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> None of the major social media companies made a real effort to come up with a solid set of content rules that most people can agree with upfront (at least in principle) and that doesn't change after every major news story.

One problem with moderation is that you have to choose somewhere on the continuum between (A) "Don't be dick (everyone surely knows when they're being a dick, right?)" and (B) Enumerating literally every possible rule violation.

You quickly learn that (A) doesn't scale and it gives your moderators maximum leeway, most of them having very, very, very different ideas of what it means to be an ass.

And with (B), you get into the business of rules lawyering where users will continually use your own rule list against. By trying to be comprehensive, you create leeway through omission. This reminds me of forums with 1000 rules. Nobody is going to read them, and the only people who do are the ones who will waste your time by finding the one obvious rule you left off. And with this, it seems even easier for bad users to rally the support of obvious ones because they seem to make a good point, and you have a weirdly bigger issue on your hands than you would have if your rules were less focused.

In other words, there is no way to make a set of content rules that people can agree with (in spirit not interpretation), else moderation would be easy.

You can try this yourself. Pick a hot topic like trans rights or racism, come up with tweets that you think are obviously unwanted and also tweets that come close to crossing the line. And then try to write a rule that encodes this sorting in a way that leaves no room for interpretation neither among users nor your moderators.

>None of the major social media companies made any real effort to make moderation transparent.

Because most people don't care about this. For most websites, making moderation transparent only opens you up to more abuse and does nothing good.

>None of the major social media companies made a real effort to come up with a solid set of content rules that most people can agree with upfront (at least in principle) and that doesn't change after every major news story.

Because it's literally impossible to do this.

>Also, I am sick and tired of social media CEOs, VPs and founders pointing a finger at their users and saying "you, users, are the real problem here". This is bullshit. An average interaction on (moderated!) social media is significantly worse than an average interaction in (unmoderated) real life.

No it's not bullshit, I'm taking from this reply that you haven't spent any amount of time moderating an internet forum. (Feel free to tell me if I'm wrong there) The users are the real problem and it's the entire problem you're getting paid to solve when you work for these companies. Nobody would use these services if they weren't solving these problems. Real life interactions usually only involve a handful of people and don't require figuring out how to get everyone in the world to get along with each other. If the users were capable of "coming up with a solid set of content rules that most people can agree with upfront" they would've done so already and we wouldn't even be having this discussion because there would be no need to demand that Twitter try to do it.

People are people. They're just worse versions of themselves on the internet, Twitter in particular.

I think Yishan was trying to say that moderation is hard not in a "This requires brilliant minds and hard effort" kind of way, but more in a "This will emotionally deflate you for years" kind of way*

Edit: *especially if you're the public figurehead who will receive tremendous heat for this.

And yet here, plus a lot of other forums, you don't constantly see people say things that would earn them a punch in the face IRL

Before we can solve "moderation," we need to be clear what the goal is. Twitter has very handy Unfollow and Block features. Therefore, moderation on Twitter means stopping people from saying things to people who want to hear those things.

This raises an obvious question. If the people hearing the ideas manifestly want to hear them, who is being served by the moderation?

One possibility is the moderator. It's evident that Twitter executives, or people who influence them, don't want certain ideas to spread. But why? One possibility is that they believe these ideas to be false or "harmful" (whatever that means).

They believe the the masses are easily duped and that counter-arguments are unlikely to be sufficiently persuasive. If only a minority of people are easily duped, then false ideas tend to burn out within a small radius as they are exposed to counter-argumentation and common sense.

But if the masses are putty in the hands of bad idea creators, then a wise and disinterested moderator has a role to play. He can spot the bad idea and cut it off before it spreads.

But can a wise and disinterested moderator exist? If company executives faced no outside pressures, then it's theoretically possible. But we can see clearly this does not exist in the real world. The US Congress and Whitehouse have not been shy about making very specific moderation demands of Twitter, backed by serious and credible threats. As a result, correct ideas are bound to be moderator out and bad ideas allowed to spread.

(A few hundred years of political philosophy, as captured in the founding documents of the US, make it clear why we don't want government to play any moderation role whatsoever.)

In my opinion, the wisdom of the masses combined with opportunities for vigorous counter beats centralized moderation by a very large margin.

>How come that an average interaction on (moderated!) social media is significantly worse than an average interaction in real life? It's about medium structure, not people.

How is it not both? Give people a medium wherein they can be semi-anonymous, or otherwise removed from the immediate social impacts of their actions and words, and they are awful. It seems to me that you need (a) distance from social impacts and (b) people willing to be awful.

How is it not both? How are people not responsible for their own actions online? I don't get what you're saying.