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Companies like Google, Facebook etc should force their executives, from VP to CEO, to do a week of content moderation every quarter.

Then we would see how sympathetic they would be to the plight of these workers and how quickly the problem would be solved.

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Toronto's current mayor did this early in his tenure after a massive number of complaints had been going up about the trains with malfunctioning cars on Line 2 during a heat wave. I remember riding those. It was torturous some days—especially when they'd get stuck in a tunnel.

He rode one, from end-to-end on the line, during the heatwave, in rush hour. He came out the other end drenched in sweat, jacket hanging in his hands, looking exhausted and quickly set about resolving that problem. (Nuanced details left aside, so don't hang me fellow Torontonians)

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/transportation/2016/09/07/j...

Counterpoint: I used to work at a place where every quarter you were supposed to do a support rotation answering customer support requests for a day or so.

Doing something for a very limited amount of time, that you know has no bearing on your job performance evaluation, is extremely different from doing that thing full-time.

In some ways I think it reduced empathy in some people, because it causes some to come away with a very warped view of that job and think "Hey I did this for a week and it was fine, what're they complaining about?"

It isn't because of a lack of sympathy but capabilities. Even cheap moderator warehouses are expensive compared to algorithmic approaches - except they aren't there yet and may never be there if they can't define what they want properly.

It's basically reinventing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative and rotation of responsabilities.

But yeah. That would be good.

To me, a more fair comparison would be how Amazon requires all office workers to shadow a customer support representative for one week out of each year.

I don't think the OP's suggestion does anything close to reinventing the concept of a worker cooperative.

Amazon really is not a good example of a successful employee management. Their attrition is horrible, worst work life balance culture out of FAANGs, their reputation is horrible and working there is most disliked. They cast a wide net, but lose employees fast.

Have you worked there? I have quite a different experience than this.

I found Amazon's hiring practices and employee management to be very effective compared to other places I've worked. In general, I found their whole dogma really worked in practice, which surprised me at first.

I have not worked there. It is what I hear from other people's experience. Of course it will vary between teams, but the reputation is still low and attrition rate very high.

That is definitely not a thing that Amazon does.

I worked at Amazon for six years and did this four times - one for each promotion I received at the company.

What makes them seem unsympathetic? Are they somehow making the job worse than it has to be?

For one, they’re farming the job out to a third-party: Accenture. Hoping to put themselves at arm’s length from any problems that arise. This is standard “late stage capitalism” shit, but I doubt Google would be willing to bring their moderation team in-house and let them interact with their precious engineers - the people who could actually help alleviate some of the stresses the moderators are facing.

Conway’s Law[1] applies. In terms of product priorities, the design needs of “contracted moderators” are somewhere below IPv6 support in the product roadmap.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

Talking about "force" you are implying as if people are slaves to these companies.

What about other things like cleaning, plumbery etc. There are other terrible jobs besides moderation. Should we rotate on these also?

I’ve never heard of plumbing or janitorial work causing PTSD. If it did then I would want to do the same thing.

Instead of having few willing people being exposed to dangers of PTSD we should force all employees to face the danger of PTSD if it is about that? What will that help achieve? Some odd sense of justice?

How can executives be expected to fix problems if they don’t fundamentally understand what them problems are? It’s the fastest way to get the problem fixed, by making those with power have skin in the game.

How would you solve the problem?

I don’t have enough information or enough power to solve the problem. I would start by doing at least 1 week of content moderation to understand what the workers are going through and then talk with other people with power who have done 1 week of content moderation to figure out how they could help solve these problems.

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