Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmpz22 | Hacker News Reader

Right but the difference is the sheer amount of money involved and the politicization that comes with that. If Facebook was worth 100m nobody would care. If facebook only has 10m users nobody would care. It's the scale that completely breaks the legal and political frameworks the our society leans on.

View on HN

I'd say another difference is the percentage of your attention is being devoted to this kind of thing. Presumably reddit or phpbb mods aren't spending 40 hr/wk looking at gore.

Wouldn't that suggest then that the "ideal" way to do it is a very part time job then with high volume? Like say 5 hours a week. It would be a scheduling and logistical nightmare of course but it would give more "dispersion time" for trauma.

I'd be interested to see if the tooling around moderation could also be improved. For example, could the images start heavily blurred, with a circle of clarity that opens when you click. Or something like that, which would harm throughput, but be more humane.

This is a very interesting idea. It could reveal only a portion and see how often that was enough for the moderator to pass judgement.

tbh I've been a moderator on various old school forums for over a decade, and I've never had to deal with anyone posting any gore at all. I think they're usually too tight knit and reputation based for anyone to feel like they could get away with it. it's not like people posting gore on facebook are doing it to mess with the moderators, that's just a side effect

From my time observing volunteer groups, it's also about leverage and force multipliers.

I can go door to door asking people to change something, and dozens of my volunteers will feel useful but overwhelmed by how much work there is to do in a city of a million people. Or I can go to city council meetings, and get more leverage there. Or if I can convince one high profile citizen to participate, others will follow. Or I can get into contact with the mayor, state congressional members, the governor, federal congressional members.

It's possible that if I convince the correct five people that they will take half of this burden off of my hands. You'd be crazy not to reach for a lever like that. They are a juicy target, and not just from a punitive standpoint. Of course when you are rebuffed repeatedly by a potential ally, then it's a very human (if questionable) response to seek out some sort of punishment.

Do you know what community organizing is? How movements accomplish change? Everything does not have some easy optimization method, only in silicon valley does everyone think it does.

edit: What I mean to say is, people have been organizing against FB, AMZN, and tech in general for the past few years now. The last is reactionary but opposition to FB and AMZN has meaningful academia, ngo/gov, and general support.

I think the point is that, if I as an activist am aiming to maximize the number of content moderators treated well, the highest leverage way to push for that is getting people mad at Facebook. There may be a preexisting system of unpaid content moderators who are supported even less, but that's much harder for anyone to address.

I worked with a group that got 100 volunteers at each event who did the work while the regular members provided coordination and resources. I am trying to do something similar on my own now and learning in a very visceral way just how important spreading that load out is.

But... that group wouldn't be able to do nearly what it has if it weren't for funding from foundations and the department of neighborhoods, and resources on permanent loan from another public sector organization. You might argue it couldn't exist at all.

I think I would say that both are necessary but insufficient.

Another factor is the working conditions at Cognizant. The difference between Reddit moderators and Cognizant employees is that the former are allowed to have bathroom breaks and individual agency. The latter not only have to deal with fairly oppressive workplace policies, but they also rely on this work to live.

Yeah, monopolies can do that.

edit: https://qz.com/1704143/the-antitrust-case-against-facebook/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com