I always look at these things from a parochial perspective, i.e. how does it apply to HN.
His first two points ("moderation is likely to end up pissing off those who are moderated" and "content moderation is always going to rely on judgment calls") are true of all moderation and certainly HN. They have nothing to do with scale though.
His third point is more interesting: at scale, even 99.9% accuracy is going to leave hundreds of thousands of mistakes a day. No one will care about the 99.9% you got right, only the things you missed. Reporters will call public attention to these.
That's a good point and not widely understood. But he stops there. All that shows is that content moderation is impossible to do perfectly, which we already know because of points 1 and 2. More interesting would be the part he didn't write: given that a large number of misses is inevitable and reporters will call attention to them, what follows next? Probably that the public image will be that moderation sucks. That's rough, but it doesn't necessarily follow that content moderation is impossible to do well.
I think the way scale comes in to play for the first two points comes down to who is being moderated / doing the moderation. At scale, the users being moderated are more capable of becoming a politically or economically effective coalition. And at scale, the consistency of judgement becomes harder to maintain. Now you have mistakes not just because judgement was incorrectly applied, but also because the judgement itself was incorrectly implemented.
I agree with you that, at scale, issues with moderation can become politically influential, and that's a huge difference from moderation at smaller scales. Lucky for us, says parochial me.
Consistency is probably a red herring. Moderation will never be perceived as consistent, at any scale. Different mods will always make different calls, and even the same mod will make different-seeming calls because humans are complicated.
Consistency being a red herring is behind the discussions over "instant" replay vs ref call in sports.
If players can trust a ref to be not perfect, but fair (that is, screwing up equally for both teams), the game will flow much more than if it is continually stopped so everyone can argue and check the replay.
I don't follow sports that do instant replays but I'd expect that people don't agree about them anyway.
The best way to signal fairness is to find a thread like a butterfly option where you can scold one of each side. Readers are alert to that and they love it. Everyone feels reassured that things are fair. That would be analogous to a ref giving a penalty to each side. It's not always possible, of course, and when the scolding is one-sided people will automatically assume that you secretly favor the other team.
Surely the 'scale' issue's answer is for a community to moderate itself. That way, the community should be happy. That's what Slashdot did (does?). All users take part in moderation [if they wish], and take part in meta-moderation.
Using a statistical consensus, and correction of outliers, but doing so through the userbase such that as the community grows so too does the base of moderators.
Making it statistical means that no one moderator can have undue influence (other than site owners).
HN does some 2nd order stuff, flags/vouches from trusted users i think are weighted (?) but doesn't go to the next level of then decreasing the weight of votes for those whose votes were meta-moderated as 'wrong' (ie contrary to community consensus).
In theory that should handle brigading, for example, because you don't know what you'll moderate before you say yes, and you can't choose to moderate - the site chooses you.
Slashdot also had several dimensions to it's moderation and allowed users to choose to consume content contrary to the community norm - eg you can choose to see more humour, even if the community in general doesn't like to view humour.
Still the best system, on paper (I have no idea if they have to constantly fix things!?!) that I've seen.
The Slashdot system won't work so well for Facebook because on Slashdot everything is public. On Facebook the meta-moderators would be either seeing only posts from their friends (defeating the purpose), or posts from total strangers that they might not want leaking out. It would break the encapsulation of your friends list.
One thing I do like about Slashdot is that they limit the total amount of score a post can get and how much each person can moderate at once. This makes it much much harder to brigade content, which is the usual problem with community based moderation.
>Surely the 'scale' issue's answer is for a community to moderate itself. That way, the community should be happy.
Self-moderation is basically what Stackoverflow is and a lot of users are not happy with the outcome. Most of the votes that close questions as "duplicates" and "not constructive" are done by fellow users. I tried to explain this previously[0] but unhappy Stackoverflow users still insist there's an "us vs them".
And consider that Stackoverflow's userbase is a much smaller scale than Facebook.
Under a Slashdot style system the "closed-duplicate" questions would be downgraded for those users who choose; you might like dupes and so you could choose to boost dupes for yourself.
The community provides a default position (duplicates closed), provides the information ('this is duplicate'), but under a Slashdot style system you can choose that content that others 'hide'.
I think HN works because it's small and focused enough to exclude many people who otherwise would have used HN if HN wasn't the way it is. General platforms however are different. Twitter doesn't have a defined purpose other than some vague tagline. What kind of people does it attract?
> His third point is more interesting: at scale, even 99.9% accuracy is going to leave hundreds of thousands of mistakes a day. No one will care about the 99.9% you got right, only the things you missed. Reporters will call public attention to these.
This is indeed the crux. The .1% failures are quite inevitable. They represent the most valuable training data, and that deserves attention. The breakdown that I see is that it becomes a popularity contest: if you have enough friends, followers, or you can bend the ear of somebody who does, then and only then do these cases receive human attention. In a sense, this is outsourcing the human-level moderation to the public, a level of bad PR determines the escalation. This will fail to capture a large portion of the false positives, fail to feed back into the training set, and the number of failures will continue to scale with the system. The goal should be to eradicate these mistakes, and I can't see how that can be done without investing in human metamoderation -- even if they catch 1% of the .1%, that could provide an opportunity to continuously improve the system. If your profits scale, then so must your investments, or as you say, public confidence will collapse.
Repeated bad PR stories erodes public confidence, which can result in regulations? My reasons include altruism and a long term view, which don't always play well with business types.
Not impossible at all. Divide the subject matter into thousands of specialist areas, and let each area be moderated by it's own community moderators/editors. It only becomes a problem when you try and publish every comment on every subject through a single organisation.
Doesn't that reinforce extremes and encourage enclaves: which is why Reddit end up closing whole communities (the good and bad in those communities). You're just putting off moderation of extreme content that doesn't confirm to a community consensus at all by hiding it in a corner and letting it grow without control.
Are the readers of 'Nature' or 'The Economist' extreme? Quality curation and editorial control are possible at those levels. I can write a letter, or indeed an article or paper for either, but it only gets accepted if it is good enough.
> Doesn't that reinforce extremes and encourage enclaves: which is why Reddit end up closing whole communities (the good and bad in those communities).
Nope. It works well on discord.
I can think of few reasons why:
1. The reliance on advertising model pushes them to retain users on their platform for longer and increase engagement in unnatural ways. You can see with how they push you to use the app or throw big subs everywhere.
2. The front-page has limited slots and there is no way to divide the community into smaller parts in itself. On discord, you can do this with channels and roles.
3. There is no voting system and realtime communication is more human like. You can get feedback naturally which you won't on reddit.
This gives you, as examples, Reddit, fandoms, academic niches, the Toxoplasma of Rage (SSC), cliques, cults, and the like. Not all horrible, but of decidedly variable, and often overtly bad, outcomes.
Small groups self-selecting rapidly give rise to highly idiosyncratic community behaviours (groupthink, cults, circle-jerks, mutual admiration societies). Large groups tend to vastly overemphasize first impressions and surface appeal, not long-term quality, depth, or complexity. See Dwight MacDonald writing on mass culture in the 1950s. Specialist fields have both legitimate barriers to entry (talent and expertise) and self-imposed ones (in-group, grants funders). Any remunerated content must appeal to the compensation mechanism, dynamics, or authority (this article was linked from Techdirt's announcement it had been banned by Google Adsense, currently on HN). Who pays the piper calls the tune.
Focusing on who moderates misses other factors such as how (mechanisms) and criteria (what is elevated / dropped). Those are also worth considering.
Most moderation tools are very blunt instruments: show or not. I've been quite frustrated with options on nu. By considering other factors -- prominence or obscurity, degree of exposure, how highly-rated though deep comments are presented, say, "virality", placement and frequency of countering or corrective messages, strength or lack of central control, frequency of posting or participation, and contributer reputation, just to name a few, there are numerous other controls which might be adjusted. Randomness is also underapreciated.
Most of all is what the moderation strives for: quality, popularity, engagement, conversions, advertising impact, artistic novelty, legal prohibitions or mandates, political objectives, humour, ... Few discussions of moderation even acknowledge this.
(This submission itself went through HN's 2nd chance queue.)
HN operates largely on human-induced nudges, some firmer than others. It's not elegent, and may not scale much beyond present activity. But it's been remarkably effective and consistent for going on two decades.
I've always been curious about "content moderation." Theoretically, if you could perfectly allow only content that was Legal in the jurisdiction, wouldn't every website allow everything Legal and be able to just point at the laws and say, "if you don't like it, change the law"?
If so, is the crux of the problem that 1. we don't know what is legal, 2. We can't perfectly allow it, and or 3. Something else.
If 3, is it that websites don't really fear legal repercussions, but fear bad PR, thus alienating users/revenue? If so, doesn't it follow that the level of content moderation will track the projected cost of losing the projected users/revenue?
The crux of the problem is that limiting moderation only to allowing content which is illegal and banning what is illegal still allows content many people may find objectionable, spam, trolling, racist and hateful speech and off topic content.
Not every online community wants to be a 4chan or Voat, which is what that sort of hands off moderation inevitably leads to.
> What if you just gave each person a way to censor the content they don't want to see?
>
> Something like show dead posts on hn.
Or a killfile in a news client. While usenet was to some extent full of troll posts and spam, with the right filters, the signal to noise ratio was very high.
4chan is one of the most popular websites out there, clearly that is a sign that people do want that freedom. What for me is even more shocking is that young people browse the boards in public and it's a mainstream discussion.
Some people obviously do and they're welcome to it, just not everyone, everywhere. No one comes to Hacker News for puerile humor and racist edgelord shitposting, and when it shows up here it gets banned.
I'm not sure the idea of "if it's legal somewhere it must be legal everywhere" is going to fly. There are areas of the world where it's not illegal to have sex with minors for example.
So maybe you try to say "if it's legal to a majority of our users then it is legal on the site", but then it becomes illegal to discuss Tienanmen Square on your supposedly global website.
Websites that ignore the law get shut down or shut out. Declaring yourself above the law because you're on the web never works once law enforcement is involved.
> I've always been curious about "content moderation." Theoretically, if you could perfectly allow only content that was Legal in the jurisdiction, wouldn't every website allow everything Legal and be able to just point at the laws and say, "if you don't like it, change the law"?
No. Many websites would want to be environments with different standards than the minimal legal one. In the same way that you see different types of discussion and language in church than in school than at work than at home. Of course, none of those places have to try to do it at scale... but should anyone try to do it at scale?
> wouldn't every website allow everything Legal and be able to just point at the laws and say, "if you don't like it, change the law"?
Again and again, industries operated by rational agents self-regulate with the goal of preventing the government from getting involved. (With many obvious exceptions, like businesses seeking regulatory capture, producers of commodities with razor thin margins, operators who don't expect to be in business long enough for regulation to take effect, etc.)
Once you get the government involved, you have not only the risk of public backlash whenever you make a mistake, you have the risk of fines or worse. Now your legal council has to get involved in the operation of your moderation system. You potentially need multiple people to sign off on moderation decisions to ensure compliance as well as a system to maintain a paper trail in case government auditors come sniffing around. Your operational costs begin to balloon.
A PR person who says, "If you don't like our behavior, change the law" is basically self-destructive.
Moderation, even at scale, is a decades old solved problem, and not even a particularly hard one. The reason places like FB etc say it's 'impossible' so they don't open themselves up to legal liability.
Perhaps you could expand on that with details of a solution you have in mind, references to a moderation system using that solution would be useful too.
Obviously right on the numbers but I have to disagree with the notion that reporters and people are just making a lot of noise over the 0.1% of inevitable "bad calls".
Usually only notable popular accounts get coverage over their censorship (or lack of). The number of such accounts is a few orders of magnitude smaller than the general userbase. Any network would want to protect these accounts from arbitrary bans and they probably do.
Most big stories about social media censorship often include comments from company reps who stand by their decision. Stories ending in "Oops we made a mistake" tend to be much less common as far as I can tell.
As such I'd say people are actually pretty good at identifying the cases that aren't just a "bad call" but a contentious matter.
Centralized moderation at scale is impossible to do for the same reason that centralized planning of economy is impossible to do: which is that goals, knowledge and resources are not known to the centralized authority that is supposed to handle the task.
> There is the argument (that I regularly advocate) that pushing out the moderation to the ends of the network (i.e., giving more controls to the end users) is better, but that also has some complications in that it puts the burden on end users, and they have neither the time nor inclination to continually tweak their own settings.
> The first obvious issue is the creation of echo chambers or online cults, where instead of choosing truth and seeking the best information, people trust those who confirm their existing beliefs.
This can be somewhat mitigated with the ability to set a trust filter level to a low level, even in the negatives, to see posts and opinions one may not usually be exposed to. This again is up to the end user if they wish to expose themselves to differing opinions or not.
It is up to individuals to determine what’s best for them. Of course, one would hope they make good choices, but it is not society’s job to save people from themselves. It’s far better to have this freedom and the power to use or misuse it, than to allow companies to build the echo chamber behind closed doors.
That's a nice dogma - which breaks down as soon as one of the cults/echo chambers starts harrassing or doxxing or otherwise hurting someone they declared an enemy.
This whole concept is based on an assumption that if someone bothers you online, this is always a personal issue that can be resolved by you pretending they didn't exist. By now we have enough experience with online communities to know that things don't work that way.
Given the "impossibility theorem" headline, I was hoping for at least a sketch of a formalizable argument. I wasn't really expecting one, and maybe this is a silly thing to be annoyed about, but I think it's better to be clear about what exactly you have backing up a particular argument.
let everyone rate content on multiple relevant criteria. Eg, quality, grammar, agreement, sexuality, violence, hate, etc.
Make some default filters that choose societally acceptable settings for each filter, and hides new content that is unrated.
Enable individuals to tweak the filters to any setting they wish, for a totally custom view, including viewing unrated content.
Enable individuals to share their filters with others.
Voila! A system that allows any content to be posted, but shows only "safe" content by default and allows individuals to bypass the filters if they wish.
Except, in this system you're relying on users who choose to view unrated content to provide the initial ratings. Even places like 4chan have moderation and most people won't be willing to engage with content at that level to positively rate memes or more general discussion. Add onto that that untrained users are going to be largely garbage at actually classifying your content; this is somethign social media struggles with and they have trained moderators. What's the difference between hate and ironic self ribbing, what's the difference between sexuality, art, and medicine (see tumblr's hilarious attempt at banning "femme presenting nipples"), what kind of content can be legitimately traumatizing or otherwise dangerous (calls to violence; deadly misinformation; etc).
The closest thing to that model is something like the fediverse where you're choosing to federate with instances based on their moderation rules and your users choose to stay on your instance based on yours. Even that has problems with chains of trust and discovery though. At scale you can't assume good faith anymore
At least for voting, the fix is simple and I don’t understand why both Reddit and HN (with the default settings) don’t do it: make voting invisible.
That is, you sort the comments by the vote value they have, as is done now, but you don’t display the value. Reddit displays the value directly, and HN by gradually greying out comments. The problem with doing that is that it leads to bandwagoning. If I’d had to hazard a guess, a solid 50% of downvotes are people blindly ramming the downvote button because that comment already has a negative vote value.
>the fix is simple and I don’t understand why both Reddit and HN (with the default settings) don’t do it: make voting invisible
Because part of the purpose of voting/karma is operant conditioning - visually marking certain comments as "low quality" and others as "high quality" and to encourage commenters to prefer creating and engaging with the latter over the former through the constant feedback loop of reward and punishment.
> If I’d had to hazard a guess, a solid 50% of downvotes are people blindly ramming the downvote button because that comment already has a negative vote value.
That's the system operating as intended, ruthlessly separating the signal from the noise. I don't particularly like it either but Hacker News isn't about free discussion so much as curated discussion.
This title is sarcastic right? It's doable just not well because there is no way to create a totalitarian panopticon without having your state first be a totalitarian panoply of optics and cons.
Score Voting (= Range Voting) is where candidates are given a score from, say zero to 99, and an average is taken. Effectively the same style as in figure skating. Yes, a once-every-four-years global aesthetic athletic event is the only place to get voting right.*
*what do you mean by "right?" Well, there is something called Bayesian regret and you can minimize it by having Score Voting (=Range Voting) or by having the magical harry potter wizard hat choose the perfect candidate. Other voting systems have more Bayesian Regret and the current First-Past-the-Post voting style has quite a lot, actually. https://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html
Any voting system that incorporates mean scores will in no way be immune to strategic deviations. (imagine a tie between your second ranked candidate and some other one, you simply inflate your score of your second ranked candidate by one) Also isn't achieving the lowest regret trivial, as the other voting systems never report anything cardinally?
In regards to your first statement, that's absolutely the point of Score Voting, to have a clear leaderboard with 1st, 2nd, 3rd and so forth. With regards to your second statement, "because we cannot access data means the data never existed?" Bayesian regret exists in all elections with all candidates, just because it's not "reported" doesn't mean it's not statistically there. The point is that Score Voting is a superset of all voting systems, and everything else is a blurrying of the detail that is available only in Score Voting. Bayesian Regret is just used to demonstrate that it will yield the highest rated candidate overall, which is logical given how it works. Nevertheless, examine the science for yourself and I believe you will soon find that all voting systems are some sort of blind or ignorant form of Score Voting. Means or averages are convenient, but you could simply take the greatest total score as well.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadHis first two points ("moderation is likely to end up pissing off those who are moderated" and "content moderation is always going to rely on judgment calls") are true of all moderation and certainly HN. They have nothing to do with scale though.
His third point is more interesting: at scale, even 99.9% accuracy is going to leave hundreds of thousands of mistakes a day. No one will care about the 99.9% you got right, only the things you missed. Reporters will call public attention to these.
That's a good point and not widely understood. But he stops there. All that shows is that content moderation is impossible to do perfectly, which we already know because of points 1 and 2. More interesting would be the part he didn't write: given that a large number of misses is inevitable and reporters will call attention to them, what follows next? Probably that the public image will be that moderation sucks. That's rough, but it doesn't necessarily follow that content moderation is impossible to do well.
Consistency is probably a red herring. Moderation will never be perceived as consistent, at any scale. Different mods will always make different calls, and even the same mod will make different-seeming calls because humans are complicated.
If players can trust a ref to be not perfect, but fair (that is, screwing up equally for both teams), the game will flow much more than if it is continually stopped so everyone can argue and check the replay.
I don't follow sports that do instant replays but I'd expect that people don't agree about them anyway.
The best way to signal fairness is to find a thread like a butterfly option where you can scold one of each side. Readers are alert to that and they love it. Everyone feels reassured that things are fair. That would be analogous to a ref giving a penalty to each side. It's not always possible, of course, and when the scolding is one-sided people will automatically assume that you secretly favor the other team.
Any other programming fourms with a different set of mods?
Using a statistical consensus, and correction of outliers, but doing so through the userbase such that as the community grows so too does the base of moderators.
Making it statistical means that no one moderator can have undue influence (other than site owners).
HN does some 2nd order stuff, flags/vouches from trusted users i think are weighted (?) but doesn't go to the next level of then decreasing the weight of votes for those whose votes were meta-moderated as 'wrong' (ie contrary to community consensus).
In theory that should handle brigading, for example, because you don't know what you'll moderate before you say yes, and you can't choose to moderate - the site chooses you.
Slashdot also had several dimensions to it's moderation and allowed users to choose to consume content contrary to the community norm - eg you can choose to see more humour, even if the community in general doesn't like to view humour.
Still the best system, on paper (I have no idea if they have to constantly fix things!?!) that I've seen.
One thing I do like about Slashdot is that they limit the total amount of score a post can get and how much each person can moderate at once. This makes it much much harder to brigade content, which is the usual problem with community based moderation.
Self-moderation is basically what Stackoverflow is and a lot of users are not happy with the outcome. Most of the votes that close questions as "duplicates" and "not constructive" are done by fellow users. I tried to explain this previously[0] but unhappy Stackoverflow users still insist there's an "us vs them".
And consider that Stackoverflow's userbase is a much smaller scale than Facebook.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23977165
The community provides a default position (duplicates closed), provides the information ('this is duplicate'), but under a Slashdot style system you can choose that content that others 'hide'.
Definitely a bigger brush than HN.
This is indeed the crux. The .1% failures are quite inevitable. They represent the most valuable training data, and that deserves attention. The breakdown that I see is that it becomes a popularity contest: if you have enough friends, followers, or you can bend the ear of somebody who does, then and only then do these cases receive human attention. In a sense, this is outsourcing the human-level moderation to the public, a level of bad PR determines the escalation. This will fail to capture a large portion of the false positives, fail to feed back into the training set, and the number of failures will continue to scale with the system. The goal should be to eradicate these mistakes, and I can't see how that can be done without investing in human metamoderation -- even if they catch 1% of the .1%, that could provide an opportunity to continuously improve the system. If your profits scale, then so must your investments, or as you say, public confidence will collapse.
How would you convince someone to increase budget for moderation without bad PR?
Sure. With a maximum bandwidth of what, dozens a month?
Nope. It works well on discord.
I can think of few reasons why:
1. The reliance on advertising model pushes them to retain users on their platform for longer and increase engagement in unnatural ways. You can see with how they push you to use the app or throw big subs everywhere.
2. The front-page has limited slots and there is no way to divide the community into smaller parts in itself. On discord, you can do this with channels and roles.
3. There is no voting system and realtime communication is more human like. You can get feedback naturally which you won't on reddit.
Small groups self-selecting rapidly give rise to highly idiosyncratic community behaviours (groupthink, cults, circle-jerks, mutual admiration societies). Large groups tend to vastly overemphasize first impressions and surface appeal, not long-term quality, depth, or complexity. See Dwight MacDonald writing on mass culture in the 1950s. Specialist fields have both legitimate barriers to entry (talent and expertise) and self-imposed ones (in-group, grants funders). Any remunerated content must appeal to the compensation mechanism, dynamics, or authority (this article was linked from Techdirt's announcement it had been banned by Google Adsense, currently on HN). Who pays the piper calls the tune.
Focusing on who moderates misses other factors such as how (mechanisms) and criteria (what is elevated / dropped). Those are also worth considering.
Most moderation tools are very blunt instruments: show or not. I've been quite frustrated with options on nu. By considering other factors -- prominence or obscurity, degree of exposure, how highly-rated though deep comments are presented, say, "virality", placement and frequency of countering or corrective messages, strength or lack of central control, frequency of posting or participation, and contributer reputation, just to name a few, there are numerous other controls which might be adjusted. Randomness is also underapreciated.
Most of all is what the moderation strives for: quality, popularity, engagement, conversions, advertising impact, artistic novelty, legal prohibitions or mandates, political objectives, humour, ... Few discussions of moderation even acknowledge this.
(This submission itself went through HN's 2nd chance queue.)
HN operates largely on human-induced nudges, some firmer than others. It's not elegent, and may not scale much beyond present activity. But it's been remarkably effective and consistent for going on two decades.
Any reason why this was killed twice?
I vouched again.
If so, is the crux of the problem that 1. we don't know what is legal, 2. We can't perfectly allow it, and or 3. Something else.
If 3, is it that websites don't really fear legal repercussions, but fear bad PR, thus alienating users/revenue? If so, doesn't it follow that the level of content moderation will track the projected cost of losing the projected users/revenue?
Not every online community wants to be a 4chan or Voat, which is what that sort of hands off moderation inevitably leads to.
Something like show dead posts on hn.
Although, why host content that isn't profitable?
>
> Something like show dead posts on hn.
Or a killfile in a news client. While usenet was to some extent full of troll posts and spam, with the right filters, the signal to noise ratio was very high.
That works to a degree, but it isn't foolproof because it still requires people to see that content to begin with. It isn't proactive.
That option works poorly against targeted harassment or brigading.
Most pointedly where one jurisdiction's mandated content is another's prohibited. Maps exhibit this frequently, though there are other examples.
I've addressed considerations other than law already in this thread.
So maybe you try to say "if it's legal to a majority of our users then it is legal on the site", but then it becomes illegal to discuss Tienanmen Square on your supposedly global website.
Websites that ignore the law get shut down or shut out. Declaring yourself above the law because you're on the web never works once law enforcement is involved.
No. Many websites would want to be environments with different standards than the minimal legal one. In the same way that you see different types of discussion and language in church than in school than at work than at home. Of course, none of those places have to try to do it at scale... but should anyone try to do it at scale?
Do we need that scale?
Again and again, industries operated by rational agents self-regulate with the goal of preventing the government from getting involved. (With many obvious exceptions, like businesses seeking regulatory capture, producers of commodities with razor thin margins, operators who don't expect to be in business long enough for regulation to take effect, etc.)
Once you get the government involved, you have not only the risk of public backlash whenever you make a mistake, you have the risk of fines or worse. Now your legal council has to get involved in the operation of your moderation system. You potentially need multiple people to sign off on moderation decisions to ensure compliance as well as a system to maintain a paper trail in case government auditors come sniffing around. Your operational costs begin to balloon.
A PR person who says, "If you don't like our behavior, change the law" is basically self-destructive.
Usually only notable popular accounts get coverage over their censorship (or lack of). The number of such accounts is a few orders of magnitude smaller than the general userbase. Any network would want to protect these accounts from arbitrary bans and they probably do.
Most big stories about social media censorship often include comments from company reps who stand by their decision. Stories ending in "Oops we made a mistake" tend to be much less common as far as I can tell.
As such I'd say people are actually pretty good at identifying the cases that aren't just a "bad call" but a contentious matter.
But it is possible to give everyone tools to modereate for themeselves https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati...
> There is the argument (that I regularly advocate) that pushing out the moderation to the ends of the network (i.e., giving more controls to the end users) is better, but that also has some complications in that it puts the burden on end users, and they have neither the time nor inclination to continually tweak their own settings.
This can be somewhat mitigated with the ability to set a trust filter level to a low level, even in the negatives, to see posts and opinions one may not usually be exposed to. This again is up to the end user if they wish to expose themselves to differing opinions or not.
It is up to individuals to determine what’s best for them. Of course, one would hope they make good choices, but it is not society’s job to save people from themselves. It’s far better to have this freedom and the power to use or misuse it, than to allow companies to build the echo chamber behind closed doors.
That's a nice dogma - which breaks down as soon as one of the cults/echo chambers starts harrassing or doxxing or otherwise hurting someone they declared an enemy.
This whole concept is based on an assumption that if someone bothers you online, this is always a personal issue that can be resolved by you pretending they didn't exist. By now we have enough experience with online communities to know that things don't work that way.
let everyone rate content on multiple relevant criteria. Eg, quality, grammar, agreement, sexuality, violence, hate, etc.
Make some default filters that choose societally acceptable settings for each filter, and hides new content that is unrated.
Enable individuals to tweak the filters to any setting they wish, for a totally custom view, including viewing unrated content.
Enable individuals to share their filters with others.
Voila! A system that allows any content to be posted, but shows only "safe" content by default and allows individuals to bypass the filters if they wish.
The closest thing to that model is something like the fediverse where you're choosing to federate with instances based on their moderation rules and your users choose to stay on your instance based on yours. Even that has problems with chains of trust and discovery though. At scale you can't assume good faith anymore
It was super controversial at the time, as I remember (I was new, so I didn't care that much).
Because part of the purpose of voting/karma is operant conditioning - visually marking certain comments as "low quality" and others as "high quality" and to encourage commenters to prefer creating and engaging with the latter over the former through the constant feedback loop of reward and punishment.
> If I’d had to hazard a guess, a solid 50% of downvotes are people blindly ramming the downvote button because that comment already has a negative vote value.
That's the system operating as intended, ruthlessly separating the signal from the noise. I don't particularly like it either but Hacker News isn't about free discussion so much as curated discussion.
Score Voting (= Range Voting) is where candidates are given a score from, say zero to 99, and an average is taken. Effectively the same style as in figure skating. Yes, a once-every-four-years global aesthetic athletic event is the only place to get voting right.*
*what do you mean by "right?" Well, there is something called Bayesian regret and you can minimize it by having Score Voting (=Range Voting) or by having the magical harry potter wizard hat choose the perfect candidate. Other voting systems have more Bayesian Regret and the current First-Past-the-Post voting style has quite a lot, actually. https://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html