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Comment by lykr0n | Hacker News Reader

I'm split on this. On one hand this company is pure evil (as i've said before), but on the other this would exactly what I would use to screen employees that I'd hire. There is some terrible shit people say online that reflects who they are as a person who I would want to stay far away from the company I built.

EDIT. An example of what I would screen for are the following: - "locker room" discussions on a profile they put their name on. off color jokes and all that - "woke" discussions about oppression and how you're more oppressed if you are X, while group Y isn't

Both of those are people who I would not want around.

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Speaking as someone who has spent multiple decades in niche Internet communities, I can vouch that in many cases, it's taken out of context when talked about or observed by a third party. Sometimes (often?) it's not as much of an attack against another person as it appears, and sometimes it's just outright satirical. It's your prerogative to judge how you see fit, but by doing so you legitimize an orwellian crackdown on free expression (and please spare me the tired argument that that's okay as long as it's not state-sponsored).

From my point of view, a person's conduct on the Internet when pseudonymous does not necessarily reflect on a person's ability to conduct themselves professionally at the workplace or in front of customers.

Is there an epidemic of people spouting off at the workplace? I must have missed the memo.

If you look in my recent comment history, you'll see one where I'm advocating for a debate platform that weights submission/comment voting by user similarity. The buried lede in that concept is that you could use that same platform to collect (and sell) data about how people get along with other people, or about how similar they are to known desirable (and undesirable) users.

So I've been thinking about this for a while, and I've come to the conclusion that anything along those lines will immediately be used to target marginalized people and will generally be ignored for certain privileged groups. You yourself are giving an example.

We should definitely not be doing anything of the sort.

But does it really matter so long as they don't bring it into the workplace. Like does it matter if the person you sit next to spends their free time beating squirrels as long as they don't spend hours of time talking about it at work and making you look at their pictures?

On the flip side would you want to have on your team someone who sucks at their job and who you always have to cover for but they spend all their free time helping teach one eyed orphans how to do multivariate calculus?

Does it matter as long as they keep their personal life at home and their professional life at work?

You're right, it doesn't matter. What matters is that stuff that can be viewed as controversial or actively discriminates against someone/group of people can be found under their name.

Look that story a few years ago where a woman tweeted something like "I'm going to Africa something something aids. jk I'm white." People got pissed and attacked her company.

I don't care she said that. I care that she was stupid enough to say that under her own name.

The issue is that there is no way their algorithm understands context. Saying "Fuck nazis" will probably flag you for swearing and being a nazi. An actual person looking your tweets/posts can understand the context.

An actual person looking at a list of tweets/posts hundreds-long is not going to spend more than a few seconds at most on average per tweet. That's not enough time to understand context. As a matter of fact, I've given up trying to engage on social media debates precisely because most of the time, the other party(ies) in the conversation still do not understand context despite being part of the conversation! Often because they are not spending more than a few seconds themselves. I remember conversations being a lot more civil when done by e-mail.

You don't need a lot more than a few seconds to understand that "Fuck, i am tired" or "Fuck nazis" is not something inherently bad. For an algorithm - i am not so sure (even a company as huge as youtube cannot figure it out).

That's a poor example. How about a message that gets flagged, where the message is a strong frustration at an issue that is very nuanced? Do you jump to conclusions on the person's point of view? Do you assume that the person is prone to being angry, just because you've seen a selection of angry posts from them?

There's many things that can go wrong there, and they will, given a system like this operating in the wild.

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