TikTok sued by former content moderator over mental health impacts of moderation (theverge.com)

I still think these sites are hiring the wrong people for moderators. There is a vast pool of untapped talent at 4chan that would gleefully do the job and hardly see it as work.

This is why Google is so bad at customer service. Because of "human ops". They think it's more humane to make a machine do the moderating and replies on email than actual humans.

To the tech giants bad customer service is just a sign of teething troubles that will be fixed than an actual tech failure or policy mistake.

And there is some sense here. And there is some nonsense.

Expect more and more less human responses, more false positives or negatives and also better mental health of employees from these cooperations.

These stories (Casey Newton also wrote a great one two years ago[1]) were pretty well tackled by Stephenson in Fall, or Dodge in Hell I think. Increasingly there's a sanitized internet for the professional class with access to high quality information while an army of sewage workers has to crawl through the waste and clean it up, either directly at home or through some algorithm that was trained with data that was labelled by even less privileged people in some poor country abroad.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Don't hire moderators, news stories saying how dangerous your unmoderated site is. Hire moderators, news stories saying how dangerous your job is to moderators.

I'm being glib and all that, but it's a hard thing to pull off well either way.