Hacker News Reader

There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have. Underlying moderation is some shared vision of decency - morality claims that should be enforced via justice. These claims certainly don't exist across nation borders, and they barely exist within a given nation's borders.

The bot moderation conundrum is a wholly second moderation question layered on top of the first. How do Twitter accounts map onto human bodies? Is it 1:1, like government ids? 1:many so brands can have accounts? many:1 so humans can amplify their voice? Until this is answered all moderation actions taken in the name of 'bot policy' is capricious. As is the assignment of blue checkmarks.

Reddit struggles with these same problems at website-scale, where moderation must work across subreddits. They only appear to have a better solution because some topics at subreddit-scale make enough of the questions I raise irrelevant that you can install a goon and have them moderate via edict. Just like chat rooms and message boards did in the old days. To make that point a little clearer: you can be off-topic in a subreddit or an Orange Site thread, but you can't be off-topic anywhere on Twitter.

I think the solution is opt-in curation.

If someone (or 10k someones) watches and compiles quality items of interest, maybe i want one of those feeds INSTEAD of Twitter’s ML algorithm.

Twitter can still monetize but now curations could monetize individually via including specific ad tweets.

And i want to subscribe to multiple curations, not just one.

Twitter could even have their own ML algorithm as a curation but I want it to be explicit opt in.

You could browse curations by popularity or topic and opt in to the ones you like, or opt out if you don’t like one anymore.

Trolls wouldn’t get included in curations that anyone cared about.

The down side is that it magnifies the social media echo chamber effect, but it also makes everyone’s feed more personally relevant.

This sounds a lot like what I'm working on with Notado Feeds[1]. Users can curate feeds (with RSS subscriptions) on specific topics from their libraries that get automatically populated. I haven't published a dedicated article on this feature yet, but it's coming.

For an idea of what it looks like in practice, these are my feeds on software development[2] and capitalism[3]. Interested in one but not the other? No problem, ignore the capitalism feed and just sub to the software development feed; you don't have to be hit by a train of all of my thoughts on every little topic by subscribing to an all-encompassing feed.

I'm currently working on a piece around feed discoverability that will integrate RSS subscription stats in few interesting late 90s/early 00s-web ways.

[1]: https://notado.app

[2]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development

[3]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/capitalism

> I think the solution is opt-in curation.

That’s a nice idea, but needs just one step done before: moderation should be placed in the each user’s hands.

I need my own filter about what I see. Like:

1. I always want to read A.

2. I always want to read B, but not when he is talking to C.

3. Show me some random people from time to time, like 3 per day.

And we can share our own “filters”, that creates opt-in curation.

Echo-chamber is indeed a problem, hence rule 3. Also I hope for rule 1 to find people who talk to their opponents meaningfully. But if a person wants to stay in an echo-chamber - she can. I just to not want to be forced into someone else’s echo-chamber.

I feel like if you changed to word goon to police, it would change the tone of your last paragraph a bit, though not the idea. This is a good summary of how I've come to feel about the subject.

> There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale.

If you mean it doesn't exist, that's arguable. If you mean it can't exist, that's nonsense. Just imagine for a second that moderation made money somehow. Boom! A moderation force that can take on planets full of new people. Tech companies are just cheap when it comes to dealing with end users. There is no obstacle but money to them creating capable moderation or customer support. It's a choice (to put profit first.)

No, the parent post makes a quite reasonable point that it can't exist, not because of any resource constraint but because there can't be a globally, universally acceptable appropriate moderation standard - different subcommunities have mutually incompatible requirements which can not be satisfied by any common standard; what's clearly acceptable in one place may even be illegal to say in another.

Well, perhaps you can, if you limit the discussion so that you can't discuss borders of countries, existence of certain countries, rights of certain groups, existence of certain groups, self-identity of many of your users, politicians, politics, religion and a bunch of other topics. If you ban all of these and permit just posting what you had for lunch, then perhaps you can make an universal moderation standard - but I would not call it "appropriate moderation" anymore.

That's a the normal, flaccid excuse. Twitter has the power to overcome the exact obstacles you mention. It's a choice to abstain from moderation, in favor of profit, like I said.

> There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have.

Haven't Wikipedia and Stack Overflow figured out the right way to moderate at scale?

Twitter sees 829,094,400 tweets/day. Wikipedia has 166,666 edits/day. So we're already talking about a factor of nearly 5000x. The number of contributors is also spectacularly different: according to [1] Wikipedia had edits from only 122,821 distinct users in the last 30 days. Twitter claims 237.8 million mDAU (which could be a low or high count, since the "m" stands for monetizable and users may not post.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_writes_Wikipedia...

But only a tiny fraction of the 829 M tweets a day are abusive.

> But only a tiny fraction of the 829 M tweets a day are abusive.

But you have to read all 829 M to find the abusive ones—and you have to agree on what 'abusive' means.

Rely on users to report the bad apples, ban accounts who abuse the report features, and provide people whose identity has been proven with a government-issued ID card with a safety switch that enforces human moderation for "spam" reports.

Right now Twitter isn't doing anything but the first part, which is why "I got mass report banned on Twitter" stories are so commonplace. They need not be, if Twitter would do their goddamn job.

A major financial criticism of Twitter is that their profits are too low compared to their revenues, mostly because of high salaries. Objectively, they're "doing their goddamn job" too well right now: I doubt a newly debt-laden private Twitter will be able to afford an increase in these human resources.

I don't think the automated abuse detection systems need to go away. They should still be around, but only serving to notify human moderators of what they find, not doing any deletions or bans themselves.

Why would you need to do that? You can just have humans review the reports that algorithms generate...

> Why would you need to do that? You can just have humans review the reports that algorithms generate...

At some point, in designing the algorithms, in instructing the human reviewers, and so on, you still need to agree on what abusive means. So there's no way around that.

As to the volume, I agree, one can deploy algorithms as a first filtering step. In this case, I don't usually trust humans to be smarter than algorithms, but I do trust humans to be better at abuse than algorithms are at recognising it—unless the algorithms have so many false positives that they're barely filtering at all.

Let the users curate their own feeds rather than trying to curate things centrally. If some threshold of users have blocked one twitter user, then ban them maybe, otherwise leave it alone. They can remove obvious spam or whatever, but let me choose whether to ban that particular take on a subject or not from my feed.

I'm likely in the minority on this, but I'd rather have the control than trust others to moderate in my best interests for me.

> Haven't Wikipedia and Stack Overflow figured out the right way to moderate at scale?

I think their different goals make it easier (which is not to say easy!) to figure out an appropriate moderation style. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; it is easier to impose norms on an encyclopedia than a social platform. I don't have such a pithy summary of what SO is, but, as basically a knowledge repository rather than a social platform, it, too, can afford to impose certain norms that would stifle a social space. And yet, even with this head start, they can still face considerable flare-ups of controversy!

"It's societal techology we as humans do not have"

Not sure about that. It's just more expensive than Twitter can afford. Same for Facebook and YouTube.

> The problem at its core is that Twitter refuses to hire appropriate levels of moderation staff for the scale it has

I don't believe that anyone could moderate at Twitter's scale. More than 500 million tweets are published per day. How do you moderate that? It's like bringing an umbrella to a tsunami.

Not to mention, Reddit moderation is crap. I've tried to use Reddit several times but gave up each time, because my innocent comments — mainly writing technical help — were getting moderated. I wasn't writing anything political; I couldn't even post on r/apple! They still use a lot of automation on Reddit in the bigger subreddits.

The important thing is that humans review algorithmic bans, not review every tweet.

That's still a huge number.

Twitter doesn't make enough revenue to hire enough people to do that intelligently.

Then they have to raise money?

You can't operate a chemical factory without paying for adequate measures to prevent spewing toxic waste into common resources like air and water, so why should you be allowed to run a facility that spews toxic hate into societies without establishing adequate protection?!

If there is one thing that made the internet so toxic, it was services labeled as "free" that in reality were nothing more than avenues for advertisers to shove ads down our throats, with the cost being our societies breaking apart as a result of all the lone village nutcases suddenly unifying themselves and no one paying for the virtual equivalent of the police to make sure the nutcases don't create chaos.

> Then they have to raise money?

I think they're trying. ;-)

To be clear, I'm not defending Twitter. If I was in charge, I would actually shut down Twitter for the benefit of the world. My point is just the basic financial fact that Twitter doesn't have enough money to do this, and thus they won't, indeed can't.

Of all the forums, websites, social media, etc I've used, never have I experienced worse moderation than reddit. I've never been banned, but I've had comments removed for some of the most arbitrary reasons, and the average moderator seems to almost despise their own userbase, with the exception of their fellow mods.

To cite a particularly egregious example, I once saw a person banned for "giving medical advice" on /r/adhd, while not one, but multiple other moderators had also given medical advice in the exact same thread. A thread that was explicitly asking for medical advice.

Blue checkmarks have been a joke for years. And imagine using Reddit as an example of "good" moderation.

> Twitter and FB both learned the hard way to not ignore these

Are there actual cases (plural)? I only know one lawyer and one case where that happened and was decided by the BGH (federal court).

Who is the "Reddit Suicide Alert?"

You can report any post or comment on reddit, an one option is "self-harm or suicide" https://i.imgur.com/aGLtTeW.png I think it meant in a way that you are afraid of the person. If you are the one reported then you also get an automatic system message from reddit: someone thought you might have problems etc. Basically the suicide alert.

Anyways people use it all the time in every single sub for any unrelated thing, just because they hate you, downvoting is not enough, trolling etc. In sport subs it's very common to report opposing fans with this option for example

I comment a lot on /r/cfb and /r/nfl and I wasn’t aware of this. I don’t really trash talk, but I’m surprised at least one of my thousands of comments hasn’t elicited a suicide alert.

Basically a "feature" of Reddit which can be used to anonymously harass somebody on Reddit by having it send them a DM about suicide prevention.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21164687/reddit-new-suicid...

Which, just to be clear, is meant to convey the opposite obviously. "Reddit cares" is 99.99 % used by people to send others (I've seen mostly women raise this) a "kill yourself" message. Just like people who put "heartwarming" awards on posts about abuse, harassment etc.

On some subreddits every other post will be reported like this.

Meanwhile, Reddit tends to do very little about reports of even direct violence threats ala "I will find you and I will kill your children" etc. which are frequently found to "not be in violation of the terms of service".

You can report someone if you think they're suicidal and they get a pm from reddit that says "we care about you, here's a suicide prevention hotline etc". It's used for trolling for some reason.

Someone tried this on me, so I reported it, and a couple days later got a "yep, that was harassment, we're acting on it". Pleasant suprise.