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Comment by village-idiot | Hacker News Reader

And this is why incorporating user submitted information is a tricky strategy. On one hand, there sure are a lot more users than employees. On the other hand, bad actors are often far more motivated and diligent than good faith actors, and they will try to screw over your system for no good reason.

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I've come to the conclusion that at least 1% of users are actively malicious with at least enough free time, resources, and coordination of a small full time team of professionals. I created and hosted a free self-moderated community which went well for a little while, until at least a couple people became obsessed with spamming the site with extreme gore (see the Mr. OP comment in http://old.reddit.com/r/editfight which is relatively tame compared to other things they've done) and evading every single method I had of stopping or banning them, until I had to just give up altogether and shut the site down. I feel bad for the moderators on imgur.com (where I got the majority of my users) because I read somewhere that many of them now have to go to therapy for some of the things they've seen in doing their job. Online communities and the moderation of them in the modern internet is problematic enough that I personally never want to tackle that again, not even by delegating it to someone else.

In the long run, I can’t help but wonder if creating the internet was a mistake. We’ve effectively encouraged the absolute worst elements of society to come out and have a field day without the social pushback that had kept them in line for millennia.

Mistake? At least there is visibility. I don't know what the answer to the issue is, but I know hiding it in the corner, unobserved by the masses is not the answer. This leads to NO social push back, as there is nothing to push back about.

If you combine that, social media, and porn, how much of the internet is still 'wholesome'? I think niche forums are my favorite part of the internet left.

I genuinely think Social Media is going to get us all killed.

Porn might prevent the next generation from being born, worst case.

>Porn might prevent the next generation from being born, worst case.

You know it's possible to watch porn and have sexual relationships with other people though, right?

Worst case, not expected case.

Worst case scenarios have to at least be possible. I don't believe it's possible that internet porn can or will 'prevent the next generation from being born', so I reject it as a valid worst case.

>We’ve effectively encouraged the absolute worst elements of society to come out and have a field day without the social pushback that had kept them in line for millennia.

We've also effectively given everyone else access to information, communication and opportunities to expand their worldview that have been more profoundly transformational than even the printing press.

No, creating the internet was not a mistake, any more than any means of mass communication is a mistake because it can be misused as well as used wisely. Without the internet, global culture would be entirely controlled, centralized and limited by media conglomerates, digital rights management and distribution by physical media, and our means of mass communication limited to telephones. The same internet that grants freedom of expression to the "absolute worst elements of society" grants it to you and I as well.

The internet is just a network, but I believe the good it's done for humanity has far outweighed the ill.

Did you somehow miss all the bad things that came to light mostly thanks to the internet, after having a field day "for millennia" without any social pushback to keep them in line?

Like the sexual abuse in Hollywood, for one example.

Do you really prefer the "absolute worst elements of society" to remain hidden rather than come out?

Hey! Just wanted to let you know that I thought Editfight was something special. I came by occasionally and drew something. Too bad it's gone now -- just a few days ago my 4 year old asked me if he could play the game where you draw something on the screen again. It's a bummer you had to shut it down, but I understand.

Thanks for the kind words, and glad to hear it made an impression! The code is sitting here on my computer just waiting to be deployed again, but it would have to be somewhere those demonic trolls can find. That said, they don't go to HN and I do own the domain name for another year, so maybe a subdomain is in order...

EDIT: (Apparently my HN account is rate-limited so I can't reply directly.) How about this: anyone who wants access, email me and I'll send you a link. The site is up and running. People can send the link to their friends, and it'll be a private HN-only sub-community.

Is there a way to federate to HN logins? Only open it to HN members?

Or at least invite only?

I just put the site up in a subdomain specific to HN, check my post history for the link. Everyone from HN is invited, tell your friends. It'll be a mini party lol

I found it!

https://hn.editfight.com

Reminds me of reddit r/place, first prominent artwork was Charizards penis

source: was a moderator for reddit r/place

Society and Distributed Systems are similar in the sense that interesting stuff happens at the tail, and if you want to make them behave properly, you need to focus on those 1% (or 0.1% of the tail cases).

For systems: queries of death, queries with highest serving latency, records with huge size compared to rest of the entries in DB, records with extremely high fan-in for your streaming pipeline, ...

For society, a tiny minority of: users who would vandalize online data sets, refugees who commit terrorism / crimes, citizens committing crimes, recipients cheating welfare programs, people avoiding taxes, ...

It is also the tail that imposes the maximum cost on your system / society.

> It is also the tail that imposes the maximum cost on your system / society.

This is not true for every case. Excessive focus on tail risks (and moral hazard,) in fact, can be absurdly costly.

See: medicare fraud prevention.

That is true, but at the same time, Wikipedia wouldn't be possible without it. The CEO confirmed that their absuse-detection system immediately flagged the label, but apparently some human reviewer approved it. Which shows that even if your system is perfect, humans are always the weakest link.

Yeah, it's clear that this strategy can work, but a lot of people underestimate how much energy must be spent policing for anti-social behavior.

> Wikipedia wouldn't be possible without it

OpenStreetMap wouldn't be possible without it either. :)

For OSM, humans are the strongest link, they are often the best way to fix these kinds of changes. A strong local community is the solution. OSM fixed this vandalism within 2 hours.

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