Show HN: Moderator Mayhem, a game about the difficulties of content moderation
moderatormayhem.engine.is
moderatormayhem.engine.is
"A post about the movie Cocaine Bear recommends doing cocaine while watching the movie and contains a photograph of a bag of white powder with the hashtag #cocaine"
That... seems like an obvious joke to me. And even if it's not, while "doing cocaine" is illegal, photographs of white powders are not, nor is suggesting that people do cocaine, nor is portraying them apparently doing so. We can know this is true because the producers and actors who worked on the film Cocaine Bear were not arrested.
Content moderation is hard, but I'm not very impressed that the very first card shown got it (in my opinion) totally wrong.
Moderation is hard and that example is… the perfect example. User reports are rarely accurate but still valuable.
It says "Content that violates local or international laws or regulations."
I don't know all the laws of all the countries, but my local laws make very little content illegal. Various types of obscenity, true threats, etc. "You should do drugs while you watch a movie about drugs" is definitely not one of those.
It would be very easy, if that's what they want, to change it to "Content that encourages breaking local or international laws or regulations."
Suggesting that a reason should be added for the specific situation you’ve encountered demonstrates the naive understanding most people have of moderation and that’s what this game is good at.
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter will have spent tens of thousands of people hours thinking about something as simple as the list of report reasons.
But the difference between "illegal content" and "content that promotes breaking the law" isn't really one of them to be made by the moderator. This is just bad instructions from the game maker.
Just cleanly not in their domain?
But the rules that this game give do not include that rule, and it's a mark of a poorly designed game that the rule says "don't allow illegal content" and then when you (correctly!) apply that rule, the game says "you should have not allowed this because it's suggesting that someone do something illegal". Those aren't the same rule!
ETA: Like lots of places have rules against reposting copyrighted content. But a post that said "Psst, kid, you should go download a movie from the Pirate Bay" should not be removed under that rule. Because the content of the post isn't copyrighted. If they also had a rule that said "don't encourage piracy", they could reasonably take it down under that rule.
This is exactly what I encountered - mods would debate these specific issues. Is the spirit of the rule or the word of the rule met.
For global teams it’s even worse.
The rules tend to be American, and they apply globally - which means that things that are illegal locally are given a pass, and this creates the same debate in the mod team.
Moderation is phyrric. Today you come up with a good argument for behavior, tomorrow you churn your team and have 60% new people. The same argument comes up and its decided in the other direction.
Do I know which one? Nope, not a clue. But many countries have pretty weak free speech protections, and pretty strict drug laws. The idea that that violates none of them seems quite unlikely.
The fact that your local laws have strong free speech protections doesn't really matter when the criteria is "local or international". If it violates north korea's, china's, or singapores laws it still violates that restriction.
These are actual problems.
Then what we actually need isn't more content moderation, we need explicit laws explicitly _protecting_ website operators and any other publishers who are actually following the law.
Start shitposting here on HN and see how long your posts hang around.
Though we didn't first define what "integrity" meant, it now seems impossible to formulate a meaning for it that isn't absurdly ironic given the actions performed to protect it.
One could be forgiven if we were talking about a forum or website that exists in a totalitarian regime like China... better that there be some conversation than the only other option, none at all. But in the US or Europe or any other nation that considers itself even minimally enlightened?
Moderation is not the solution. It may even be the problem.
What free speech rights? You have no legal right to compel someone else to display your words on their website.
In fact, you all seem to be constructing that society even as we speak. Given the audience of this particular forum, more than a few of you are literally doing just that, rather than being accomplices and bystanders.
I'm more of a free speech fundamentalist myself.
What you seem to be asking for is a world where the government can override the autonomy of publications and force them to publish specific items. How is that "free" speech?
Look at the statement "private entities can't be compelled by the government". Which government are we even talking about here? It's quite clear that many governments do actually compel such things when it suits them. Have you never noticed?
You might switch to making the argument that "private governments shouldn't x", and I suppose if you were clever they might even be good arguments. You might also make the argument that this government or that government doesn't currently do it... but that boils down to "I want it to continue not compelling x". Hardly an argument, except maybe for the status quo.
You don't know what I'm asking for. It's an idea far enough outside your narrow cone of comprehension and even narrower cone of imagination that we might as well not even be speaking the same language.
Personally I don't think social media speech is that important. It's ad-based, convenience-driven, and fickle. If it were to disappear people would just move to different media.
I'm coming up blank. Could it even be non-electronic in this day and age? If it were, it'd almost certainly look identical to current social media. If it didn't look like that, what, we'd all get ham licenses and tap out our opinions in Morse? Maybe we'd set up landline partylines and gossip until the wee hours of the morning?
Would people start mailing in letters to the editor again to magazine printed on cheap acid-soaked paper? Wearing sandwich signs and walking down the sidewalks in major metropolitan areas?
Services based in the US are not legally obligated to prevent users from writing about using cocaine, or pictures of white powders they're claiming are cocaine, or writing that it's desirable to use cocaine, so the post itself is not illegal. Real policies for content moderators should be much more detailed than what's in this game so that most moderators will reach the same conclusions about whether a post violates the policy.
OP didn't miss anything, the website is not subtly showing you how content moderation is difficult, it's telling you: we want to moderate it that way and you are failing or succeeding. That's not a lesson. That's gameplay.
Edit: In some ways, a card that's incredibly contextual as the first one is a brilliant move.
But also: this isn't actually a hard judgment call. It's just bad instructions. There's an objective difference between "content that breaks laws" and "content that promotes the breaking of laws" and the rules could easily be changed to indicate the one they want.
If you were playing a platformer tutorial and you came to a gap and the tutorial instructions said "Press A to jump over the gap" and then when you tried you fell in and died and the tutorial then said "That was too big a gap to jump over. You should have pressed [Down] to climb over it instead", would you think "Ah, what a brilliant meditation on trusting trust and how the right choice is not obvious" or would you think "this is a shitty tutorial for a dumb game"? I'm not saying there's for sure a right answer here. I could imagine a well-made game where the tutorial straight-up lies to you and gives you the wrong directions. But most games like that are just badly written and poorly thought out.
A lot of time context matters. In a forum thread called "What would be the worst title for a self help book?" a post that just says "Give up, kill yourself" is not actually promoting self harm. It's saying that its the worst advice.
assuming the entire point of the game is "moderation is harder than you think, stop assuming all mods are power tripping, they have tough choices to make!" -- the tutorial isn't supposed to be teaching you how to answer the questions properly, because answering questions properly isn't the point of the game. It's teaching you that about how hard moderation is.
Also, I've played plenty of games where the tutorial involves dying and then the follow up is learning how not to die (generally in games where dying is common and they want to indicate that "dying isn't the same as game over, this isn't Super Mario for NES")
But that makes me even more annoyed at this game which rather than presenting me with legitimately difficult judgment calls, just gave me clear rules that were not the rules that the actual game used when determining whether I did the right thing.
It's possible that this is a cleverly designed thing to make you realize that the real rules are unwritten and the whole thing is a Kafkaesque contraption with no correct answers. Or it's just a quickly-made game where no one proofread the actual instructions they were giving players.
The authors are very clear that there are no right or wrong answers. Interpreting it that way misses the entire point of the exercise.
Where were they clear that there are no right or wrong answers?
those are not the difficulties of moderating though, those are the difficulties of general employment.
> Also, there’s often no “correct” answer, so the game won’t tell you if you got something “right” or “wrong” because often there is no right or wrong.
My God, we must run in different circles. I had people I know who shamelessly posted almost that exact thing. A few of them, lol.
They weren't joking. :P
Also this game is interesting and I don't mind at all if they are using the game to make a point. Perhaps we all need to learn this lesson. Especially elected officials could stand to learn the problem with moderation.
Does this mean that we should disregard it? What do we do if the person we dont like is correct
In all after playing for about ten minutes, I have to conclude that this is some kind of corporate apologetics for bad content management. The pointless timer really drives home that this problem could be solved by spending more money on training content reviewers and hiring more of them. I came away from the game feeling like it's a sequel to Papers, Please.
I was personally more convinced of the double-bind issue after playing: different groups of people (at every level) have different norms, the Internet helps bring them all in contact with each other, and I can see how that's a recipe for making them angry with each other and also with the intermediary.
The entire concept of modern social media where every site wants to be everything to everyone is wrong. Even the "fediverse" gets this wrong IMHO. There's plenty of room on the web for all of us. Links are features, not a threat to your retention metric.
If you liked that game, you might like Police Contraband. There is some bad combat aspects forced into the game, but it's enjoyable.
The game is tense and boring and it illustrates both why paid Facebook "moderators" suffer PTSD and why this so-called "moderation" fails to improve the content of discussion or build community.
Actually worthwhile moderation involves someone caring about the whole direction of the discussion and not merely considering "is this content over the line", especially since a large portion of "don't talk about drugs" or whatever is pure CYA. "Don't say that 'cause someone might sue us".
So it's possible on Facebook. It's just not possible for just Facebook. Reddit seems a better model for community at scale but somehow I haven't jumped into that.
For eduction purpose would be cool to explain rules after the fact.
Small feedback: when there is an appeal, I'm not sure wether green means approving the appeal or stay with the initial decision.
https://www.engine.is/startupseverywhere
which I guess may be meant to appeal to legislative staff (because they can see that there are likely to be startups in their districts?).
That said, one important takeaway I got is that moderation needs priorities. While I’m thinking for 15s about whether a review about a herbal health product is “medically misleading” I have CSAM in the queue right after.
This would make the blue look-into-it-more button useless
> the creators value judgments are inserted (for instance “ethnic slur” is ambiguous in many real cases, eg negro could be legit in a spanish-speaking or referencing context, or “white trash” which could both be a slur and the title of an edgy Vice documentary).
You’re supposed to use the blue look-into-it-more button to figure this kind of stuff out
Isn't that the problem? If a report is in regards to the content of a post, and we have limited time, why not start with the actual content being reported first and have the reporter's arbitrary comments be secondary?
It's only not considered a slur in the second case because Vice has money, you and your friends and powerful people like Vice, and the "white trash" don't reflexively assault you like beasts when they hear the words uttered. The meaning is understood and remembered regardless.
It turns out that we don't have to speculate about this motivation, because they spelled it out quite explicitly in a blog post:
(And she doesn't take Nerf breaks!)
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/11/moderator-mayhem-a-mobil...
He's been writing about the difficulties of site moderation for a long time.
first few minutes : yeah this is cool this is what i wanted
not very long later : this is awful, please take it back
if i wanted to moderate something more effectively i would make a better one
i'd rather blame the difficulty of moderation itself on people's inability to innovate
The trick seems to be that you have to check the “extra info” frequently, and be reasonably quick to decide as soon as you see it. It doesn’t seem possible to make the right decision on many of the cards without that context. It is kinda fun to see all the attempts to game the system.
A few of the cards were really frustrating: the correct solution to some of them would be writing a ten-word response, or making an edit, but I only had "take down" and "leave up" buttons. (‘It's just a game!’ I remind myself.) I do hope real content moderators aren't so bereft of tooling.
The story is… really boring, actually? There are a couple dozen little things going on in the background, but not many, and there's not enough gameplay time for them to be explored. I'd hoped for something more like Papers, Please. (Judging by the achievements, there are actually several possible stories; I can only seem to get the election one.)
The sentiment of the general public doesn't seem to behave realistically, either: not when I made obviously-unpopular decisions, and not when the CEO made obviously-unpopular decisions.
I got 4 out of 5 stars with high ratings.
One thing I'd add: doxxing of a quasi legal type such as posting details about a politicians family member and their private dealings.
Certainly captures the feel of going through modqueue and making snap decisions.
Glad I don't have a boss constantly reviewing my decisions though.
Theres a relatively well known video of multiple mods at a seminar asked to decide if pieces of content should stay up or be taken down.
At no point, was there consensus.
Content that most people would consider heinous, were allowed up by at least one mod, with a strong reason to do so.
There is no “fix”. There’s no magic. It’s just us in here.
Well made!
reality dictates that what is or isn't acceptable content is not a function of platform policy, it's a function of the legal jurisdiction in which the content is produced and/or consumed
this isn't really complicated
you can't evaluate the acceptability of a given post on a content platform without knowledge of the relevant legal jurisdiction
the game doesn't seem to understand this core property, so (shrug) useless I guess