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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

I've always wanted a feature that just bins similar reactions together, so I don't have to read them. For example, I'd love replies to be binned into categories like "cruel disparagement", "wilful misunderstanding", "mindless agreement", "fallacious", "opinion as fact", and "threats and doxing". Ideally the last category would be taken seriously by law enforcement.

People who write things who get binned into these categories should get a score which, after reaching a threshold, get blocked, and ideally even generates a report for others to see of who I've blocked, and why, to save others the trouble.

Interestingly I feel like the trolls would like this too because it would let them compete with each other for being the most horrible and the most blocked on the platform.

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Crowd-sourcing moderation, including flagging for categories you've outlined, will fail utterly.

Spend some time on /r/BestOfReports and you'll see what moderators deal with. People use reports like a "super downvote" button for things they disagree with, and I don't mean the "things they disagree with" as the racism/bigotry dog whistle it often means.

Reddit somewhat recently added a option to report a post for describing intent to self-harm, and if someone hits it, it sends a message to the user containing resources for seeking help, and spend enough time on reddit and you'll see people edit posts/comments saying "Apparently someone reported this for self-harming?"

I think the only way to make crowd-sourced content flagging and moderation work is if you see a post that's been flagged that clearly shouldn't be, you should be able to click a button that unflags it for yourself, AND adds everyone who flagged it to a list of accounts to ignore their flags. But that list must be kept personal. As soon as you allow that data to train an algorithm that detects false flaggers, the system gets broken again.

>Crowd-sourcing moderation, including flagging for categories you've outlined, will fail utterly.

I agree, which is why I didn't suggest it.

Then how do you determine is a post is "cruel disparagement", "willful misunderstanding", etc?

How do you? You read it, and decide. Eventually I can train software to help me so I can delegate some of the responsibility to it. Twitter could put such tools in people's hands so they can protect themselves. Strictly speaking, Twitter doesn't have to do anything for this solution. Usenet solved this problem long ago with killfiles, which each person maintained. I basically want a killfile++ for twitter.

> How do you? You read it, and decide.

Right, but you said...

> I've always wanted a feature that just bins similar reactions together, so I don't have to read them.

You've presented a contradiction. You said you want them binned together so you don't have to read them, but that you decide how to bin them by reading them.

Using AI as you suggest could work. Could also possibly eventually be gamed.

> I basically want a killfile++ for twitter.

I've said in the past that I wish I could just never see any tweet by someone whose username takes the form of a first name followed by 4 or more numbers, like "Joel47871". Those are bot accounts 99.9% of the time.

Fair enough, I could have been clearer. It sounds like you understand what I'm suggesting now, though. What do you think?

> I think the only way to make crowd-sourced content flagging and moderation

I think the issue is that there’s no reputation cost for false or wrong reporting. They need some way to have reputational value for positive contributions and negative.

This is hard but I’d like to see some company try rather than give up.

Maybe make reports public for who reported them. Or just false reports.

>I've always wanted a feature that just bins similar reactions together, so I don't have to read them. For example, I'd love replies to be binned into categories like "cruel disparagement", "wilful misunderstanding", "mindless agreement", "fallacious", "opinion as fact", and "threats and doxing".

The problem has always been who gets to decide those things, not that it would be nice to have. And since no one can be trusted to do that, we don't get to have it.

If the Topic suggestions are any indication, I would have 0 faith in Twitter's ability to accurately group together similar replies.

Fantastic idea. Probably doable as well.

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