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by nomel 2139 days ago
> One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation.

I don't mean to sound condescending, but I think the answer to this question would be much clearer to you if you took a moment to try to comprehend the scale that google operates in.
2 comments
tpxl 2139 days ago
Some random source on the internet tells me Alphabet made around 7 billion profit in a quarter last year. That's 28 billion per year. At 100k/year per person you get 280 000 people doing moderation for you to breakeven. According to another random source Alphabet has about 120k employees.

The scale is not the problem, the profiteering is.

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pwinnski 2139 days ago
Somewhat ironically, the very site at issue has long claimed that content moderation at scale is impossible[0].

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...

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edmundsauto 2139 days ago
Human solutions have problems too. Inconsistency, monitoring, access control. Every employee is a potential leak or Twitter takeover. Building systems to manage these things are difficult, painful, and could make Google do work they aren't very good at.

Also, we have no idea how their support teams metrics are doing. Maybe the automation is actually superior to human customer service.

From the outside of the castle, what we see is more a result of our projections rather than what's going on inside.

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InfiniteRand 2138 days ago
One thing I imagine is if you scale up assuming that algorithmic solutions will be good enough, and then find out that they aren't, you find yourself in a hole, because you haven't budgeted enough to hire human moderators now, and you have enough visibility and investors that it is hard to scale down.

There was some post on HN I think about a Morrocan links site that basically got into this situation, his solution was to freeze sign-ups and look for someone to buy his domain, which is probably not an appetizing option for Google. I think MySpace's experience was also somewhat like this.

Of course, in reality the situation with Adsense is not that they cannot function while using algorithmic moderation, but that they cannot provide a high quality service, so whether they like or not the most viable option is to provide a lesser quality service.

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