Content moderators review the dark side of the internet | Hacker News Reader

Content moderators review the dark side of the internet

theatlantic.com

33 pointslnguyen26 comments

Building after building, filled with endless rows of workstations, manned by groggy censors forever reading notes between people they don't know, deleting some, changing a few words on more, getting paid half a penny per post reviewed.

Doubleplusgood

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a nameless wage slave deleting posts — forever.

I'm not saying that's cool, but there are millions of people with worst jobs, or simply dying of hunger

Bowden said that her team consisted of the odd conglomeration of people that were drawn to overnight work looking at weird and disturbing stuff. “I had a witch, a vampire, a white supremacist, and some regular day-to-day people. I had all these different categories,” Bowden, who is black, said. “We were saying, ‘Based on your experience in white-supremacist land, is this white-supremacist material?’”

That right there is an incredible vignette capturing the level of diplomacy and thick skin required to do this job well: A black woman asking a white supremacist employee to ID white supremacist content so they can create guidelines and get it off the internet.

Could you really trust the white supremacist to correctly ID the material, though?

That depends on a lot of factors.

Some people are into porn. That doesn't mean they want porn everywhere all the time on all sites they frequent.

This is why we use NSFW warnings on sites like HN: People here are not necessarily averse to viewing and discussing sexually explicit material, but they want to make sure they aren't fired for doing so if they are on their break at work while reading HN.

That's an interesting observation. There are excellent HN users who are trolls elsewhere. They just respect the rules here, because they understand the intention behind them and want HN to actually be the kind of site you get when the game has those rules.

After encountering a few such users, I got more interested in explaining the intention behind the site: that it isn't about being nice or virtuous so much as having a place that isn't boring, and that this only works if everyone carries their share of responsibility for not torching it.

Metafilter was the absolute worst social experience of my life. When I joined, it was common for individuals who did not fit in for some reason to be routinely ganged up on by other people. Mods would ask the person being ganged up on to stop posting, then let other people continue to make personal attacks against the person who had been asked to leave the conversation, who could now not defend themselves. If they did come back into the conversation to defend themselves, they were "behaving badly" for disobeying mod instruction (but the people attacking them were never told they were behaving badly).

As someone who was openly homeless at the time that I was gifted a Metafilter membership (by someone on HN), I ended up on the receiving end of that on Metafilter. At some point, I stopped participating.

It is clear to me that both Hacker News and Metafilter have a high percentage of well educated, well heeled members. In fact, there is significant overlap between the membership of Hacker News and of Metafilter. Some active users of both sites have the same handle on both sites.

I fairly often see remarks on HN by well-to-do people that strike me as sort of clueless wrt how the other half lives. But I have not been openly, actively and repeatedly ganged up on and continuously harassed here the way I was on Metafilter.

Given the similarities of the populations and the actual overlap of membership, in recent months I have been forced to conclude that the difference in culture is due to a difference in moderation. So, you do good work and should be proud of that.

"Given the similarities of the populations and the actual overlap of membership, in recent months I have been forced to conclude that the difference in culture is due to a difference in moderation. So, you do good work and should be proud of that."

Although the moderators certainly deserve credit for contributing to a civil atmosphere on HN, the users have a lot to do with it too. There's a lot of self-policing, as it were, going on here, with users who already buy in to HN's constructive comment ethic downvoting and calling out posts that go against that. That takes more than mere intelligence or education, but a willingness to adhere to commonly-shared norms of what's good for the site -- in HN's case it's constructive, helpful comments.

Couldn't agree more.

There's a lot of self-policing

The crux of my point is that I was really puzzled for a long time as to how on earth I could interact in two forums with some of the same members and people who are openly, persistently and consistently ugly to me in one successfully self police in the other and refrain from harassing me. That blew my mind for the longest time. It made no sense at all.

I eventually concluded that a difference in moderation must be the difference that makes a difference.

Perhaps that should have been said privately. I am not prone to flattery. That isn't the point of saying it here.

The point is that it is a clear example that demonstrates the power of moderation. As someone who has done some moderating myself, it is an intriguing contrast.

I completely agree with your assessment of Metafilter. The recent decision there to curtail the histrionic behavior in the political threads was a good step, but it’s probably not possible for them to restore the quality and quantity of comments now as too many good users have given up trying to contribute rather than face constant attacks from the same 50 or so users.

They very much have an in crowd. The rules for the in crowd are de facto different from the rules for everyone else

Historical comments by the previous lead mod essentially admit this is conscious and intentional. But if you try to point it out, you get all kinds of denial.

That was back in the mid '00s. Nowadays lots of that is outsourced to low wage labor places like PH. plus, it does not say, but in that example, that person could have been an "ex-" whatever. So they were once an insider, since denounced and now provide insight to evaluate. But again, it's beside the point, lots of moderation gets outsourced --sometimes there is communication breakdown between the off-shore location and stateside management and their guidelines. Often times these misunderstandings result in some content getting falsely moderated away and then restored after an outcry.

Certainly. Their experience would allow them to recognize a lot of covert signals ("dog whistles") which would not be obvious to other viewers.

The same goes for pornography. There's a lot of weird porn which gets away with being on sites like YouTube because it's too esoteric to be recognizable by most reviewers. For example [NSFW but not explicit]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWW8_8fc0-E -- there isn't any exposed genitals or sexual activity in the video, but it's clearly made to arouse people with the right fetish. (Just look at the comments if it isn't obvious.) A reviewer who's familiar with "weird porn" would likely be much better at recognizing fetish material, even if it's a fetish they don't personally enjoy.

Article says most of this work is done in countries like philippines. I wish they interviewed people from philippines not just people in america. I was more interested in their view of things.

Here's one such article: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/

I think either Vice or MoBo had one around the same time but can't find it.

I find that the Atlantic has to much narrative in their storys.

The articles are more about peoples opinions than they are about the facts behind those opinions. Its like reading books.

I'm pretty sure that's their view of how the magazine should be. Not everything is to everyone's taste, and now you know that The Atlantic isn't to yours.

One of the reasons I stopped eating meat was the that the industry itself is traumatic to the humans who process the animals and I wasn't comfortable participating in that economically.

So, I was happy to see that I don't use any of the services listed there, except a bit of YouTube. If I could avoid that one, I would too.

People are basically good, right?

Both the title here as well as the article itself have "the the" repeated. :O

Its repeated but its correct.

>Both the title here as well as the article itself have "the the" repeated

That would spell "the the the the".

You probably mean they have the "the" repeated :Q

Thanks! Fixed here.

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