[HN Gopher] Bluesky is receiving about 3k reports/hour
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       Bluesky is receiving about 3k reports/hour
        
       Author : Funes-
       Score  : 42 points
       Date   : 2024-11-16 21:20 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (bsky.app)
 (TXT) w3m dump (bsky.app)
        
       | yapyap wrote:
       | " Excessive moderation is a barrier to open and robust debate,
       | ultimately undermining the diversity of perspectives that make
       | meaningful discourse possible. Supressing dissenting opinions
       | will lead to an echo chamber effect. Would you like to join me an
       | upcoming campaign to restore Europe? Deus vult!"
       | 
       | ah social media, some people are truly as dumb as rocks
        
         | ranger_danger wrote:
         | Not to mention all the people extremely confused over what
         | "CSAM" is seemingly without having the ability to google it.
        
       | OutOfHere wrote:
       | Use an LLM to rapidly scale the moderation of both text and
       | images (while keeping free speech in mind).
        
         | whaaaaat wrote:
         | Moderation is orthogonal to free speech. They are separate
         | concerns.
        
           | zeroonetwothree wrote:
           | How does that make any sense? More moderation clearly means
           | speech is less free, in that you are blocking some of it
           | (whether for good reason or not)
        
             | jp_nc wrote:
             | I do not have a right to put signs promoting my beliefs in
             | your front yard. Preventing me from doing that is not a
             | prohibition of free speech. What's going to slay me is that
             | the group that bitched and moaned about twitter preventing
             | free speech have turned it into a hellhole nobody wants to
             | be in. Now they will come over and say the same about Blue
             | Sky??? Guys - you can post your ridiculous nonsense on X...
             | nobody is infringing on your right to free speech.
        
               | anon291 wrote:
               | If you live in California, you have every right to say
               | what you want even in privately owned spaces so long as
               | they're regularly opened to the public. More states
               | should be like this and enforce it
        
             | paxys wrote:
             | It isn't that clear cut. If you are trying to say something
             | on a forum and a bot farm immediately gives you a thousand
             | downvotes, will banning those bots increase or decrease
             | free speech on that forum?
        
             | ranger_danger wrote:
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
        
           | jrvarela56 wrote:
           | No it's not. More moderation, more false positives, less free
           | speech.
           | 
           | Just having 'moderation' means the speech is not 'free'.
        
             | linotype wrote:
             | Most people would be OK with suppressing CSAM. At least I
             | hope most people are.
        
               | erulabs wrote:
               | Sure, you're not wrong, I am very okay with not seeing
               | CSAM, but your argument doesn't hold water. Every
               | communication is speech, and moderating it by definition
               | limits it. What limits are acceptable is the question,
               | and I think zero human beings truly believe the answer is
               | 100% or 0%. I am a free speech maximalist, but I also
               | used to work at a place that had a huge 8ft wide sombrero
               | you'd wear when working with content moderation teams to
               | prevent unneeded trauma to coworkers.
               | 
               | Anyone who pretends there is a totally morally clean way
               | to solve this issue is naive or a liar.
        
               | DrillShopper wrote:
               | This is what Silicon Valley does to your brain
        
               | almatabata wrote:
               | > I am very okay with not seeing CSAM, but your argument
               | doesn't hold water.
               | 
               | By this you mean that its very easy to define a clear set
               | of rules for moderation?
        
             | DrillShopper wrote:
             | So if I posted your home address, social security number,
             | bank account and routing numbers, your work address,
             | pictures of you, your spouse, your kids, the schools they
             | go to, your license plate numbers, pictures of your car and
             | its real time location that moderators can't take that down
             | if they believe in free speech?
             | 
             | Interesting world we live in then.
        
           | l33t7332273 wrote:
           | Unless you're taking the stance that free speech as a concept
           | applies only to the government, then it's definitely not
           | orthogonal.
           | 
           | Almost all moderation concerns are obviously restrictions on
           | free speech, it's just that for several reasons people have
           | started to shrink "speech" into "political speech within some
           | Overton window"
           | 
           | For some obvious examples of typical moderation that
           | conflicts with pure free speech , consider amoral speech like
           | abuse material, violent speech like threats, and economically
           | harmful speech like fraudulent advertising or copyright
           | violations.
           | 
           | Extending these to things like hate speech, bigotry,
           | pornography, etc are all moderation choices that are not
           | orthogonal to free speech.
        
           | jabroni_salad wrote:
           | As a booru and ao3 enjoyer I can promise you that a tag based
           | system works perfectly if posters are good about applying
           | consistent agreed-upon tags and users are good about
           | subscribing to tags they like and putting tags they dont like
           | on their PBL.
           | 
           | I dont think mega-big 'public square' type platforms will
           | ever achieve this since growth requires chasing the most
           | passive types of consumers who need everything done for them.
        
         | pfisherman wrote:
         | Why use an LLM as opposed to a more narrow purpose built model?
         | LLMs are not beating smaller, purpose built models on tasks
         | like POS tagging, NER, sentiment analysis, etc. And the
         | inference costs scale quite poorly (unless you are self hosting
         | llama or something).
        
           | OutOfHere wrote:
           | That's where "rapidly" comes in. Also, LLMs allow very high
           | customization via the choice of prompt. It's a lot quicker to
           | adapt the prompt than to retrain a fine-tuned model. I think
           | the outputs of the stabilized LLM could later be used to
           | properly fine-tune a custom model for efficient use.
           | 
           | As for sentiment, even embeddings can do a good job at it.
        
       | hipadev23 wrote:
       | Due to how easy it is to setup accounts and post on Bluesky, it's
       | likely many of the same operatives behind the propaganda and bot
       | armies on Twitter are now pushing the same vitriolic content, and
       | triggering these reports. If they can negatively impact Bluesky
       | at a critical moment, it'll reduce the flow of users who will
       | quickly surmise "oh this is just like twitter"
        
         | ranger_danger wrote:
         | How would they make it harder / reduce bots without sacrificing
         | privacy (such as SMS/ID verification/etc.)?
         | 
         | I think if you can realistically solve that you'd be a
         | millionaire already.
        
           | hipadev23 wrote:
           | I don't think you realistically can. I'd instead approach it
           | from limiting the reach of new accounts until proven as good
           | actors.
           | 
           | Or switch it back to invite only, as there's a massive
           | userbase now, and if you invite a problematic account it
           | becomes a problem for your account too. Operate on a vouch
           | system.
        
             | fullstackchris wrote:
             | > good actors
             | 
             | Aha... dont be naive... what is the definition of "good" in
             | 2024? Take the US population for example... 50% will say
             | your intentions are "good", the other half will not!
        
           | jabroni_salad wrote:
           | this IMO is why groupchat is best social network. Anything
           | with more than 20 people doesnt go on my phone. sorry
           | marketers.
        
           | DrillShopper wrote:
           | That problem is unsolvable
        
             | calebh wrote:
             | What about using TPM modules? I've been researching these
             | modules lately, primarily for use in online video games.
             | From my understanding, you can use TPMs to effectively ban
             | players (TPM ban) based on their hardware. This would mean
             | every time an account is banned, the bad actor would have
             | to switch to a different TPM. Since a TPM costs real money,
             | this places a limit on the scalability of a bad actor.
        
               | DrillShopper wrote:
               | Cool, if you can require them for every possible
               | interaction on a platform but even that violates privacy
               | if you have one universal value that ties it all together
               | (the identifier of the specific TPM).
               | 
               | It's just the phone number/email issue but tied to
               | hardware. If you think these things won't leak and allow
               | bad actors to tie your accounts across services then I
               | have some lovely real estate in Florida you may be
               | interested in.
               | 
               | It also appears that resetting a fTPM works around this
               | since it fully resets the TPM. Even if it didn't then
               | people buying used CPUs could find that they're banned
               | from games that they've never even played or installed on
               | their system before
        
               | nicce wrote:
               | > It also appears that resetting a fTPM works around this
               | since it fully resets the TPM. Even if it didn't then
               | people buying used CPUs could find that they're banned
               | from games that they've never even played or installed on
               | their system before
               | 
               | It depends how the TPM utilization was applied in
               | practice. The initial manufacturer key (Endorsement Key)
               | is hardcoded and unextractable. All the long-lived keys
               | are derived from it, and can be verified by using the
               | public part of the EK. Usually EK is directly used for
               | remote attestation.
               | 
               | More here, for example : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
               | us/windows-server/identity/ad...
        
               | nicce wrote:
               | > What about using TPM modules? I've been researching
               | these modules lately, primarily for use in online video
               | games. From my understanding, you can use TPMs to
               | effectively ban players (TPM ban) based on their
               | hardware. This would mean every time an account is
               | banned, the bad actor would have to switch to a different
               | TPM. Since a TPM costs real money, this places a limit on
               | the scalability of a bad actor.
               | 
               | It is even worse for privacy than phone number. You can
               | never change it and you can be linked between different
               | services, soon automatically if Google goes forward with
               | the plans.
        
         | citizenkeen wrote:
         | This underestimates the effect of Bluesky's culture of "block
         | and move on". There are curated block lists you can subscribe
         | to. Individual communities do a pretty good job of shutting
         | down toxicity they don't want to engage with.
        
       | voat wrote:
       | I'm interested to see how Bluesky ends up handling bad actors in
       | the long-term. Will they have the resources to keep up? Or will
       | it become polluted like the other large platforms.
       | 
       | Also, if a part of their business model will be based off selling
       | algorithmic feeds, won't that mean more spam is actually good for
       | their bottom line because they'll sell more algorithmic feeds
       | that counter the spam?
        
         | paxys wrote:
         | The AT Protocol already accounts for this. There will
         | eventually be community-built content labelers and classifers
         | that you can subscribe to to rank and moderate your own feed
         | however you want.
        
           | luckylion wrote:
           | I understand the moderators working for the big social
           | networks have a terrible job and often see the worst the
           | internet has to offer.
           | 
           | Who is going to do that job as a volunteer? Or is that
           | expected to be solved by technology? Hard to imagine them
           | achieving what Google, Facebook etc could not reliably.
        
             | dartos wrote:
             | The internet has been run on volunteer moderators for a
             | long long long long long time.
        
             | bdangubic wrote:
             | you really think Google/Facebook/... can't do it reliably?
             | :-)
        
           | Waterluvian wrote:
           | I have a feeling that this is going to create a weird thing
           | of some magnitude where accounts end up on popular blacklists
           | for poor reasons and have no recourse.
           | 
           | I'm concerned that in time it might develop into zealous
           | communities of samethink where you have to mind any slightly
           | dissenting opinion or you'll get blacklisted.
           | 
           | I think what I'm thinking about is essentially that judges
           | cannot be replaced by community opinion. (Not that Twitter
           | moderation was less bad).
        
       | shams93 wrote:
       | I saw what happened on threads, essential CSA material flooding
       | in, very very creepy so I stopped using threads.
        
         | AzzyHN wrote:
         | Blegh. Hopefully they're using some computer assistance, like
         | PhotoDNA or Project Arachnid
        
       | James_K wrote:
       | Do they have any way to make money yet?
        
       | jmyeet wrote:
       | This is the big challenge of any platform for user-generated
       | content and it's incredibly difficult to scale, do well and be
       | economical. A bit like CAP, it's almost like "pick 2". You will
       | have to deal with:
       | 
       | - CSAM
       | 
       | - Lower-degree offensive material eg Youtube had an issue a few
       | years ago where (likely) predators were commenting timestamps on
       | inocuous videos featuring children or on Tiktok videos with
       | children get saved _way_ more often. I would honestly advise any
       | parent to _never_ publicly post videos or photos of your children
       | to any platform, ever.
       | 
       | - Compliance with regulation in different countries (eg NetzDG in
       | Germany);
       | 
       | - Compliance with legal orders to take down content
       | 
       | - Compliance with legal orders to preserve content
       | 
       | - Porn, real or AI
       | 
       | - Weaponization of reporting systems to silence opinions. Anyone
       | who uses Tiktok is familiar with this. Tiktok clearly will simply
       | take down comments and videos when they receive a certain number
       | of reports without it ever being reviewed by a human, giving you
       | the option to appeal
       | 
       | - Brigading
       | 
       | - Cyberbullying and harassment
       | 
       | This is one reason why "true" federation doesn't really work.
       | Either the content on Bluesky (or any other platform) has to go
       | through a central review process, in which case it's not really
       | federated, or these systems need to be duplicated across more
       | than one node.
        
       | egypturnash wrote:
       | I wonder how they're planning to pay for people to deal with
       | these reports.
        
       | bigbones wrote:
       | I think the central nature of moderation needs fixed, rather than
       | moderation itself. Real world moderation doesn't work by having a
       | central censor, it involves like-minded people identifying into a
       | group and having their access to conversation enabled by that
       | identification. When the conversation no longer suits the group,
       | the person is no longer welcome. I think a technical model of
       | this could be made to work.
       | 
       | Looked semi-seriously at doing a Twitter clone around the time
       | Bluesky was first announced, and to solve this I'd considered
       | something like GitHub achievement badges (e.g. organization
       | membership), except instead of a static number, these could be
       | created by anyone, and trust relationships could exist between
       | them. For example, a programming language community might have
       | existing organs who might wish to maintain a membership badge -
       | the community's existing CoC would necessarily confer application
       | of this badge to a user, thus extending the existing expectation
       | for conduct out from the community to that platform.
       | 
       | Since within the tech community these expectations are relatively
       | aligned, trust relationships between different badges would be
       | quite straightforward to imagine (e.g. Python and Rust community
       | standards are very similar). Outside tech, similar things might
       | be seen in certain areas of politics, religion or local cultural
       | areas. Issues and dramatics regarding cross-community alignment
       | would naturally be confined only to the neighbouring badges of a
       | potential trust relationship, not the platform as a whole.
       | 
       | I like the idea of badge membership and badge trust being the
       | means by which visibility on the platform could be achieved.
       | There need not be any big centralized standards for
       | participation, each user effectively would be allowed to pick
       | their own poison and starting point for building out their own
       | visibility into the universe of content. Where issues occur
       | (abusive user carrying a highly visible badge, or maintainer of
       | such a badge turning sour or suddenly giving up on its reputation
       | or similar), a centralized function could still exist to step in
       | and potentially take over at least in the interim, but the need
       | for this (at least in theory) should be greatly diminished.
       | 
       | A web of trust over a potentially large number of user-governed
       | groupings has some fun technical problems to solve, especially
       | around making it efficient enough for interactive use. And from a
       | usability perspective, application onboarding for a brand new
       | account
       | 
       | Running on little sleep but thought it was worth trying to sketch
       | this idea out on a relevant thread.
        
         | photochemsyn wrote:
         | The whole point of online discussion IMO is not to join some
         | little hive mind where everyone agrees with each other (eg many
         | subreddits) but rather to have discussion between people with
         | different information bases and different viewpoints. That's
         | why it's valuable, you learn new things and are exposed to
         | different points of views.
        
           | bigbones wrote:
           | That is true regardless, for example pre-Elon Twitter was
           | nothing but right wing tears, post-Elon nothing but left wing
           | tears.
        
       | Waterluvian wrote:
       | I suspect that when people love Bluesky so much, a lot of that is
       | actually just the fact that it's free and has no ads and the
       | population was quite manageable.
       | 
       | I don't think I've seen a concrete plan for how it's going to
       | keep scaling and pay the bills.
        
       | bakugo wrote:
       | The audience Bluesky is currently cultivating is the kind of
       | audience that mashes the report button every time they see
       | something they disagree with, so this isn't surprising.
       | 
       | If the user base actually keeps growing at a steady rate, I don't
       | see how they'll get the resources to deal with so many reports
       | (especially since they don't seem to have a plan to monetize the
       | site yet) without resorting to the usual low-effort solutions,
       | such as using some sort of algorithm that bans automatically
       | based on keywords or number of reports.
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-16 23:02 UTC)