Hacker News Reader

Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

You know who should really be doing the moderation work?

The very people in that very local community!

This is how this is supposed to work in a healthy and well-functioning society/community -- it moderates itself with internal deliberation about what the norms are and with reflection and awareness of how things are changing, with self-assigned community leaders and adults! The moment you outsource that important task outside the community is the moment you doom and cripple that community.

Because when it's some Kenyans far away doing the moderation then we here don't have an awareness of what's going on here and what the social climate is, how norms are changing, what the youth are up to. Forgoing this feedback loop which results in some measure of self-correction can't be good and that lag in cognizance will come to get us before it's too late to do much of the dangers lurking about.

View on HN

Ok, let's take the example of the video of someone being beheaded, who from the "local community" should do the moderation in that case? The ones doing the beheading, or the ones in danger of being beheaded?

I personally would want to know who in my local community is doing the beheading, who is supporting it, and what the reason is for the beheading. I am against moderation in the online world. We need to bring it all into the light and be transparent. Perhaps we just have "flag and make this post blurry" button on the post and keep the content as a compromise.

edited: rewording

But the vast majority of people don’t want to see it. How would you resolve that?

Don't shield people of the horrors caused by mad men, for they will be their next victims.

Shouldn’t the people decide what constitutes shielding and sheltering by themselves?

I'm pretty sure my chances of being beheaded don't vary with how many ISIS videos some troll adds to my Facebook feed

Q: It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid.

Should timid people refrain from using the internet altogether?

Absolutely. Public speaking, conversations with strangers, and exposure to unfiltered communication are generally avoided by the timid.

My question was about what you think should happen, not what generally tends to happen. Do you think people who prefer not to view explicit photos or footage of immolations, beheadings, or child abuse should refrain from any form of online communication?

At a young age having seen all the above and worse, both in person and online - yes, the Internet (and world) is a corrupted place. There is darkness and light all around.

I recently explained to my child that there are things in this world we cannot forget and that is why we must be careful what we listen to, what we watch, and what we seek. The idea of stopping any of the above is impossible yet I can change where my attention is focused.

Ok, but say someone posted explicit child pornography on your wondrous social network. What now?

I could imagine a pretty simple social network where, if someone posted a beheading video, many people would report it as being objectionable. If enough of the people I connected as friends reported the video (or, perhaps, enough of the ones whom I marked as trustworthy) then I would never see it.

Instead the way the social network is designed is that some freak who is a friend of a friend posts a video of a person's head being chopped off and a guy in Kenya has to delete it, because everything about the internet is profoundly insane.

I could imagine a pretty simple social network where, if someone posted a gay marriage video, many people would report it as being objectionable. If enough of the people I connected as friends reported the video (or, perhaps, enough of the ones whom I marked as trustworthy) then I would never see it.

Right. If I’m friends with a bunch of bigots and I delegate my moderation function to them, I would expect the system to work as you described. This is community moderation.

Or are you suggesting that an optimal social network should jam both gay marriage and beheading videos down my throat?

I’m honestly curious what you’re getting at here. Would you mind making a much more substantive post?

that seems like the ideal, but I'm pretty sure in my town the moderator will end up being the mayor's best friend and just railroad everything.

Just can't help but notice that everybody in leadership where I live is from the same clan!

Well yeah, whoever is the town moderator is any mayor's best friend. Essentially the same power formerly held by a newspaper's publisher and editorial board.

> The very people in that very local community!

I think you are right. It's also important that the local community set behavioral boundaries (in real life, actual laws) and the system for dealing with breaking those boundaries (in real life, the actual judicial system). The stuff they are moderating, if done in real life, would enjoy very little protection from the law.

Facebook: Person starts talking to person, sends dick pic, continues conversation.

Real Life: Person starts conversation in public place, exposes self, keeps on talking.

In real life this kind of behavior is highly likely to result in an arrest, engagement with the legal system, possible fines and jail. In Facebook world, you might get a post post deleted, a warning from a mod, and maybe get your account suspended. Additionally, local norms may be very different, and so laws tend to be very different.

A lot of the bad behavior we see in social media is largely because people get away with it, with little risk to loss of freedom and wealth.

> In Facebook world, you might get a post post deleted, a warning from a mod, and maybe get your account suspended

In Ireland sending dick pics is now illegal and can result in legal action.

> The very people in that very local community!

On one level I agree. On another level I think this is perhaps unrealistically idealistic.

I'm a member, and very infrequent poster, on a couple of different facebook groups for local communities. I've seen too many instances of admins in these communities going on some sort of mini-powertrip with post "moderation" to believe that many of the people in these communities possess the maturity, objectivity, and self-awareness to do this well.

And then, if you are a mod, and you're genuinely good at it, you still seem to get tons of abuse thrown at you, so where's the incentive? It seems like a very thankless task to me.

Er, how do you draw borders around an Internet community, which has no physical boundaries?

This is the fundamental failure of social networks. We never should have expected "anyone in the world can talk to anyone else" to work. Humans just don't work like that (and physically cannot function in such an environment. See research by Robin Dunbar et. al).

I’m currently in Arkansas. Where are you?

I'm in the UK, but we are united by a common culture: HN is designed to select its users for a particular set of interests, attitudes and behaviours. But mainstream social media platforms are designed to be for everybody, and that's not working.

They’re designed to show you content you like so you watch their ads…

But sure, only compatible cultures should talk to one another?

So which cultures pair well with yours and which don’t, then? Who would you kick off the Internet/social media?

> But sure, only compatible cultures should talk to one another?

No, this would be taking my argument too far. Online communities develop their own cultures and norms, mostly borrowed from the real-world cultural contexts of their constituent members. Someone trying to participate in a community without conforming to those cultural expectations is going to cause trouble.

> So which cultures pair well with yours and which don’t, then? Who would you kick off the Internet/social media?

I see no reason to kick anyone off social media, but I think unfocused social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, &c. are causing social problems. There were Americans in America protesting against coronavirus lockdowns in Australia, and there are Australians who have reoriented their entire identities around Donald Trump and QAnon: people are being radicalised about events that have nothing to do with them, and over which they have no control.

The social media I want to see is the old-style message fora that existed before modern social media: phpBB- and vBulletin-based communities that were designed around shared interests, not platform functionality.

Moderation is a real problem for modern social platforms. In the 90s, we had the so-called Scunthorpe Problem: AOL users living in UK towns like Scunthorpe and Penistone were banned from the AOL support forum for giving honest answers to inquiries into their location. The problem persists in a more subtle form, even on this website, in the Forbidden Meatball Problem[0].

Interest-based online communities would be able to carry out their own moderation according to their own cultures, and consequently avoid these problems.

[0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-dish-encounters-q...

Okay cool; so we should... ban companies that build social networks that are too inclusive?

What is the action you're suggesting?

> This is how this is supposed to work in a healthy and well-functioning society/community -- it moderates itself with internal deliberation about what the norms are and with reflection and awareness of how things are changing, with self-assigned community leaders and adults!

I'd like to think that it's a good idea, but don't you think that it will quickly become an echo chamber?

Think of current communities known for being intolerant of outside ideas (The very religious communities, the hard left/right communities) - the only way they can do so is because they police themselves against new ideas.

Maybe.

So what?

Humans are wired to form small communities. That was the world before the internet.

Now everyone is connected on these massive platforms and people are miserable.

Maybe that older model was the right one after all, and the trade-off--less contact between those communities--is worth it, so long as people can freely associate with whichever communities they choose.

> Maybe.

> So what?

So ... nothing, I guess? I didn't say whether I thought it was a good or bad thing, I just wanted to point out that there is more nuance than appears at first glance.

I'm not advocating for blind "in-group good, out-group bad" policies, nor for the reverse of "new thing good, old thing bad".

I get and appreciate what you're saying but I disagree because I think when the veil is a little bit lifted for a community of the mechanisms of moderation it is subject to, it both nullifies a component of chaos in its evolution and I think it hastens the path of progression by allowing a more clear-headed internal deliberation.

I think it is generally true that things get better and better values win when a community is left alone to their devices (pun unintended), what with the long arc of justice in the universe and all.

To an extent. Members of the gardening community probably won't be ok moderating gore and creepy DMs, they'll be scared away. You need someone else who's desensitized enough to gore and creepy DMs that they can filter them out before they get to the community.

I really doubt that Kenyans are filtering anything remotely reasonable, only obvious hate speech and nudity/gore. And the general consensus is that people shouldn't be exposed to hate and graphic content unless they explicitly seek it out, even though it by-definition "shelters" them.

Internet moderation is even more thankless and maligned than meatspace moderation, so nobody wants to do it. I don't know how to fix the problem, but that's at the heart of it.

Counterpoint wikipedia. Reddit. Various smaller forums

But i agree that i cant see it working for facebook which isn't really modeled as a community.

Reddit mostly managed to get people to do this. (Even taking recent controversy into account.) Facebook could similarly require people who create a group to moderate it.

Of course Facebook also has "non group" posts, but that's the minority of the total posts, and they could probably get completely rid of it.

>You know who should really be doing the moderation work?

>The very people in that very local community!

Don't be silly! Then people might get the idea that they own their own community instead of passively accepting what they're told. They might even get the idea that they should actively participate instead of mindlessly doomscrolling and receiving the all important consensus shaping on what to purchase this week.

And who wants that?

> The very people in that very local community!

This is mostly how Reddit moderation works, each subreddit is one small community with local moderators.

I generally agree that this approach to moderation is much better than some universal moderation. OTOH, small communities are often playgrounds for petty dictators.

I'd suggest googling what kinds of material is there on Fb and considering a bit if it's appropriate for "the community" to moderate such kinds of material

What do you mean "in that very local community". Do you mean DMs should also be public to the geographic location you're in? Do you mean a white majority in a local space should be allowed to blanket ban black people from using facebook?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com