of most subreddits (aka they
| become echo-chamber of whatever the main moderators find "worth
| of value" and very toxic about whatever is against their idea),
| community self-moderation seems a total failure.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Most people are stupid. Therefore I would expect most
| communities to be moderated horribly. How could it be
| otherwise if they are moderated by stupid people elected by
| other stupid people? The good part is that people who are
| better than average can create their own community which will
| be better than average. How much better, that only depends on
| those people.
|
| The alternative is having some kind of elite moderators that
| moderate all communities. It sets a lower bar on their
| quality. Unfortunately, it also sets an upper bar on their
| quality. Everything will be as good as the appointed elite
| likes it, neither better nor worse.
|
| From the perspective of what the average person sees, the
| latter is probably better. From the perspective that I am an
| individual who can choose a community or two to participate
| in, and I don't care about the rest, the latter is better.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Reddit still relies on human moderators, admins, etc. What
| I'm talking about is a purely community driven moderation
| scheme where, through various algorithms, the community
| dictates what is and isn't acceptable.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Wouldn't that just be essentially upvoting and downvoting
| and deleting downvoted posts?
|
| That was originally the intent of reddit, that people would
| downvote unconstructive comments, but that quickly turns
| into the community "moderating" away anything they disagree
| with, and enforcing an echochamber.
|
| I don't think communities can have enough objectivity to
| effectively moderate themselves.
| watwut wrote:
| Parler moderated by showing post to 5 random people and
| taking their result.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > I've been brewing up strategies of letting the community
| itself moderate because a machine really cannot "see" what
| content is good or bad, re: context.
|
| There's a ton of material on that subject, thankfully; look at
| news groups, HN itself (flagging), Stack Overflow, Joel
| Spolsky's blogs on Discourse, etc etc etc. My girlfriend is
| active on Twitter and frequently joins in mass reporting of
| certain content, which is both a strong signal, and easily
| influenced by mobs.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Do you have any references to those materials? Would love to
| read up on some more academic takes.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > I think it's evident from Facebook, Twitter, et al that human
| moderation of very dynamic situations is incredibly hard, maybe
| even impossible.
|
| How would you know what the evidence tells us from those
| platforms, when their criteria and resources for moderation are
| proprietary and opaque?
|
| FB is a profitable company.
|
| Have you calculated how many moderators could be paid $20 per
| hour out of $15.92 billion profit?
|
| Approximately 400,000.
| techbio wrote:
| Sounds like a use case for some of those humanities majors.
| mr-wendel wrote:
| The problem with scaling upward is how incredibly soul-
| rending the job is. At some level you're basically
| guaranteeing that some number of people are going to be
| traumatized.
|
| Maybe at some point the better strategy is to limit public
| exposure and favor segmenting some groups out into their own
| space that requires extremely explicit opt-in measures? Hard
| to say, and tucking it away into its own corner of the web
| seems rife with its own problems.
|
| As another commenter expressed on some other topic, this is a
| long-running problem with many incarnations: Usenet, IRC,
| BBSs, etc. It's become especially salient with the explosion
| of social media platforms that include everyone from Grandma
| to Grandson.
|
| Bottom line... my heart goes out to moderators of these kind
| of platforms.
| repartix wrote:
| I'd like to know what dang learned moderating HN.
| mountainb wrote:
| 'Bubbles' are a pejorative way of just saying 'local
| communities.' Perhaps as a nation we do not benefit from having
| an international and transparent global community that is
| always on and always blaring propaganda and manipulation at
| people.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| Yup, people have been brainwashed into thinking "bubbles" are
| a problem when they've been the solution to that problem from
| the start.
|
| I've suggested that idea a million time, it's all yours for
| the taking for those who want to implement it:
|
| Build a social network where there is a per-user
| karma/reputation graph, with a recursive mechanism to
| propagate reputation (with decay): I like a post, that boosts
| the signal/reputation from whoever posted, and from people
| who liked it, and decreases signal from people who downvoted
| it.
|
| There can be arbitrarily more sophisticated propagation
| algorithms to jumpstart new users by weighing their first few
| votes more highly and "absorb" existing user reputation
| graphs (some Bayesian updating of some kind).
|
| Allow basic things like blocking/muting/etc with similar
| effects.
|
| This alone would help people curate their information way
| more efficiently. There are people who post things I know for
| a fact I never want to read again. That's fine, let me create
| my own bubble.
|
| The TrustNet/Freechains concepts seem adjacent and it's the
| first time I come across them -- looks interesting.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> a centralized service dictate what is and isn't "good".
|
| This isn't movie reviews. Good and bad are not the standards.
| The standard is whether or not something is illegal. When the
| feds come knocking on your door because your servers are full
| of highly illegal content, "we let them moderate themselves"
| will be no defense.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| "Legal" is not a very good determination.
|
| Discussion of homosexuality is "illegal" in many states. It
| is a moral imperative for systems to break those laws.
| pjc50 wrote:
| "Legal" is both local and can change over time. America has
| been in an unusual situation because it allows far more
| speech, especially speech right up to the boundary of
| "incitement to violence".
|
| However, the police have far too much to do, so in practice
| millions of blatently illegal death threats get sent every
| day and do not receive any police response. Hence the demand
| for a non-police response that can far more cheaply remove
| the death threats or threateners.
| eternalban wrote:
| Make a cogent and non-authoritarian case for even having a
| "decentralized content moderation" which doesn't pass the "is
| this an oxymoron?" smell test.
|
| > I'm building a large, chatroom-like service for TV.
|
| So the profit motive is likely the motivation for applying a
| "central" doctrine of acceptable discourse using a
| decentralized mechanism.
|
| > While I think that community moderation will inevitably lead
| to bubbles
|
| Which allows for e.g. an athiest community to have content that
| rips religion x's scripture to shred (and why not?) in the same
| planet that also has a religion-x community that has content
| that takes a bat to over-reaching rationalism. Oh the horror!
| Diversity of thought. "We simply can not permit this."
| EGreg wrote:
| A news and celebrity pundit industry that operates in a
| capitalist fashion has companies that employ people. They have
| a profit motive and face market competition. This shapes their
| behavior. News organizations that tell both sides of a story do
| not provoke the sensationalism and outrage that news
| organizations which tell only one side. So they don't get
| shared as much.
|
| The market literally selects for more one sided clickbaity
| outrage articles.
|
| Meanwhile social networks compete for your attention and
| "engagement" for clicks on ads so their algorithms will show
| you the stories that are the most outrageous and put you in an
| echo chamber.
|
| It's not some accident. It's by design.
|
| If we were ok with slowing down the news and running it like
| Wikipedia with a talk page, peer review, byzantine consensus,
| whatever you want to call it -- concentric circles where people
| digest what happens and the public gets a balanced view that is
| based on collaboration rather than competition with a profit
| motive - our society would be less divided and more informed.
|
| Also, Apple and Google should start charging for notifications,
| with an exception for real-time calls and self-selected
| priority channels/contacts signing the notification payload.
| The practically free notifications creates a tragedy of the
| commons and ruins our dinners!
| eternalban wrote:
| _I fear that many decentralised web projects are designed for
| censorship resistance not so much because they deliberately want
| to become hubs for neo-nazis, but rather out of a kind of naive
| utopian belief that more speech is always better. But I think we
| have learnt in the last decade that this is not the case. If we
| want technologies to help build the type of society that we want
| to live in, then certain abusive types of behaviour must be
| restricted. Thus, content moderation is needed._
|
| Let's unpack this: Axiom: a kind of naive
| utopian belief [exists that asserts] that more speech is always
| better. But I think we have learnt in the last decade that this
| is not the case.
|
| False premise. The "naive belief", based on the _empirical_
| evidence of history, is that prioritizing the supression of
| speech to address social issues is the hallmark of authoritarian
| systems.
|
| Martin also claims "we have learned" something that he is simply
| asserting as fact. My lesson from the last 3 decades has been
| that it was a huge mistake to let media ownership be concentrated
| in the hands of a few. We used to have laws against this in the
| 90s. Axiom: By "we" as in "we want", Martin
| means the community of likeminded people, aka the dreaded
| "filter bubble" or "community value system".
|
| Who is this "we", Martin? Theorem: If we want
| technologies to help build the type of society that we want to
| live in, then certain abusive types of behaviour must be
| restricted.
|
| We already see that the "we" of Martin is a restricted subset of
| "we the Humanity". There are "we" communities that disagree with
| Martin's on issues ranging from: the fundamental necessity for
| freedom of thougth and conscience; the positive value of
| diversity of thoughts; the positive value of unorthodox
| ("radical") thought; the fundamental identity of the concept of
| "community" with "shared values"; etc. Q.E.D.:
| Thus, content moderation is needed.
|
| Give the man a PhD.
|
| --
|
| So here is a _parable_ of a man named Donald Knuth. This Donald,
| while a highly respected and productive contributing member of
| the 'Community of Computer Scientists of America' [ACM, etc.],
| also sadly entertains irrational beliefs that "we" "know" to be
| superstitious non-sense.
|
| The reason that this otherwise sane man entertains this
| nonsensical thoughts is because of the "filter bubble" of the
| community he was raised in.
|
| Of course, to this day, Donald Knuth has never tried to force his
| views in the ACM on other ACM members, many of whom are devout
| athiests. And should Donald Knuth ever try to preach his religion
| in ACM, we would expect respectful but firm "community filter
| bubble" action of ACM telling Mr. Knuth to keep his religious
| views for his religious community.
|
| But, "[i]f we want technologies to help build the type of society
| that we want to live in" -- and my fellow "we", do "we" not agree
| that there is no room for Donald Knuth's religious nonsense in
| "our type of society"? -- would it not be wise to ensure that the
| tragedy that befell the otherwise thoughtful and rational Donald
| Knuth could happen to other poor unsuspecting people who happen
| to be born and raised in some "fringe" community?
|
| "Thus, content moderation is needed."
| EGreg wrote:
| Let's take one step back. Just like in the Title I vs Title II
| debate, let's go one step earlier. WHY do we have these issues in
| the first place?
|
| It's because our entire society is permeated with ideas about
| capitalism and competition being the best way to organize
| something, almost part of the moral fabric of the country.
| Someone "built it", now they ought to "own" the platform. Then
| they get all this responsibility to moderate, not moderate, or
| whatever.
|
| Compare with science, wikipedia, open source projects, etc. where
| things are peer reviewed before the wider public sees them, and
| there is collaboration instead of competition. People contribute
| to a growing snowball. There is no profit motive or market
| competition. There is no private ownership of ideas. There are no
| celebrities, no heroes. No one can tweet to 5 million people at 3
| am.
|
| Somehow, this has mistakenly become a "freedom of speech" issue
| instead of an issue of capitalism and private ownership of the
| means of distribution. In this perverse sense, "freedom of
| speech" even means corporations should have a right to buy local
| news stations and tell news anchors the exact talking points to
| say, word for word, or replacing the human mouthpieces if they
| don't...
|
| Really this is just capitalism, where capital consists of
| audience/followers instead of money/dollars. Top down control by
| a corporation is normal in capitalism. You just see a landlord
| (Parler) crying about higher landlord ... ironically crying to
| the even higher landlord, the US government - to use force and
| "punish" Facebook.
|
| Going further, it means corporations (considered by some to have
| the same rights as people) using their infrastructure and
| distribution agreements to push messages and agendas crafted by a
| small group of people to millions. Celebrity culture is the
| result. Ashton Kutcher was the first to 1 million Twitter
| followers because kingmakers in the movie industry chose him
| earlier on to star in movies, and so on down the line.
|
| Many companies themselves employ social media managers to
| regularly moderate their own Facebook Pages and comments,
| deleting even off-topic comments. Why should they have an
| inalienable right to be on a platform? So inside their own
| website and page these private companies can moderate and choose
| not to partner with someone but private companies Facebook and
| Twitter should be prevented from making decisions about content
| on THEIR own platform. You want a platform that can't kick you
| off? It's called open source software, and decentralized
| networks. You know what they don't have?
|
| Private ownership of the whole network. "But I built it so I get
| to own it" is the capitalist attitude that leads to exactly this
| situation. The only way we will get there is if people build it
| and then DON'T own the whole platform. Think about it!
| lawrencevillain wrote:
| Obviously upvoting and downvoting is not enough for adequate
| moderation. There's still the aspect of people trolling and
| generally posting horrible things online. There's a reason
| Facebook had to pay $52 million to content moderators for the
| trauma/ptsd they suffered.
| neiman wrote:
| We (at Almonit) work on a self-governing publication system which
| would bring democratic control to content moderation.
|
| We just wrote about its philosophy earlier this week.
|
| https://almonit.com/blog/2021-01-08/self-governing_internet_...
| theylon wrote:
| This is an interesting concept. Are there any implementations
| of this?
| kstrauser wrote:
| I'm active with Mastodon and absolutely love its moderation
| model. In a nutshell:
|
| - It's made up of a bunch of independent servers, or "instances".
| The common analogy here is to email systems.
|
| - If you want to join the federation, stand up an instance and
| start using it. Voila! Now you're part of it.
|
| - My instance has a lot of users, and I don't want to run them
| off, so it's in my own interest to moderate my own instance in a
| way that my community likes. Allow too much in without doing
| anything? They leave. Tighten it so that it starts losing its
| value? They leave. There's a feedback mechanism that guides me to
| the middle road.
|
| - But my users _can_ leave for greener pastures if they think I
| 'm doing a bad job and think another instance is better. They're
| not stuck with me.
|
| The end result is that there are thousands of instances with
| widely varied moderation policies. There are some "safe spaces"
| where people who've been sexually assaulted hang out and that
| have zero tolerance for harassment or trolling. There are others
| that are very laissez faire. There's a marketplace of styles to
| choose from, and no one server has to try to be a perfect fit for
| everyone.
|
| I realize that this is not helpful information for someone who
| wants to run a single large service. I bring it up just to point
| out that there's more than one way to skin that cat.
|
| (That final idiom would probably get me banned on some servers.
| And that's great! More power to that community for being willing
| and able to set policies, even if I wouldn't agree with them.)
| makeworld wrote:
| Couldn't have said it better myself. Mastodon appears to solve
| all the moderation problems I've seen raised about social
| media.
| [deleted]
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Since I'm using libp2p in Go for a side project, may I take this
| opportunity to ask how this could work in principle for a
| decentralized network? The way I see it, this seems to be
| impossible but maybe I'm missing something.
|
| For example, in my network, anyone can start a node and the user
| has full control over it. So how would you censor this node? The
| following ideas don't seem to work:
|
| 1. Voting or another social choice consensus mechanism. Problems:
|
| - Allows a colluding majority to mount DOS attacks against
| anyone.
|
| - Can easily be circumvented by changing host keys / creating a
| new identity.
|
| 2. The equivalent of a killfile: Users decide to blacklist a
| node, dropping all connections to it. Problems:
|
| - Easy to circumvent by creating new host keys / creating a new
| identity.
|
| 3. Karma system: This is just the same as voting / social choice
| aggregation and has the same problems.
|
| 4. IP banning by distributing the blocked IPs with the binaries
| in frequent updates. Problem:
|
| - Does not work well with dynamic IPs and VPNs.
|
| Basically, I can't see a way to prevent users from creating new
| identities / key pairs for themselves whenever the old one has
| been banned. Other than security by obscurity nonsense ("rootkit"
| on the user's machine, hidden keys embedded in binaries, etc.) or
| a centralized server as a gateway, how would you solve that
| problem?
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| The way it works in Mastodon is that (1) not everyone runs a
| node, but there are many nodes, and they each have their own
| policies and can kick users off, and (2) nodes can blacklist
| other nodes they federate content from.
|
| This two level split allows node operators to think of most
| other users at the node level, which means dealing with far
| fewer entities. It provides users with a choice of hosts, but
| means that their choice has consequences.
| yorwba wrote:
| > I can't see a way to prevent users from creating new
| identities / key pairs for themselves whenever the old one has
| been banned.
|
| You could prevent banned users from returning with a new
| identity by disallowing the creation of new identities. E.g.
| many Mastodon instances disable their signup pages and new
| users can only be added by the admins.
|
| If you don't want to put restrictions on new identities, you
| could still treat them as suspect by default. E.g. apply a kind
| of rate limiting where content created by new users is shown at
| most once per day and the limit rises slowly as the user's
| content is viewed more and more without requiring moderation.
| (This is a half-baked idea I had just now, so I'm sure there
| are many drawbacks. But it might be worth a shot.)
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I've thought about this a lot. Currently, my preferred solution
| to the problem of Sybil attacks in decentralized social
| networks is a reputation system based on a meritocratic web of
| trust.
|
| Basically it would work something like this: By default,
| clients hide content (comments, submissions, votes, etc)
| created by new identities, treating it as untrusted (possible
| spam/abusive/malicious content) unless another identity with a
| good reputation vouches for it. (Either by vouching for the
| content directly, or vouching for the identity that submitted
| it.) Upvoting a piece of content vouches for it, and increases
| your identity's trust in the content's submitter. Flagging a
| piece of content distrusts it and decreases your identity's
| trust in the content's submitter (possibly by a large amount
| depending on the flag type), and in other identities that
| vouched for that content. Previously unseen identities are
| assigned a reputation based on how much other identities you
| trust (and they identities _they_ trust, etc.) trust or
| distrust that unseen identity.
|
| The advantage of this system is that it not only prevents sibyl
| attacks, but also doubles as a form of fully decentralized
| community-driven moderation.
|
| That's the general idea anyway. The exact details of how a
| system like that would work probably need a lot of fleshing out
| and real-world testing in order to make them work effectively.
| emaro wrote:
| Matrix published an interesting concept for decentralised content
| moderation [0]. I think this is the way to go.
|
| Edit: Discussed here [1] and here [2].
|
| [0]: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-
| matrix...
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24826951
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24836987
| AstroNoise58 wrote:
| I find it pretty interesting that Martin does not mention the
| kind of community member-driven up/downvote mechanism found on
| this site (and elsewhere) as an example of decentralised content
| moderation.
|
| Edit: now I see Slashdot and Reddit mentioned at the end in the
| updates section (I don't remember seeing them on my first read,
| but that might just be me).
| maurys wrote:
| He mentions Reddit at the end of the article, which is close
| enough in mechanism to Hackernews.
| totemandtoken wrote:
| "We vote on values, we bet on beliefs" - Robin Hanson.
|
| Voting tells us what we value but that doesn't mean what is
| good for us. It also treats all content as somewhat equivalent,
| which isn't true. A call to (maybe violent) action isn't the
| same thing as sharing a cute cat video.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Up/downvote mechanisms always end up as agree/disagree votes.
|
| Moderation is not the same. It is not about agreeing but
| curating content that is not acceptable (off-topic, illegal,
| insulting).
|
| Article quote: " _In decentralised social media, I believe that
| ultimately it should be the users themselves who decide what is
| acceptable or not_ "
|
| In my view that is only workable if that means users define the
| rules because, as said above, I think 'voting' on individual
| piece of content always leads to echo chambers and to censoring
| dissenting views.
|
| Of course this may be fine if within an online community focus
| on one topic or interest, but probably not if you want to
| foster open discussions and a plurality of views and opinions.
|
| We can observe this right here on HN. On submissions that are
| prone to trigger strong opinions downvotes and flagging
| explode.
| Steltek wrote:
| How would up/down votes work on a decentralized platform?
| Wouldn't it be easy to game by standing up your own server and
| wishing up a legion of sockpuppets?
|
| There's a whole Moonshot of spam resistance that's going to
| need to happen in Mastodon/Matrix/Whatever.
| nine_k wrote:
| Decentralized networks need trust, and trust is not a Boolean
| value.
|
| With a centralized service, trust is simple: how much you
| trust the single entity that represents the service.
|
| In a distributed network, nodes need to build trust to each
| other. In the best-known federated network, email, domain
| reputation is a thing. Various blacklists and graylists pass
| around trust values in bulk.
|
| So a node with a ton of sock puppets trying to spam votes (or
| content) is going to lose the trust of its peers fast, so the
| spam from it will end up marked as such. A well-run node will
| gain considerable trust with time.
|
| This, of course, while helpful, does not _guarantee_
| "fairness" of any kind. If technology and people's values
| clash, the values prevail. You cannot alter values with
| technology alone (even weapon technology).
| dboreham wrote:
| The problem you describe is called Sybil resistance and is
| known to be hard, but there are some example working systems
| such as Bitcoin.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| FTA: "even though such filtering saves you from having to see
| things you don't like, it doesn't stop the objectionable
| content from existing". He doesn't want upvoting/downvoting, he
| wants complete eradication (of whatever the majority happens to
| objects to right now).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| On the other hand, decentralised filtering out of
| objectionable content might go hand-in-hand with replicating
| and thus preserving the most valuable content. Empirically,
| 90% of the content in most decentralized systems (e-mail, the
| Web etc.) is worthless spam that 99.99999% of users or more
| (a rather extreme majority if there ever was one) will never
| care about and could be eradicated with no issues whatsoever.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| > of whatever the majority happens to objects to right now
|
| I don't see that Martin Kleppmann is using 'democracy' to
| mean 'majoritarianism' here. He makes considered points about
| how to form and implement policies against harmful content,
| and appears to talk about agreement by consensus.
|
| Democracy and majoritarianism are (in general) quite
| different things. This might be more apparent in European
| democracies.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| He plays a little trick by saying "ultimately it should be
| the users themselves who decide what is acceptable or not".
| This has two meanings, somewhat contradictory.
|
| The straightforward meaning is that ultimately I decide
| what is acceptable or not for me, and you decide what is
| acceptable or not for you. We can, and likely will, have a
| different opinion on different things.
|
| But the following talk of "governance" and "democratic
| control" suggest that the one who ultimately decides are
| not users as individuals, but rather some kind of process
| that would be called democratic in some sense. Ultimately,
| someone else will make the decision for you... but you can
| participate in the process, if you wish... but if your
| opinions are too unusual, you will probably lose anyway...
| and then the rest of us will smugly congratulate ourselves
| for giving you the chance.
|
| > Democracy and majoritarianism are (in general) quite
| different things.
|
| Sure, a minority can have rights as long as it is popular,
| rich, well organized, able to make coalitions with other
| minorities, or too unimportant to attract anyone's
| attention. But that still means living under the potential
| threat. I don't see a reason why online communities would
| have to be built like this, if instead you could create a
| separate little virtual universe for everyone who wished to
| be left alone... and then invent good tools for navigating
| these universes, to make it convenient, from user
| perspective, to create their places, to invite and be
| invited, and to exlude those who don't follow the local
| rules (who in turn can create their own places and compete
| for popularity).
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| > The straightforward meaning is that ultimately I decide
| what is acceptable or not for me, and you decide what is
| acceptable or not for you.
|
| I disagree that this is straightforward in meaning. Even
| if I do have a good idea of what is unacceptable to me, I
| need someone external to screen for that. If the point is
| to avoid personally facing the content that I find
| unacceptable, it's impossible for me to adequately
| perform this screening on my own behalf.
|
| I can instruct or employ someone (or something) to do
| this, but then ultimately they will make the decision for
| me. It's only plausible to do this at scale, unless I'm
| wealthy enough to employ my own personal cup-bearer who
| accepts the harm. So, it makes sense to band together
| with other users with similar requirements.
|
| Your claim seems to be that delegating these decisions is
| a bad thing that should be avoided, but it is an
| essential and inevitable part of this service - I _have
| to_ delegate that decision to someone else, or I won 't
| get that service.
|
| This is not to mention legal restrictions on content in
| different jurisdictions, which define a minimum standard
| of moderation and responsibility, that may include
| additional risk wherever they are not fully defined.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> I can instruct or employ someone (or something) to do
| this, but then ultimately they will make the decision for
| me. It 's only plausible to do this at scale, unless I'm
| wealthy enough to employ my own personal food-taster, so
| it makes sense to band together with other users with
| similar requirements._
|
| And here we run into the issue that economists and
| political scientists call "the Principal-Agent
| problem"[0].
|
| Whether we're talking about the management of a firm
| acting in the interests of owners, elected officials
| acting in the interests of voters, or moderators of
| communication platforms acting in the interest of users,
| this isn't a solved problem.
|
| And in fact, that last has extra wrinkles since there is
| not agreement on just whose interests the moderator is
| supposed to prioritize (there can be similar disagreement
| regarding company management, but at least the
| disagreement itself is far better defined).
|
| This is deeply messy, and as hard as it is now, it is
| only going to get worse with every additional human that
| is able to access and participate in these systems.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93age
| nt_prob...
| nine_k wrote:
| This is the crux of censorship. If anything, it hinges on
| hubris: the censor assumes to know which content deserves to
| exist at all.
|
| The need for censoring content still exists because certain
| kinds of content are deemed illegal, and failure to remove
| that may end up in serving jail time.
|
| On the other hand, _moderation_ is named very aptly.
|
| That said, I fully support the right of private companies to
| censor content on their premises as they see fit. If they do
| a poor job, I can just avoid using their services.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| -Devils Advocate
|
| > I fully support the right of private companies to censor
| content on their premises as they see fit.
|
| Those private companies don't have the right to censor
| content on their premises 'as they see fit' without giving
| up protections afforded to them in law as 'platforms'. The
| question is at what level of moderation and/or bias do they
| become a 'publisher', not a 'platform'.
|
| > If they do a poor job, I can just avoid using their
| services.
|
| Issues arise when the poor job spills over outside their
| service. As an example, The people who live around the US
| Capitol endangered by pipe bombs in part because of
| incitement organised on Twitter.
| nine_k wrote:
| They don't have the common carrier protections. That is,
| phone companies are not required to censor hate speech,
| and ISPs are not required to censor unlawful content that
| passes their pipes, because they are just, well, pipe,
| oblivious of the bytes they pass.
|
| Platforms are in the business of making content
| _available_ , so they are forced to control the
| availability, and censor unlawful content. They choose to
| censor any "objectionable content" along the way, without
| waiting for PR attacks or lawsuits. I can understand
| that.
|
| (What is harder for me to understand is when these same
| platforms extoll the freedom of expression. I'd like them
| be more honest.)
| chrisoverzero wrote:
| > Those private companies don't have the right to censor
| content on their premises 'as they see fit' without
| giving up protections afforded to them in law as
| 'platforms'.
|
| Not only do they, but there's no such thing as
| "protections afforded to them in law as 'platforms'": "No
| provider or user of an interactive computer service shall
| be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information
| provided by another information content provider."
|
| > The question is at what level of moderation and/or bias
| do they become a 'publisher', not a 'platform'.
|
| This idea of "publisher vs. platform" has been entirely
| made up by people with no understanding of the state of
| the law. [1] "Bias" doesn't play into it - they can do
| what they want, in good faith, on their website. Hacker
| News (via its moderators) has a bias against low-effort
| "shitposting" and posts which fan racial flames. It's so
| frequent and well-known that it could become a tagline,
| "Hacker News: Please Don't Do This Here". At what level
| of curation of non-flamey posts does it become a
| publisher due to this bias?
|
| [1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-
| platform-...
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Moderation is not upvoting/downvoting.
|
| For example, when you moderate a debate you do not silence
| opinions you disagree with, you simply ensure that people
| express themselves within 'acceptable' boundaries, which
| usually means civility.
|
| To me this means that 'decentralised content moderation' is
| largely an utopia: Whilst the rules may be defined by the
| community, letting everyone moderate will, in my view, always
| end up being similar to upvoting/downvoting which is a vote
| of agreement/disagreement.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Isn't it just an example of democratic content moderation? We
| up vote, down vote and flag content. We don't get the ability
| to do so unless we are a community member of some tenure. It's
| augmented by centralized moderation by a handful of moderators.
|
| How well it works is always a topic here.
| randompwd wrote:
| > Isn't it just an example of democratic content moderation
|
| A democracy makes great efforts to ensure 1 person = 1 vote.
| Online platforms do not.
| [deleted]
| freeqaz wrote:
| We don't see all of the countless hours spent by mods like
| dang to keep the quality high. It's a thankless job most of
| the time!
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Having moderated some large forums in the past I know!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-14 23:02 UTC)