[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.