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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about the contents that these people moderated. What is it that seeing it fucks people up?

From the first paragraph of the article:

> post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism.

If you want a taste of the legal portion of theses just got to 4chan.org/gif/catalog and look for a "rekt", "war", "gore", or "women hate" thread. Watch every video there for 8-10 hours a day.

Now remember this is the legal portion of the content moderated as 4chan does a good job these days of removing illegal content mentioned in that list above. So all these examples will be a milder sample of what moderators deal with.

And do remember to browse for 8-10 hours a day.

edit: it should go without saying that the content there is deep in the NSFW territory, and if you haven't already stumbled upon that content, I do not recommend browsing "out of curiosity".

As someone that grew up with 4chan I got pretty desensitized to all of the above very quickly. Only thing I couldn’t watch was animal abuse videos. That was all yers ago though, now I’m fully sensitized to all of it again.

The point is that you don't know which one will stick. Even people who are desensitized will remember certain things, a person's facial expression or a certain sound or something like that, and you can't predict which one will stick with you.

Did your parents know what you were seeing? Advice to others to not have kids see this kind of stuff, let alone get desensitized to it?

What drew you to 4chan?

Of course not. What drew me in was the edginess. What kept me there was the very dark but funny humor. This was in 2006-2010, it was all brand new, it was exciting.

I have a kid now and my plan is to not give her a smartphone/social media till she’s 16 and heavily monitor internet access until she’s atleast 12. Obviously I can’t control what she will see with friends but she goes to a rigorous school and I’m hoping that will keep her busy. Other than that I’m hoping the government comes down hard on social media access to kids/teenagers and all the restrictions are legally codified by the time she’s old enough.

That fucking guy torturing monkeys :(

These accounts like yours and this report of PTSD don't line up. Both of them are credible. What's driving them crazy but not Old Internet vets?

Could it be:

  - the fact that moderators are hired and paid  
  - that kids are young and a lot more tolerant  
  - that moderators aren't intended audiences  
  - backgrounds, sensitivity in media at all  
  - the amount, of disturbing images  
  - the amount, in total, not just bad ones  
  - anything else?

Personally, I'm suspecting that difference in exposure to _any kind of media_ might be a factor; I've come across stories online that imply visiting and staying at places like Tokyo can almost drive people crazy, from the amount of stimuli alone.

Doesn't it sound a bit too shallow and biased to determine it was specifically CSAM or whatever specific type of data that did it?

Because intent and perspective play a huge role is how we feel about things. Some people are excited for war and killing their enemies makes them feel better about themselves whereas others come back from war broken and traumatized. A lot of it depends on how you or others frame that experience for you.

things that you cannot unsee, the absolute worst of humanity

There was a report by 60 minutes (I think) on this fairly recently. I’m not surprised the publicity attracted lawyers soon after.

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