Facebook’s internal rules of deletion
international.sueddeutsche.de
international.sueddeutsche.de
Community insiders promoted to moderate have usually demonstrated that their opinions are in line with the culture that the moderators are attempting to promote, which means the sort of rules that lay out exactly what is acceptable versus what is unacceptable are not required.
There's definitely upsides to the moderator-community-gestalt method of determining what content is unacceptable, the biggest of which is that it denies trolls the ability to 'rules lawyer' their way into posting content which is against the spirit of the rules, but not against the letter.
Which system is more elegant? I don't think Facebook's is, necessarily, but even if it were I don't think it should (or needs to) apply to a community like HN.
Exploiting that particular human proclivity is part of why Facebook exists.... [2]
[1]: http://68.media.tumblr.com/1b024b598c740a53f23f35f801251cc7/...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facemash
and then, just a few paragraphs later:
"[C]ombining a protected category with an unprotected category results in an unprotected category. Irish teenagers are the example. While they are protected under the national origin category, the term teenager does not enjoy special protection"
Wat?
> There are also sub-categories that enjoy extra
> protection. These are listed in the same chapter:
> Age – youth, senior citizens, teenagers
Every time I ask peers about what the best rule for HN would be with respect to racism, anti-Semitism, ageism, homophobia and gender discrimination, I'm met with the response "duh, just ban racism, anti-Semitism, ageism, homophobia and gender discrimination". HN wants something more elegant than that kind of ban, but the construction Facebook uses here seems plenty elegant.
But yes, you eventually get to the PC/NPC stuff, and "fucking Muslim" vs. "fucking migrant", and it's off the rails.
The good parts of this, though, are worth considering!
This sounds reasonable at face value, but not one of these things is well-defined.
Many people interpret uncomfortable but entirely reasonable discussion of sociology and demography (e.g. discussions of wage differences or crime distribution) as racist or sexist or ageist. Many people confuse anti-Zionism or anti-theism for anti-Semitism. IMO it's better to be very conservative with banning such things, because the false positive risk is very high, and there are a lot of important things to discuss around these topics.
a) The scale is small enough that most content can be manually reviewed, or reviewed after it reaches any significant number of views.
b) People in HN are expecting a professional discussion forum and are largely ok with a relatively active moderation. People posting in FB often assume that any moderation by Facebook the company must comport to freedom of the press or freedom of speech laws. This is of course legally nonsense, but it might not be an unreasonable expectation over all. In some ways, because of the scale of online platforms, the societal effects of FB/Twitter/Youtube content policing norms is closer to say, a code about what is allowed or not on-air in radio/TV in a country than a particular set of editorial policies for a particular newspaper.
Again I want to be clear that most of these rules seem silly or even puerile. Just the beginning of it made sense.
Frankly I think it's starting to fray a little around the edges. Downvotes and flags are supposed to be used to suppress non-constructive comments and submissions but I see them being used more and more to express disagreement (or, to be more precise, I see more and more comments being downvoted and stories being flagged that seem to me to be constructive and respectful but which express unpopular points of view.)
This is not actually true for downvotes. Or if it is true it's currently ambiguous, it's not in the FAQ.
But I find it rare that an unpopular opinion will get downvoted if it's well justified.
Where as I think upvoting of popular opinions is an issue.
PG: "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."
- how they'd play into karma (probably just the constructive/unproductive points, maybe agree/disagree displayed as a pair but not contribute to karma)
- whether this is would be too complex from a UX perspective
- while I think "disagree" and "unproductive" can be usefully distinguished, whether "agree" and "constructive" would be useful. That said, if we want people to comment for disagreement (substantively, I would hope), I wouldn't want to see or encourage a bunch of "+1" or "me, too", or "this" comments. I think users want to show support for good comments, and up-votes are currently the only way to do this if you have nothing else to add.
I would abolish karma. It turns HN into a silly game.
As for karma, I think it serves two purposes: it acts as a gating function to ensure members have contributed usefully before allowing them to behave in a potentially unproductive manner (e.g., creating throwaway accounts to down-vote or flag). It also encourages continued constructive contributions. Yes, it's artificial, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it can't serve that purpose. I don't think karma is perfect, but I think it is, on balance, a constructive feature on HN.
If there are other methods of serving those two purposes more effectively and as simply as karma does (and I admit to ignorance here), I think they'd be worth exploring. I think there needs to be some pressure over the lifetime of an account to encourage constructive comments, non only on a per-comment basis.
As for karma, you make a good point. Have an upvote :-)
Two additional/final thoughts:
- It really should be a ternary selector, not up/down + flag. You should only be able to select one of the three.
- Having both up and down contribute to undimming would actively discourage using disagree as "punishment". It would very likely change how "flag" is used, though the proper use of "flag" is unclear to me right now, as from what I can tell its effect is not visible until the comment is dead. It would clarify the effect between "down" and "flag".
I can't think of any comments 'Dead' because of disagreement.
I really think this is a non-existent issue.
If anything the grey-out attracts users to read it. I read these more than middle comments.
I've seen feedback from users that they feel that this is exactly why a comment was down-voted, whether it gets killed or not. I admit I don't have any dead comments at hand, and I don't think the search API returns dead comments. Granting the anecdatum, here's one that I came across:
I think users blame downvotes on disagreement, but in reality it's often badly formed written viewpoints lacking in value or OT.
But if it's a popular opinion people will be forgiving. Unpopular, not so much.
I think that's often (but not always) the case. That said, I don't know how to convince those who think otherwise. One person's weakly argued comment might be someone else's disagreement. Compare with the Political Detox Week experiment: there was quite a bit of expressed disagreement as to what "politics" means. Or what constitutes civility. Or what's off-topic. It's not only whether the down votes are due to disagreement; it's also whether the commenter perceives the down-votes as such (which is the case of the example I provided).
Edit to add: There will always be some percentage of members who won't agree, and they're more likely to be vocal. I'm not sure how to measure when the optimum is reached (most users feel the system is working as expected).
"Constructive" is interestingly subjective. The higher the raise the bar, the more likely it is to be controversial because e.g. you require posters to share and build on the same assumed knowledge. You are welcomed to challenge assumed knowledge from a position of expertise but not from a position of ignorance.
I give "I disagree" downvotes on topics I am very familiar with and the poster is simply insufficiently experienced to be broadcasting their bogus opinions however polite they are. I can surely imagine even more inexperienced posters would see that poster as constructive and helpful but its not the case.
I think you were attracted to the improvement of writing rules down, but that has a host of other problems, including the fact that you are then forced to enforce the rules, even where they don't make sense (e.g. you have to remove some comment because of the letter of the law, even though it wasn't actually inflammatory, it just ran into an edge case).
I moderate(d) a large reddit community (millions of subscribers?) and you pretty much can't win. If you don't have rules, you're "murky" and "wanton". If you have rules, you get "these rules suck" or "you're only enforcing the rules whenever you feel like it" when you try to go by the spirit of the law rather than the letter.
That photo violates a several of Facebook "ban" rules, but is an exception to the rules. After much outcry, Facebook reversed their rule-based ban.
Hell, I can't even ballpark where your freedom to speak ends and my freedom to not feel bad starts.
Would it?
It would certainly require less effort, but we know from other places that blanket rules are pretty easy to game (eg, see the games people play on Wikipedia with the 3RR rule).
Once people know them, the rules themselves become weaponized.
Do you have any suggestions for rules, just off the top of your head?
However, a rule that says you can't make blanket statements about a PC is much easier to enforce.
statements such as “migrants are dirty” are allowed, while “migrants are dirt” isn’t
So I'm not sure the rules are quite as simple as outlined. There's other oddities, like one area says " the term teenager does not enjoy special protection", then another area where they specifically say it does get protection. Argh.
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