I like yishan's content and his climate focus, but this "we interrupt your tweet thread for sponsored content" style tangent is a bit annoying - not directly for doing it or its content, but because I can see other thread writers picking this up and we end up the same as Youtube with sponsored sections of content that you can't ad block.
FWIW With YT you can block them with Sponsorblock, which works with user submitted timestamps of sponsored sections in videos. If this tweet technique takes off I'd imagine a similar idea for tweets.
While many YouTube videos provide very interesting content most twitter „threads“ are just inane ramblings by some blue checkmark. So for yt videos I go the extra steps to install an extension. For twitter though? I just close the tab and never return.
How can people who are not totally dopamine deprived zombies find twitter and this terrible „thread“ format acceptable? Just write a coherent blog post pls.
> but this "we interrupt your tweet thread for sponsored content" style tangent is a bit annoying
I found this hilarious. I don't use Twitter and so was unaware that these annoying tangents are common on the platform. As a result, I thought Yishan was using them to illustrate how it's not necessarily the content (his climate initiative) but a specific pattern of behavior (saying the 'right' thing at the wrong time, in this case) that should be the target of moderation.
In real life we say: "it's not what you said, it's just the way you said it!" Perhaps the digital equivalent of that could be: "it's not what you said, it's just when you said it."
>, but this "we interrupt your tweet thread for sponsored content" style tangent is a bit annoying
It is annoying but it can be seen as part of his argument. How can spam be moderated if even trustworthy creators create spam?
According to him, it's not spam because it doesn't fulfill the typical patterns of spam, which shows that identifying noise does require knowledge of the language.
It could be interesting to turn his argument around. Instead of trying to remove all spam, a platform could offer the tools to handle all forms of spam and let its users come up with clever ways to use those tools.
> Our current climate of political polarization makes it easy to think itʻs about the content of the speech, or hate speech, or misinformation, or censorship, or etc etc.
Are we sure that it is not the other way around? Didn't social platforms created or increased polarization?
I always see this comments from social platforms that take as fact that society is polarized and they work hard to fix it, when I believe that it is the other way around. Social media has created the opportunity to increase polarization and they are not able to stop it for technical, social or economic reasons.
>I visited Mr. Cain in West Virginia after seeing his YouTube video denouncing the far right. We spent hours discussing his radicalization. To back up his recollections, he downloaded and sent me his entire YouTube history, a log of more than 12,000 videos and more than 2,500 search queries dating to 2015.
I think that you should look into the history of talk radio, or maybe just radio in general. Then maybe a history of American journalism, from Robert McCormick's Chicago Tribune back to the the party newspapers set up in the first years of the republic.
Yepp, same message different medium. Having someone in your family who “listens to talk radio” was the “they went down the far right YouTube rabbit hole” of old.
I mean the big names in talk radio are still clucking if you want to listen to them today.
I used to think this until several instances of various neighbors getting drunk enough to shed the veil of souther hospitality and reveal how racist they are.
Plenty of people have radical thoughts and opinions, but are smart enough to keep it to themselves IRL
Society is a closed system, twitter is not outside of society.
The people on twitter are real people (well, mostly, probably), and have real political opinions.
If you talk to people, by and large they'll profess moderate opinions, because in person discussions still trigger politeness and non-confrontational emotions in most people, so the default 'safe' thing to say is the moderate choice, no matter what their true opinion happens to be.
The internet allows people to take the proverbial mask off.
I would disagree about proverbial masks. Majority of people in the world including US are simply too preoccupied with their everyday routine, problems and work to end up with extreme political views.
What Internet does have is ease of changing masks and joining diverse groups. Trying something unusual without reprecussions appeal to a lot of people who usually simply dont have time to join such groups offline.
The real problem is that unfortunately propoganda has evolved too with all new research about human phychology, behaviors and fallacies. Abusing weaknesses of monkey brain on scale is relatively easy and profitable.
So most of the republicans I run into are extremely frank about the way the country ought to be run. When I was younger it was the same way with democrats.
In fact it seems that people were always polarized, it's just that the political parties (R & D in the US) didn't really bother sorting themselves on topics until the 1960s: even in the 1970s and early 1980s it was somewhat common to vote for (e.g.) an R president but a D representative (or vice versa). Straight-through one-party voting didn't really become the majority until the late-1980s and 1990s.
There's a chapter or two in the above book describing psychology studies showing that humans form tribes 'spontaneously' for the most arbitrary of reasons. "Us versus them" seems to be baked into the structure of humans.
I think political parties only later began astroturfing on social media and split users in camps. Formerly content on reddit in default subreddits often had low quality, but you still got some nice topics here and there. Now it is a propaganda hellhole that is completely in the hands of pretty polarized users.
> "Us versus them" seems to be baked into the structure of humans.
Not quite, but one of the most effective temptations one can offer is giving people a moral excuse to hate others. Best when see as those as responsible for all evil in the world. It feels good to judge, it distracts from your own faults, flaws, insecurities, fears and problems. This is pretty blatant and has become far, far worse than the formerly perhaps populist content on reddit. We especially see this on political topics, but also the pandemic as an example.
It's quite interesting that the USSR collapsed in 1991, which removed the biggest external "us vs them" actor.
But on the other hand there are also countless other factors that are going to affect society at scale: rise internet, rise of pharmaceutical psychotropics, surge in obesity, surge in autism, declines in testosterone, apparent reversal of Flynn effect, and more.
With so many things happening it all feels like a Rorschach test when trying to piece together anything like a meaningful hypothesis.
What’s wrong with this thread? It seems really level headed and exactly accurate to the people I know IRL who are insane-but-left and insane-but-right who won’t shut up about censorship while if you look at their posts it’s just “unhinged person picks fights with and yells at strangers.”
HN in general is convinced that social media is censoring right ideas because it skews counterculture and “grey tribe” and there have been a lot of high profile groups who claim right views while doing the most vile depraved shit like actively trying to harass people into suicide and celebrating it or directing massive internet mobs at largely defenseless not public figures for clout.
As I said in my post, he never justifies this point. To then turn it upon me to prove a negative?
Devils advocating against myself: I do believe the parler deplatforming is the proof for what he says. The world has indeed changed, but anyone who knows the details sure isn't saying why. Why? Because revealing how the world has changed, in the usa, would have some pretty serious consequences.
I don't know. I wish I could have a closed door, off record, tell me everything, conversation with yishan to have him tell me why he believes the world changed, in the context of social media censorship.
In terms of public verified knowledge, nothing at all has changed in the context of censorship. I stand by the point. Elon obviously stands by this as well. Though elon's sudden multiweek delays on unbanning... im expecting he suddenly knows as well.
>You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
Guess I'm not allowed to reply again today. No discussion allowed on HN.
I do find it funny they say 'you're posting too fast' but I haven't been able to post on HN or reply to you for an hour. How "fast" am I really going. I expect it will be a couple more hours before I am allowed to post again. How dare I discuss a forbidden subject.
One is 'put up or shutup' for appeals of moderator decisions.
That is anyone who wishes to appeal needs to also consent to have all their activities on the platform, relevant to the decision, revealed publicly.
It definitely could prevent later accusations of secretiveness or arbitrariness. And it probably would also make users think more in marginal cases before submitting.
But those users would be left alone in their pride in the put-up-or-shut-up model, because everybody else would see the mistakes of that user and abandon them. So the shame doesn't have to be effective for the individual, it just has to convince the majority that the user is in the wrong.
Right. To put it another way, this "put up or shut up" system, in my mind, isn't even really there to convince the person who got moderated that they were in the wrong. It's to convince the rest of the community that the moderation decision was unbiased and correct.
These news articles about "platform X censors people with political views Y" are about generating mass outrage from a comparatively small number of moderation decisions. While sure, it would be good for the people who are targeted by those moderation decisions to realize "yeah, ok, you're right, I was being a butthole", I think it's much more important to try to show the reactionary angry mob that things are aboveboard.
The most high profile, and controversial, "moderation" decisions made by large platforms recently have generally been for obvious, and very public, reasons.
This is something that occurs on twitch streams sometimes. While it can be educational for users to see why they were banned, some appeals are just attention seeking. Occasionally though it exposes the banned user’s or worse a victim users personal information, (eg mental health issues, age, location) and can lead to both users being targeted and bad behaviour by the audience. For example Bob is banned for bad behaviour towards Alice (threats, doxxing), by making that public you are not just impacting Bob, but could also put Alice at risk.
This also used to be relatively popular in the early days of League of Legends, people requesting a "Lyte Smite". Players would make inflammatory posts on the forums saying they were banned wrongly, and Lyte would come in with the chatlogs, sometimes escalating to perma-ban. I did always admire this system and thought it could be improved.
There's also a lot of drama around Lyte in his personal life, should you choose to go looking into that.
It is expensive to do, because you have to ensure the content being made public doesn't dox / hurt someone other than the poster. But I think you could add two things to the recipe. 1 - real user validation. So the banned user can't easily make another account. Obviously not easy and perhaps not even possible, but essential. 2 - increased stake. Protest a short ban, and if you lose, you get an even longer ban.
I've never understood that idea that PM's on a platform must be held purely private by the platform even in cases where:
* There's some moderation dispute that involves the PM's
* At least one of the parties involved consents to release the PM's
The latter is the critical bit, to me. When you send someone a chat message, or an email, obviously there's nothing actually stopping them from sharing the content of the message with others if they feel that way, either legally or technically. If an aggrieved party wants to share a PM, everyone knows they can do so -- the only question mark is that they may have faked it.
To me the answer here seems obvious: allow users to mark a PM/thread as publicly visible. This doesn't make it more public than it otherwise could be, it just lets other people verify the authenticity, that they're not making shit up.
Every single social media platform that has ever existed makes the same fundamental mistake. They believe that they just have to remove or block the bad actors and bad content and that will make the platform good.
The reality is everyone, myself included, can be and will be a bad actor.
How do you build and run a "social media" product when the very act of letting anyone respond to anyone with anything is itself the fundamental problem?
To be honest, and maybe this will be panned, but the real answer is for people to grow thicker skin and stop putting one's feelings on a pedestal above all.
Interesting, that wasn’t my interpretation of the twitter thread, it was more that spam and not hurtful content was the real tricky thing about moderating social media.
Spam was more of an example than the point, I think -- the argument Yishan is making is that moderation isn't for content, it's for behavior. The problem is that if bad behavior is tied to partisan and/or controversial content, which it often is, people react as if the moderation is about the content.
Look - I don't even particularly disagree with you, but I want to point out a problem with this approach.
I'm 33. I grew up playing multiplayer video games (including having to run a db9 COM cable across the house from one machine to another to play warcraft 2 multiplayer, back when you had to explicitly pick the protocol for the networking in the game menu)
My family worked with computers, so I had DSL since I have memories. I played a ton of online games. The communities are BRUTAL. They are insulting, abusive, misogynistic, racist, etc... the spectrum of unmonitored teenage angst, in all it's ugly forms (and to be fair, some truly awesome folks and places).
As a result - I have a really thick skin about basically everything said online. But a key difference between the late 90s and today, is that if I wanted it to stop, all I had to do was close the game I was playing. Done.
Most social activities were in person, not online. I could walk to my friend's houses. I could essentially tune out all the bullshit by turning off my computer, and there was plenty of other stuff to go do where the computer wasn't involved at all.
I'm not convinced that's enough anymore. The computer is in your pocket. It's always on. Your social life is probably half online, half in person. Your school work is online. Your family is online. your reputation is online (as evidenced by those fucking blue checkmarks). The abuse is now on a highway into your life, even if you want to turn it off.
It's like the school bully is now waiting for you everywhere. He's not waiting at school - he's stepping into the private conversations you're having online. He's talking to your friends. He's hurling abuse at you when you look at your family photos. He's in your life in a way that just wasn't possible before.
I don't think it's fair to say "Just grow a thicker skin" in response to that. I think growing a thicker skin is desperately needed, but I don't think it's sufficient. The problem is deeper.
We have a concept for people who do the things these users are doing on twitter in person - They're called fighting words, and most times, legally (even in the US) there is zero assumption of protected speech here. You say bad shit about someone with the goal of riling them up and no other value? You have no right of free speech, because you aren't "speaking" - you're trying to start a fight.
I'm not protecting your ability to bully someone. Full stop. If you want to do that, do it with the clear understanding that you're on your own, and regardless of how thick my skin is - I think you need a good slap upside the head. I'd cheer it on.
In person - this resolves itself because the fuckwads who do this literally get physically beaten. Not always - but often enough we have a modicum of civil discussion we accept, and a point where no one is going to defend you because you were a right little cunt, and the beating was well deserved.
I don't know how you simulate the same constraint online. I'm not entirely sure you can, but I think the answer isn't to just stop trying.
> The computer is in your pocket. It's always on. Your social life is probably half online, half in person. Your school work is online. Your family is online. your reputation is online (as evidenced by those fucking blue checkmarks). The abuse is now on a highway into your life, even if you want to turn it off.
It is still a choice to participate online. I'm not on Twitter or Facebook or anything like that. It doesn't affect my life in the slightest. Someone could be on there right this minute calling me names, and it can't bother me because I don't see it, and I don't let it into my life. This is not a superpower, it's a choice to not engage with social media and all the ills it brings.
Have I occasionally gotten hate mail from an HN post? Sure. I even got a physical threat over E-mail (LOL good luck, guy). If HN ever became as toxic as social media can be, I could just stop posting and reading. Problem solved. Online is not real if you just ignore it.
The attitude of "If you don't like it, leave!" is allowing the bullies to win.
Minorities, both racial and gender, should be able to use social media without having vitriol spewed at them because they're guilty of being a minority.
This is yet another antitrust issue, regulation should be put in place so that a private company cannot have own a platform with a market share large enough to become "the" public square.
I respectfully disagree. Beyond the reason that there is no way you can be 100% certain 'unmoderated media' was the primary motivator. Nobody can presume to know his motivations or inner dialogue. A look at that mans history shows clear mental health issues and self-destructive behavior so we can infer some things but never truly know.
Violence exists outside of mean tweets and political rhetoric. People, even crazy ones, almost always have their own agency even if it runs contrary to what most consider to be normal thoughts and behavior. They choose to act, regardless of others and mostly without concern or conscious. There are crazy people out there and censoring others wont ever stop bad people from doing bad things. If so, then how do we account for the evils done by those prior to our inter-connected world?
I don't block people because they hurt my feelings, i block people because im just not interested in seeing bird watching content on my timeline. No one deserves my eyeballs.
That's asking human nature to change, or at least asking almost everyone to work on their trauma until they don't get so activated. Neither will happen soon, so this can't be the real answer.
You hit the nail on the head, but maybe the other way around.
"Block" and "Mute" are the Twitter user's best friends. They keep the timeline free of spam, be it advertisers, or the growth hackers creating useless threads of Beginner 101 info and racking up thousands of likes.
After using several communications tools over the past couple of decades (BBSes, IRC, Usenet, AIM, plus the ones kids these days like), I'm convinced blocking and/or muting is required for any digital mass communication tool anyone other than sociopaths would use.
> The reality is everyone, myself included, can be and will be a bad actor.
But you likely aren't, and most people likely aren't either. That's the entire premise behind removing bad actors and spaces that allow bad actors to grow.
Your logic makes sense but is not how these moderation services actually work. When I used my own phone number to create a Twitter, I was immediately banned. So instead I purchased an account from a service with no issues. It’s become impossible for me at least to use large platforms without assistance from an expert who runs bot farms to build accounts that navigate the secret rules that govern bans.
I know sales bros who live their live by their ABCs - always be closing, but that's besides the point. if the person behind the spam bot one day wakes up and decides to do turn over a new leaf and something else with their life, they're not going to use the buyC1alis@vixagra.com email address they use for sending spam as the basis for their new persona. thus sending spam is inherit to the buyC1alis@vixagra.com identity that we see - of course there's a human being behind it, but as we'll never know them in ant other context, that is who they are to us.
> But you likely aren't, and most people likely aren't either.
Is there any evidence of this? 1% bad content can mean that 1% of your users are bad actors, or it can mean that 100% of your users are bad actors 1% of the time (or anything in between.)
I assume all of us have evidence of this in our daily lives.
Even the best people we know have bad days. But you have probably also encountered people in your life who have consistent patterns of being selfish, destructive, toxic, or harmful.
> you have probably also encountered people in your life who have consistent patterns of being selfish, destructive, toxic, or harmful.
This is not evidence that most bad acts are done by bad people. This is evidence that I've met people who've annoyed or harmed me at one or more points, and projected my personal annoyance into my fantasies of their internal states or of their essence. Their "badness" could literally have only consisted of the things that bothered me, and during the remaining 80% of the time (that I wasn't concerned with) they were tutoring orphans in math.
Somebody who is "bad" 100% of the time on twitter could be bad 0% of the time off twitter, and vice-versa. Other people's personalities aren't reactions to our values and feelings; they're as complex as you are.
As the OP says: our definitions of "badness" in this context are of commercial badness. Are they annoying our profitable users?
edit: and to add a bit - if you have a diverse userbase, you should expect them to annoy each other at a pretty high rate with absolutely no malice.
We have laws around mobs and peaceful protest for a reason. Even the best people can become irrational as a group. The groupmind is what we need controls for: not good and bad people.
I believe that's GP's point! Any of us has the potential to be the bad actor in some discussion that gets us irrationally worked up. Maybe that chance is low for you or I, but it's never totally zero.
And even if the chance is zero for you or I specifically, there's no way for the site operators to a priori know that fact or to be able to predict which users will suddenly become bad actors and which discussions will trigger it.
Give the user exclusive control over what content they can see. The platform should enforce legal actions against users only, as far as bans are concerned.
Everything else, like being allowed to spam or post too quickly, is a bug, and bugs should be addressed in the open.
How do you build and run a "social media" product when the very act of letting anyone respond to anyone with anything is itself the fundamental problem?
This isn't the problem as much as giving bad actors tools to enhance their reach. Bad actors can pay to get a wider reach or get/abuse a mark of authority, like a special tag on their handle, getting highlighted in a special place within the app, gaming the algorithm that promotes some content, etc. Most of these tools are built into the platform. Some though, like sock puppets, can be detected but aren't necessarily built in functionality.
At the very least you could be susceptible overreacting because of an emotionally charged issue. Eg. Reddit's boston marathon bomber disaster, when they started trying to round up brown people (actual perp "looked white")
Maybe that wouldn't be your crusade and maybe you would think you were standing up for an oppressed minority. You get overly emotional, and you could be prone to making some bad decisions.
People act substantially differently on reddit vs. hackernews; honestly I have to admit to being guilty of it. Some of the cool heads here are probably simultaneously engaged in flamewars on reddit/twitter.
Charge them $10 to create an account (anonymous, real, parody whatever), then if they break a rule give them a warning, 2 rule breaks, a 24 hour posting suspension, 3 strikes and permanently ban the account.
Let them reregister for $10.
Congrats, i just solved spam, bots, assholes and permanent line steppers.
Unless you generate more than $10 from the account. For example in presidential election years in the US billions is spent in advertising the elections. A few PACs would gladly throw cash at astroturf movements on social media even at the risk of being banned.
Sounds good to me. That would mean that your energy in moderation would directly result in income. If superpacs are willing to pay $3.33 a message, that's a money-spinner.
I think the idea is that it shifts the incentives. Sure, a rich nation state could buy tons of bot accounts at $10 a pop. But is that still the most rational path to their goal? Probably not, because there are lots of other things you can do for $100M.
Having posted there in its heyday, it made for an interesting self-moderation dynamic for sure. Before I posted something totally offbase that I knew I'd be punished for, I had to think "is saying this stupid shit really worth $10 to me?". Many times that was enough to get me to pause (but sometimes you also can't help yourself and it's well worth the price).
This is how the SomethingAwful forums operated when they started charging for accounts. Unfortunately it probably wouldn't be useful as a test case because it was/is, at it's core, a shitposting site.
It sounds like a insurmountable problem. What makes this even more interesting to me is that HN seems to have this working pretty well. I wonder how much of it has to do with clear guidelines of what should be valued and what shouldn't and having a community that buys in to that. For example one learns quickly that Reddit-style humor comments are frowned upon because the community enforces it with downvotes and frequently explanations of etiquette.
Some areas of reddit do similar things with similar results. AskHistorians and AskScience are the first two to come to mind.
This may be a lot easier in places where there's an explicit point to discussion beyond the discussion itself - StackOverflow is another non-Reddit example. It's easier to tell people their behavior is unconstructive when it's clearly not contributing to the goal. HN's thing may just be to declare a particular type of conversation to be the goal.
I think that has far more to do with this site being relatively low-traffic. Double the traffic, while keeping the exact same rules and topic, and it would become unreadable. It's easy to "moderate" when people clearly break the rules; but "moderation" can't do anything if the only problem is that most comments are uninsightful. Large numbers always ruin things, in real life or online. You can see that on this very website on Musk-related stories, with a terrible heat-to-light ratio in the comments.
It's controversial, but if the average IQ was 120 rather than 100, I doubt you'd have 1/10th as many issues on massively popular social media; most of the moderation issues would go away. The problem comes from the bottom-up, and can't be fixed from the top down.
If we follow the logic of Yishan's thread, HN frowns upon and largely doesn't allow discussion that would fall into group 3 which removes most of the grounds for accusations of political and other biases in the moderation. As Yishan says, no one really cares about banning groups 1 and 2, so no one objects to when that is done here.
Plus scale is a huge factor. Automated moderation can have its problems. Human moderation is expensive and hard to keep consistent if there are large teams of individuals that can't coordinate on everything. HN's size and its lack of desire for profit allow for a very small human moderation team that leads to consistency because it is always the same people making the decisions.
Category 1 from Yishan's thread, spam, obviously isn't allowed. But also thinking about house general framework of it all coming down to signal vs noise, most "noise" gets heavily punished on here. Reddit-style jokes frequently end in the light greys or even dead. I had my account shadow-banned over a decade ago because I made a penis joke and thought people didn't get the joke.
Free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever, wherever, without any repercussions. It solely means the government can't restrict your expression. On a private platform you abide their rules.
What now? You’re suggesting that the removal of the word “general” turns it into a concept that can exist and be disagreed upon? There can’t be conflicting general principles of free speech over which people consistently disagree? What a bizarre correction.
Well, no. Free Speech is an idea, far more expansive than the law as written in the US constitution, or many other countries and their respective law of the land/documents.
Free Speech does mean what you describe it not as. But there is no legal body to punish you for violating the principle. It is similar to 'primum non nocere', translated roughly to 'do no harm', extremely common in medicine and something you may see alongside the 'Hippocratic Oath'. You can be in violation of that principle or the oath at any time, some people even get fired for violating either as a pretext to malpractice. Some even argue that it is quite impossible to abide by this principle, and yet, it is something many people take on as responsibility everyday all across the globe.
I won't argue about websites and their rules, they have their own set of principles and violate plenty of others, sometimes they even violate their own principles. But Free Speech is not just the law and interactions one may have with their government.
Where are the people arguing about Donald Trump? Where are the people promoting dodgy cryptocurrencies? Where are the people arguing about fighting duck-sized horses? Where's the Ask HN asking for TV show recommendations?
I think most posts are short lived so they drop off quickly and people move on to new content. I think a lot of folks miss a lot of activity that way. I know I miss a bunch. And if you miss the zeitgeist it doesn’t matter what you say cause nobody will reply.
The twitter retweet constantly amplifies and the tweets are centered around an account vs a post.
Reddit should behave similarly but I think subreddit topics stick longer.
Very good point about the "fog of war". If HN had a reply-notification feature, it would probably look differently. Every now and then someone builds a notification feature as an external service. I wonder if you can measure change in the behavior of people before and after they've started using it?
Of course, that also soft-forces everyone to move on. Once a thread is a day or two old, you can still reply, but the person you've replied to will probably not read it.
There's also the fact that there's no alerts about people replying to you or commenting on your posts. You have to explicitly go into your profile, click comments, and then you can see if anyone has said anything to you.
This drastically increases time between messages on a topic, lets people cool off, and lets a topic naturally die down.
This is essentially moderation rule #0. it is unwritten, enforced before violation can occur, and generates zero complaints because it filters complainers out of the user pool from the start.
The no-avatars rule also takes away some of the personalization aspect. If you set your account up with your nickname, your fancy unique profile picture and your favorite quote in the signature, and someone says you're wrong, you're much more invested because you've tied some of your identity to the account.
If you've just arrived on the site, have been given a random name and someone says you're wrong, what do you care? You're not attached to that account at all, it's not "you", it's just a random account on a random website.
I thought that was an interesting point on 4chan (and probably other sites before them), that your identity was set per thread (iirc they only later introduced the ability to have permanent accounts). That removes the possibility of you becoming attached to the random name.
Why would one be concerned with being wrong at all? Being wrong, thus being able to learn, is the whole reason for having discussions with others.
Once you’re confident that you can’t be wrong, you’re not going to care about the topic anymore. There is good reason why we don’t sit around talking about how 1+1=2 all day.
Nope. There's been abuse in text-only environments online since forever. And lots of people have left (or rarely post on) HN because of complaints about the enviroment here.
The only thing HN has going for it imo is its size. Once it becomes a larger and therefore more attractive market for media, the propaganda will be a lot more heavy handed, like what happened to reddit as it grew from something no one used and into a mainstream platform. You definitely see propaganda posted on here already from time to time.
This is something Riot Games has spoken on, the observation that ordinary participants can have a bad day here or there, and that forgiving corrections can preserve their participation while reducing future incidents.
Did Riot eventually sort out the toxic community? If so that would be amazing, and definitely relevant. I stopped playing when it was still there, and it was a big part of the reason I stopped.
I’ve been playing very very active from 2010 to 2014 and since then on-off, sometimes skipping a season.
Recently picked it up again and I noticed that I didn’t had to use /mute all anymore. I’ve got all-chat disabled by default so I’ve got no experience there, but overall I’d say it has come a long way.
But I’d also say it depends which mode and MMR you are in. I mostly play draft pick normals or ARAMs in which I both have a lot of games played - I heard from a mate that chat is unbearable in low level games.
The only success I've seen in sorting out random vitriol is cutting chat off entirely and minimizing methods of passive aggressive communication. But Nintendo's online services haven't exactly scaled to the typical MOBA size to see how it actually works out
It's not a mistake. It's a PR strategy. Social media companies are training people to blame content and each other for the effects that are produced by design, algorithms and moderation. This reassigns blame away from things that those companies control (but don't want to change) to things that aren't considered "their fault".
Its really all media not just social media that profits from propaganda. Turn on CNN. You might agree with what they are saying versus what the talking heads on fox news are saying, but they use the same state of constant panic style of reporting because that works really well to fix eyeballs on advertisements, both overt ones and the more subtle ones that happen during the programming.
That is very much a problem in the US (AFAIK) where news and entertainment are merged. Other countries have laws to ensure that news are presented emotionless and factual.
You're confusing bad actors with bad behavior. Bad behavior is something good people do from time to time because they get really worked up about a specific topic or two. Bad actors are people who act bad all the time. There may be some of those but they're not the majority by far (and yes, sometimes normal people turn into bad actors because they get upset about a given thing that they can't talk about anything else anymore).
OP's argument is that you can moderate content based on behavior, in order to bring the heat down, and the signal to noise ratio up. I think it's an interesting point: it's neither the tools that need moderating, nor the people, but conversations (one by one).
I think that's right. One benefit this has: if you can make the moderation about behavior (I prefer the word effects [1]) rather than about the person, then you have a chance to persuade them to behave differently. Some people, maybe even most, adjust their behavior in response to feedback. Over time, this can compound into community-level effects (culture etc.) - that's the hope, anyhow. I think I've seen such changes on HN but the community/culture changes so slowly that one can easily deceive oneself. There's no question it happens at the individual user level, at least some of the time.
Conversely, if you make the moderation about the person (being a bad actor etc.) then the only way they can agree with you is by regarding themselves badly. That's a weak position for persuasion! It almost compels them to resist you.
I try to use depersonalized language for this reason. Instead of saying "you" did this (yeah that's right, YOU), I'll tell someone that their account is doing something, or that their comment is a certain way. This creates distance between their account or their comment and them, which leaves them freer to be receptive and to change.
Someone will point out or link to cases where I did the exact opposite of this, and they'll be right. It's hard to do consistently. Our emotional programming points the other way, which is what makes this stuff hard and so dependent on self-awareness, which is the scarcest thing and not easily added to [2].
> I try to use depersonalized language for this reason. Instead of saying "you" did this (yeah that's right, YOU), I'll tell someone that their account is doing something, or that their comment is a certain way. This creates distance between their account or their comment and them, which leaves them freer to be receptive and to change.
I feel quite excited to read that you, dang, moderating HN, use a similar technique that I use for myself and try to teach others. Someone told my good friend the other day that he wasn't being a very good friend to me, and I told him that he may do things that piss me off, annoy me, confuse me, or whatever, but he will always be a good friend to me. I once told an Uber driver who told me he just got out of jail and was a bad man, I said, "No, you're a good man who probably did a bad thing."
That scares me. Today's norms are tomorrow's taboos. The dangers of conforming and shaping everyone into the least controversial opinions and topics are self evident. It's an issue on this very forum. "Go elsewhere" doesn't solve the problem because that policy still contributes to a self-perpetuating feedback loop that amplifies norms, which often happen to be corrupt and related to the interests of big (corrupt) commercial and political powers.
I don't mean persuade them out of their opinions on $topic! I mean persuade them to express their opinions in a thoughtful, curious way that doesn't break the site guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Sufficiently controversial opinions are flagged, downvoted til dead/hidden, or associated users shadow banned. HN's policies and voting system, both de facto and de jure, discourage controversial opinions and reward popular, conformist opinions.
That's not to pick on HN, since this is a common problem. Neither do I have a silver bullet solution, but the issue remains, and it's a huge issue. Evolution of norms, for better or worse, is suppressed to the extent that big communication platforms suppress controversy. The whole concept of post and comment votes does this by definition.
Completely disagree about HN. Controversial topics that are thought out, well formed, and argued with good intent are generally good sources of discussion.
Most of the time though, people arguing controversial topics phrase them so poorly or include heavy handed emotions so that their arguments have no shot of being fairly interpreted by anyone else.
That's true to an extent (and so is what ativzzz says, so you're both right). But the reasons for what you're talking about are much misunderstood. Yishan does a good job of going into some of them in the OP, by the way.
People always reach immediately for the conclusion that their controversial comments are getting moderated because people dislike their opinion—either because of groupthink in the community or because the admins are hostile to their views. Most of the time, though, they've larded their comments pre-emptively with some sort of hostility, snark, name-calling, or other aggression—no doubt because they expect to be opposed and want to make it clear they already know that, don't care what the sheeple think, and so on.
The way the group and/or the admins respond to those comments is often a product of those secondary mixins. Forgive the gross analogy, but it's as if someone serves a shit milkshake and when it's rejected, say, "you just hate dairy products" or "this community is so biased against milkshakes".
If you start instead from the principle that the value of a comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of [1], then a commenter is responsible for the effects of their comments [2] – at least the predictable ones. From that it follows that there's a greater burden on the commenter who's expressing a contrarian view [3]. The more contrarian the view—the further it falls outside the community's tolerance—the more responsibility that commenter has for not triggering degenerative effects like flamewars.
This may be counterintuitive, because we're used to thinking in terms of atomic individual responsibility, but it's a model that actually works. Threads are molecules, not atoms—they're a cocreation, like one of those drawing games where each person fills in part of a shared picture [4], or like a dance—people respond to the other's movements. A good dancer takes the others into account.
It may be unfair that the one with a contrarian view is more responsible for what happens—especially because they're already under greater pressure than the one whose views agree with the surround. But fair or not, it's the way communication works. If you're trying to deliver challenging information to someone, you have to take that person into account—you have to regulate what you say by what the listener is capable to hear and to tolerate. Otherwise you're predictably going to dysregulate them and ruin the conversation.
Contrarian commenters usually do the opposite of this—they express their contrarian opinion in a deliberately aggressive and uncompromising way, probably because (I'm repeating myself sorry) they expect to be rejected anyhow, and it's safer to be inside the armor of "you people can't handle the truth!" than it is to really communicate, i.e. to connect and relate.
This model is the last thing that most contrarian-opinion commenters want to adopt, because it's hard and risky, and because usually they have pre-existing hurt feelings from being battered repeatedly with majoritarian opinions already (especially the case when identity is at issue, such as being from a minority population along some axis). But it's the one that actually has a hope of working, and is by far the best solution I know of to the problem of unconventional opinions in groups.
Are there some views which are so far beyond the community's tolerance that any mention in any form will immediately blow up the thread, making the above model impossible? Yes, but they're rare and extreme and not usually the thing people have in mind. I think it's better to stick to the 95% or 99% case when having this discussion.
> The more contrarian the view—the further it falls outside the community's tolerance—the more responsibility that commenter has for not triggering degenerative effects like flamewars.
This sounds similar to the “yelling fire” censorship test
it’s not that we censor discussing combustion methods,
there would be no effect if everyone else was also yelling fire
But people were watching a movie and now the community’s experience has been ruined (with potential for harm), in exchange for nothing of value
Just wanted to say that it's great to have you posting your thoughts/experience on this topic. I've run a forum for almost 19 years as a near-lone moderator and so have a lot of thoughts, experience and interest in the topic. It's been frustrating when Yishan's posted (IMO, solid) thoughts on social networks and moderation and the bulk of HN's discussion can be too simple to be useful ("Reddit is trash", etc).
I particularly liked his tweet about how site/network owners just wish everyone would be friendly and have great discussions.
There are a few sacred cows here (I won't mention them by name, though the do exist), but I have earned my rep by posting mostly contrarian opinions, and I almost always have quite a few net upvotes - sometimes dozens. It's not too difficult: First, I cite facts that back up my claims from sources whose narratives would typically go against my argument. I cite the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, NPR, CNN, etc.; I only rarely cite Fox News, and never cite anything to the right of Fox. Second, I really internalize the rules about good faith, not attacking the weakest form of an argument, not cross-examining, etc. Sometimes I have a draft that has my emotions, and I'll edit it to make it more rational before posting. Third, I ask open-ended questions to allow myself to be wrong in the mind of other commenters. Instead of just asserting that some of my ultra-contrarian opinions are the only way anyone can see an issue, I may propose a question. By doing that, I have at times seen some excluded middle I hadn't considered, and my opinion becomes more nuanced. Fourth, I often will begin replying and then delete my reply because I know it won't add anything. This is the hardest one to do, but sometimes it's just the way you have to go. Some differences are merely tastes and preferences, and I'm not going to change the dominant tastes and preferences of the Valley on HN. I can only point out some of the consequences.
The content moderation rules and system here have encouraged me to write better and more clearly about my contrarian opinions, and have made me more persuasive. HN can be a crap-show at times, but in my experience, it's often some of the best commentary on the Internet.
Yes. But in our experience to date, this is less common than people say it is, and there are strategies for dealing with it. One such strategy is https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... (sorry I don't have time to explain this, as I'm about to go offline - but the key word is 'primarily'.) No strategy works in all cases though.
If someone points out a specific action I did that can/should be improved upon (and especially if they can tell me why it was "bad" in the first place), I'm far more likely to accept that, attempt to learn from it, and move on. As in real life, I might still be heated in the moment, but I'll usually remember that when similar cues strike again.
But if moderation hints at something being wrong with my identity or just me fundamentally, then that points to something that _can't be changed_. If that's the case, I _know they are wrong_ and simply won't respect that they know how to moderate anything at all, because their judgment is objectively incorrect.
Practically at work, this has actually been a good policy you described when I think about bugs and code reviews.
> "@ar_lan broke `main` with this CLN. Reverting."
is a pretty sure-fire way to make me defend my change and believe you are wrong. My inclination, for better or worse, will be to dispute the accusation directly and clear my name (probably some irrational fear that creating a bug will go on a list of reasons to fire me).
But when I'm approached with:
> "Hey, @ar_lan. It looks like pipeline X failed this test after this CLN. We've automatically reverted the commit. Could you please take a second look and re-submit with a verification of the test passing?"
I'm almost never defensive about it, and I almost always go right ahead to reproducing the failure and working on the fix.
The first message conveys to me that I (personally) am the reason `main` is broken. The second conveys that it was my CLN that was problematic, but fixable.
Both messages are taken directly from my companies Slack (ommitting some minor details, of course), for reference.
... kinda wondering if this is the sort of OT post we're supposed to avoid, it would be class if you chastised me for it. But anyway, glad you're here to keep us in check and steer the community so well.
Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.
It's true that empty positive comments don't add much information but they have a different healthy role (assuming they aren't promotional)
I think your moderation has made me better at HN, and consequently I'm better in real life. Actively thinking about how to better communicate and create environments where everyone is getting something positive out of the interaction is something I maybe started at HN, and then took into the real world. I think community has a lot to do with it, like "be the change you want to see".
But to your point, yeah my current company has feedback guidelines that are pretty similar: criticize the work, not the worker, and it super works. You realize that action isn't aligned with who you want to be or think you are, and you stop behaving that way. I mean, it's worked on me and I've seen it work on others, for sure.
> I try to use depersonalized language for this reason. Instead of saying "you" did this (yeah that's right, YOU), I'll tell someone that their account is doing something, or that their comment is a certain way. This creates distance between their account or their comment and them, which leaves them freer to be receptive and to change.
I use this tactic with my kids when they do something wrong. Occasionally I slip up and really lay into them, but almost all of the time these days I tell them that I love them, I think they are capable of doing the right thing, but I didn't love some action they did or didn't do and I explain why. They may not be happy with this always, or with the natural (& parent-imposed) consequences of their actions, but it reinforces that they have a choice to do good in the future even if they slip up from time to time. If all of us were immutably identified by the worst thing we ever did, no one would have any incentive to change.
Thanks for the thoughtful & insightful comment, dang.
This "impersonal" approach to also works in the other direction. Someone who said something objectively bad once doesn't have to be a "known bad person" forever.
I think you do a good job on HN and I appreciate, as someone who moderated a similarly large forum for a long time, how candid you are in your communications on and off site. You're also a very quick email responder!
> I try to use depersonalized language for this reason. Instead of saying "you" did this (yeah that's right, YOU), I'll tell someone that their account is doing something, or that their comment is a certain way. This creates distance between their account or their comment and them, which leaves them freer to be receptive and to change.
My sense is that this is a worthy thing to do (first of all because it's intellectually correct to blame actions rather than people, and second of all because if you're right about the effect it's all upside). But I suspect this will produce very little introspection, maybe a tiny but on the margins.
It's pretty normal in an argument between two people IRL that one will say something like "That was a stupid comment" or "Stop acting like an asshole" -- both uses of distancing language -- and the other person will respond "Don't call me stupid" or "Don't call me an asshole". I think most people who are on the receiving end of even polite correction are going to elide the distancing step.
On the social psych side, I have no idea whether there's any validated way to encourage someone to be more introspective, take a breath, try to switch down into type-II processing, etc.
And bad behavior gets rewarded with engagement. We learned this from "reality television" where the more conflict there was among a group of people the more popular that show was. (Leading to producers abandoning the purity of being unscripted in the pursuit of better ratings.) A popular pastime on Reddit is posting someone behaving badly (whether on another site, a subreddit, or in a live video) for the purpose of mocking them.
When the organizational goal is to increase engagement, which will be the case wherever there are advertisers, inevitably bad behavior will grow more frequent than good behavior. Attempts to moderate toward good behavior will be abandoned in favor of better metrics. Or the site will stagnate under the weight of the new rules.
In this I'm in disagreement with Yishan because in those posts I read that engagement feedback is a characteristic of old media (newspapers, television) and social media tries to avoid that. The OP seems to be saying that online moderation is an attempt to minimize controversial engagement because platforms don't like that. I don't believe it. I think social media loves controversial engagement just as much as the old-school "if it bleeds, it leads" journalists from television and newspapers. What they don't want is the (quote/unquote) wrong kind of controversies. Which is to say, what defines bad behavior is not universally agreed upon. The threshold for what constitutes bad behavior will be different depending on who's doing the moderating. As a result the content seen will be influenced by the moderation, even if said moderation is being done in a content-neutral way.
And I just now realize that I've taken a long trip around to come to the conclusion that the medium is the message. I guess we can now say the moderation is the message.
I'd argue that bad actors are people that behave badly "on purpose". Their goals are different than the normal actor. Bad actors want to upset or scare people. Normal actors want to connect with, learn from, or persuade others.
I can "behave well" and still be a bad actor in that I'm constantly spreading dangerous disinformation. That disinformation looks like signal by any metadata analysis.
Yes, that's probably the limit of the pure behavioral analysis, esp. if one is sincere. If they're insincere it will probably look like spam; but if somebody truly believes crazy theories and is casually pushing them (vs promoting them aggressively and exclusively), that's probably harder to spot.
> The reality is everyone, myself included, can be and will be a bad actor.
Customised filters for anyone, but I am talking about filters completely under the control of the user. Maybe running locally. We can wrap ourselves in a bubble but better that than having a bubble designed by others.
I think AI will make spam irrelevant over the next decade by switching from searching and reading to prompting the bot. You don't ever need to interface with the filth, you can have your polite bot present the results however you please. It can be your conversation partner and you get to control its biases as well.
Internet <-> AI agent <-> Human
(the web browser of the future, the actual web browser runs in a sandbox under the AI)
The original post is paradoxical in the very way it talks about social media being paradoxical.
He observes that social media moderation is about signal to noise. Then he goes on about introducing off-topic noise. Then, he comes to conclusions that seem to ignore his original conclusion about it being a S/N problem.
Chiefly, he doesn't show how a "council of elders" is necessary to solve S/N problems.
Strangely enough, Slashdot seems to have a system which worked pretty well back in the day.
I think the key is that no moderation can withstand outside pressure. A community can be entirely consistent and happy but the moment outside pressure is applied it folds or falls.
Slashdot moderation is largely done by the users themselves, acting anonymously as "meta-moderators." I think they were inspired by Plato's ideas around partially amnesiac legislators who forget who they are while legislating.
Not true at all - everyone has the capacity for bad behaviour in the right circumstances but most people are not, in my opinion, there intentionally to be trolls.
There are the minority who love to be trolls and get any big reaction out of people (positive or negative). Those people are the problem. But they are also often very good at evading moderation or laying in wait and toeing the line between bannable offences and just every so slightly controversial comments.
Some people are much more likely to engage in bad behavior than others. The thing is, people who engage in bad behavior are also much more likely to be "whales," excessive turboposters who have no life and spend all day on these sites.
Someone who has a balanced life, who spends time at work, with family, in nature, only occasionally goes online, uses most of their online time for edification, spends 30 minutes writing a reply if they decide one is warranted - that type of person is going to have a minuscule output compared to the whales. The whales are always online, thoughtlessly writing responses and upvoting without reading articles or comments. They have a constant firehouse of output that dwarfs other users.
Worth reading "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People"[1].
If you actually saw these people in real life, chances are you'd avoid interacting with them. People seeing a short interview with the top mod of antiwork almost destroyed that sub (and lead to the mod stepping down). People say the internet is a bad place because people act badly when they're not face to face. That might be true to some extent, but we're given online spaces where it's hard to avoid "bad actors" (or people that engage in excessive bad behavior) the same way we would in person.
And these sites need the whales, because they rely on a constant stream of low quality content to keep people engaged. There are simple fixes that could be done, like post limits and vote limits, but sites aren't going to implement them. It's easier to try to convince people that humanity is naturally terrible than to admit they've created an environment that enables - and even relies on - some of the most unbalanced individuals.
The business plan of massive user scale, user generated content, user “engagement” with ad driven revenue leads to the perceived issues about polarization and content moderation. That and the company structure are the fundamental problems that attract what we see on social media. The data about users is the product sold to advertisers. The platform only cares about moderation in that it supports the goal of more ad revenue, that is why Yishan said spam moderation was job #1, its more harmful to ad revenue than users with poor behavior.
If a social media company’s mission is to have no barrier, anyone and everyone to share ideas, information and “all are welcome” then maybe a company structure like a worker cooperative [0] would be a better match to that mission statement. No CEO that gets massive pay/stock, instead employees are owners. All employees. They decide what features/projects the company does, how to allocate resources, how to moderate content, etc.
>How do you build and run a "social media" product when the very act of letting anyone respond to anyone with anything is itself the fundamental problem?
What about fox news? AM radio? These are bastions of radicalization but they dont let anyone come on and say anything. At the end of the day this sort of rhetoric played by these groups is taught in university communications classes as a way to exert influence. Its all just propaganda at the end of the day, and that can come in the form of a pamphlet, or a meeting in a town hall, or from some talking head on tv, or a tweet. Social media is just another avenue for propaganda to manifest just like how the printing press is.
Reading these threads on twitter is like listening to a friend having a bad mdma trip replaying his whole emotional life to you in a semi incoherent diarrhea like stream of thoughts
Please write a book, or at the very least an article... posting on twitter is like writing something on a piece of paper, showing it to your best friend and worst enemy before throwing it in the trash
These things seem to be fine when it's 5-6 tweets in a coherent thread. There's even that guy who regularly multi-thousand-word threads that are almost always a good read.
Just NOT in twitter. I gave up on twitter and signed out of it years ago and refuse to sign back in.
I spent a good hour of my life looking for ways to read this thread. I personally know Yishan and value the opinions he cares to share so I new this would be interesting if I could just manage to read it.
Replacing the url to nitter.net helped but honestly it was most cohesive in threadreaderapp although it missed some of the referenced sidebar discussions (like the appeal to Elon to not waste his mental energy on things that aren’t real atom problems).
my guess is that people can like () individual posts.
The positive of that is:
a) possibility to like () just one post, or 2, 3… depending of who good the thread is
b) the fine granular way to like () gives the algorithm way better possibilities to whom to show a thread and even better, to first show just one intereting post out of that thread (also people can mores easily quote or retweet individual parts of a thread)
What got me was him weaving in (2-3 times) self promotion tweets of some tree planting company he funds/founded(?). He basically personally embedded ads into his thread, which is actually kind of smart I suppose, but very confusing as a reader.
Kind of genius to put it in the middle. Most normal people write a tweet that blows up and then have to append "Check out my soundcloud!" on the end. Or an advert for the nightsky lamp.
At the same time (as much as I strongly support climate efforts, and am impressed by his approach, so give him a pass in this instance), that 'genius move' sort of needs to be flagged as his [Category #1 - Spam], which should be moderated. It really is inserting off-topic info into another thread.
The saving grace may be that both small enough volume and sufficiently interesting to his audience to be just below the threshold.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
It was a massive stream of tweets, with two long digressions, and several embeds. The only thing that would have made it worse is if every tweet faded in on scroll.
If we're going to pedantically point out rules, why don't we add one that says "No unrolled Twitter threads."?
It is not pedantic, it is people derailing possibly interesting discussion of the content with completely off-topic noise discussion of the presentation. If you do not like the presentation there are ways to change it.
If people are constantly complaining about the same thing, the thing should be fixed. Then you'll have no more complaints about the thing or people complaining about complaints about the thing. I'm tackling world peace next.
If we’re going to pedantically point out rules why don’t we cook hamburgers on the roof of parliament? Or something else that isn’t pedantically point out rules?
I've never understood this, it's just reading: you start at the beginning of tweet, you read it, then go to the next tweet and read it. How is that different from reading paragraphs?
The amount of UI noise around each tweet and how much you have to scroll, coupled with the need to trigger new loads once Twitter has truncated the number of replies and also HOW MUCH YOU HAVE TO SCROLL makes this a terrible experience
I understand why people tweet rather than write blogs. Twitter gives more visibility and is a far lower barrier of entry than sitting down and writing an article or a blog. That Twitter hasn't solved this problem after years of people making long threads and this being a big way that people consume content on the platform is a failure on their part. Things like ThreadReader should be in-built and much easier to use. I think they acquired one of these thread reader apps too
I think this is important enough to highlight. Tweets are very different from other forms of communication on the internet. You can see it even here on HN in the comments section.
Twitter railroads the discussion into a particular type by the form of discourse. Each tweet, whether it's meant to or not, is more akin to a self contained atomic statement then a paragraph relating to a whole. This steers tweets into short statements of opinion masquerading as humble, genuine statements of fact. Often times each tweet is a simple idea that's given more weight because it's presented in tweet form. An extreme example is the joke thread of listing out each letter of the alphabet [0] [1].
When tweets are responding to another tweet, it comes off as one of the two extreme choices of being a shallow affirmation or a combative "hot take".
Compare this with the comments section here. Responses are, for the most part, respectful. Comments tend to address multiple points at once, often interweaving them together. When text is quoted, it's not meant as a hot take but a refresher on the specific point that they're addressing.
The HN comments section has its problems but, to me, it's night and day from Twitter.
I basically completely avoid responding to most everything on Twitter for this reason. Anything other than a superficial "good job" or "wow" is taken as a challenge and usually gets a nasty response. I also have to actively ignore many tweets, even from people I like and respect, because the format over emphasizes trivial observations or opinions.
Imagine it is a text and you can mark any paragraph. You can save that paragraph, like it, or even reply to it. So the interaction can grow like tentacles (edit: or rather like a tree).
Right now, I could make a comment on either your first or second paragraph, or on your entire comment. However, there is no way to determine which category my reply falls into until you have read it entirely. On a platform like Twitter, where there can be up to 100,000 comments on a given piece of content, this is very useful.
Better yet, it allows the author himself to dig down into tangent. In theory, someone could create an account and then have all of their interactions stay on the same tree without ever cutting off. Essentially turning their account into an interconnected "wiki" where everyone can add information.
With enough time your brain no longer registers the metadata around the tweet. If you ignore it and read it as an entire text it is not very different from a regular article or long form comment: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html
What you're saying is that we should optimise the way we debate things to please the algorithm and maximise user engagement instead of maximising quality content and encouraging deep reflexions
The truth is people can't focus for more than 15 seconds so instead of reading a well researched and deep article or book that might offer sources, nuances, &c. they'll click "like" and "retweet" whoever vomited something that remotely goes their way while ignoring the rest
> If you ignore it and read it as an entire text it is not very different from a regular article or long form comment
It is extremely different as each piece is written as a independent 10s thought ready to be consumed and retweeted. Reading it on threadreaderapp makes it even more obvious, your brain need to work 300% harder to process the semi incoherent flow, some blogs written by 15 years old are more coherent and pleasant to read than this
> What you're saying is that we should optimise the way we debate things to please the algorithm and maximise user engagement instead of maximising quality content and encouraging deep reflexions
Not at all, in my opinion being able to interact with every piece of an exchange allows to dig down into specific points of a debate.
There is a soft stop at the end of every tweet because it's a conversation and not a presentation. It's an interactive piece of information and not a printed newspaper. You can interact during the thread and it might change its outcome.
When you are the person interacting, it's similar to a real life conversation. You can cut someone and talk about something else at any time. The focus conversation will shift for a short moment and then come back to the main topic.
For someone arriving after the fact, you have a time machine of the entire conversation.
---
About the link, it is only the first result on Google because I don't use those services and not me vetting for this specific one. I also use ad blockers at all levels (from pi-hole to browser extension to VPN level blocking), so I don't see ads online.
If I go meta for a second, this is the perfect example of how breaking ideas into different tweets can be useful.
Were I to share your comment on its own, it contains that information about a link that is not useful to anyone but you and I.
For someone reading our comments, they have to go through this interaction on the ads and this product. If instead this were two tweets it would have allowed us to comment on this in parallel. If it was HN, imagine if you had made two replies under my comments and we could have commented under each. However, that's the wrong way on this platform.
> Right now, I could make a comment on either your first or second paragraph, or on your entire comment. However, there is no way to determine which category my reply falls into until you have read it entirely
That is exactly what quoting does, and is older than the web itself.
This is brilliant, I had never thought about it like this before. I’d maybe say grow like a tree rather than tentacles although you might have a point in that if you’re speaking with the wrong person it could be pretty cthulonic.
> Right now, I could make a comment on either your first or second paragraph, or on your entire comment. However, there is no way to determine which category my reply falls into until you have read it entirely. On a platform like Twitter, where there can be up to 100,000 comments on a given piece of content, this is very useful.
Oh, look, I have managed to reply to your second paragraph without having to use twatter, how quaint!
There would be a lot of noise if everyone left 5 comments under every comments. This is not the way HN is built. Commenting too quickly even blocks you from interacting.
But also an example of how moderation or lack therein would help to serve a particular end goal. ex. HackerNews is a pretty well moderated forum, however sometimes the content (PC being related to technology) is within the rules, but the behavior it elicited in the other users is detrimental to the overall experience.
The post says that moderation is first and foremost a signal-to-noise curation. Writing long form content in a Twitter thread greatly reduces the signal-to-noise ratio.
What’s funny is he’s arguing that moderation should be based on behavior, not content. And that you could identify spam if it was written in Loren Ipsum.
If this thread and self-referential Tweeting was written in Loren Ipsum, it would definitely look like spam to me.
So I guess I disagree with one of the main points. For me, the content matters much more than the behavior. Pretty sure that’s how the Supreme Court interprets 1A rights as well. The frequency and intensity of the speech hasn’t played a part in any 1A cases that I can remember, it’s exclusively if the content of the speech violates someone’s rights and then deciding which outcome leads to bigger problems, allowing the speech or not.
And hilariously he starts with "How do you solve the content moderation problems on Twitter?" and never actually answer it. Just rambles on about a dissection of the problem. Guess we know now why content moderation was never "solved" at Reddit, nor will it ever be.
He kinda did in roundabout way; the "perfect" moderation, even if possible, will turn it into nice and cultured place to have discussion and that doesn't bring controversy and sell ads.
You would have way less media "journalists" making a fuss about what someone said on that social network and would have problems just getting it to be popular, let alone displace any of the big ones. It would maybe be possible with existing one but that's a ton of work and someone needs to pay for that work.
And it's entirely possible for smaller community to have that, but the advantage with this is small community about X will also have moderators that care about X so
* any on-topic bollocks can be spotted by mods and it is no longer "unknown language"
* any off-topic bollocks can be just dismissed with "this is a forum about X, if you don't like it go somewhere else
> the "perfect" moderation, even if possible, will turn it into nice and cultured place to have discussion and that doesn't bring controversy and sell ads.
That's not a solution though since every for profit business is generally seeking to maximize profit, and furthermore we already knew this to be the case - nothing he is saying is novel. I guess that's where I'm confused.
There’s a study to be done on the polarization around twitter threads. I have zero problem with them and find overall that lots of great ideas are posted in threads, and the best folks doing it end up with super cogent and well written pieces. I find it baffling how many folks are triggered by them and really hate them!
This is likely because threads are a "high engagement" signal for Twitter and therefore prone to being gamed.
There are courses teaching people how to game the Twitter algo. One of those took off significantly in the past 18 months. You can tell by the number of amateurs creating threads on topics far beyond their reach. The purpose of these threads is for it to show up on people's feeds under the "Topic" section.
For example, I often see see random posts from "topics" Twitter thinks I like (webdev, UI/UX, cats, old newspaper headlines). I had to unsubscribe from 'webdev' and "UI/UX" because the recommended posts were all growth hackers. It wasn't always that way.
I'm not the only one, others have commented on it as well, including a well known JS developer:
> This is likely because threads are a "high engagement" signal for Twitter and therefore prone to being gamed.
You mean this is the reason folks respond differently to the form of twitter thread? This is one that is definitely not from a growth hacker but folks here still seem to hate it.
"Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam. We ban spam for purely outcome-based reasons:
It affects the quality of experience for users we care about, and users having a good time on the platform makes it successful."
And also this Chinese Room argument: "once again, I challenge you to think about it this way: could you make your content moderation decisions even if you didnʻt understand the language they were being spoken in?""
In other words, there are certain kinds of post which trigger escalating pathological behavior - more posts - which destroy the usability platform for bystanders by flooding it. He argues that it doesn't matter what these posts mean or whose responsibility is it for the escalation, just the simple physics of "if you don't remove these posts and stop more arriving, your forum will die".
I would argue that the signal-to-noise ratio outcome-based reason is the principle: it's off-topic. You could also argue another principle: you're censoring a bot, not a human.
Nobody has the answers. Social media is an experiment gone wrong. Just like dating apps and other pieces of software that exist that are trying to replace normal human interaction. These first generation prototypes have a basic level of complexity and I expect by 2030 technology should evolve to the point where better solutions exist.
This really was an outstanding read and take on Elon, Twitter, and what's coming up.
But it literally could not have been posted in a worse medium for communicating this message. I felt like I had to pat my head and rub my tummy at the same time reading through all this, and to share it succinctly with colleagues resulted in me spending a good 15 minutes cutting and pasting the content.
I've never understood people posting entire blog type posts to.... Twitter.
It was incoherent rambling and none of really works for Twitter.
Twitter is ultimately at the behest of its advertisers who are constantly on a knife edge about whether to bother using it or not. We have already seen GM and L'Oreal pull ad spend and many more will follow if their moderation policies are not in-line with community standards.
If Musk wants to make Twitter unprofitable then sure relax the moderation otherwise might want to keep it the same.
Did he begin answering the question, drop some big philosophical terms, and then just drift off into here is what I think we should do about climate change in 4 steps...?
he does come back to the point after his little side-piece about trees, but after a while I didn't feel he was actually providing any valuable information, so I stopped reading
Yes, he is leveraging his audience. This like going to a conference with a big-name keynote, but the lunch sponsor gets up and speaks for 5 minutes first.
We're on the thread to read about content moderation. But since we're there, he's going to inject a few promos about what he is working on now. Just like other ads, I skimmed past them until he got back on track with the main topic.
> Moderating spam is very interesting: it is almost universally regarded as okay to ban (i.e. CENSORSHIP) but spam is in no way illegal.
Interesting, in my country spam is very much illegal and I would hazard a guess that it is also illegal in the US, similar to how littering, putting up posters on peoples buildings/cars/walls, graffiti (a form of spam), and so on is also illegal. If I received the amount of spam I get in email as phone calls I would go as far as calling it harassment, and of course robot phone calls are also illegal. Unsolicited email spam is also again the law.
And if spam is against the service agreement on twitter then that could be a computer crime. If the advertisement is fraudulent (as is most spam), it is fraud. Countries also have laws about advertisement, which most spam are unlikely to honor.
So I would make the claim that there is plenty of principled reasons for banning spam, all backed up by laws of the countries that the users and the operators live in.
Unsolicited phone calls are somewhat illegal, but it's dependent on circumstances. It's the same with email spam and mail spam. One person's spam is another person's cold call. Where do you draw the line? Is mailing a flier with coupons spam? Technically yes, but some people find value in it.
In the US, spam is protected speech, but as always, no company is required to give anybody a platform.
It is both yes, and no. CAN-SPAM do only apply to electronic mail messages, usually shorten down to email. However...
In late March, a federal court in California held that Facebook postings fit within the definition of "commercial electronic mail message" under the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act ("CAN-SPAM Act;" 15 U.S.C. § 7701, et seq.). Facebook, Inc. v. MAXBOUNTY, Inc., Case No. CV-10-4712-JF (N.D. Cal. March 28, 2011).
There is also two other court cases: MySpace v. The Globe.com and MySpace v. Wallace.
In the later, the court concluded that "[t]o interpret the Act in the limited manner as advocated by [d]efendant would conflict with the express language of the Act and would undercut the purpose for which it was passed." Id. This Court agrees that the Act should be interpreted expansively and in accordance with its broad legislative purpose.
The court defined "electronic mail address" as meaning nothing more specific than "a destination . . . to which an electronic mail message can be sent, and the references to local part and domain part and all other descriptors set off in the statute by commas represent only one possible way in which a destination can be expressed.
Basically, in order to follow the spirit of the law the definition of "email" expanded, with traditional email like user@example.invalid being just one example of many forms of "email".
> In the US, spam is protected speech, but as always, no company is required to give anybody a platform.
Commercial speech in the US is not protected speech and may be subject to a host of government regulation [0]. The government has broad powers to regulate the time, place, and content of commercial speech in ways that it does not for ordinary speech.
It is dependent on circumstances, and the people who would draw the line in the end would be the government followed by the court.
Not all speech is protected speech. Graffiti is speech, and the words being spoken could be argued as protected, but the act of spraying other people properties with it is not protected. Free speech rights does not overwrite other rights. As a defense in a court I would not bet my money on free speech in order to get away with crimes that happens to involves speech.
Historically the US court has defined speech into multiple different categories. One of those are called fraudulent speech which is not protected by free speech rights. An other category is illustrated with the anti-spam law in Washington State, which was found to not be in violation of First Amendment rights because it prevent misleading emails. Washington’s statue regulate deceptive commercial speech and thus passed the constitutional test. An other court ruling, this one in Maryland, confirmed that commercial speech was less protected than other forms of speech and that commercial speech had no protection when it was demonstrably false.
In theory a spammer could make non-commercial, non-misleading, non-fraudulent speech, and a site like twitter would then actually have to think about questions like first-amendment. I can't say I have ever received or seen spam like that.
> In theory a spammer could make non-commercial, non-misleading, non-fraudulent speech, and a site like twitter would then actually have to think about questions like first-amendment. I can't say I have ever received or seen spam like that.
While I don't think I have seen it on Twitter (then again I only read it when it's linked) I have seen plenty of it in some older forums & IRC. Generally it's just nonsense like "jqrfefafasok" or ":DDDDDD" being posted lots of times in quick succession, often to either flood out other things, to draw attention to poster or to show annoyance about something (like being banned previously).
You got a point. Demonstration as a form of free speech is an interesting dilemma. Review spam/bombing for example can be non-commercial, non-misleading, non-fraudulent, while still being a bit of a grey-zone. Removing them is also fairly controversial. Outside the web we have a similar problem when demonstrations and strikes are causing disruption in society. Obviously demonstration and strikes should be legal and are protected by free speech, but at the same time there are exceptions when they are not.
I am unsure if one would construct a objective fair model for how to moderate such activity.
>a site like twitter would then actually have to think about questions like first-amendment.
I wish people understood that the first amendment does not have anything to do with social media sites allowing people to say anything. Twitter is not a public square, no matter how much you want it to be.
Nudity and porn are other examples of legal speech that have broad acceptance among the public (at least the U.S. public) to moderate or ban on social media platforms.
Yishan's point is, most people's opinions on how well a platform delivers free speech vs censorship will index more to the content of the speech, rather than the pattern of behavior around it.
Is there a better name than "rational jail" for the following phenomenon:
We are having a rational, non-controversial, shared-fact based discussion. Suddenly the first party in the conversation goes off on a tangent and starts saying values or emotions based statements instead of facts. The other party then gets angry and or confused. The first party then gets angry and or confused.
The first party did not realize they had broken out of the rational jail that the conversation was taking place in; they thought they were still being rational. The second party detected some idea that did not fit with their rational dataset, and detected a jailbreak, and this upset them.
I thought this point was overstated, twitter certainly has some controversial content related rules and while as the CEO of Reddit he may have been mostly fighting macro battles, there are certainly content related things that both networks censor.
Reddit's content policy has also changed a LOT since he was CEO. While the policy back then may not have been as loose as "is it illegal?" it was still far looser than what Reddit has had to implement to gain advertisers.
It is good recapitulation of why (particularly from a more legal-oriented layperson's standpoint) moderation is hard for an online platform.
The crazy thing is even though that is a long list, you could probably double the size of that list of issues with whole other classes of issues.
For example, that list is mostly focused on issues facing a platform with outside stakeholders making it difficult... then there are the inside stakeholders!
Stuff like... "actually, arguments/controversy increases engagement/views/ads (and your/my bonus/stock)", "more regulation we have to comply with actually increases barriers to entry for new competitors", "I work here and have politics X but I sense our company acting with bias Y", "Our moderators are traumatized from looking at too much <porn/hate/etc>", etc.
Besides a Reddit CEO posting on this, I would also pay money to see a CmdrTaco editorial on this topic...
"The community (Beatingwomen), which featured graphic depictions of violence against women, was banned after its moderators were found to be sharing users' personal information online"
"According to Reddit administrators, photos of gymnast McKayla Maroney and MTV actress Liz Lee, shared to 130,000 people on popular forum r/TheFappening, constitute child pornography"
You mean like the people who are telling us that happened also said:
> CNN is not publishing “HanA*holeSolo’s” name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
> It resulted in rampant child pornography, doxxing, death threats, gory violence etc. It epitomised the worst of humanity.
It resulted in reddit. That style of moderation is how reddit became reddit; so it should also get credit for whatever you think is good about reddit. The new (half-decade old) reddit moderation regime was a new venture that was hoping to retain users who were initially attracted by the old moderation regime.
My Reddit account is 16 years old. I was there in the very early days of the site well before the Digg invasion and well before it gained widespread popularity.
It was never because it allowed anything. It was because it was a much more accessible version of Slashdot. And it was because Digg did their redesign and it ended up with a critical mass of users. Then they started opening up the subreddits and it exploded from there.
The fact that Reddit is growing without that content shows that it wasn't that important to begin with.
Here's a radical idea: let me moderate my own shit!
Twitter is a subscription-based system (by this, I mean that I have to subscribe to someone's content) so if I subscribe to someone and don't like what they say then buh-bye!
Let me right click on a comment/tweet (I don't use social media so not sure of the exact terminology the kids use these days) with the options of:
- Hide this comment
- Hide all comments in this thread from <name>
- Block all comments in future from <name> (you can undo this in settings).
Like I can't believe that this reasoning doesn't resonate with people even outside of advertisers. Who wants to be on a social network where if one of your posts breaks containment you spend the next few weeks getting harassed by people who just hurl slurs and insults at you. This is already right now a problem on Twitter and opening the floodgates is the opposite of helping.
I feel like you don't understand the issue here at all.
Blocking them requires first engaging with their content. This is what people always miss in the discussion. To know if you need to block someone or not involves parsing their comment and then throwing it in the bin.
The same goes for ignoring it. And eventually people get tired of the barrage of slurs and just leave because the brainpower required to sift through garbage isn't worth it anymore. That's how you end up with places like Voat.
People producing products don’t actually care. I’d love to see stats on this made public (I’ve seen internal metrics). Facebook and Twitter don’t even show you what your ad is near. You fundamentally just have to “trust” them.
If you have a billboard with someone being raped beneath it and a photo goes viral, no one would blame the company advertising on the billboard. Frankly, no one will associate the two to change their purchasing habits.
The reason corporations care are the ESG scores and activist employees.
Also these brands still advertise in places where public executions will happen (Saudi Arabia). No one is complaining there.
Most customers don't care the only reason it's a real issue is Twitter users run the marketing department at a lot of companies and they are incorrectly convinced people care.
How much is "most"? What data do you have? Plus, even if ~20% of customers care and only half will boycott, that's still going to have an impact on the company's bottom line.
More like "let us moderate it ourselves". Reddit users already do this - there are extensions you can install that allow you to subscribe to another group of user's ban list. So you find a "hivemind" that you mostly agree with, join their collective moderation, and allow that to customize the content you like. The beauty is that you get to pick the group you find most reasonable.
Key word here: ex (joking)... but seriously I'm absolutely baffled why someone would look to a former reddit exec for advice on moderation.
I guess you could say that they have experience, having made all the mistakes, and figured it out through trial and error! This seems to be his angle.
What I got from the whole reddit saga is how horrible the decision making was, and won't be looking to them for sage advice. These people are an absolute joke.
Who is doing a good job at scale? Is there really anyone we can look to other than people who “have experience, having made all the mistakes, and figured it out through trial and error”?
Sorry if this wasn't clear, but that's just his perspective. Mine is that they're a bunch of clowns with little to offer anyone. Who cares what this person thinks more than you, I, or a player for the Miami Dolphins.
Twitter is going to have to moderate at least exploitative and a ton of abusive content, eventually. I don't understand how this rant is helpful in the slightest. Seemed like a bunch of mumbo jumbo.
You do have a good point about there not being very many good actors, if any.
Who cares what this person thinks? They actually have experience tackling the problem. You or I have never been in a position of tackling the problem. Of course I am interested in the experience of someone who has seen this problem inside and out.
I think you have to be quite credulous to engage in this topic of "twitter moderation" as if it's in good faith. It's not about about creating a good experience for users, constructive debate or even money. It's ALL about political influence.
> Iʻm heartened to know that @DavidSacks is involved.
I'm not. I doubt he is there because Twitter is like Zenefits, it's because his preoccupation over the last few years has been politics as part of the "New Right" Thiel, Master, Vance etc. running fund raisers for DeSantis and endorsing Musk's pro-Russian nonsense on Ukraine.
“ The entitled elite is not mad that they have to pay $8/month. They’re mad that anyone can pay $8/month.”
There must be quite a few people in here who are well versed in customer relations, at least in the context of a startup, can anyone explain to me why Musk and Sacks seem to have developed the strategy of insulting their customers and potential customers?
I can think of two reasons
1. They think twitter has a big enough most of obsessed people that they can het away with whatever they want.
2. They think that there really is a massive group of angry “normies” they can rile up to pay $8 a month for twitter blue, but isn’t ironically the goal of twitter blue to get priority access to the “anointed elite”? For sure I’m not paying $8 a month to get access to the feeds of my friends and business associates.
David Sacks’ tweet does feel very Trumpian in a way though, which supports the notion of bringing trump back and starting the free speech social network.
I think their general plan will be to discourage/silence influential left-wing voices with enough cover to keep the majority of the audience for an emboldened right-wing.
If thinking imaginatively, then the proposal framed as "$8/mo or have your tweets deranked" is a deal they actively don't want left-wingers to take. They want to be able to derank their tweets with a cover of legitimacy.
The more they can turn this fee into a controversial "I support Musk" loyalty test, the more they can discourage left-wing / anti-Musk subscribers while encouraging right-wing / pro-Musk subscribers who will all have their tweets boosted.
Feels conspiratorial but it's a fee that mostly upsets existing blue tick celebrities which should be the last group Twitter The Business would want to annoy but they are the influential left-wingers. If you look at who Musk picked fights with about it e.g. AOC and Stephen King, then that is even more suggestive of deliberate provocation.
Whether planned or not, I suspect that this is how it play out.
Aside from the weird elite baiting rhetoric, does this mean that blue checkmark no longer means "yes, this is that famous person/thing you've heard of, not an impersonator" but now just means "this person gave us 8 dollars?"
I think because Elon and Co. are acting so dismissive and entitled. They're acting frickin weird. Admittedly I think who you think sounds more entitled depends on your worldview. I do think the journalist reactions are strange, but probably just because they're acting to something so strange.
Elon is hardly describing a vision for this new version of twitter that people might be inspired to spend $8 for, yes something vague about plebs vs nobility, and half has many ads, but his biggest call to action has been "Hey we need the money". They're acting so shitty to everyone it's hardly a surprise people aren't fawning in confidence back. Plus I can't help but feel that these people are really just echoing what everyone else is thinking. Why am I paying $8 a month for Twitter?
> Elon is hardly describing a vision for this new version of twitter that people might be inspired to spend $8 for, yes something vague about plebs vs nobility,
Yeah, Elon calls the status quo a “lords & peasants system” and says that to get out of that model Twitter should have a two-tier model where the paid users get special visual flair, algorithmic boosts in their tweets prominence and reach, and a reduced-ads feed experience compared to free users.
When the context of the discussion is twitter moderation in the wake of Musk's takeover and who his team is, it's already political. For Yishan to pump up Sacks and his confidence in him to fix moderation, without acknowledging that today he is a political operator, is close to dishonest. Contributing this information is hopefully helpful.
The bad actors were much less prevalent back in the heyday of small phpBB style forums. I have run a forum of this type for 20 years now, since 2002. Around 2011 was when link spam got bad enough that I had to start writing my own bolt-on spam classifier and moderation tools instead of manually deleting spammer accounts. Captchas didn't help because most of the spam was posted by actual humans, not autonomous bots.
In the past 2 years fighting spam became too exhausting and I gave up on allowing new signups through software entirely. Now you have to email me explaining why you want an account and I'll manually create one for the approved requests. The world's internet users are now more numerous and less homogeneous than they were back when small forums dominated, and the worst 0.01% will ruin your site for the other 99.99% unless you invest a lot of effort into prevention.
Yep, if you're on the internet long enough you'll remember the days before you were portscanned constantly. You'll remember the days before legions of bots hammered at your HTTP server. You'd remember it was rare to have some kiddie DDOS your server off the internet and you had to hide behind a 3rd party provider like cloudflare.
That internet is long dead, hence discussions like Dead Internet Theory.
My mom still has a land-line. She gets multiple calls a day, robots trying to steal an old lady's money. For this we invented the telephone? the transistor?
phpBB forums have always been notorious for capricious bans based on the whims of mods and admins, it's just that getting banned from a website wasn't newsworthy 10 years ago.
That's because they were small and often has strict rules (written or not), aka moderation, about how to behave. You don't remember massive problems because the bad actors were kicked off. It falls apart at scale and when everyone can't/won't agree on "good behavior" or "the rules" is/are.
As a moderator of one of such forums, all of the behavioural issues have been a staple there too. We always had to moderate not just spam, racism and insults, but also "that dude that rants about his pet peeve in every topic", "that dude that rants over Apple even in topics where someone is asking how to change keyboard layout in macos", "that dude that's obviously mentally ill" and many others.
It was always a job of ensuring a comfortable environment for the community gathering on the forum and it did require "censorship" beyond obvious to prevent a minority of users from souring the environment for everyone.
The problems didn't exist as much because people didn't usually come across communities they hated/disagreed with unless they were searching them out, and every community could set the standards it wanted to set. And I think that's where large social media sites can't work; they put a bunch of groups, many of which deeply disagree and dislike each other, on the same site/platform and have to try and keep the peace without said groups getting into flame wars and personal attacks 24/7.
Small, indepedently run communities could set their own standards, and those that who disagreed with any one set of rules could go and find somewhere more to their liking. Reddit and Discord have this to an extent, but even then, it's too centralised and too heavily controlled by one organisation.
Hopefully if Mastodon takes off, federated services will bring this style of community back, except with the ability to take part in other communities if people agree with that.
If it was for some random app or gadget I’d be mad but it’s literally trying to save humanity so I give it a pass. We need to be talking about mitigating and surviving catastrophic climate change more, not less.
more like "oh never click on yishan threads ever again, this guy wants to put ads in twitter threads, who has time and patience for that? not me."
Brilliant? For immediately getting large amounts of readers to click away and discrediting himself into the future, sure that might be brilliant I guess.
It makes him seem desperate for attention and clueless.
I've had to give this some thought for other reasons, and after a couple decades solving analogous problems to moderation in security, I agree with yishan about signal to noise over the specific content, but what I have effectively spent a career studying and detecting with data is a single factor: malice.
It's something every person is capable of, and it takes a lot of exercise and practice with higher values to reach for something else when your expectations are challenged, and often it's an active choice to recognize the urge and act differently. If there were a rule or razor I would make on a forum or platform, it's that all content has to pass the bar of being without malice. It's not "assume good intent," it's recognizing that there are ways of having very difficult opinions without malice, and one can have conventional views that are malicious, and unconventional ones that are not. If you have ever dealt with a prosecutor or been on the wrong side of a legal dispute, these are people fundamentally actuated by malice, and the similar prosecution of ideas and opinions (and ultimately people) is what wrecks a forum.
It's not about being polite or civil, avoiding conflict, or even avoiding mockery and some very funny and unexpected smackdowns either. It's a quality that in being universally capable of it, I think we're also able to know it when we see it. "Hate," is a weak substitute because it is so vague we can apply it to anything, but malice is ancient and essential. Of course someone malicious can just redefine malice the way they have done other things and use it as an accusation because words have no meaning other than as a means in struggle, but really, you can see when someone is actuated by it.
I think there is a point where a person decides, consciously or not, that they will relate to the world around them with malice, and the first casulty of that is an alignment to honesty and truth. What makes it useful is that you can address malice directly and restore an equillibrium in the discourse, whereas accusations of hate and others are irrevocable judgments. I'd wonder if given it's applicability, this may be the tool.
For me, malice relates to intent. Intent isn't observable. When person X makes a claim about Y's intent, they're almost always filling in invisible gaps using their imagination. You can't moderate on that basis. We have to go by effects, not intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
It took me a long time to learn that if I tell a user "you were being $FOO" where $FOO relates to their intent, they can simply say "no I wasn't" and no one can prove otherwise, making the moderation position a weak one. Mostly they will deny it sincerely because they never had such an intent, at least not consciously. If you do that as a mod, you've just given them a reason to feel entirely in the right, and if you proceed to moderate them anyway, they will feel treated unjustly. This is a way to generate bad blood, make enemies, and lose the high ground.
The reverse strategy is better: describe the effects of someone's posts and explain why they are bad. When inevitably they respond with "but my intent was $BAR", the answer is "I believe you [what else can you say about something only that person could know?], but nonetheless the effects were $BAZ and we have to moderate based on effects. Intent doesn't communicate itself—the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate it." (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
Often when people get moderated in this way, they respond by writing the comment they originally had in their head, as a defense of what they actually meant. It's often astonishing what a gap there is between the two. Then you can respond that if they had posted that in the first place, it would have been fine, and that while they know what they have in their head while posting, the rest of us have no access to that—it needs to be spelled out explicitly.
Being able to tell someone "if you had posted that in the first place, it would have been fine" is a strong moderation position, because it takes off the table the idea "you're only moderating me because you dislike my opinions", which is otherwise ubiquitous.
This exchange ought to be a post in its own right. It seems to me that malice, hate, Warp contamination, whatever you want to call it, is very much a large part of the modern problem; and also it's a true and deep statement that you should moderate based on effects and not tell anyone what their inner intentions were, because you aren't sure of those and most users won't know them either.
This aspect of people writing what they meant again after being challenged and it being different - I'd assert that when there is malice (or another intent) present, they double down or use other tactics toward a specific end other than improving the forum or relationship they are contributing to. When there is none, you get that different or broader answer, which is really often worth it. However, yes it is intent, as you identify.
I have heard the view that intent is not observable, and I agree with the link examples that the effect of a comment is the best available heuristic. It is also consistent with a lot of other necessary and altruistic principles to say it's not knowable. On detecting malice from data, however, the security business is predicated on detecting intent from network data, so while it's not perfect, there are precedents for (more-) structured data.
I might refine it to say that intent is not passively observable in a reliable way, as if you interrogate the source, we get revealed intent. On the intent taking place in the imagination of the observer, that's a deep question.
I think I have reasonably been called out on some of my views being the artifacts of the logic of underlying ideas that may not have been apparent to me. I've also challenged authors with the same criticism, where I think there are ideas that are sincere, and ones that are artifacts of exogenous intent and the logic of other ideas, and that there is a way of telling the difference by interrogating the idea (via the person.)
I even agree with the principle of not assuming malice, but professionally, my job has been to assess it from indirect structured data (a hawkish, is this an attack?) - whereas I interpret the moderator role as assessing intent directly by its effects, but from unstructured data (is this comment/person causing harm?).
Malice is the example I used because I think it has persisted in roughly its same meaning since the earliest writing, and if that subset of effectively 'evil' intent only existed in the imaginations of its observers, there's a continuity of imagination and false consciousness about their relationship to the world that would be pretty radical. I think it's right to not assume malice, but fatal to deny it.
Perhaps there is a more concrete path to take than my conflating it with the problem of evil, even if on these discussions of global platform rules, it seems like a useful source of prior art?
Hi, dang! I wonder if it makes sense to add a summarized version of your critical point on "effects, not intent" to the HN guidelines. Though, I fear there might be undesirable ill effects of spelling it out that way.
Thanks (an understatement!) for this enlightening explanation.
There are so many heuristics like that, and I fear making the guidelines so long that no one will read them.
I want to compound a bunch of those explanations into a sort of concordance or whatever the right bibliographic word is for explaining and adding to what's written else where (so, not concordance!)
Fair enough. Yeah your plans of "compounding" and "bibliographic concordance" (thanks for the new word) sound good.
I was going to suggest this (but scratch it, your above idea is better): A small section called "a note on moderation" (or whatever) with hyperlinks to "some examples that give a concrete sense of how moderation happens here". There are many excellent explanations buried deep in the the search links that you post here. Many of them are a valuable riffing on [internet] human nature.
As a quick example, I love your lively analogy[1] of a "boxer showing up at a dance/concert/lecture" for resisting flammable language here. It's funny and a cutting example that is impossible to misunderstand. It (and your other comment[2] from the same thread) makes so many valuable reminders (it's easy to forget!). An incomplete list for others reading:
- how to avoid the "scorched earth" fate here;
- how "raw self-interest is fine" (if it gets you to curiosity);
- why you can't "flamebait others into curiosity";
- why the "medium" [of the "optionally anonymous internet forum"] matters;
- why it's not practical to replicate the psychology of "small, cohesive groups" here;
- how the "burden is on the commenter";
- "expected value of a comment" on HN; and much more
It's a real shame that these useful heuristics are buried so deep in the comment history. Sure, you do link to them via searches whenever you can; that's how I discovered 'em. But it's hard to stumble upon otherwise. Making a sampling of these easily accessible can be valuable.
I would attribute to malice things like active attempts to destroy the very forum - spamming is a form of "malice of the commons".
You will know when you encounter malice because nothing will de-malice the poster.
But if it is not malice; you can even take what they said and rewrite it for them in a way that would pass muster. In debate this is called steelmanning - and it's a very powerful persuasion method.
Spamming is an attempt to promote something. Destroying the forum is a side effect.
It's fair to describe indifference to negative effects of one's behavior as malicious, and it is, indeed almost never possible to transform a spammer into a productive member of a community.
Yeah, most people take the promotion spamming as the main one, but you can also refer to some forms of shitposting as spamming (join any twitch chat and watch whatever the current spam emoji is flood by) - but the second is more almost a form of cheering perhaps.
If you wanted to divide it further I guess you could discuss "in-group spamming" and "out-group spamming" where almost all of the promotional stuff falls in the second but there are still some in the first group.
I guess I'd describe repeatedly posting the same emoji to a chat as flooding rather than spamming. Even then, your mention of cheering further divides it into two categories of behavior:
1. Cheering. That's as good a description as any. This is intended to express excitement or approval and rally the in-group. It temporarily makes the chat useless for anything else, but that isn't its purpose.
2. Flooding. This is an intentional denial of service attack intended to make the chat useless for as long as possible, or until some demand made by the attacker is met.
Yeah - one thing I've noticed with some forums is that the addition of the "like/dislike" buttons (some have even more reactions available) greatly INCREASES the signal to noise ratio (I mean makes the forum have more signal, maybe I said it backwards) because the "me too" posts and the "fuck off" posts are reduced, you can just hit the button instead.
Some streaming platforms have a button you can hit that makes party emoji or heart emoji or whatever appear in a stream from the lower right, that's a similar thing which helps with cheering so you can then combat flooding.
I've observed the same with Matrix and Discord. It reduces noise to the point that while "fuck off" would call for moderation in a lot of contexts, reacting with the middle finger emoji usually doesn't even though it has the same meaning.
Kate Manne, in Down Girl, writes about the problems with using intent as the basis for measuring misogyny. Intent is almost always internal; if we focus on something internal, we can rarely positively identify it. The only real way to identify it is capturing external expressions of intent: manifestos, public statements, postings, and sometimes things that were said to others.
If you instead focus on external effects, you can start to enforce policies. It doesn't matter about a person's intent if their words and actions disproportionately impact women. The same goes for many -isms and prejudice-based issues.
A moderator who understands this will almost certainly be more effective than one who gets mired in back-and-forths about intent.
But the difference between the original post and the revised post often is malice (or so I suspect). The ideas are the same, though they may be developed a bit more in the second post. The difference is the anger/hostility/bitterness coloring the first post, that got filtered out to make the second post.
I think that maybe the observable "bad effects" and the unobservable "malice" may be almost exactly the same thing.
> "Hate," is a weak substitute because it is so vague we can apply it to anything
That is a big stretch. Hate can't be applied to many things, including disagreements like this comment.
But it can be pretty clearly applied to statements that, if carried out in life, would deny another person or peoples' human rights. Another is denigration or mocking someone on the basis of things that can't or shouldn't have to change about themselves, like their race or religion. There is a pretty bright line there.
Malice (per the conventional meaning of something bad intended, but not necessarily revealed or acted out) is a much lower bar that includes outright hate speech.
> but really, you can see when someone is actuated by it.
How can you identify this systematically (vs it being just your opinion), but not identify hate speech?
Hate absolutely can, and is, applied to disagreements: Plenty of people consider disagreement around allowing natal males in women's sport is hateful. Plenty of people consider opposition to the abolishment of police is hateful. Plenty of people immigration enforcement hateful. I could go on...
> Plenty of people consider disagreement around allowing natal males in women's sport is hateful. Plenty of people consider opposition to the abolishment of police is hateful. Plenty of people immigration enforcement hateful.
Those things aren't deemed hate speech, but they might be disagreed with and downvoted on some forums (i.e. HN), and championed on others (i.e. Parler) but that has nothing to do with them being hate speech. They are just unpopular opinions in some places, and I can understand how it might bother you if those are your beliefs and you get downvoted.
Actual hate speech based on your examples is: promoting violence/harassment against non-cisgender people, promoting violence/harassment by police, and promoting violence/harassment by immigration authorities against migrants.
Promoting violence and harassment is a fundamentally different type of speech than disagreeing with the prevailing local opinion on a controversial subject that has many shades of gray (that your examples intentionally lack).
> Promoting violence and harassment is a fundamentally different type of speech than disagreeing with the prevailing local opinion on a controversial subject that has many shades of gray (that your examples intentionally lack).
Plenty of people disagree, and do indeed claim that not letting a transgender woman compete against natal females is harassment towards transgender people. Heck, I've even seen people claim that this is genocide.
I don't really care about these topics, but the point is that many people do not, or perhaps cannot, distinguish between "hate speech" and and opinions they disagree with. Contrary to your claim that "hate can't be applied to many things, including disagreements like this comment", hate speech is often applied to dissenting opinions.
> Plenty of people disagree, and do indeed claim that not letting a transgender woman compete against natal females is harassment towards transgender people. Heck, I've even seen people claim that this is genocide.
It's a ridiculous claim but so what? It has no teeth anyways.
Nobody gets suspended from mainstream social media for simply expressing opposition to transgender gender athletics.
They get suspended for actually harassing transgender athletes.
You might get demonetized for that opinion, but getting paid to express an unpopular opinion isn't a right.
From that same article it says that he was banned for "Promoting, encouraging, or facilitating the discrimination or denigration of a group of people based on their protected characteristics". That is harassment, not expressing an opinion.
All you did was repeat the banned individual's own opinion about why they were banned. Of course, you are free to think Twitch is lying about its reasons for the ban, but you've offered no evidence of that.
According to that article, the individual also had a history of encouraging the murder of protestors by white militias on Twitch, so sounds like they had plenty of grounds on which to ban him already, and perhaps they finally just got around to it.
It undermines your argument to use someone like that as an example.
> From that same article it says that he was banned for "Promoting, encouraging, or facilitating the discrimination or denigration of a group of people based on their protected characteristics". That is harassment, not expressing an opinion. All you did was repeat the banned individual's own opinion about why they were banned. Of course, you are free to think Twitch is lying about its reasons for the ban, but you've offered no evidence of that.
And what was the nature of that "harassment"? The fact that he didn't agree with the orthodoxy around natal males in women's sports. You're acting out the the exact dynamic I'm talking about: dissenting opinions are labeled harassment or denigration and become bannable offenses. Then people get banned for the "harassment" that is holding a verboten opinion, with no actual harassment taking place. And this is by far from the only example [1].
You're asking me to prove a negative. Who was harassed? Twitch didn't say, and no one can seem to identify a harassment target. When did this harassment occur? Again, nothing is specified. If you can identify a harassment victim it'd be good of you to do so.
> According to that article, the individual also had a history of encouraging the murder of protestors by white militias on Twitch, so sounds like they had plenty of grounds on which to ban him already, and perhaps they finally just got around to it.
If this was the case, the ban would have been for incitement to violence, a separate ToU clause Twitch uses to ban people who call for violence. Not discrimination or denigration of a group on the basis of protected characteristics. Furthermore, these comments occurred two years before the ban - your comment makes it sound like this happened the week before he commented about Thomas. In case you're wondering, in reference to people defending themselves from arsonists (the exact words were, "dipshit protesters that think that they can torch buildings at 10 p.m.") not shooting actual protestors. It continues to amaze me how 10 seconds can be edited to portray someone in a completely opposite light of reality. If you're interested in this creator's leanings, just take a look at a recent video [2].
Espousing dissenting opinions absolutely does get people banned. The reasons cited are harassment, but no harassment victim is identified because holding the prohibited opinion is now considered harassment even if no individual is actually harassed.
> How can you identify this systematically (vs it being just your opinion), but not identify hate speech?
What I think distinguishes malice is the prosecution example. Where if someone makes an argument about you personally, and they are unable to abstract the idea from you personally as an individual, that is acting with malintent toward you.
Antagonizing someone personally by trying to scandalize them in the eyes of others (performatively, as though in front of a judge or jury, or public opinion) is not discourse, it's just persecution and animus. The modern internet version in the form of, "hey everybody, this person is an X!" is probably malice in its more pure form, with a spectrum of dilutions that are variations of, "surely you aren't tainting yourself with this taboo!" after that. It's a purity game, but really a proxy for the 'deadly sin' of wrath and the secular concept of animus. In this sense, it's something that with reflection we recognize ourselves as capable of and learn to moderate it within ourselves.
Hate is something we only recently started accusing others of. I do think it's part of a substitute, secular, belief that persuades people they cannot ever be good, so instead we can repent of our recieved worthlessness by giving up our moral agency and becoming _anti-bad_, all while accepting poor treatment and even demanding it for others because the people we have animus for are also equally bad. The only hope is that by redemption through criticism, some are less worthless than others, but that's the upside. It's like a profoundly false religion whose core tenant is that you believe in the universality of hate, and then be against it. Things are shaped by the forces they oppose, and I think indexing on hate has had the effect of moralizing malice. When we start with the premise that we are all interchangeable group elements without moral agency, and we must redeem ourselves by becoming above criticism, that is a system of slavery with the reins in the hands of the most zealous critics - who happen to be other living people, and not a relationship with a self or an ideal. This whole cycle is based on this _anti-bad_ negative definition that mostly seems to moralize malice in its followers. Back in the day they had to call them sins because they felt good, but really weren't.
Anyway this isn't your outgroup either, it's us. In terms of detecting it, I think ML is just on the cusp of doing it as well or better than most people and that's the future of forum moderation. This question of whether we can observe intent is going to be a big one. It's a huge topic.
What was normal was not hate, and hate - as an extreme emotion - was never normal, but if belief in hate is the root of one's entire ontology, there isn't common ground with someone who doesn't have that princple. Acts of hate absolutely occurred, especially systemic ones that resulted in genocides, but what was considered normal was not hate. We have adapted the word to mean something it did not previously. Just like we don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, I'd say the same thing about modern hate and self-interest.
The instances of the other examples have only barely been reduced by identifying them, and in many cases, it has licensed behaviours that don't fit the definition, and it has empowered a layer of people who have jobs effectively managing and extracting value from them now, imo. Like malice, I reject hate, and in doing so, I also reject indexing on it as the axiom for a positive morality.
I find most forums that advocate against behavior they view as malicious wind up becoming hugboxes as people skirt this arbitrary boundary. I will never, never come back to platforms or groups after I get this feeling.
Hugbox environments wind up having a loose relationship with the truth and a strong emphasis on emotional well-being.
Setting your moderation boundaries determines the values of your platform. I’d much rather talk to someone who wants to hurt my feelings than someone who is detached from reality or saying what they think.
I think it's two things: the power of malice, and popularity measurement. Malice and fame.
Social networks are devices for measuring popularity; if you took the up/down arrows off, no one would be interested in playing. And we have proven once again that nothing gets up arrows like being mean.
HN has the unusual property that you can't (readily) see others' score, just your own. That doesn't really make it any less about fame, but maybe it helps.
When advertising can fund these devices to scale to billions, it's tough to be optimistic about how it reflects human nature.
I don't think it's as simple as malice either because the people who get worked up about online debate often believe they are doing the right thing, they believe they are trying to save someone else from thinking the wrong thing. There's no malice there.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 422 ms ] threadFWIW With YT you can block them with Sponsorblock, which works with user submitted timestamps of sponsored sections in videos. If this tweet technique takes off I'd imagine a similar idea for tweets.
How can people who are not totally dopamine deprived zombies find twitter and this terrible „thread“ format acceptable? Just write a coherent blog post pls.
I don’t find threads hard to read. There’s some extra scrolling, but it’s still in linear order.
People post on Twitter because it reaches people, obviously.
I found this hilarious. I don't use Twitter and so was unaware that these annoying tangents are common on the platform. As a result, I thought Yishan was using them to illustrate how it's not necessarily the content (his climate initiative) but a specific pattern of behavior (saying the 'right' thing at the wrong time, in this case) that should be the target of moderation.
In real life we say: "it's not what you said, it's just the way you said it!" Perhaps the digital equivalent of that could be: "it's not what you said, it's just when you said it."
I think the fundamental problem with the internet today is that by definition almost, ads are unwanted content and have to be forced on the user.
It is annoying but it can be seen as part of his argument. How can spam be moderated if even trustworthy creators create spam?
According to him, it's not spam because it doesn't fulfill the typical patterns of spam, which shows that identifying noise does require knowledge of the language.
It could be interesting to turn his argument around. Instead of trying to remove all spam, a platform could offer the tools to handle all forms of spam and let its users come up with clever ways to use those tools.
I had to stop after the tree myths. Was it related to content moderation at all?
Are we sure that it is not the other way around? Didn't social platforms created or increased polarization?
I always see this comments from social platforms that take as fact that society is polarized and they work hard to fix it, when I believe that it is the other way around. Social media has created the opportunity to increase polarization and they are not able to stop it for technical, social or economic reasons.
>The Making of a YouTube Radical
>I visited Mr. Cain in West Virginia after seeing his YouTube video denouncing the far right. We spent hours discussing his radicalization. To back up his recollections, he downloaded and sent me his entire YouTube history, a log of more than 12,000 videos and more than 2,500 search queries dating to 2015.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo... (2019)
I mean the big names in talk radio are still clucking if you want to listen to them today.
Twitter is not a real place.
If far right political bullshit would stay online and out of my state’s general assembly that would be such a positive change.
Plenty of people have radical thoughts and opinions, but are smart enough to keep it to themselves IRL
The people on twitter are real people (well, mostly, probably), and have real political opinions.
If you talk to people, by and large they'll profess moderate opinions, because in person discussions still trigger politeness and non-confrontational emotions in most people, so the default 'safe' thing to say is the moderate choice, no matter what their true opinion happens to be.
The internet allows people to take the proverbial mask off.
What Internet does have is ease of changing masks and joining diverse groups. Trying something unusual without reprecussions appeal to a lot of people who usually simply dont have time to join such groups offline.
The real problem is that unfortunately propoganda has evolved too with all new research about human phychology, behaviors and fallacies. Abusing weaknesses of monkey brain on scale is relatively easy and profitable.
So far ...
The process of polarization (in the US) started decades ago:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized
In fact it seems that people were always polarized, it's just that the political parties (R & D in the US) didn't really bother sorting themselves on topics until the 1960s: even in the 1970s and early 1980s it was somewhat common to vote for (e.g.) an R president but a D representative (or vice versa). Straight-through one-party voting didn't really become the majority until the late-1980s and 1990s.
There's a chapter or two in the above book describing psychology studies showing that humans form tribes 'spontaneously' for the most arbitrary of reasons. "Us versus them" seems to be baked into the structure of humans.
> "Us versus them" seems to be baked into the structure of humans.
Not quite, but one of the most effective temptations one can offer is giving people a moral excuse to hate others. Best when see as those as responsible for all evil in the world. It feels good to judge, it distracts from your own faults, flaws, insecurities, fears and problems. This is pretty blatant and has become far, far worse than the formerly perhaps populist content on reddit. We especially see this on political topics, but also the pandemic as an example.
The splitting into camps (in the US) based on particular topics started much earlier than social media:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
> Not quite, but one of the most effective temptations one can offer is giving people a moral excuse to hate others.
The psychology studies referenced in the book show us-versus-them / in/out-group mentality without getting in moral questions or political topics.
But on the other hand there are also countless other factors that are going to affect society at scale: rise internet, rise of pharmaceutical psychotropics, surge in obesity, surge in autism, declines in testosterone, apparent reversal of Flynn effect, and more.
With so many things happening it all feels like a Rorschach test when trying to piece together anything like a meaningful hypothesis.
If you want a decend unroll, one example would be threadreaderapp: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html
edit/ Guess it is working now?
The most important post in his older thread: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514939100444311560
He never ever justifies this point. The world absolutely has not changed in the context of censorship. Censorship apologetics notwithstanding.
The realization is the world changed is a reveal. He as CEO learnt about where the censorship is coming from.
HN in general is convinced that social media is censoring right ideas because it skews counterculture and “grey tribe” and there have been a lot of high profile groups who claim right views while doing the most vile depraved shit like actively trying to harass people into suicide and celebrating it or directing massive internet mobs at largely defenseless not public figures for clout.
Citation needed
As I said in my post, he never justifies this point. To then turn it upon me to prove a negative?
Devils advocating against myself: I do believe the parler deplatforming is the proof for what he says. The world has indeed changed, but anyone who knows the details sure isn't saying why. Why? Because revealing how the world has changed, in the usa, would have some pretty serious consequences.
I don't know. I wish I could have a closed door, off record, tell me everything, conversation with yishan to have him tell me why he believes the world changed, in the context of social media censorship.
In terms of public verified knowledge, nothing at all has changed in the context of censorship. I stand by the point. Elon obviously stands by this as well. Though elon's sudden multiweek delays on unbanning... im expecting he suddenly knows as well.
>You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
Guess I'm not allowed to reply again today. No discussion allowed on HN.
I do find it funny they say 'you're posting too fast' but I haven't been able to post on HN or reply to you for an hour. How "fast" am I really going. I expect it will be a couple more hours before I am allowed to post again. How dare I discuss a forbidden subject.
One is 'put up or shutup' for appeals of moderator decisions.
That is anyone who wishes to appeal needs to also consent to have all their activities on the platform, relevant to the decision, revealed publicly.
It definitely could prevent later accusations of secretiveness or arbitrariness. And it probably would also make users think more in marginal cases before submitting.
But there are entire groups of users that not only don't feel shame about their activities, but are proud of them.
These news articles about "platform X censors people with political views Y" are about generating mass outrage from a comparatively small number of moderation decisions. While sure, it would be good for the people who are targeted by those moderation decisions to realize "yeah, ok, you're right, I was being a butthole", I think it's much more important to try to show the reactionary angry mob that things are aboveboard.
If it's only one of them being nasty, then I don't see why some third person would dox the recipient?
And if they do so regardless, they would also get punished for obvious bad behaviour.
There's also a lot of drama around Lyte in his personal life, should you choose to go looking into that.
* There's some moderation dispute that involves the PM's
* At least one of the parties involved consents to release the PM's
The latter is the critical bit, to me. When you send someone a chat message, or an email, obviously there's nothing actually stopping them from sharing the content of the message with others if they feel that way, either legally or technically. If an aggrieved party wants to share a PM, everyone knows they can do so -- the only question mark is that they may have faked it.
To me the answer here seems obvious: allow users to mark a PM/thread as publicly visible. This doesn't make it more public than it otherwise could be, it just lets other people verify the authenticity, that they're not making shit up.
The reality is everyone, myself included, can be and will be a bad actor.
How do you build and run a "social media" product when the very act of letting anyone respond to anyone with anything is itself the fundamental problem?
Based on this premise we can conclude that the best way to improve Reddit and Twitter is to block everyone.
I'm 33. I grew up playing multiplayer video games (including having to run a db9 COM cable across the house from one machine to another to play warcraft 2 multiplayer, back when you had to explicitly pick the protocol for the networking in the game menu)
My family worked with computers, so I had DSL since I have memories. I played a ton of online games. The communities are BRUTAL. They are insulting, abusive, misogynistic, racist, etc... the spectrum of unmonitored teenage angst, in all it's ugly forms (and to be fair, some truly awesome folks and places).
As a result - I have a really thick skin about basically everything said online. But a key difference between the late 90s and today, is that if I wanted it to stop, all I had to do was close the game I was playing. Done.
Most social activities were in person, not online. I could walk to my friend's houses. I could essentially tune out all the bullshit by turning off my computer, and there was plenty of other stuff to go do where the computer wasn't involved at all.
I'm not convinced that's enough anymore. The computer is in your pocket. It's always on. Your social life is probably half online, half in person. Your school work is online. Your family is online. your reputation is online (as evidenced by those fucking blue checkmarks). The abuse is now on a highway into your life, even if you want to turn it off.
It's like the school bully is now waiting for you everywhere. He's not waiting at school - he's stepping into the private conversations you're having online. He's talking to your friends. He's hurling abuse at you when you look at your family photos. He's in your life in a way that just wasn't possible before.
I don't think it's fair to say "Just grow a thicker skin" in response to that. I think growing a thicker skin is desperately needed, but I don't think it's sufficient. The problem is deeper.
We have a concept for people who do the things these users are doing on twitter in person - They're called fighting words, and most times, legally (even in the US) there is zero assumption of protected speech here. You say bad shit about someone with the goal of riling them up and no other value? You have no right of free speech, because you aren't "speaking" - you're trying to start a fight.
I'm not protecting your ability to bully someone. Full stop. If you want to do that, do it with the clear understanding that you're on your own, and regardless of how thick my skin is - I think you need a good slap upside the head. I'd cheer it on.
In person - this resolves itself because the fuckwads who do this literally get physically beaten. Not always - but often enough we have a modicum of civil discussion we accept, and a point where no one is going to defend you because you were a right little cunt, and the beating was well deserved.
I don't know how you simulate the same constraint online. I'm not entirely sure you can, but I think the answer isn't to just stop trying.
It is still a choice to participate online. I'm not on Twitter or Facebook or anything like that. It doesn't affect my life in the slightest. Someone could be on there right this minute calling me names, and it can't bother me because I don't see it, and I don't let it into my life. This is not a superpower, it's a choice to not engage with social media and all the ills it brings.
Have I occasionally gotten hate mail from an HN post? Sure. I even got a physical threat over E-mail (LOL good luck, guy). If HN ever became as toxic as social media can be, I could just stop posting and reading. Problem solved. Online is not real if you just ignore it.
Minorities, both racial and gender, should be able to use social media without having vitriol spewed at them because they're guilty of being a minority.
"Start your own" isn't really a viable solution since the greatest challenge of making a social network is getting people to use it.
(OK, that wasn't a twitter problem, but the attack on him was 100% a product of unmoderated media in general)
Violence exists outside of mean tweets and political rhetoric. People, even crazy ones, almost always have their own agency even if it runs contrary to what most consider to be normal thoughts and behavior. They choose to act, regardless of others and mostly without concern or conscious. There are crazy people out there and censoring others wont ever stop bad people from doing bad things. If so, then how do we account for the evils done by those prior to our inter-connected world?
He lived in a community with BLM signs and a rainbow flag. He did hemp jewellry.
He registered a website three months ago and only recently filled it with standard extreme right garbage.
This is all so odd that for all we know someone else radicalized him offline, the old fashioned way.
When other people attack me personally, it's a deep and dangerous violation of social norms.
"Block" and "Mute" are the Twitter user's best friends. They keep the timeline free of spam, be it advertisers, or the growth hackers creating useless threads of Beginner 101 info and racking up thousands of likes.
But you likely aren't, and most people likely aren't either. That's the entire premise behind removing bad actors and spaces that allow bad actors to grow.
Would be interesting to make a service where spammers have to do recaptcha-like spam flagging to get their account unlocked.
Is there any evidence of this? 1% bad content can mean that 1% of your users are bad actors, or it can mean that 100% of your users are bad actors 1% of the time (or anything in between.)
Even the best people we know have bad days. But you have probably also encountered people in your life who have consistent patterns of being selfish, destructive, toxic, or harmful.
This is not evidence that most bad acts are done by bad people. This is evidence that I've met people who've annoyed or harmed me at one or more points, and projected my personal annoyance into my fantasies of their internal states or of their essence. Their "badness" could literally have only consisted of the things that bothered me, and during the remaining 80% of the time (that I wasn't concerned with) they were tutoring orphans in math.
Somebody who is "bad" 100% of the time on twitter could be bad 0% of the time off twitter, and vice-versa. Other people's personalities aren't reactions to our values and feelings; they're as complex as you are.
As the OP says: our definitions of "badness" in this context are of commercial badness. Are they annoying our profitable users?
edit: and to add a bit - if you have a diverse userbase, you should expect them to annoy each other at a pretty high rate with absolutely no malice.
I believe that's GP's point! Any of us has the potential to be the bad actor in some discussion that gets us irrationally worked up. Maybe that chance is low for you or I, but it's never totally zero.
And even if the chance is zero for you or I specifically, there's no way for the site operators to a priori know that fact or to be able to predict which users will suddenly become bad actors and which discussions will trigger it.
Everything else, like being allowed to spam or post too quickly, is a bug, and bugs should be addressed in the open.
This isn't the problem as much as giving bad actors tools to enhance their reach. Bad actors can pay to get a wider reach or get/abuse a mark of authority, like a special tag on their handle, getting highlighted in a special place within the app, gaming the algorithm that promotes some content, etc. Most of these tools are built into the platform. Some though, like sock puppets, can be detected but aren't necessarily built in functionality.
Maybe that wouldn't be your crusade and maybe you would think you were standing up for an oppressed minority. You get overly emotional, and you could be prone to making some bad decisions.
People act substantially differently on reddit vs. hackernews; honestly I have to admit to being guilty of it. Some of the cool heads here are probably simultaneously engaged in flamewars on reddit/twitter.
Let them reregister for $10.
Congrats, i just solved spam, bots, assholes and permanent line steppers.
EDIT: Lol Dalton's PART of YC now. Hey dude, why not pitch it then
For instance, the three deletions (forget the exact term) rule in wikipedia. It is now a tool used by “the first to write”…
This may be a lot easier in places where there's an explicit point to discussion beyond the discussion itself - StackOverflow is another non-Reddit example. It's easier to tell people their behavior is unconstructive when it's clearly not contributing to the goal. HN's thing may just be to declare a particular type of conversation to be the goal.
It's controversial, but if the average IQ was 120 rather than 100, I doubt you'd have 1/10th as many issues on massively popular social media; most of the moderation issues would go away. The problem comes from the bottom-up, and can't be fixed from the top down.
Plus scale is a huge factor. Automated moderation can have its problems. Human moderation is expensive and hard to keep consistent if there are large teams of individuals that can't coordinate on everything. HN's size and its lack of desire for profit allow for a very small human moderation team that leads to consistency because it is always the same people making the decisions.
Free Speech does mean what you describe it not as. But there is no legal body to punish you for violating the principle. It is similar to 'primum non nocere', translated roughly to 'do no harm', extremely common in medicine and something you may see alongside the 'Hippocratic Oath'. You can be in violation of that principle or the oath at any time, some people even get fired for violating either as a pretext to malpractice. Some even argue that it is quite impossible to abide by this principle, and yet, it is something many people take on as responsibility everyday all across the globe.
I won't argue about websites and their rules, they have their own set of principles and violate plenty of others, sometimes they even violate their own principles. But Free Speech is not just the law and interactions one may have with their government.
The twitter retweet constantly amplifies and the tweets are centered around an account vs a post.
Reddit should behave similarly but I think subreddit topics stick longer.
Of course, that also soft-forces everyone to move on. Once a thread is a day or two old, you can still reply, but the person you've replied to will probably not read it.
This drastically increases time between messages on a topic, lets people cool off, and lets a topic naturally die down.
No pictures and no avatars.
I wonder how much bad behavior is weeded out by the interface itself ?
A lot, I suspect …
This is essentially moderation rule #0. it is unwritten, enforced before violation can occur, and generates zero complaints because it filters complainers out of the user pool from the start.
If you've just arrived on the site, have been given a random name and someone says you're wrong, what do you care? You're not attached to that account at all, it's not "you", it's just a random account on a random website.
I thought that was an interesting point on 4chan (and probably other sites before them), that your identity was set per thread (iirc they only later introduced the ability to have permanent accounts). That removes the possibility of you becoming attached to the random name.
Once you’re confident that you can’t be wrong, you’re not going to care about the topic anymore. There is good reason why we don’t sit around talking about how 1+1=2 all day.
Recently picked it up again and I noticed that I didn’t had to use /mute all anymore. I’ve got all-chat disabled by default so I’ve got no experience there, but overall I’d say it has come a long way.
But I’d also say it depends which mode and MMR you are in. I mostly play draft pick normals or ARAMs in which I both have a lot of games played - I heard from a mate that chat is unbearable in low level games.
OP's argument is that you can moderate content based on behavior, in order to bring the heat down, and the signal to noise ratio up. I think it's an interesting point: it's neither the tools that need moderating, nor the people, but conversations (one by one).
Conversely, if you make the moderation about the person (being a bad actor etc.) then the only way they can agree with you is by regarding themselves badly. That's a weak position for persuasion! It almost compels them to resist you.
I try to use depersonalized language for this reason. Instead of saying "you" did this (yeah that's right, YOU), I'll tell someone that their account is doing something, or that their comment is a certain way. This creates distance between their account or their comment and them, which leaves them freer to be receptive and to change.
Someone will point out or link to cases where I did the exact opposite of this, and they'll be right. It's hard to do consistently. Our emotional programming points the other way, which is what makes this stuff hard and so dependent on self-awareness, which is the scarcest thing and not easily added to [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454968
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33448079
I feel quite excited to read that you, dang, moderating HN, use a similar technique that I use for myself and try to teach others. Someone told my good friend the other day that he wasn't being a very good friend to me, and I told him that he may do things that piss me off, annoy me, confuse me, or whatever, but he will always be a good friend to me. I once told an Uber driver who told me he just got out of jail and was a bad man, I said, "No, you're a good man who probably did a bad thing."
Thank you for your write-up.
That scares me. Today's norms are tomorrow's taboos. The dangers of conforming and shaping everyone into the least controversial opinions and topics are self evident. It's an issue on this very forum. "Go elsewhere" doesn't solve the problem because that policy still contributes to a self-perpetuating feedback loop that amplifies norms, which often happen to be corrupt and related to the interests of big (corrupt) commercial and political powers.
That's not to pick on HN, since this is a common problem. Neither do I have a silver bullet solution, but the issue remains, and it's a huge issue. Evolution of norms, for better or worse, is suppressed to the extent that big communication platforms suppress controversy. The whole concept of post and comment votes does this by definition.
Most of the time though, people arguing controversial topics phrase them so poorly or include heavy handed emotions so that their arguments have no shot of being fairly interpreted by anyone else.
People always reach immediately for the conclusion that their controversial comments are getting moderated because people dislike their opinion—either because of groupthink in the community or because the admins are hostile to their views. Most of the time, though, they've larded their comments pre-emptively with some sort of hostility, snark, name-calling, or other aggression—no doubt because they expect to be opposed and want to make it clear they already know that, don't care what the sheeple think, and so on.
The way the group and/or the admins respond to those comments is often a product of those secondary mixins. Forgive the gross analogy, but it's as if someone serves a shit milkshake and when it's rejected, say, "you just hate dairy products" or "this community is so biased against milkshakes".
If you start instead from the principle that the value of a comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of [1], then a commenter is responsible for the effects of their comments [2] – at least the predictable ones. From that it follows that there's a greater burden on the commenter who's expressing a contrarian view [3]. The more contrarian the view—the further it falls outside the community's tolerance—the more responsibility that commenter has for not triggering degenerative effects like flamewars.
This may be counterintuitive, because we're used to thinking in terms of atomic individual responsibility, but it's a model that actually works. Threads are molecules, not atoms—they're a cocreation, like one of those drawing games where each person fills in part of a shared picture [4], or like a dance—people respond to the other's movements. A good dancer takes the others into account.
It may be unfair that the one with a contrarian view is more responsible for what happens—especially because they're already under greater pressure than the one whose views agree with the surround. But fair or not, it's the way communication works. If you're trying to deliver challenging information to someone, you have to take that person into account—you have to regulate what you say by what the listener is capable to hear and to tolerate. Otherwise you're predictably going to dysregulate them and ruin the conversation.
Contrarian commenters usually do the opposite of this—they express their contrarian opinion in a deliberately aggressive and uncompromising way, probably because (I'm repeating myself sorry) they expect to be rejected anyhow, and it's safer to be inside the armor of "you people can't handle the truth!" than it is to really communicate, i.e. to connect and relate.
This model is the last thing that most contrarian-opinion commenters want to adopt, because it's hard and risky, and because usually they have pre-existing hurt feelings from being battered repeatedly with majoritarian opinions already (especially the case when identity is at issue, such as being from a minority population along some axis). But it's the one that actually has a hope of working, and is by far the best solution I know of to the problem of unconventional opinions in groups.
Are there some views which are so far beyond the community's tolerance that any mention in any form will immediately blow up the thread, making the above model impossible? Yes, but they're rare and extreme and not usually the thing people have in mind. I think it's better to stick to the 95% or 99% case when having this discussion.
[1] https://hn.algo...
This sounds similar to the “yelling fire” censorship test
it’s not that we censor discussing combustion methods, there would be no effect if everyone else was also yelling fire
But people were watching a movie and now the community’s experience has been ruined (with potential for harm), in exchange for nothing of value
I particularly liked his tweet about how site/network owners just wish everyone would be friendly and have great discussions.
I'd like to hear your thoughts/experience as well.
There are a few sacred cows here (I won't mention them by name, though the do exist), but I have earned my rep by posting mostly contrarian opinions, and I almost always have quite a few net upvotes - sometimes dozens. It's not too difficult: First, I cite facts that back up my claims from sources whose narratives would typically go against my argument. I cite the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, NPR, CNN, etc.; I only rarely cite Fox News, and never cite anything to the right of Fox. Second, I really internalize the rules about good faith, not attacking the weakest form of an argument, not cross-examining, etc. Sometimes I have a draft that has my emotions, and I'll edit it to make it more rational before posting. Third, I ask open-ended questions to allow myself to be wrong in the mind of other commenters. Instead of just asserting that some of my ultra-contrarian opinions are the only way anyone can see an issue, I may propose a question. By doing that, I have at times seen some excluded middle I hadn't considered, and my opinion becomes more nuanced. Fourth, I often will begin replying and then delete my reply because I know it won't add anything. This is the hardest one to do, but sometimes it's just the way you have to go. Some differences are merely tastes and preferences, and I'm not going to change the dominant tastes and preferences of the Valley on HN. I can only point out some of the consequences.
The content moderation rules and system here have encouraged me to write better and more clearly about my contrarian opinions, and have made me more persuasive. HN can be a crap-show at times, but in my experience, it's often some of the best commentary on the Internet.
If someone points out a specific action I did that can/should be improved upon (and especially if they can tell me why it was "bad" in the first place), I'm far more likely to accept that, attempt to learn from it, and move on. As in real life, I might still be heated in the moment, but I'll usually remember that when similar cues strike again.
But if moderation hints at something being wrong with my identity or just me fundamentally, then that points to something that _can't be changed_. If that's the case, I _know they are wrong_ and simply won't respect that they know how to moderate anything at all, because their judgment is objectively incorrect.
Practically at work, this has actually been a good policy you described when I think about bugs and code reviews.
> "@ar_lan broke `main` with this CLN. Reverting."
is a pretty sure-fire way to make me defend my change and believe you are wrong. My inclination, for better or worse, will be to dispute the accusation directly and clear my name (probably some irrational fear that creating a bug will go on a list of reasons to fire me).
But when I'm approached with:
> "Hey, @ar_lan. It looks like pipeline X failed this test after this CLN. We've automatically reverted the commit. Could you please take a second look and re-submit with a verification of the test passing?"
I'm almost never defensive about it, and I almost always go right ahead to reproducing the failure and working on the fix.
The first message conveys to me that I (personally) am the reason `main` is broken. The second conveys that it was my CLN that was problematic, but fixable.
Both messages are taken directly from my companies Slack (ommitting some minor details, of course), for reference.
... kinda wondering if this is the sort of OT post we're supposed to avoid, it would be class if you chastised me for it. But anyway, glad you're here to keep us in check and steer the community so well.
Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.
It's true that empty positive comments don't add much information but they have a different healthy role (assuming they aren't promotional)
But to your point, yeah my current company has feedback guidelines that are pretty similar: criticize the work, not the worker, and it super works. You realize that action isn't aligned with who you want to be or think you are, and you stop behaving that way. I mean, it's worked on me and I've seen it work on others, for sure.
I use this tactic with my kids when they do something wrong. Occasionally I slip up and really lay into them, but almost all of the time these days I tell them that I love them, I think they are capable of doing the right thing, but I didn't love some action they did or didn't do and I explain why. They may not be happy with this always, or with the natural (& parent-imposed) consequences of their actions, but it reinforces that they have a choice to do good in the future even if they slip up from time to time. If all of us were immutably identified by the worst thing we ever did, no one would have any incentive to change.
Thanks for the thoughtful & insightful comment, dang.
> I try to use depersonalized language for this reason. Instead of saying "you" did this (yeah that's right, YOU), I'll tell someone that their account is doing something, or that their comment is a certain way. This creates distance between their account or their comment and them, which leaves them freer to be receptive and to change.
My sense is that this is a worthy thing to do (first of all because it's intellectually correct to blame actions rather than people, and second of all because if you're right about the effect it's all upside). But I suspect this will produce very little introspection, maybe a tiny but on the margins.
It's pretty normal in an argument between two people IRL that one will say something like "That was a stupid comment" or "Stop acting like an asshole" -- both uses of distancing language -- and the other person will respond "Don't call me stupid" or "Don't call me an asshole". I think most people who are on the receiving end of even polite correction are going to elide the distancing step.
On the social psych side, I have no idea whether there's any validated way to encourage someone to be more introspective, take a breath, try to switch down into type-II processing, etc.
When the organizational goal is to increase engagement, which will be the case wherever there are advertisers, inevitably bad behavior will grow more frequent than good behavior. Attempts to moderate toward good behavior will be abandoned in favor of better metrics. Or the site will stagnate under the weight of the new rules.
In this I'm in disagreement with Yishan because in those posts I read that engagement feedback is a characteristic of old media (newspapers, television) and social media tries to avoid that. The OP seems to be saying that online moderation is an attempt to minimize controversial engagement because platforms don't like that. I don't believe it. I think social media loves controversial engagement just as much as the old-school "if it bleeds, it leads" journalists from television and newspapers. What they don't want is the (quote/unquote) wrong kind of controversies. Which is to say, what defines bad behavior is not universally agreed upon. The threshold for what constitutes bad behavior will be different depending on who's doing the moderating. As a result the content seen will be influenced by the moderation, even if said moderation is being done in a content-neutral way.
And I just now realize that I've taken a long trip around to come to the conclusion that the medium is the message. I guess we can now say the moderation is the message.
A giant amount of social quandaries melt away when you realize:
"Good guys" and "Bad guys" is not a matter of identity, it's a matter of activity.
You aren't a "Good guy" because of who you are, but because of what you do.
There are vanishingly few people who as a matter of identity are reliably and permanently one way or another.
They pointed out that everybody can be a bad actor and you will not find a way to get better users.
I'd argue that bad actors are people that behave badly "on purpose". Their goals are different than the normal actor. Bad actors want to upset or scare people. Normal actors want to connect with, learn from, or persuade others.
Customised filters for anyone, but I am talking about filters completely under the control of the user. Maybe running locally. We can wrap ourselves in a bubble but better that than having a bubble designed by others.
I think AI will make spam irrelevant over the next decade by switching from searching and reading to prompting the bot. You don't ever need to interface with the filth, you can have your polite bot present the results however you please. It can be your conversation partner and you get to control its biases as well.
Internet <-> AI agent <-> Human
(the web browser of the future, the actual web browser runs in a sandbox under the AI)
He observes that social media moderation is about signal to noise. Then he goes on about introducing off-topic noise. Then, he comes to conclusions that seem to ignore his original conclusion about it being a S/N problem.
Chiefly, he doesn't show how a "council of elders" is necessary to solve S/N problems.
Strangely enough, Slashdot seems to have a system which worked pretty well back in the day.
There are the minority who love to be trolls and get any big reaction out of people (positive or negative). Those people are the problem. But they are also often very good at evading moderation or laying in wait and toeing the line between bannable offences and just every so slightly controversial comments.
Someone who has a balanced life, who spends time at work, with family, in nature, only occasionally goes online, uses most of their online time for edification, spends 30 minutes writing a reply if they decide one is warranted - that type of person is going to have a minuscule output compared to the whales. The whales are always online, thoughtlessly writing responses and upvoting without reading articles or comments. They have a constant firehouse of output that dwarfs other users.
Worth reading "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People"[1].
If you actually saw these people in real life, chances are you'd avoid interacting with them. People seeing a short interview with the top mod of antiwork almost destroyed that sub (and lead to the mod stepping down). People say the internet is a bad place because people act badly when they're not face to face. That might be true to some extent, but we're given online spaces where it's hard to avoid "bad actors" (or people that engage in excessive bad behavior) the same way we would in person.
And these sites need the whales, because they rely on a constant stream of low quality content to keep people engaged. There are simple fixes that could be done, like post limits and vote limits, but sites aren't going to implement them. It's easier to try to convince people that humanity is naturally terrible than to admit they've created an environment that enables - and even relies on - some of the most unbalanced individuals.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
All others are just trolls not backed up by their verified public Internet / Reputation ID.
If a social media company’s mission is to have no barrier, anyone and everyone to share ideas, information and “all are welcome” then maybe a company structure like a worker cooperative [0] would be a better match to that mission statement. No CEO that gets massive pay/stock, instead employees are owners. All employees. They decide what features/projects the company does, how to allocate resources, how to moderate content, etc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
That's...that's not a problem.
Please write a book, or at the very least an article... posting on twitter is like writing something on a piece of paper, showing it to your best friend and worst enemy before throwing it in the trash
This thread in particular is really bad.
https://nitter.net/yishan/status/1586955288061452289
Agreed, though, Twitter threads are a really poor communications medium.
Just NOT in twitter. I gave up on twitter and signed out of it years ago and refuse to sign back in.
I spent a good hour of my life looking for ways to read this thread. I personally know Yishan and value the opinions he cares to share so I new this would be interesting if I could just manage to read it.
Replacing the url to nitter.net helped but honestly it was most cohesive in threadreaderapp although it missed some of the referenced sidebar discussions (like the appeal to Elon to not waste his mental energy on things that aren’t real atom problems).
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html
The positive of that is:
a) possibility to like () just one post, or 2, 3… depending of who good the thread is
b) the fine granular way to like () gives the algorithm way better possibilities to whom to show a thread and even better, to first show just one intereting post out of that thread (also people can mores easily quote or retweet individual parts of a thread)
After this comment I went back to read the rest.
The saving grace may be that both small enough volume and sufficiently interesting to his audience to be just below the threshold.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
If we're going to pedantically point out rules, why don't we add one that says "No unrolled Twitter threads."?
Maybe
we could put more
Words in a single
Please visit my new website and subscribe to my podcast
Line so it would be
More readable
random user comment: yes you're right mark that would be better
and much more user friendly
_ insert latest Musk schizophrenic rant_
Ah and I forgot the "sign up to read the rest" pop up that seemingly appears at random interval
so it reads more like the post you are reading now. where each tweet is a decent chunk of text.
making the reading experience only marginally worse than reading something on hacker news.
I understand why people tweet rather than write blogs. Twitter gives more visibility and is a far lower barrier of entry than sitting down and writing an article or a blog. That Twitter hasn't solved this problem after years of people making long threads and this being a big way that people consume content on the platform is a failure on their part. Things like ThreadReader should be in-built and much easier to use. I think they acquired one of these thread reader apps too
... in the early days of the internet ...
... comments could be very, very long; the user was given a virtual unbounded battleground to fight their ideological battles ...
... The public, the rabble, couldn't stop.. The words kept coming; a torrent of consonants and vowels descending upon our eye ba ... (limit exceeded)
... lls like an avalanche of ideas ...
... it was too much and twitter was borne ...
... the people keep their ideas small, like their tiny brains, and non-existent attention spans ...
P.S. I was gonna write this as a comment chain, but HackerNews, in all their wisdom, limits self-replies to only one
Twitter railroads the discussion into a particular type by the form of discourse. Each tweet, whether it's meant to or not, is more akin to a self contained atomic statement then a paragraph relating to a whole. This steers tweets into short statements of opinion masquerading as humble, genuine statements of fact. Often times each tweet is a simple idea that's given more weight because it's presented in tweet form. An extreme example is the joke thread of listing out each letter of the alphabet [0] [1].
When tweets are responding to another tweet, it comes off as one of the two extreme choices of being a shallow affirmation or a combative "hot take".
Compare this with the comments section here. Responses are, for the most part, respectful. Comments tend to address multiple points at once, often interweaving them together. When text is quoted, it's not meant as a hot take but a refresher on the specific point that they're addressing.
The HN comments section has its problems but, to me, it's night and day from Twitter.
I basically completely avoid responding to most everything on Twitter for this reason. Anything other than a superficial "good job" or "wow" is taken as a challenge and usually gets a nasty response. I also have to actively ignore many tweets, even from people I like and respect, because the format over emphasizes trivial observations or opinions.
[0] https://twitter.com/dancerghoul/status/1327361236686811143
[1] https://twitter.com/ChaikaGaming/status/1270330453053132800
Right now, I could make a comment on either your first or second paragraph, or on your entire comment. However, there is no way to determine which category my reply falls into until you have read it entirely. On a platform like Twitter, where there can be up to 100,000 comments on a given piece of content, this is very useful.
Better yet, it allows the author himself to dig down into tangent. In theory, someone could create an account and then have all of their interactions stay on the same tree without ever cutting off. Essentially turning their account into an interconnected "wiki" where everyone can add information.
With enough time your brain no longer registers the metadata around the tweet. If you ignore it and read it as an entire text it is not very different from a regular article or long form comment: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html
The truth is people can't focus for more than 15 seconds so instead of reading a well researched and deep article or book that might offer sources, nuances, &c. they'll click "like" and "retweet" whoever vomited something that remotely goes their way while ignoring the rest
> If you ignore it and read it as an entire text it is not very different from a regular article or long form comment
It is extremely different as each piece is written as a independent 10s thought ready to be consumed and retweeted. Reading it on threadreaderapp makes it even more obvious, your brain need to work 300% harder to process the semi incoherent flow, some blogs written by 15 years old are more coherent and pleasant to read than this
btw this is what I see on your link, more ads: https://i.imgur.com/rhaXStj.png
Not at all, in my opinion being able to interact with every piece of an exchange allows to dig down into specific points of a debate.
There is a soft stop at the end of every tweet because it's a conversation and not a presentation. It's an interactive piece of information and not a printed newspaper. You can interact during the thread and it might change its outcome.
When you are the person interacting, it's similar to a real life conversation. You can cut someone and talk about something else at any time. The focus conversation will shift for a short moment and then come back to the main topic.
For someone arriving after the fact, you have a time machine of the entire conversation.
---
About the link, it is only the first result on Google because I don't use those services and not me vetting for this specific one. I also use ad blockers at all levels (from pi-hole to browser extension to VPN level blocking), so I don't see ads online.
If I go meta for a second, this is the perfect example of how breaking ideas into different tweets can be useful.
Were I to share your comment on its own, it contains that information about a link that is not useful to anyone but you and I.
For someone reading our comments, they have to go through this interaction on the ads and this product. If instead this were two tweets it would have allowed us to comment on this in parallel. If it was HN, imagine if you had made two replies under my comments and we could have commented under each. However, that's the wrong way on this platform.
That is exactly what quoting does, and is older than the web itself.
Oh, look, I have managed to reply to your second paragraph without having to use twatter, how quaint!
If this thread and self-referential Tweeting was written in Loren Ipsum, it would definitely look like spam to me.
So I guess I disagree with one of the main points. For me, the content matters much more than the behavior. Pretty sure that’s how the Supreme Court interprets 1A rights as well. The frequency and intensity of the speech hasn’t played a part in any 1A cases that I can remember, it’s exclusively if the content of the speech violates someone’s rights and then deciding which outcome leads to bigger problems, allowing the speech or not.
You would have way less media "journalists" making a fuss about what someone said on that social network and would have problems just getting it to be popular, let alone displace any of the big ones. It would maybe be possible with existing one but that's a ton of work and someone needs to pay for that work.
And it's entirely possible for smaller community to have that, but the advantage with this is small community about X will also have moderators that care about X so
* any on-topic bollocks can be spotted by mods and it is no longer "unknown language"
* any off-topic bollocks can be just dismissed with "this is a forum about X, if you don't like it go somewhere else
That's not a solution though since every for profit business is generally seeking to maximize profit, and furthermore we already knew this to be the case - nothing he is saying is novel. I guess that's where I'm confused.
There are courses teaching people how to game the Twitter algo. One of those took off significantly in the past 18 months. You can tell by the number of amateurs creating threads on topics far beyond their reach. The purpose of these threads is for it to show up on people's feeds under the "Topic" section.
For example, I often see see random posts from "topics" Twitter thinks I like (webdev, UI/UX, cats, old newspaper headlines). I had to unsubscribe from 'webdev' and "UI/UX" because the recommended posts were all growth hackers. It wasn't always that way.
I'm not the only one, others have commented on it as well, including a well known JS developer:
https://twitter.com/wesbos/status/1587071684539973633
You mean this is the reason folks respond differently to the form of twitter thread? This is one that is definitely not from a growth hacker but folks here still seem to hate it.
> https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1586956650455265281
"Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam. We ban spam for purely outcome-based reasons:
It affects the quality of experience for users we care about, and users having a good time on the platform makes it successful."
And also this Chinese Room argument: "once again, I challenge you to think about it this way: could you make your content moderation decisions even if you didnʻt understand the language they were being spoken in?""
In other words, there are certain kinds of post which trigger escalating pathological behavior - more posts - which destroy the usability platform for bystanders by flooding it. He argues that it doesn't matter what these posts mean or whose responsibility is it for the escalation, just the simple physics of "if you don't remove these posts and stop more arriving, your forum will die".
I read long twitter threads often, you get used to it
But it literally could not have been posted in a worse medium for communicating this message. I felt like I had to pat my head and rub my tummy at the same time reading through all this, and to share it succinctly with colleagues resulted in me spending a good 15 minutes cutting and pasting the content.
I've never understood people posting entire blog type posts to.... Twitter.
Twitter is ultimately at the behest of its advertisers who are constantly on a knife edge about whether to bother using it or not. We have already seen GM and L'Oreal pull ad spend and many more will follow if their moderation policies are not in-line with community standards.
If Musk wants to make Twitter unprofitable then sure relax the moderation otherwise might want to keep it the same.
0. https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/loral-suspe...
FT had "sources", while Reuters had a direct statement from L'Oreal itself, confirming that there was no pull of ad spending.
(But I agree this is weird)
We're on the thread to read about content moderation. But since we're there, he's going to inject a few promos about what he is working on now. Just like other ads, I skimmed past them until he got back on track with the main topic.
Interesting, in my country spam is very much illegal and I would hazard a guess that it is also illegal in the US, similar to how littering, putting up posters on peoples buildings/cars/walls, graffiti (a form of spam), and so on is also illegal. If I received the amount of spam I get in email as phone calls I would go as far as calling it harassment, and of course robot phone calls are also illegal. Unsolicited email spam is also again the law.
And if spam is against the service agreement on twitter then that could be a computer crime. If the advertisement is fraudulent (as is most spam), it is fraud. Countries also have laws about advertisement, which most spam are unlikely to honor.
So I would make the claim that there is plenty of principled reasons for banning spam, all backed up by laws of the countries that the users and the operators live in.
In the US, spam is protected speech, but as always, no company is required to give anybody a platform.
[citation needed]
Doesn't the CAN-SPAM act explicitly declare otherwise?
In late March, a federal court in California held that Facebook postings fit within the definition of "commercial electronic mail message" under the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act ("CAN-SPAM Act;" 15 U.S.C. § 7701, et seq.). Facebook, Inc. v. MAXBOUNTY, Inc., Case No. CV-10-4712-JF (N.D. Cal. March 28, 2011).
There is also two other court cases: MySpace v. The Globe.com and MySpace v. Wallace.
In the later, the court concluded that "[t]o interpret the Act in the limited manner as advocated by [d]efendant would conflict with the express language of the Act and would undercut the purpose for which it was passed." Id. This Court agrees that the Act should be interpreted expansively and in accordance with its broad legislative purpose.
The court defined "electronic mail address" as meaning nothing more specific than "a destination . . . to which an electronic mail message can be sent, and the references to local part and domain part and all other descriptors set off in the statute by commas represent only one possible way in which a destination can be expressed.
Basically, in order to follow the spirit of the law the definition of "email" expanded, with traditional email like user@example.invalid being just one example of many forms of "email".
Commercial speech in the US is not protected speech and may be subject to a host of government regulation [0]. The government has broad powers to regulate the time, place, and content of commercial speech in ways that it does not for ordinary speech.
[0] See https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commercial_speech
In fact, US legislators specifically made political spam legal in the CAN-SPAM bill.
Not all speech is protected speech. Graffiti is speech, and the words being spoken could be argued as protected, but the act of spraying other people properties with it is not protected. Free speech rights does not overwrite other rights. As a defense in a court I would not bet my money on free speech in order to get away with crimes that happens to involves speech.
Historically the US court has defined speech into multiple different categories. One of those are called fraudulent speech which is not protected by free speech rights. An other category is illustrated with the anti-spam law in Washington State, which was found to not be in violation of First Amendment rights because it prevent misleading emails. Washington’s statue regulate deceptive commercial speech and thus passed the constitutional test. An other court ruling, this one in Maryland, confirmed that commercial speech was less protected than other forms of speech and that commercial speech had no protection when it was demonstrably false.
In theory a spammer could make non-commercial, non-misleading, non-fraudulent speech, and a site like twitter would then actually have to think about questions like first-amendment. I can't say I have ever received or seen spam like that.
While I don't think I have seen it on Twitter (then again I only read it when it's linked) I have seen plenty of it in some older forums & IRC. Generally it's just nonsense like "jqrfefafasok" or ":DDDDDD" being posted lots of times in quick succession, often to either flood out other things, to draw attention to poster or to show annoyance about something (like being banned previously).
I am unsure if one would construct a objective fair model for how to moderate such activity.
I wish people understood that the first amendment does not have anything to do with social media sites allowing people to say anything. Twitter is not a public square, no matter how much you want it to be.
Yishan's point is, most people's opinions on how well a platform delivers free speech vs censorship will index more to the content of the speech, rather than the pattern of behavior around it.
We are having a rational, non-controversial, shared-fact based discussion. Suddenly the first party in the conversation goes off on a tangent and starts saying values or emotions based statements instead of facts. The other party then gets angry and or confused. The first party then gets angry and or confused.
The first party did not realize they had broken out of the rational jail that the conversation was taking place in; they thought they were still being rational. The second party detected some idea that did not fit with their rational dataset, and detected a jailbreak, and this upset them.
some interesting thoughts from Yishan, a novel way to look at the problem.
Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
It is good recapitulation of why (particularly from a more legal-oriented layperson's standpoint) moderation is hard for an online platform.
The crazy thing is even though that is a long list, you could probably double the size of that list of issues with whole other classes of issues.
For example, that list is mostly focused on issues facing a platform with outside stakeholders making it difficult... then there are the inside stakeholders!
Stuff like... "actually, arguments/controversy increases engagement/views/ads (and your/my bonus/stock)", "more regulation we have to comply with actually increases barriers to entry for new competitors", "I work here and have politics X but I sense our company acting with bias Y", "Our moderators are traumatized from looking at too much <porn/hate/etc>", etc.
Besides a Reddit CEO posting on this, I would also pay money to see a CmdrTaco editorial on this topic...
edit: it has multiple commercial breaks!
It resulted in rampant child pornography, doxxing, death threats, gory violence etc. It epitomised the worst of humanity.
Now the Reddit admins keep a watch on moderators and if their subreddits do not meet site-wide standards they are replaced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
"The community (Beatingwomen), which featured graphic depictions of violence against women, was banned after its moderators were found to be sharing users' personal information online"
"According to Reddit administrators, photos of gymnast McKayla Maroney and MTV actress Liz Lee, shared to 130,000 people on popular forum r/TheFappening, constitute child pornography"
> CNN is not publishing “HanA*holeSolo’s” name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-use...
Yeah, I totally trust these people to not lie.
Reddit definitely had all of these issues, and they were handled horribly.
It resulted in reddit. That style of moderation is how reddit became reddit; so it should also get credit for whatever you think is good about reddit. The new (half-decade old) reddit moderation regime was a new venture that was hoping to retain users who were initially attracted by the old moderation regime.
Unmoderated hell holes tend to have to survive on questionable funding and rarely grow to any size.
My Reddit account is 16 years old. I was there in the very early days of the site well before the Digg invasion and well before it gained widespread popularity.
It was never because it allowed anything. It was because it was a much more accessible version of Slashdot. And it was because Digg did their redesign and it ended up with a critical mass of users. Then they started opening up the subreddits and it exploded from there.
The fact that Reddit is growing without that content shows that it wasn't that important to begin with.
Their anything goes policy is also a huge part of what made them successful back in the day.
Did you need help looking that up? Or were you just being edgy?
Twitter is a subscription-based system (by this, I mean that I have to subscribe to someone's content) so if I subscribe to someone and don't like what they say then buh-bye!
Let me right click on a comment/tweet (I don't use social media so not sure of the exact terminology the kids use these days) with the options of:
- Hide this comment
- Hide all comments in this thread from <name>
- Block all comments in future from <name> (you can undo this in settings).
That would work for me.
And they don't want their brands to be associated with unpleasant content.
Just ignore it or block them. The only time it's an issue is when you engage. Seriously the only people with this issue can't let shit go.
Blocking them requires first engaging with their content. This is what people always miss in the discussion. To know if you need to block someone or not involves parsing their comment and then throwing it in the bin.
The same goes for ignoring it. And eventually people get tired of the barrage of slurs and just leave because the brainpower required to sift through garbage isn't worth it anymore. That's how you end up with places like Voat.
If you have a billboard with someone being raped beneath it and a photo goes viral, no one would blame the company advertising on the billboard. Frankly, no one will associate the two to change their purchasing habits.
The reason corporations care are the ESG scores and activist employees.
Also these brands still advertise in places where public executions will happen (Saudi Arabia). No one is complaining there.
The idea that they won't seems pretty ridiculous.
But their customers complain about it, media picks it up and it becomes an outrage story.
That's what brands are scared of.
A LOT, but nothing happened.
It’s not about customers complaining.
How much is "most"? What data do you have? Plus, even if ~20% of customers care and only half will boycott, that's still going to have an impact on the company's bottom line.
If that were the case why is Twitter ad spend in the low single digits for most companies.
> MAYBE sometimes an advertiser will get mad, but a backroom sales conversation will usually get them back once the whole thing blows over.
This is what the existing block feature does?
Blocking a comment, or even blocking a user for a comment is useless on platforms that allow free and endless user accounts.
Mail spam/scam folders of everyone's email accounts are proof that "let me moderate it myself" does not work for the majority of people.
And remember "It is harder to police bad behavior than it is to automate it."
More like "let us moderate it ourselves". Reddit users already do this - there are extensions you can install that allow you to subscribe to another group of user's ban list. So you find a "hivemind" that you mostly agree with, join their collective moderation, and allow that to customize the content you like. The beauty is that you get to pick the group you find most reasonable.
I guess you could say that they have experience, having made all the mistakes, and figured it out through trial and error! This seems to be his angle.
What I got from the whole reddit saga is how horrible the decision making was, and won't be looking to them for sage advice. These people are an absolute joke.
Twitter is going to have to moderate at least exploitative and a ton of abusive content, eventually. I don't understand how this rant is helpful in the slightest. Seemed like a bunch of mumbo jumbo.
You do have a good point about there not being very many good actors, if any.
> Iʻm heartened to know that @DavidSacks is involved.
I'm not. I doubt he is there because Twitter is like Zenefits, it's because his preoccupation over the last few years has been politics as part of the "New Right" Thiel, Master, Vance etc. running fund raisers for DeSantis and endorsing Musk's pro-Russian nonsense on Ukraine.
https://newrepublic.com/article/168125/david-sacks-elon-musk...
“ The entitled elite is not mad that they have to pay $8/month. They’re mad that anyone can pay $8/month.”
There must be quite a few people in here who are well versed in customer relations, at least in the context of a startup, can anyone explain to me why Musk and Sacks seem to have developed the strategy of insulting their customers and potential customers?
I can think of two reasons
1. They think twitter has a big enough most of obsessed people that they can het away with whatever they want.
2. They think that there really is a massive group of angry “normies” they can rile up to pay $8 a month for twitter blue, but isn’t ironically the goal of twitter blue to get priority access to the “anointed elite”? For sure I’m not paying $8 a month to get access to the feeds of my friends and business associates.
David Sacks’ tweet does feel very Trumpian in a way though, which supports the notion of bringing trump back and starting the free speech social network.
If thinking imaginatively, then the proposal framed as "$8/mo or have your tweets deranked" is a deal they actively don't want left-wingers to take. They want to be able to derank their tweets with a cover of legitimacy.
The more they can turn this fee into a controversial "I support Musk" loyalty test, the more they can discourage left-wing / anti-Musk subscribers while encouraging right-wing / pro-Musk subscribers who will all have their tweets boosted.
Feels conspiratorial but it's a fee that mostly upsets existing blue tick celebrities which should be the last group Twitter The Business would want to annoy but they are the influential left-wingers. If you look at who Musk picked fights with about it e.g. AOC and Stephen King, then that is even more suggestive of deliberate provocation.
Whether planned or not, I suspect that this is how it play out.
I find it fascinating that so many people are whip-crack quick to loudly criticize the $8 checkmark move.
How many of these critics even use Twitter?
And of those who do use Twitter, how can any of them know the outcome of such a move? Why not just wait and observe?
Elon is hardly describing a vision for this new version of twitter that people might be inspired to spend $8 for, yes something vague about plebs vs nobility, and half has many ads, but his biggest call to action has been "Hey we need the money". They're acting so shitty to everyone it's hardly a surprise people aren't fawning in confidence back. Plus I can't help but feel that these people are really just echoing what everyone else is thinking. Why am I paying $8 a month for Twitter?
Yeah, Elon calls the status quo a “lords & peasants system” and says that to get out of that model Twitter should have a two-tier model where the paid users get special visual flair, algorithmic boosts in their tweets prominence and reach, and a reduced-ads feed experience compared to free users.
And somehow doesn’t see the irony.
This will be seen as an "attack on the left" because Twitter has been controlled by the left till now.
In the past 2 years fighting spam became too exhausting and I gave up on allowing new signups through software entirely. Now you have to email me explaining why you want an account and I'll manually create one for the approved requests. The world's internet users are now more numerous and less homogeneous than they were back when small forums dominated, and the worst 0.01% will ruin your site for the other 99.99% unless you invest a lot of effort into prevention.
That internet is long dead, hence discussions like Dead Internet Theory.
It was always a job of ensuring a comfortable environment for the community gathering on the forum and it did require "censorship" beyond obvious to prevent a minority of users from souring the environment for everyone.
Small, indepedently run communities could set their own standards, and those that who disagreed with any one set of rules could go and find somewhere more to their liking. Reddit and Discord have this to an extent, but even then, it's too centralised and too heavily controlled by one organisation.
Hopefully if Mastodon takes off, federated services will bring this style of community back, except with the ability to take part in other communities if people agree with that.
More like weird and unexpected
Brilliant? For immediately getting large amounts of readers to click away and discrediting himself into the future, sure that might be brilliant I guess.
It makes him seem desperate for attention and clueless.
It's something every person is capable of, and it takes a lot of exercise and practice with higher values to reach for something else when your expectations are challenged, and often it's an active choice to recognize the urge and act differently. If there were a rule or razor I would make on a forum or platform, it's that all content has to pass the bar of being without malice. It's not "assume good intent," it's recognizing that there are ways of having very difficult opinions without malice, and one can have conventional views that are malicious, and unconventional ones that are not. If you have ever dealt with a prosecutor or been on the wrong side of a legal dispute, these are people fundamentally actuated by malice, and the similar prosecution of ideas and opinions (and ultimately people) is what wrecks a forum.
It's not about being polite or civil, avoiding conflict, or even avoiding mockery and some very funny and unexpected smackdowns either. It's a quality that in being universally capable of it, I think we're also able to know it when we see it. "Hate," is a weak substitute because it is so vague we can apply it to anything, but malice is ancient and essential. Of course someone malicious can just redefine malice the way they have done other things and use it as an accusation because words have no meaning other than as a means in struggle, but really, you can see when someone is actuated by it.
I think there is a point where a person decides, consciously or not, that they will relate to the world around them with malice, and the first casulty of that is an alignment to honesty and truth. What makes it useful is that you can address malice directly and restore an equillibrium in the discourse, whereas accusations of hate and others are irrevocable judgments. I'd wonder if given it's applicability, this may be the tool.
It took me a long time to learn that if I tell a user "you were being $FOO" where $FOO relates to their intent, they can simply say "no I wasn't" and no one can prove otherwise, making the moderation position a weak one. Mostly they will deny it sincerely because they never had such an intent, at least not consciously. If you do that as a mod, you've just given them a reason to feel entirely in the right, and if you proceed to moderate them anyway, they will feel treated unjustly. This is a way to generate bad blood, make enemies, and lose the high ground.
The reverse strategy is better: describe the effects of someone's posts and explain why they are bad. When inevitably they respond with "but my intent was $BAR", the answer is "I believe you [what else can you say about something only that person could know?], but nonetheless the effects were $BAZ and we have to moderate based on effects. Intent doesn't communicate itself—the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate it." (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
Often when people get moderated in this way, they respond by writing the comment they originally had in their head, as a defense of what they actually meant. It's often astonishing what a gap there is between the two. Then you can respond that if they had posted that in the first place, it would have been fine, and that while they know what they have in their head while posting, the rest of us have no access to that—it needs to be spelled out explicitly.
Being able to tell someone "if you had posted that in the first place, it would have been fine" is a strong moderation position, because it takes off the table the idea "you're only moderating me because you dislike my opinions", which is otherwise ubiquitous.
I have heard the view that intent is not observable, and I agree with the link examples that the effect of a comment is the best available heuristic. It is also consistent with a lot of other necessary and altruistic principles to say it's not knowable. On detecting malice from data, however, the security business is predicated on detecting intent from network data, so while it's not perfect, there are precedents for (more-) structured data.
I might refine it to say that intent is not passively observable in a reliable way, as if you interrogate the source, we get revealed intent. On the intent taking place in the imagination of the observer, that's a deep question.
I think I have reasonably been called out on some of my views being the artifacts of the logic of underlying ideas that may not have been apparent to me. I've also challenged authors with the same criticism, where I think there are ideas that are sincere, and ones that are artifacts of exogenous intent and the logic of other ideas, and that there is a way of telling the difference by interrogating the idea (via the person.)
I even agree with the principle of not assuming malice, but professionally, my job has been to assess it from indirect structured data (a hawkish, is this an attack?) - whereas I interpret the moderator role as assessing intent directly by its effects, but from unstructured data (is this comment/person causing harm?).
Malice is the example I used because I think it has persisted in roughly its same meaning since the earliest writing, and if that subset of effectively 'evil' intent only existed in the imaginations of its observers, there's a continuity of imagination and false consciousness about their relationship to the world that would be pretty radical. I think it's right to not assume malice, but fatal to deny it.
Perhaps there is a more concrete path to take than my conflating it with the problem of evil, even if on these discussions of global platform rules, it seems like a useful source of prior art?
Thanks (an understatement!) for this enlightening explanation.
I want to compound a bunch of those explanations into a sort of concordance or whatever the right bibliographic word is for explaining and adding to what's written else where (so, not concordance!)
I was going to suggest this (but scratch it, your above idea is better): A small section called "a note on moderation" (or whatever) with hyperlinks to "some examples that give a concrete sense of how moderation happens here". There are many excellent explanations buried deep in the the search links that you post here. Many of them are a valuable riffing on [internet] human nature.
As a quick example, I love your lively analogy[1] of a "boxer showing up at a dance/concert/lecture" for resisting flammable language here. It's funny and a cutting example that is impossible to misunderstand. It (and your other comment[2] from the same thread) makes so many valuable reminders (it's easy to forget!). An incomplete list for others reading:
- how to avoid the "scorched earth" fate here;
- how "raw self-interest is fine" (if it gets you to curiosity);
- why you can't "flamebait others into curiosity";
- why the "medium" [of the "optionally anonymous internet forum"] matters;
- why it's not practical to replicate the psychology of "small, cohesive groups" here;
- how the "burden is on the commenter";
- "expected value of a comment" on HN; and much more
It's a real shame that these useful heuristics are buried so deep in the comment history. Sure, you do link to them via searches whenever you can; that's how I discovered 'em. But it's hard to stumble upon otherwise. Making a sampling of these easily accessible can be valuable.
[1] 3rd paragraph here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27166919
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162386
You will know when you encounter malice because nothing will de-malice the poster.
But if it is not malice; you can even take what they said and rewrite it for them in a way that would pass muster. In debate this is called steelmanning - and it's a very powerful persuasion method.
It's fair to describe indifference to negative effects of one's behavior as malicious, and it is, indeed almost never possible to transform a spammer into a productive member of a community.
If you wanted to divide it further I guess you could discuss "in-group spamming" and "out-group spamming" where almost all of the promotional stuff falls in the second but there are still some in the first group.
1. Cheering. That's as good a description as any. This is intended to express excitement or approval and rally the in-group. It temporarily makes the chat useless for anything else, but that isn't its purpose.
2. Flooding. This is an intentional denial of service attack intended to make the chat useless for as long as possible, or until some demand made by the attacker is met.
Some streaming platforms have a button you can hit that makes party emoji or heart emoji or whatever appear in a stream from the lower right, that's a similar thing which helps with cheering so you can then combat flooding.
If you instead focus on external effects, you can start to enforce policies. It doesn't matter about a person's intent if their words and actions disproportionately impact women. The same goes for many -isms and prejudice-based issues.
A moderator who understands this will almost certainly be more effective than one who gets mired in back-and-forths about intent.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/down-girl-the-logic-of-misogyny...
I think that maybe the observable "bad effects" and the unobservable "malice" may be almost exactly the same thing.
That is a big stretch. Hate can't be applied to many things, including disagreements like this comment.
But it can be pretty clearly applied to statements that, if carried out in life, would deny another person or peoples' human rights. Another is denigration or mocking someone on the basis of things that can't or shouldn't have to change about themselves, like their race or religion. There is a pretty bright line there.
Malice (per the conventional meaning of something bad intended, but not necessarily revealed or acted out) is a much lower bar that includes outright hate speech.
> but really, you can see when someone is actuated by it.
How can you identify this systematically (vs it being just your opinion), but not identify hate speech?
We cannot regulate the internal forum, only the actions we perceive.
Those things aren't deemed hate speech, but they might be disagreed with and downvoted on some forums (i.e. HN), and championed on others (i.e. Parler) but that has nothing to do with them being hate speech. They are just unpopular opinions in some places, and I can understand how it might bother you if those are your beliefs and you get downvoted.
Actual hate speech based on your examples is: promoting violence/harassment against non-cisgender people, promoting violence/harassment by police, and promoting violence/harassment by immigration authorities against migrants.
Promoting violence and harassment is a fundamentally different type of speech than disagreeing with the prevailing local opinion on a controversial subject that has many shades of gray (that your examples intentionally lack).
Plenty of people disagree, and do indeed claim that not letting a transgender woman compete against natal females is harassment towards transgender people. Heck, I've even seen people claim that this is genocide.
I don't really care about these topics, but the point is that many people do not, or perhaps cannot, distinguish between "hate speech" and and opinions they disagree with. Contrary to your claim that "hate can't be applied to many things, including disagreements like this comment", hate speech is often applied to dissenting opinions.
It's a ridiculous claim but so what? It has no teeth anyways.
Nobody gets suspended from mainstream social media for simply expressing opposition to transgender gender athletics.
They get suspended for actually harassing transgender athletes.
You might get demonetized for that opinion, but getting paid to express an unpopular opinion isn't a right.
This is untrue, people are indeed banned for this: https://www.pcgamer.com/politics-streamer-destiny-receives-i...
All you did was repeat the banned individual's own opinion about why they were banned. Of course, you are free to think Twitch is lying about its reasons for the ban, but you've offered no evidence of that.
According to that article, the individual also had a history of encouraging the murder of protestors by white militias on Twitch, so sounds like they had plenty of grounds on which to ban him already, and perhaps they finally just got around to it.
It undermines your argument to use someone like that as an example.
And what was the nature of that "harassment"? The fact that he didn't agree with the orthodoxy around natal males in women's sports. You're acting out the the exact dynamic I'm talking about: dissenting opinions are labeled harassment or denigration and become bannable offenses. Then people get banned for the "harassment" that is holding a verboten opinion, with no actual harassment taking place. And this is by far from the only example [1].
You're asking me to prove a negative. Who was harassed? Twitch didn't say, and no one can seem to identify a harassment target. When did this harassment occur? Again, nothing is specified. If you can identify a harassment victim it'd be good of you to do so.
> According to that article, the individual also had a history of encouraging the murder of protestors by white militias on Twitch, so sounds like they had plenty of grounds on which to ban him already, and perhaps they finally just got around to it.
If this was the case, the ban would have been for incitement to violence, a separate ToU clause Twitch uses to ban people who call for violence. Not discrimination or denigration of a group on the basis of protected characteristics. Furthermore, these comments occurred two years before the ban - your comment makes it sound like this happened the week before he commented about Thomas. In case you're wondering, in reference to people defending themselves from arsonists (the exact words were, "dipshit protesters that think that they can torch buildings at 10 p.m.") not shooting actual protestors. It continues to amaze me how 10 seconds can be edited to portray someone in a completely opposite light of reality. If you're interested in this creator's leanings, just take a look at a recent video [2].
Espousing dissenting opinions absolutely does get people banned. The reasons cited are harassment, but no harassment victim is identified because holding the prohibited opinion is now considered harassment even if no individual is actually harassed.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meghan_Murphy#Twitter_ban_and_...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXfiUqlK4gU
What I think distinguishes malice is the prosecution example. Where if someone makes an argument about you personally, and they are unable to abstract the idea from you personally as an individual, that is acting with malintent toward you.
Antagonizing someone personally by trying to scandalize them in the eyes of others (performatively, as though in front of a judge or jury, or public opinion) is not discourse, it's just persecution and animus. The modern internet version in the form of, "hey everybody, this person is an X!" is probably malice in its more pure form, with a spectrum of dilutions that are variations of, "surely you aren't tainting yourself with this taboo!" after that. It's a purity game, but really a proxy for the 'deadly sin' of wrath and the secular concept of animus. In this sense, it's something that with reflection we recognize ourselves as capable of and learn to moderate it within ourselves.
Hate is something we only recently started accusing others of. I do think it's part of a substitute, secular, belief that persuades people they cannot ever be good, so instead we can repent of our recieved worthlessness by giving up our moral agency and becoming _anti-bad_, all while accepting poor treatment and even demanding it for others because the people we have animus for are also equally bad. The only hope is that by redemption through criticism, some are less worthless than others, but that's the upside. It's like a profoundly false religion whose core tenant is that you believe in the universality of hate, and then be against it. Things are shaped by the forces they oppose, and I think indexing on hate has had the effect of moralizing malice. When we start with the premise that we are all interchangeable group elements without moral agency, and we must redeem ourselves by becoming above criticism, that is a system of slavery with the reins in the hands of the most zealous critics - who happen to be other living people, and not a relationship with a self or an ideal. This whole cycle is based on this _anti-bad_ negative definition that mostly seems to moralize malice in its followers. Back in the day they had to call them sins because they felt good, but really weren't.
Anyway this isn't your outgroup either, it's us. In terms of detecting it, I think ML is just on the cusp of doing it as well or better than most people and that's the future of forum moderation. This question of whether we can observe intent is going to be a big one. It's a huge topic.
Because hate was normalized before, just like child abuse, spousal abuse, and any number of other terrible things that we call out by name now.
Just because we didn't have a general word for what inspired lynchings doesn't mean it didn't exist.
The instances of the other examples have only barely been reduced by identifying them, and in many cases, it has licensed behaviours that don't fit the definition, and it has empowered a layer of people who have jobs effectively managing and extracting value from them now, imo. Like malice, I reject hate, and in doing so, I also reject indexing on it as the axiom for a positive morality.
Hugbox environments wind up having a loose relationship with the truth and a strong emphasis on emotional well-being.
Setting your moderation boundaries determines the values of your platform. I’d much rather talk to someone who wants to hurt my feelings than someone who is detached from reality or saying what they think.
Social networks are devices for measuring popularity; if you took the up/down arrows off, no one would be interested in playing. And we have proven once again that nothing gets up arrows like being mean.
HN has the unusual property that you can't (readily) see others' score, just your own. That doesn't really make it any less about fame, but maybe it helps.
When advertising can fund these devices to scale to billions, it's tough to be optimistic about how it reflects human nature.