[halfmatthalfcat]

I've been thinking hard about decentralized content moderation, especially around chatrooms, for years. More specifically because I'm building a large, chatroom-like service for TV.

I think it's evident from Facebook, Twitter, et al that human moderation of very dynamic situations is incredibly hard, maybe even impossible.

I've been brewing up strategies of letting the community itself moderate because a machine really cannot "see" what content is good or bad, re: context.

While I think that community moderation will inevitably lead to bubbles, it's a better and more organic tradeoff than letting a centralized service dictate what is and isn't "good".

[Blikkentrekker]

The problem is obviously that people very often do not want what they say they want.

When a man says he supports freedom of speech, he isn't thinking about the speech that he wishes to limit as he finds it so abhorrent, and where that line lies differs from one man to the other.

Such initiatives fail, as even when men come together and admit they allow for the most abhorrent of opinions to be censored, they seldom realize that each and every one of them has a very different idea of what that is.

[enumjorge]

Case in point, alt-right communities who champion “free speech” like Parler and in Reddit often ban people who express opinions they disagree with.

[Mindwipe]

Indeed, Parler banned lots of speech. Especially breasts.

[youdontlisten]

Case in point, alt-left communities who champion "free speech" like Hacker News often shadowban people who express opinions they disagree with, especially if it's said in the wrong 'tone' of voice--direct aggression rather than passive aggressiveness, which is the preferred atmosphere here.

[Blikkentrekker]

I'm always suspicious when specifically “left” or “right” or any other specific political colors are mentioned as such with regards to censorship — it reeks of not being objective.

It is a problem of all mankind, not any particular political color; the only color above it are of course specifically the free speech advocates.

[Blikkentrekker]

I was honestly more so thinking about holocaust denial which some consider to abhorrent but others within the line of acceptability.

As in, the things that, some wish, were banned by law.

I don't think many of the reddit moderators so notorious for wanting an echo chamber would advocate it be criminally illegal.

[mountainb]

'Bubbles' are a pejorative way of just saying 'local communities.' Perhaps as a nation we do not benefit from having an international and transparent global community that is always on and always blaring propaganda and manipulation at people.

[davidivadavid]

Yup, people have been brainwashed into thinking "bubbles" are a problem when they've been the solution to that problem from the start.

I've suggested that idea a million time, it's all yours for the taking for those who want to implement it:

Build a social network where there is a per-user karma/reputation graph, with a recursive mechanism to propagate reputation (with decay): I like a post, that boosts the signal/reputation from whoever posted, and from people who liked it, and decreases signal from people who downvoted it.

There can be arbitrarily more sophisticated propagation algorithms to jumpstart new users by weighing their first few votes more highly and "absorb" existing user reputation graphs (some Bayesian updating of some kind).

Allow basic things like blocking/muting/etc with similar effects.

This alone would help people curate their information way more efficiently. There are people who post things I know for a fact I never want to read again. That's fine, let me create my own bubble.

The TrustNet/Freechains concepts seem adjacent and it's the first time I come across them — looks interesting.

[pitay]

If it includes a recommendation system, then something to mix them up a bit so that people can see things that are different to what they have holed themselves into one view/subject by their own karma curation. The idea is that each recommendation has a chance to be anything, more likely something suggested by karma, but has the tiny chance to be the thing that karma suggests I least like. I like the idea of seeing a subject that I didn't know I was interested in or posts I would find objectionable some of the time.

[davidivadavid]

Yeah, you could introduce a random element of serendipity where you sometimes push a bit further out of the graph to discover things out of your usual purview.

[yulaow]

Honestly after seeing the state of most subreddits (aka they become echo-chamber of whatever the main moderators find "worth of value" and very toxic about whatever is against their idea), community self-moderation seems a total failure.

[Viliam1234]

Most people are stupid. Therefore I would expect most communities to be moderated horribly. How could it be otherwise if they are moderated by stupid people elected by other stupid people? The good part is that people who are better than average can create their own community which will be better than average. How much better, that only depends on those people.

The alternative is having some kind of elite moderators that moderate all communities. It sets a lower bar on their quality. Unfortunately, it also sets an upper bar on their quality. Everything will be as good as the appointed elite likes it, neither better nor worse.

From the perspective of what the average person sees, the latter is probably better. From the perspective that I am an individual who can choose a community or two to participate in, and I don't care about the rest, the latter is better.

[halfmatthalfcat]

Reddit still relies on human moderators, admins, etc. What I'm talking about is a purely community driven moderation scheme where, through various algorithms, the community dictates what is and isn't acceptable.

[mminer237]

Wouldn't that just be essentially upvoting and downvoting and deleting downvoted posts?

That was originally the intent of reddit, that people would downvote unconstructive comments, but that quickly turns into the community "moderating" away anything they disagree with, and enforcing an echochamber.

I don't think communities can have enough objectivity to effectively moderate themselves.

[watwut]

Parler moderated by showing post to 5 random people and taking their result.

[gremlinsinc]

That's a great idea, if those people were vetted for being objective. If I posted the communist manifesto, would that be blocked, would I be kicked out?

What about censorship on something like that?

[watwut]

Kicked out, it was heavily right wing community. That was partly point of it.

But even outside of Parler, no human is ever perfectly objective.

[Cthulhu_]

> I've been brewing up strategies of letting the community itself moderate because a machine really cannot "see" what content is good or bad, re: context.

There's a ton of material on that subject, thankfully; look at news groups, HN itself (flagging), Stack Overflow, Joel Spolsky's blogs on Discourse, etc etc etc. My girlfriend is active on Twitter and frequently joins in mass reporting of certain content, which is both a strong signal, and easily influenced by mobs.

[halfmatthalfcat]

Do you have any references to those materials? Would love to read up on some more academic takes.

[wombatmobile]

> I think it's evident from Facebook, Twitter, et al that human moderation of very dynamic situations is incredibly hard, maybe even impossible.

How would you know what the evidence tells us from those platforms, when their criteria and resources for moderation are proprietary and opaque?

FB is a profitable company.

Have you calculated how many moderators could be paid $20 per hour out of $15.92 billion profit?

Approximately 400,000.

[mr-wendel]

The problem with scaling upward is how incredibly soul-rending the job is. At some level you're basically guaranteeing that some number of people are going to be traumatized.

Maybe at some point the better strategy is to limit public exposure and favor segmenting some groups out into their own space that requires extremely explicit opt-in measures? Hard to say, and tucking it away into its own corner of the web seems rife with its own problems.

As another commenter expressed on some other topic, this is a long-running problem with many incarnations: Usenet, IRC, BBSs, etc. It's become especially salient with the explosion of social media platforms that include everyone from Grandma to Grandson.

Bottom line... my heart goes out to moderators of these kind of platforms.

[techbio]

Sounds like a use case for some of those humanities majors.

[sandworm101]

>> a centralized service dictate what is and isn't "good".

This isn't movie reviews. Good and bad are not the standards. The standard is whether or not something is illegal. When the feds come knocking on your door because your servers are full of highly illegal content, "we let them moderate themselves" will be no defense.

[pjc50]

"Legal" is both local and can change over time. America has been in an unusual situation because it allows far more speech, especially speech right up to the boundary of "incitement to violence".

However, the police have far too much to do, so in practice millions of blatently illegal death threats get sent every day and do not receive any police response. Hence the demand for a non-police response that can far more cheaply remove the death threats or threateners.

[Mindwipe]

"Legal" is not a very good determination.

Discussion of homosexuality is "illegal" in many states. It is a moral imperative for systems to break those laws.

[DangerousPie]

How do you deal with the problem that the content the current community promotes isn't necessarily the content that is best for your product in the long run (what if they are very dismissive of new members, hampering growth?), or even legal?

[halfmatthalfcat]

Per TV show, it's not one big chat room, however there is a default "general" room that is use to that effect. It's very much like Slack/Discord channels. Users are able to essentially create topic rooms within a show.

Think of each TV show as it's own Discord server and within the show are user-generated topic rooms.

My hope is that users basically self-silo into topic rooms that interest them in regards to whatever show their watching.

For example: the Yankees are playing the Marlins. Users can create a #yankees room, a #marlins room, a #umpire room, etc to create chat rooms around a given topic in regards to whatever they're watching. In each room, a user has the ability to block, filter words, etc...so they can tailor their chat experience in whatever way they want while watching any given show.

[EGreg]

A news and celebrity pundit industry that operates in a capitalist fashion has companies that employ people. They have a profit motive and face market competition. This shapes their behavior. News organizations that tell both sides of a story do not provoke the sensationalism and outrage that news organizations which tell only one side. So they don’t get shared as much.

The market literally selects for more one sided clickbaity outrage articles.

Meanwhile social networks compete for your attention and “engagement” for clicks on ads so their algorithms will show you the stories that are the most outrageous and put you in an echo chamber.

It’s not some accident. It’s by design.

If we were ok with slowing down the news and running it like Wikipedia with a talk page, peer review, byzantine consensus, whatever you want to call it — concentric circles where people digest what happens and the public gets a balanced view that is based on collaboration rather than competition with a profit motive - our society would be less divided and more informed.

Also, Apple and Google should start charging for notifications, with an exception for real-time calls and self-selected priority channels/contacts signing the notification payload. The practically free notifications creates a tragedy of the commons and ruins our dinners!

[repartix]

I'd like to know what dang learned moderating HN.

[eternalban]

Make a cogent and non-authoritarian case for even having a "decentralized content moderation" which doesn't pass the "is this an oxymoron?" smell test.

> I'm building a large, chatroom-like service for TV.

So the profit motive is likely the motivation for applying a "central" doctrine of acceptable discourse using a decentralized mechanism.

> While I think that community moderation will inevitably lead to bubbles

Which allows for e.g. an athiest community to have content that rips religion x's scripture to shred (and why not?) in the same planet that also has a religion-x community that has content that takes a bat to over-reaching rationalism. Oh the horror! Diversity of thought. "We simply can not permit this."