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Comment by elpakal | Hacker News Reader

If moderators are good, why cant you just hire more moderators?

Money. Moderators are expensive and if you want it to be any good you need people from the culture you're moderating to understand the context of what is and isn't abusive in a given language. It's also an absolutely terrible job because you're just sifting through the absolute worst of the content on the platform all day.

Reddit has free moderators

And reddit has not solved the problem.

To many, reddit is just as unpleasant, and in some cases worse than twitter.

Generally either the users or the admins are unhappy with the moderators of any given subreddit. They're on possible way around it but not a particularly good one and it's less likely to scale because there's not the same "ownership of a community" feeling you can engender in Twitter where there's not really an equivalent to subreddits to give volunteer mods control over.

Moderators on forums had to handle maybe 100 messages per day. They knew the context of each discussion thread and could make pretty well-considered and nuanced moderating decisions.

Twitter receives something like 500 million tweets per day. So if you had a million paid moderators, maybe they would be able to keep up with the sheer volume. And then you'd still get people arguing either side, too much or too little moderation/censorship. Corporate bias would be attributed, rightly or wrongly, just as it is now.

Because moderators need to be competent, understanding and honest. They will not come cheap and these apps have billions of users in some cases.

As the GP stated repeatedly, it doesn't scale. Number of interactions scales with the factorial of users. The moderation team itself also doesn't scale. Good moderation is very difficult and requires trust. More moderators spreads the trust thin and greatly increases the chance that you end up with one or more bad moderators, who in turn damage that trust.

> Number of interactions scales with the factorial of users.

That is just not true. That's a count of possible relationships. There is a limit to how many interactions a human will perform in a day, and it's not related to how many other users there are on the platform.

The motivations are different, but I think wikipeida is an interesting example where editing / moderation does (mostly) work. Again, I can't see how that could ever work on twitter, but wikipedia is the only large-user-base example of "social media" that isn't horrible.

I think that is because every contributor is responsible for the whole, and thus they are also all moderators, and all responsible for any content digressions.

If someone posts a hateful tirade on twitter, it's no one else's responsibility but twitter's really. It's their account, and Twitters platform.

Of course, if you gave Twitter uses the ability to self moderate, it would be an absolute mess.

If one woman can make a baby in 9 months, why can't 9 women do it in one?

Moderators are not identical. One moderator's ban is another moderator's timeout.

C'mon. You know this.

The combinatorial explosion mentioned in the above post - it would be bad enough if the requirement for moderators expanded linearly with users, but it actually expands exponentially, more like with interactions.

Plus, Musk tweeted that he's eliminate bots or die trying. If he really means this, it would be a truly great contribution to twitter -- free speech is one thing, but amplified disinformation is another. But, this apparently requires levels of effort beyond all the social media today, especially when it is not just automated bots, but also paid troll farms grinding out disinformation and deliberately undermining communications.

Facebook does this no? I thought the issue was you effectively have to be a psychopath to do the job because of how horrific the unmoderated internet get.

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