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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Moderating a top web destination today isn't possible to do correctly.

You could automate moderation with ML, automatic recognition, user-flagging but the sheer number of false positives, and alleged false positives, means you basically need to have a full human moderation team to have real accuracy.

You could just use human moderators, but then you have to pay for them all. Ads based websites can't afford that.

You could charge users money and not be purely ads-based, but then you won't be a top web destination because people aren't willing to pay for the internet with money.

So the only remaining option is to automate, ignore the false positive problem entirely and rake in money while abusing your content creators and users. This is 'The Google Strategy'.

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I think the main thing lacking on modern platforms is a quick, reliable way to verify the reputation of any given content creator.

First off, it obviously needs to be relative reputation, and not centralizedI think some sort of cross platform web of trust, where you publicly endorse some friends, some content creators, and some investigative journalists, etc. You also publicly repudiate sources of information that you don't find credible. This means that if anyone goes off the rails there's a visible trail of distrust, and that information is de-prioritized in your network.

This also has a bit of sybil resistance built in, because upvotes or downvotes of thousands of bots isn't relevant at all to your trust graph unless friend of friends actually endorse some of these bots or something. Still though, it would probably also be good to have some burnable staking mechanic. Everyone needs to put in a dollar, or 10 dollars, or something to participate (which could be removed at any time), and people who clearly violate terms of use would have their stake burned, and all of their endorsements or repudiations would be invalidated.

I feel like eventually someone is going to have to build something like this. Incentives are hard to get right, but if by some miracle it works, and the trust graph takes off, then lots of these problems just go away. Imagine something like DNS that you could just query to see how much you should trust some chunk of information. It would be a game changer.

So, like, a social credit score....?

I'm being quite reductive, but at the same time your points could be interpreted to resemble the concept. Fruit for thought

Recognize the difference between a centralized score and a relative score.

In the model I proposed, your "score" of anyone else would only be affected by people who you've selected to "score" others. This is exactly how people build trust mentally today, but assisted by a graph that lets you expand your trust network beyond Dunbar's number, which is required for filtering modern media.

The Dystopian centralized credit score seen in the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" is what will happen if we fail to build something capable of calculating relative trust relationships.

> So the only remaining option is to automate, ignore the false positive problem entirely and rake in money while abusing your content creators and users. This is 'The Google Strategy'.

Actually, I see this as both not the only remaining option and also as not an option.

If you can't moderate, then you're being irresponsible on your platform. Reduce the load (disable comments, limit uploads, etc), hire, or shut down.

"We're too big to moderate" is an absurd and irresponsible statement by some of the biggest companies in the world.

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