Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

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People with moderating experience:

Why not just delete [most] offending comments, immediately, no questions asked (and ban repeat offenders)? For maybe 95% (as a wild guess), there's no question - it's clear that the comment is inflammatory or disinformation or whatever. It surprises me that I see so many of them permitted in so many forums, even here on HN. Why tolerate them? One click and move on.

Tell people about the policy, of course, and if the comment is partly offending and partly constructive, delete it. They can re-post the constructive part. It's not hard to behave - we all do it in social situations. If you want your comment to be retained, don't do stupid stuff.

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Also, it's telling IMHO that in this conversation among people relatively sophisticated in this issue, organized disinformation is barely discussed. It's well-known, well-documented, and common, yet we seem to close our eyes to it. It's a different kind of moderation challenge.

(Have run and moderated a forum for 15+ years.)

You are outnumbered. Spammers or bad actors run 24/7 whereas you need to sleep or holiday. You are criticised for moderating (“censorship!”) or not moderating, if you are ever inconsistent you’re “playing favourites”. Persistent bad actors skirt the boundaries and dedicate themselves wholly to getting past you. Trolls work in the grey areas. You and your parents get doxxed for handing out a minor imposition.

You are up against spam bots working constantly to bypass you. Up against bots skirting what contravenes rules, or spammers asking an “innocent question” to set up another account to provide a spam answer.

Any question remotely involving politics/gender/race devolves immediately into a shitshow (this is a newish phenomenon).

This is what is done by any experienced content moderation team, except for trying to rescue the good part.

That’s essentially editorial work, and the “good” part is subjective.

Mods also spend 90% of their time dealing with bad content, which means they end up be far more sophisticated at smelling false arguments or traps that would snare normal users.

Eventually, attackers start targeting the mod team, and the rule set - since the experience/content delta between mods and users keeps growing, attackers are able to exploit it for PR.

> "Why not just delete offending comments..."

How do you define offending? Some people are offended by a great many things. China is offended if you point out they have human rights abuses. The US is offended if you point out their interference in other country's affairs. Thailand literally makes it illegal (jail time) to offend some people that in the US is not only legal, but encouraged by our culture!

It's not so simple or easy.

IMHO this argument is potentially interesting philosophically, if someone has something new to say. It's an appeal to the logical extreme of post-modern relativism (and when we see logical extremes, I believe it's a good question to ask - is this a real problem or just philosophical). It also is misleading, IMHO, because it conflates morality, offensiveness, and power. Regardless, these kinds of philosophical arguments can be continued indefinitely, but so is the one that says the Internet is a figment of my imagination. I'm talking about reality.

In reality, the human mind doesn't need and very rarely uses the extreme of hard and fast algorithms; we are not computers. I can judge good from bad, constructive from destructive, etc. and it is easy to identify most of the problematic comments. When it's a forum with rules, it's easy to identify (again, a wild guess) 95% of them.

No it is easy. You define offending as whatever the moderator finds offending. Like a strike in baseball.

But you can always moderate the moderators.

Then people will get offended for getting censored out?

Some will, but is that a loss? If you aim at accommodating destructive behavior, you'll have it and attract more of it. If you aim at accommodating constructive behavior, you'll have it and attract more of it. I'd happily let some other sites have the entire market of destructive behavior.

But we are just speculating; can someone with actual experience and expertise say how it would work?

You are correct. Eventually moderation becomes opaque to not give information to bad actors (trolls/botters/harassers).

At that point it becomes about attack surface areas and patterns.

I think a clever mod will realize that they are not the Supreme Court. They are certainly not the best judge out there. Just clicking accounts and comments out of existence wont solve misinformation - it will just make the mod a tyrant. I know for a fact if i were moderating, there would be few safe users.

> I think a clever mod will realize that they are not the Supreme Court. They are certainly not the best judge out there. Just clicking accounts and comments out of existence wont solve misinformation - it will just make the mod a tyrant.

We're not talking about prison and the law of the land; we're making decisions about the disposition of some comments on an Internet forum. Far more consequential decisions are made without any due process - for example, managers decide on whether people will keep their jobs; they are 'tyrants'.

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