Comment by rngname22 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rngname22 | Hacker News Reader

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If you could pick a curated video catalog, where a human editorial team accepted or declined new video submissions at upload time, and a human team decided what videos ought to be featured / amplified more broadly to various user clusters, would you prefer that to an open system where anyone could upload and ML decided that some users enjoy seeing reptilian conspiracies but a particular group of moderators/curators weren't the arbitrators of truth and taste and moral purity?

(not a loaded question, and it is possible different companies could emerge that would compete on the basis of their taste/curation/moderation policies. also equally possible it would be too costly/ unprofitable for the market to bear many smaller competing entities).

I think perhaps there's a third option but we just haven't really defined and figured it out yet. Some mixture of crowdsourced taste/moderation plus top down taste/moderation plus unfiltered UGC. Twitter's new user-generated Community Notes might be a good example of a step in a new direction. Social media is still relatively new.

> arbitrators of truth and taste and moral purity

I have not once looked at TV network executives, publishing house editors, museum curators, retail inventory buyers, librarians, gallerists, or magazine editors as any of those things. Why would somebody do so for video curation?

You don’t need some complicated top down bottom up crowdsourced ML blah blah blah. You just need to be able to contextualize content to the curator. Which is what people naturally do when there is an accountable curator.

Perhaps people who grew up recently only know content as endless troves of machine-curated feeds with no accountability or attributability, but that’s actually just a very ahistorical side effect of Section 230.

Every other way of experiencing media has always been through some curated context, with a specific entity you can point at as the responsible curator, and through which you color your experience of the content.

That’s not to say people couldn’t be misled in that model as well, but this whole “curators are the arbiter of truth” thing has no real or historical ground. Explicit curation actually offers the very opposite thing: recognizable, accountable, obvious context.

I think I’m happy with the current system, I’m anti-censorship and IMHO any content that doesn’t harm someone directly should never be deleted.

I am on the side of personal responsibility, that is, any content should be associated with its creator, and it should follow them. If someone posts completely ridiculous video, that video should affect their personal lives. If they change mind and apologize, that should be accepted too. That’s basically how real life relations work.

I just find the labeling as AI pointless.

I think the root of the problem is presuming that "engagement" is always good. Engagement can be for multiple reasons, and the problem will be solved as soon as we can figure out how to more qualitatively measure engagement.

Why does it have to be a centralized team?

I think the best answer will be some form of decentralized moderation. All we need is to put curators (users) in a web of trust, and have them cryptographically sign their opinions.

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