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by intended 2165 days ago
Absolutely not.

There are 2 mods running HN. Responding to people is TAXING - as in its hugely costly. And it has some terrible edge cases which destroy the process:

The costly occasions are when you meet people who are either

a) Angry

b) Rule lawyers

c) malignantly motivated

AT this point their goal is to get attention or apply coercive force on the moderation process.

These guys are an existential threat to the conversational process and one of the win conditions is to get people to turn against the moderators.

Social media is a topic that HN gets wrong so regularly, and without recourse to research or analysis so frequently that I would avoid discussing moderation in general here.

The fact is that if people are arguing in good faith, we can have some amount of peace, and even deal with inadvertent faux pas and ignorance, provided you never reach an eternal september scenario.

But bad faith actors make even this scenario impossible.

1 comments

If you know of research or analysis that is essential on this topic, please tell us what it is. I'd like to be sure I'm aware of it, and other readers would surely be interested also.
Hmm. Given the broad range of topics "social Media" covers, there are vast numbers of papers on it.

For people who have NEVER thought of social networks and conversations online I find this site to discuss some of the blander but more game theoretic elements of networks/trust and therefore online conversations:

https://ncase.me/crowds/

https://ncase.me/trust/

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For you guys (HN Mods) I'd bet that you in particular are abreast of stuff.

- I'd ask if you have heard/seen Civil Servant, by Nathan Matias - its a system to do experiments on forums and test the results (see if there is a measurable change on user behavior)

https://natematias.com/ - Civil Servant, Professor Cornell. He probably has an account here

https://civilservant.io/moderation_experiment_r_science_rule...

- Books: Custodians of the internet.

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Going through some of the papers I have stocked away, sadly in no sane order. I can't say if they are classic papers, you may have better.

- Policy/law Paper: Georgetown law, Regulating Online Content Moderation. https://www.law.georgetown.edu/georgetown-law-journal/wp-con...

- NBER paper on polarization - https://www.nber.org/papers/w23258, I disagreed/was surprised by the conclusion. America centric.

- Homophily and minority-group size explain perception biases in social networks, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0677-4

- The spreading of misinformation online: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554.full

- The Uni of Alabama has a reddit research group, - https://arrg.ua.edu/research.html, they have 2 papers. One of which explores the effect of a sudden influx of new users on r/2xchromosomes. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10143/...

-policy: OFCOM (UK) has a policy paper on using AI for moderation https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/157249/...

- Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053951719897945

- The Web Centipede: Understanding How Web Communities Influence Each Other Through the Lens of Mainstream and Alternative News Sources

- Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web,

- You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech

Papers I have to read myself,

- Does Transparency in Moderation Really Matter?: User Behavior After Content Removal Explanations on Reddit. https://shagunjhaver.com/files/research/jhaver-2019-transpar...

- Censored, suspended, shadowbanned: User interpretations of content moderation on social media platforms: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/146144481877305... (I need to read that paper, but I expect it to be a good foundation of knowledge and examples)

Other stuff:

- The turing institute talked about Moderators being key workers during COVID - https://www.turing.ac.uk/blog/why-content-moderators-should-...

Hey really big thank you for posting this! I'm working on a new discussion site and so much of this is pertinent. I may return with some follow-up commentary once I've read through some of it, thank you.
NP. If you find any interesting papers, do share.
What papers/articles/sources do you guys read?