Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

But user behavior problem can be solved cheaply, easily and in a scalable way:

Give each user an ability to form the personal filter. Basically, all what I need is:

1. I want to read what person A writes - always.

2. I want to read what person B writes - always, except when talking to person C.

3. I want to peek through a filter of the person I like - to discover more interesting to me persons.

4. Show me random people posts like 3-4 (configurable) times per day.

This is basically how my spinal brain worked in unmoderated Fido-over-Usenet groups (Upd: yes, this “oh how everyone will die without moderation” problem is that old). Some server help will be great, sure, but there is nothing here that is expensive or not scalable. PS: centralized filtering is needed only when you are going after some content, not noise.

Apparently in both studies I found the most statistically significant user behavior for bans was if the user had a tendency to post articles from low quality online ”news” sites.

So essentially even the political controversy around moderation boils down to the fact that one side, the right, is happily posting low quality news/fake news that they either get banned for disinformation or other rule-breaking behavior.

https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5

One of the things rarely touched on about Twitter / FB et al are that they are transmission platforms and then a discovery / recommendation layer on top.

The "algorithm" is this layer on top and it is assumed that this actively sorts people into their bubbles and people passively follow - there is much discussion about splitting the companies AT&T style to improve matters.

But countries where much of the discourse is on WhatsApp do not have WhatsApp to do this recommendation - it is done IRL (organically) - and people actively sort themselves.

The problem is not (just) the social media companies. It lies in us.

The solution if we are all mired in the gutter of social media, is to look up and reach for the stars.

I'm very confident at this point that the problem is the enormous size of the rooms where everyone is talking.

I don't think user behavior will ever be better in a sufficiently large room. Effective communication requires shared context which is impossible to establish when a room is sufficiently large and sufficiently diverse.

What we're seeing with increased political polarization is I think an attempt by most people to differentiate themselves into groups of like minded people not just so they can form echo chambers, but so they can actually talk and be heard, and hear what other people are saying. You don't get that when the room becomes global in scale, you just get a bunch of noise, as is mentioned.

I think we're in a particularly nasty situation in tech because most of the people involved in creating and administering these platforms have a huge blindspot when it comes to the lack of context hopping ability in the average person, because the people that tend to get into tech tend to be very open to global connectivity and actually do have somewhat of a capacity to hop around and absorb a huge range of different contexts (although much more superficially than I think they realize/that's the price of extreme openness).

I am also fairly confident the solution is to create user managed and federated platforms. The problem would I think solve itself if people were better able to control what online social groups they expose themselves to. We've been organizing ourselves for thousands of years into a hierarchical networks of different families/towns/cities/states because those are the only long term stable systems that can deal with the huge variations in contextual difference between people. You can still have egalitarian cosmopolitan global villages for people who want that, and you can still have emissaries and exchange programs and global shared interest channels and encourage cooperation amongst different groups and avoid conflict, but I think the idea of a singular all encompassing global village was always a terribly thought out, completely untenable idea that would never work at scale.

I was going to write an article on this a long time ago after a similar thread came up here, but I don't have any clout and ended up getting swamped in other things, so I never did. Properly making this case would also require a lot of research and historical comparison to really evaluate, but the more time passes, the stronger and stronger my hunch is that we need to do almost exactly the opposite of what most people seem to think we should and allow people to differentiate themselves instead of forcing them to be together and all play by the same rules. The echo chambers will become less echoey if you allow people to build their own and feel safe enough to poke their heads out of when they feel sufficiently understood in their corner. The echo chambers are the result of gamed automated feeds where people are trying to signal I want my space by pulling harder and harder in a direction that makes them less and less likely to be bombarded with stuff they don't want entering their space involuntarily.

> "In fact, once again, I challenge you to think about it this way: could you make your content moderation decisions even if you didnʻt understand the language they were being spoken in?"

However, I think discussions of controversial subjects often fall under 'this content is a problem' type of thinking. I was banned from all the major Reddit Covid subreddits for politely noting that a lab leak was entirely plausible, even likely. I was banned from their major news subreddits for regularly discussing the economic agendas behind the vast majority of military invasions in both the present day and historically - for example, I'd note that the USA-Russia split seems to have got started in 2003 when Putin rejected an Exxon bid for majority control of Russia oil production, and then started jailing the Wall Street-linked oligarchs like Khodorkovsky. I was also banned from the Ukraine subreddit for noting that a negotiated settlement to the regional war was inevitable, even if Ukraine had to relinquish some territory inhabited mainly by Russia-speaking citizens. Banned from Neoliberal, for pointing out failures of neoliberalism. Etc.

In none of those cases did I start hurling nasty insults, spam-posting, etc. Clearly those subreddits and their mods have a particular 'keep the conversation on our preferred message' agenda, i.e. 'align with the hive mind or be excommunicated'. (Eventually I tired of this and deleted my account at Reddit).

Now, if Elon can change Twitter such that polite, even-tempered but off-desired-message content isn't actively suppressed, it will be a much better platform. However, will advertisers and other sources of revenue be pleased with such changes? That may be a major factor in how it all plays out.

The internet enables multicast communication, whereas before we could only afford broadcast communication. Broadcast requires the same message to be sent to all, so it forces that message to be moderate and non-polarizing.

We always harbored the ability to be polarized according to our beliefs, but the technology didn't yet exist to allow that.

If you believed in alien lizard people controlling the world or in 1980, your options to collaborate with fellow lunatics were limited.

Today, that’s a real thing with followers.

Of course there are political reasons for which algorithms also do content filtering and censorship but the money reason trumps all: the more time you spend on a network, the more ads you see, the more time you spend on a network, the more content you produce and the more you interact with others and that produces a smell that will attract other small insects which will be served ads, will produce more content and interaction.

1. Is information a neutral abstract unit?

2. Is information as an abstract unit charged with a particular strange attractor?

3. Does language/words hold a particular charge?

4. Is language the life-form and humans the host-form?

So it goes something like this for a user, using a real anecdote as an example:

1) Get exposed to content they never seen before, like let's say "The UN in reality is run by satanist pedophiles". This is more likely to happen outside of one's bubble - therefore not on whatsapp.

2) Get exposed again and again, either to the content, or high-reach influencers, or ads, or a mixture of the 3.

3) Search google for "UN satanist pedophile". Now you can read "real theory" by "very legitimate people" in long form explaining the proofs, history, motivation, etc for the conspiracy.

4) Radicalization

5) Now you need validation for your behavior/beliefs.

6) You identify and approach or get approached by liked-minded lunatics.

7) They invite you to the whatsapp group "only for believers".

8) Now you feel part of a group and ready to "act".

9) You take part in a nazi rally [a]

a: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlQkEAfX_xA

Polarization, partisanship, and radicalization receive a great deal of academic attention. (I can't speak to the public mind, or political hobbyists.)

The book Why We Are Polarized [2020] by Ezra Klein surveys what was known at the time. Nationalization of politics, consolidation of media, death of journalism, election reform, campaign spending. TLDR: Politics used to have weird coalitions, where party was not strongly associated with positions. Then people sorted. Then people's identities (positions) fused into a kind of super identity. Now party is a strong predictor of position.

Rachel Bitecofer https://twitter.com/RachelBitecofer researched (negative) partisanship and used to talk about it. I don't know of an otherwise good intro.

People have always self-radicalized. Pamphlets and zines. Social media made it a self renewing pandemic. Root cause is probably a combo of algorithmic hate machines and social isolation. (People are increasingly anxious and isolated. These para-social relationships fill the void.)

Based on this premise we can conclude that the best way to improve Reddit and Twitter is to block everyone.

But you likely aren't, and most people likely aren't either. That's the entire premise behind removing bad actors and spaces that allow bad actors to grow.

Everything else, like being allowed to spam or post too quickly, is a bug, and bugs should be addressed in the open.

This isn't the problem as much as giving bad actors tools to enhance their reach. Bad actors can pay to get a wider reach or get/abuse a mark of authority, like a special tag on their handle, getting highlighted in a special place within the app, gaming the algorithm that promotes some content, etc. Most of these tools are built into the platform. Some though, like sock puppets, can be detected but aren't necessarily built in functionality.

Maybe that wouldn't be your crusade and maybe you would think you were standing up for an oppressed minority. You get overly emotional, and you could be prone to making some bad decisions.

People act substantially differently on reddit vs. hackernews; honestly I have to admit to being guilty of it. Some of the cool heads here are probably simultaneously engaged in flamewars on reddit/twitter.

Let them reregister for $10.

Congrats, i just solved spam, bots, assholes and permanent line steppers.

OP's argument is that you can moderate content based on behavior, in order to bring the heat down, and the signal to noise ratio up. I think it's an interesting point: it's neither the tools that need moderating, nor the people, but conversations (one by one).

Customised filters for anyone, but I am talking about filters completely under the control of the user. Maybe running locally. We can wrap ourselves in a bubble but better that than having a bubble designed by others.

I think AI will make spam irrelevant over the next decade by switching from searching and reading to prompting the bot. You don't ever need to interface with the filth, you can have your polite bot present the results however you please. It can be your conversation partner and you get to control its biases as well.

Internet <-> AI agent <-> Human

(the web browser of the future, the actual web browser runs in a sandbox under the AI)

He observes that social media moderation is about signal to noise. Then he goes on about introducing off-topic noise. Then, he comes to conclusions that seem to ignore his original conclusion about it being a S/N problem.

Chiefly, he doesn't show how a "council of elders" is necessary to solve S/N problems.

Strangely enough, Slashdot seems to have a system which worked pretty well back in the day.

There are the minority who love to be trolls and get any big reaction out of people (positive or negative). Those people are the problem. But they are also often very good at evading moderation or laying in wait and toeing the line between bannable offences and just every so slightly controversial comments.

Someone who has a balanced life, who spends time at work, with family, in nature, only occasionally goes online, uses most of their online time for edification, spends 30 minutes writing a reply if they decide one is warranted - that type of person is going to have a minuscule output compared to the whales. The whales are always online, thoughtlessly writing responses and upvoting without reading articles or comments. They have a constant firehouse of output that dwarfs other users.

Worth reading "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People"[1].

If you actually saw these people in real life, chances are you'd avoid interacting with them. People seeing a short interview with the top mod of antiwork almost destroyed that sub (and lead to the mod stepping down). People say the internet is a bad place because people act badly when they're not face to face. That might be true to some extent, but we're given online spaces where it's hard to avoid "bad actors" (or people that engage in excessive bad behavior) the same way we would in person.

And these sites need the whales, because they rely on a constant stream of low quality content to keep people engaged. There are simple fixes that could be done, like post limits and vote limits, but sites aren't going to implement them. It's easier to try to convince people that humanity is naturally terrible than to admit they've created an environment that enables - and even relies on - some of the most unbalanced individuals.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

All others are just trolls not backed up by their verified public Internet / Reputation ID.

If a social media company’s mission is to have no barrier, anyone and everyone to share ideas, information and “all are welcome” then maybe a company structure like a worker cooperative [0] would be a better match to that mission statement. No CEO that gets massive pay/stock, instead employees are owners. All employees. They decide what features/projects the company does, how to allocate resources, how to moderate content, etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

That's...that's not a problem.

It took me a long time to learn that if I tell a user "you were being $FOO" where $FOO relates to their intent, they can simply say "no I wasn't" and no one can prove otherwise, making the moderation position a weak one. Mostly they will deny it sincerely because they never had such an intent, at least not consciously. If you do that as a mod, you've just given them a reason to feel entirely in the right, and if you proceed to moderate them anyway, they will feel treated unjustly. This is a way to generate bad blood, make enemies, and lose the high ground.

The reverse strategy is better: describe the effects of someone's posts and explain why they are bad. When inevitably they respond with "but my intent was $BAR", the answer is "I believe you [what else can you say about something only that person could know?], but nonetheless the effects were $BAZ and we have to moderate based on effects. Intent doesn't communicate itself—the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate it." (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

Often when people get moderated in this way, they respond by writing the comment they originally had in their head, as a defense of what they actually meant. It's often astonishing what a gap there is between the two. Then you can respond that if they had posted that in the first place, it would have been fine, and that while they know what they have in their head while posting, the rest of us have no access to that—it needs to be spelled out explicitly.

Being able to tell someone "if you had posted that in the first place, it would have been fine" is a strong moderation position, because it takes off the table the idea "you're only moderating me because you dislike my opinions", which is otherwise ubiquitous.

That is a big stretch. Hate can't be applied to many things, including disagreements like this comment.

But it can be pretty clearly applied to statements that, if carried out in life, would deny another person or peoples' human rights. Another is denigration or mocking someone on the basis of things that can't or shouldn't have to change about themselves, like their race or religion. There is a pretty bright line there.

Malice (per the conventional meaning of something bad intended, but not necessarily revealed or acted out) is a much lower bar that includes outright hate speech.

> but really, you can see when someone is actuated by it.

How can you identify this systematically (vs it being just your opinion), but not identify hate speech?

Hugbox environments wind up having a loose relationship with the truth and a strong emphasis on emotional well-being.

Setting your moderation boundaries determines the values of your platform. I’d much rather talk to someone who wants to hurt my feelings than someone who is detached from reality or saying what they think.

Social networks are devices for measuring popularity; if you took the up/down arrows off, no one would be interested in playing. And we have proven once again that nothing gets up arrows like being mean.

HN has the unusual property that you can't (readily) see others' score, just your own. That doesn't really make it any less about fame, but maybe it helps.

When advertising can fund these devices to scale to billions, it's tough to be optimistic about how it reflects human nature.

Censorship in the traditional sense is close to impossible online today.

Today censorship is often and most effectively about suppressing your ability to be heard, often by flooding out the good communications with nonsense, spam, abuse, or discrediting it by association (e.g. fill the forums of a political opponents with apparent racists). This turns the neigh uncensorability of modern communications methods on its head and makes it into a censorship tool.

And, ironically, anyone trying to use moderation to curb this sort of censorious abuse is easily accused of 'censorship' themselves.

I remain convinced that the best tool we have is topicality: When a venue has a defined topic you can moderate just to stay onto the topic without a lot of debatable value judgements (or bruised egos-- no reason to feel too bad about a post being moved or removed for being offtopic). Unfortunately, the structure of twitter pretty much abandons this critical tool.

(and with reddit increasingly usurping moderation from subreddit moderators, it's been diminished there)

Topicality doesn't solve all moderation issues, but once an issue has become too acrimonious it will inherently go off-topic: e.g. if your topic is some video game well participants calling each other nasty names is clearly off-topic. Topicality also reduces the incidence of trouble coming in from divisive issues that some participants just aren't interested in discussing-- If I'm on a forum for a video game I probably don't really want to debate abortion with people.

In this thread we see good use of topicality at the top with Dang explicitly marking complaints about long form twitter offtopic.

When it comes to spam scaling considerations mean that you need to be able to deal with much of it without necessarily understanding the content. I don't think this should be confused with content blindness being desirable in and of itself. Abusive/unwelcoming interactions can occur both in the form (e.g. someone stalking some around from thread to thread or repeating an argument endlessly) and and in the content (continually re-litigating divisive/flame-bate issues that no one else wants to talk about, vile threatening messages, etc.)

Related to topicality is that some users just don't want to interact with each other. We don't have to make a value judgement about one vs the other if we can provide space so that they don't need to interact. Twitter's structure isn't great for this either, but more the nature of near-monopoly mega platforms isn't great for it. Worse, twitter actively make it hard-- e.g. if you've not followed someone who is network-connected to other people you follow twitter continually recommends their tweets (as a friend said: "No twitter, there is a reason I'm not following them") and because blocking is visible using it often creates drama.

There are some subjects on HN where I might otherwise comment but I don't because I'd prefer to avoid interacting with a Top Poster who will inevitably be active in those subjects. Fortunately, there are plenty of other places where I can discuss those things where that poster isn't active.

Even a relatively 'small' forum can easily have as many users as many US states populations at the founding of the country. I don't think that we really need to have mega platforms with literally everyone on them and I see a fair amount of harm from it (including the effects of monoculture moderation gone wrong).

In general, I think the less topic constrained you can make a venue the smaller it needs to be-- a completely topic-less social venue probably should have no more than a few dozen people. Twitter is both mega-topicless and ultra-massive-- an explosive mixture which will inevitably disappoint.

Another tool I think many people have missed the value of is procedural norms including decorum. I don't believe that using polite language actually makes someone polite (in fact, the nastiest and most threatening remarks I've ever received were made with perfectly polite language)-- but some people are just unable to regulate their own behavior. When there is an easily followed set of standards for conduct you gain a bright line criteria that makes it easier to eject people who are too unable to control themselves. Unfortunately, I think the value of a otherwise pointless procedural conformity test is often lost on people today, though they appear common in historical institutions. (Maybe a sign of the ages of the creators of these things: As a younger person I certainly grated against 'pointless' conformity requirements, as an older person I see more ways that their value can pay for their costs: I'd rather not waste my time on someone who can't even manage to go through the motions to meet the venue's standards)

Early on in Wikipedia I think we got a lot of mileage out of this: the nature of the site essentially hands every user a loaded gun (ability to edit almost everything, including elements on the site UI) and then tells them not to do use it abusively rather than trying to technically prevent them from using it abusively. Some people can't resist and are quickly kicked out without too much drama. Had those same people been technically prevented they would have hung around longer and created trouble that was harder to kick them out over (and I think as the site added more restrictions on new/casual users the number of issues from poorly behaved users increased).

Also for anyone have Deja-Vu, he had almost the same thread a few months ago (and probably a few more times before/after.

https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440

One problem with your idea is that moderation votes are anonymous, but ranking up positively or negatively depending on another users votes would allow their votes to be deanonymised.

Perhaps adding in deterministic noise would be enough to offset that? Or to prevent deanonimisation you need a minimum number of posting friends?

In fact I would love to see more noise added to the HN comments and a factor to offset early voting. Late comments get few votes because they have low visibility, which means many great comments don’t bubble to the top.

On an anecdotal level, the fraction of tweets in my feed that are "recommended topics" or "liked by people I follow" or simply "promoted" has risen astronomically over the past few months. I have a pretty curated list of follows (~100), I had the "show me tweets in chronological order" box checked back when that was an option, and the signal to noise ratio has still become overwhelmingly unusable.

I think this comes back to the “focus on bad behaviors, not bad actors” discussion, but in reverse: focusing on “good actors” (“trusted” users) assumes people have fixed patterns, when there’s a lot of nuance and variability to be taken into account.

Amusingly, a subreddit I frequent has one notorious user who has abused the 'block' feature to ensure their frequent posts on a particular topic are free of dissenting commenters. They block anyone who even slightly disagrees with their position, this prevents them from seeing his threads, and the comments on each thread become entirely one-sided as a result - and the growing list of blocked people have no idea that those threads even exist.

I follow official gov accounts notifying of policy changing, deadlines etc.

- Should I see their retweets ? Yes, they retweet relevant info from other gov, accounts.

- Should I see replies to these tweets ? Probably, there’s useful info coming in the comments from time to time, in particular about situations similar to mine.

So as a user, I have valid reason to whant these two mechanism. But then applying them to shitposting accounts, it becomes a hell scape. And with users who bring in valuable info but sometimes shitpost, we’re starting to need nuance. And so on.

We’re back to square one. The “simple” solution expanded to its useful form brings back the moderation issues we’re trying to flee.

I only see tweets from people I follow. There is zero chance I'd use the twitter app/site default timeline, look at "trending" topics etc. I just follow a hundred or so people and I see their tweets in alphabetical order because I use a sane client (In my case Tweetbot, but there are others).

Content/people discovery is not a problem because of retweets. Almost all the people I follow I follow because people I already followed retweeted or quoted them. Then I look at that profile, the content they write, and if they are interesting, I follow them too.

If someone produces content I don't like for whatever reason, I unfollow them. That includes content they quote or retweet too obviously.

But there are entire groups of users that not only don't feel shame about their activities, but are proud of them.

There's also a lot of drama around Lyte in his personal life, should you choose to go looking into that.

* There's some moderation dispute that involves the PM's

* At least one of the parties involved consents to release the PM's

The latter is the critical bit, to me. When you send someone a chat message, or an email, obviously there's nothing actually stopping them from sharing the content of the message with others if they feel that way, either legally or technically. If an aggrieved party wants to share a PM, everyone knows they can do so -- the only question mark is that they may have faked it.

To me the answer here seems obvious: allow users to mark a PM/thread as publicly visible. This doesn't make it more public than it otherwise could be, it just lets other people verify the authenticity, that they're not making shit up.

And they don't want their brands to be associated with unpleasant content.

This is what the existing block feature does?

Blocking a comment, or even blocking a user for a comment is useless on platforms that allow free and endless user accounts.

Mail spam/scam folders of everyone's email accounts are proof that "let me moderate it myself" does not work for the majority of people.

And remember "It is harder to police bad behavior than it is to automate it."

It is good recapitulation of why (particularly from a more legal-oriented layperson's standpoint) moderation is hard for an online platform.

The crazy thing is even though that is a long list, you could probably double the size of that list of issues with whole other classes of issues.

For example, that list is mostly focused on issues facing a platform with outside stakeholders making it difficult... then there are the inside stakeholders!

Stuff like... "actually, arguments/controversy increases engagement/views/ads (and your/my bonus/stock)", "more regulation we have to comply with actually increases barriers to entry for new competitors", "I work here and have politics X but I sense our company acting with bias Y", "Our moderators are traumatized from looking at too much <porn/hate/etc>", etc.

Besides a Reddit CEO posting on this, I would also pay money to see a CmdrTaco editorial on this topic...

1. The very hands-off approach style that relies on the subject matter of the discussion/topic of interest naturally weeding out "normies" and "trolls" with moderation happening "behind the curtain";

2. The very hands-on approach that relies on explicit clear rules and no qualms about acting on those rules, so moderation actions are referred directly back to the specific rule broken and in plain sight.

Camp 1 begins to degrade as more people use your venue; camp 2 degrades as the venue turns over to debate about the rules themselves rather than the topic of interest that was the whole point of the venue itself (for example, this is very common in a number of subreddits where break-off subreddits usually form in direct response to a certain rule or the enforcement of a particular rule).

One of the exceptionally egregious things that made me quit happened in a voice call where someone was screensharing something deplorable (sexually explicit content with someone that wasn't consenting to the screensharing). I wouldn't have even known it happened except that someone in the voice call wasn't using their microphone, so I was able to piece together what happened from them typing in the voice chat text channel. I can't imagine the horror of moderating a larger community where various voice calls are happening at all times of the day.

And sometimes people are looking for a fight and will search it until they find it ... and then leave.

  Someone asked a dumb question, I replied in good faith. The conversation goes on and on and becomes weirder and weirder, until the person said "You shouldn't have replied me.", and left.

There's a lot of people whose behavior on internet message boards/chat groups can be succinctly summarized as, "they're an asshole." Now maybe IRL they're a perfectly fine person, but for whatever reason they just engage like an disingenuous jerk on the internet, and the latter case is what's relevant to you as a moderator. In some cases a warning or talking-to will suffice for people to change how they engage, but often times it won't, they're just dead set on some toxic behavior.

> Comes the second incident, I thought I learnt my lesson. Once a user is targeted, I tried to stop others from targeting the person. But this time the people who targeted the person wrote angry messages and left.

Makes me think that moderators should have the arbitrational power to take two people or groups, and (explicitly, with notice to both people/groups) make each person/group's public posts invisible to the other person/group. Like a cross between the old Usenet ignore lists, and restraining orders, but externally-imposed without either party actively seeking it out.

Then there is just arbitrary or malicious enforcement of the rules. /r/Star_Trek was told by admins they would be banned if they talked about /r/StarTrek at all, so now that's a topic that's no longer allowed in that sub. But there are tons of subs set up specifically to talk about other subs, where just about all posts are about other subs (such as /r/subredditdrama), and the admins never bother them.

I don't think we can have a conversation about moderation when people are pretending that the current situation doesn't exist, and that moderation is only ever done for altruistic reasons. It's like talking about police reform but pretending that no police officer has ever done anything wrong and not one of them could ever be part of a problem.

It's literally the difference between your feed being filtered by your choices & preferences and someone else imposing theirs upon you.

"I don't trust left-y CEO's", is a fair enough answer, but really that's where the counter-claim seems to end. Now that we have a right-wing CEO, looks like the shoe is on the other foot[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1588174959817658368?s=20&t=F9...

As for specific platforms, aka Reddit, how can one be sure that right wingers on that platform aren't in fact more likely to engage in bad behavior that left wingers? It might be because they are being targeted, but it could also be that that group of people on that platform tend to act more aggressively.

I am NOT saying that I know if Reddit is fair in its moderation, I just don't know.

At the same time, it's trivial to demonstrate that YouTube and Twitter (easy examples) primarily target conservatives with their "moderation". Just look at who primarily uses major alternative platforms.

So no, you're just factually wrong here.

If this is one of Musk's goals with Twitter he didn't overpay. The Internet definitely needs such a system..has for awhile now!

He might connect Twitter into the crypto ecosystem and that along with a verified public Internet / Reputation ID system i think could be powerful.

I like your comment about "track record of insightful, levelheaded conversation", but that introduces another abstraction. Who measures insight or levelheadedness, and how to avoid that being gamed?

I general I agree that reputation is an interesting and potentially important signal, I'm just not sure I've ever seen an implementation that doesn't cause a lot of the problems it's trying to solve. Any good examples?

For example, suppose a very famous TV star joins Twitter and amasses a huge following due to his real-world popularity independent of Twitter. (Whoever you have in mind at this point, you are likely wrong.) His differentiator is he's a total jerk all the time, in person, on TV, etc. He is popular because he treats everyone around him like garbage. People love to watch him do it, love the thrill of watching accomplished people debase themselves in attempts to stay in his good graces. He has a reputation for being a popular jerk, but people obviously like to hear what he has to say.

Everyone would expect his followers to see his posts, and in fact it is reasonable to expect those posts to be more prominent than those of lesser-famous people. Now imagine that famous TV star stays in character on the platform and so is also total jerk there: spewing hate, abuse, etc.

Do you censor this person or not? Remember that you make more money when you can keep famous people on the site creating more engagement.

The things that make for a good online community are not necessarily congruent with those that drive reputation in real life. Twitter is in the unfortunate position of bridging the two.

Why? Because my reputation in meatspace is precisely 0 with 99.9% of the world's population. They haven't heard of me, and they haven't heard of anyone who has heard of me. Meanwhile, my reputation with my selected set of friends and relatives is fairly high, and undoubtedly my reputation with some small set of people who are my enemies is fairly low. And this is all good, because no human being can operate in a world where everyone has an opinion about them all the time.

Global reputation is bad, and giving anyone a megaphone so they can chime into any conversation they want is bad, full stop. Megaphone-usage should not be a democratic thing where a simple majority either affirms or denies your ability to suddenly make everyone else listen to you. People have always been able to speak to their tribes/affinity groups/whatever you want to call them without speaking to the entire state/country/world, and if we want to build systems that will be resilient then we need to mimic that instead of pretending that reputation is a zero-sum global game.

Couldn't agree more here.

Going back to the "US Postal service allows spam" comment made by Yishan, well yes, the US postal service will deliver mail that someone has PAID to have delivered, they've also paid to have it printed. There's not a zero cost here and most businesses will not send physical spam if there weren't at least some return on investment.

One big problem not even touched by Yishan is vote manipulation, or to put it in your terms, artificially boosted reputation. I consider those to be problems with the platform. Unfortunately, I haven't yet seen a platform that can solve the problem of "you, as an individual, have ONE voice". It's too easy for users to make multiple accounts, get banned, create a new one, etc.

At the same time, nobody who's creating a platform for users will want to make it HARDER for users to sign up. Recently Blizzard tried to address this (in spirit) by forcing users to use a phone number and not allowing "burner numbers" (foolishly determined by "if your phone number is pre-paid"). It completely backfired for being too exclusionary. I personally hate the idea of Blizzard knowing and storing my phone number. However, the idea that it should be more and more difficult or costly for toxic users to participate in the platform after they've been banned is not, on its own, a silly idea.

Put another way, not everyone deserves a megaphone.

Devil's Advocate here...Let's presume you're correct. The question is: who gets to decide? Who gets to says, "Sorry, no soup or megaphone for you."

On the other hand, light sanitizes.

However, as you noted, reputation matters. And too many who should be able to outshine a jerk, don't have the juice, nor the will.

Some people don’t care and have different value systems/goals - or the jerk behavior is valued by their community

Wonder if that is something the behavior can catch, ie prevent quote tweeting/ screenshot a particular person etc

In the past 2 years fighting spam became too exhausting and I gave up on allowing new signups through software entirely. Now you have to email me explaining why you want an account and I'll manually create one for the approved requests. The world's internet users are now more numerous and less homogeneous than they were back when small forums dominated, and the worst 0.01% will ruin your site for the other 99.99% unless you invest a lot of effort into prevention.

It was always a job of ensuring a comfortable environment for the community gathering on the forum and it did require "censorship" beyond obvious to prevent a minority of users from souring the environment for everyone.

Small, indepedently run communities could set their own standards, and those that who disagreed with any one set of rules could go and find somewhere more to their liking. Reddit and Discord have this to an extent, but even then, it's too centralised and too heavily controlled by one organisation.

Hopefully if Mastodon takes off, federated services will bring this style of community back, except with the ability to take part in other communities if people agree with that.

Can you name the topic areas where even cautious presentation will not be sustained on twitter?

Think this is good because it usually stops a discussion from dissolving into a meaningless flame war.

It allows the power of moderation to stay within the power of those in the discussion.

Gaslight: "manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity." Definition from Oxford Languages

HN in general is convinced that social media is censoring right ideas because it skews counterculture and “grey tribe” and there have been a lot of high profile groups who claim right views while doing the most vile depraved shit like actively trying to harass people into suicide and celebrating it or directing massive internet mobs at largely defenseless not public figures for clout.

Citation needed

I specifically don't want any editor for online content. Just don't make it boring or worse turn everything into astroturfing. Masks are a good example already.

https://xkcd.com/1425/

I personally believe this won't be a solvable problem, or at least the problem will grow a long tail. One example would be hate groups co-opting the language of the victim group in an intentional manner. Then as the hate group is moderated for their behaviors, the victim group is caught up in the action by intentional user reporting for similar language.

It's a difficult problem to deal with as at least some portion of your userbase will be adversarial and use external signaling and crowd sourced information to cause issues with your moderation system.

In my eyes, $8 creates more problems than solves. It's the normal, human twitter users who are more likely to NOT want to pay. The people who use Twitter to make money or obviously going to be most likely to pay the $8.

It resulted in rampant child pornography, doxxing, death threats, gory violence etc. It epitomised the worst of humanity.

Now the Reddit admins keep a watch on moderators and if their subreddits do not meet site-wide standards they are replaced.

That is a byproduct of Reddit specifically. With 90s style forums, this kind of discussion happens just fine because it ends up being limited to a few threads. On Reddit, all community members must interact in the threads posted in the last day or two. After two days they are gone and all previous discussion is effectively lost. So maybe this can be fixed by having sub-reddits sort topics by continuing engagement rather than just by age and upvotes.

A good feature would be for Reddit moderators to be able to set the desired newness for their subreddit. /r/aww should strive for one or two days of newness (today's status quo). But /r/communism can have one year of newness. That way the concerned people and concern trolls can be relegated to the yearly threads full of good-faith critiques of communism and the good-faith responses and everyone else can read the highly upvoted discussion. Everything else could fall in-between. /r/woodworking, which is now just people posting pictures of their creations, could split: set the newness to four months and be full of useful advice; set the newness for /woodworking_pics to two days to experience the subreddit like it is now. I feel like that would solve a lot of issues.

In the US, spam is protected speech, but as always, no company is required to give anybody a platform.

Yishan's point is, most people's opinions on how well a platform delivers free speech vs censorship will index more to the content of the speech, rather than the pattern of behavior around it.

People will learn from mistakes and create more problem for the platform with alt-accounts.

This only works on non-adversarial systems. Anywhere else, it will be like handing over to bad actors (i.e. people whose interests will never align with operator's) a list of blindspots

Both types of bans have privacy issues that result in lack of transparency with bans.

Doesn't this build echo chambers where beliefs get more and more extreme? Good from a business perspective (nobody gets pissed off and leaves because they don't see much that they object to). But perhaps bad from a maintaining-democracy perspective?

Even in Slashdot's heyday the number of metamoderators was vanishingly small. The best thing it had was the ability to filter anonymous cowards and the ability to browse from -5 to +5 if you wanted to.

How can people who are not totally dopamine deprived zombies find twitter and this terrible „thread“ format acceptable? Just write a coherent blog post pls.

I found this hilarious. I don't use Twitter and so was unaware that these annoying tangents are common on the platform. As a result, I thought Yishan was using them to illustrate how it's not necessarily the content (his climate initiative) but a specific pattern of behavior (saying the 'right' thing at the wrong time, in this case) that should be the target of moderation.

In real life we say: "it's not what you said, it's just the way you said it!" Perhaps the digital equivalent of that could be: "it's not what you said, it's just when you said it."

It is annoying but it can be seen as part of his argument. How can spam be moderated if even trustworthy creators create spam?

According to him, it's not spam because it doesn't fulfill the typical patterns of spam, which shows that identifying noise does require knowledge of the language.

It could be interesting to turn his argument around. Instead of trying to remove all spam, a platform could offer the tools to handle all forms of spam and let its users come up with clever ways to use those tools.

So the freedom of speech doesn't belong to the bots but to the citizens who control them.

He made this exact point in a previous post. Some topics look like they're being censored only because they tend to attract such a high concentration of bad actors who simultaneously engage in bullying type behavior. They get kicked off for that behavior and it looks like topic $X is being censored when it mostly isn't.

>The Making of a YouTube Radical

>I visited Mr. Cain in West Virginia after seeing his YouTube video denouncing the far right. We spent hours discussing his radicalization. To back up his recollections, he downloaded and sent me his entire YouTube history, a log of more than 12,000 videos and more than 2,500 search queries dating to 2015.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo... (2019)

Twitter is not a real place.

The process of polarization (in the US) started decades ago:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized

In fact it seems that people were always polarized, it's just that the political parties (R & D in the US) didn't really bother sorting themselves on topics until the 1960s: even in the 1970s and early 1980s it was somewhat common to vote for (e.g.) an R president but a D representative (or vice versa). Straight-through one-party voting didn't really become the majority until the late-1980s and 1990s.

There's a chapter or two in the above book describing psychology studies showing that humans form tribes 'spontaneously' for the most arbitrary of reasons. "Us versus them" seems to be baked into the structure of humans.

Some people want to escape the filter bubble, to expose their ideas to criticism, to strengthen their thinking and arguments through conflict.

Other people want a community of like-minded people to share and improve ideas and actions collectively, without trolls burning everything down all the time.

Some people want each of those types of community depending on the topic and depending on their mood at the time.

A better platform would let each community decide, and make it easy to fork off new communities with different rules when a subgroup or individual decides the existing rules aren't working for them.

If you want a decend unroll, one example would be threadreaderapp: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html

Conspiracy theories coming due to being motivated by the content is literally discussed on the text and you decide to skip all that and just do the thing he is saying is a problem. With no hint of irony whatsoever...

Here is the specific tweets you might need to re-read

> Now back to where we were… when we left off, I was talking about how people are subconsciously influenced by the specific content thatʻs being moderated (and not the behavior of the user) when they judge the moderation decision. When people look at moderation decisions by a platform, they are not just subconsciously influenced by the nature of the content that was moderated, they are heavily - overwhelmingly - influenced by the nature of the content! Would you think the moderation decision you have a problem with would be fair if the parties involved were politically reversed?

It really was great - I probably wouldn't care how horrible it's become if not for the fact that I remember how it used to be.