[stonogo]

This is more like a game about shitty management communication. The rules are fairly arbitrary, and you're not told about any of them until you screw up, and even clear-cut cases like someone posting someone else's phone number are used to slap your wrist (apparently the second person consented, but nobody explains why that's your problem. Surely the second person can post their own phone number). Some advertisement is okay, other advertisement is forbidden. There's never a policy about which is which, you just have to guess. If this is how social media websites handle content reviewing it's no wonder the industry is a cesspit.

In all after playing for about ten minutes, I have to conclude that this is some kind of corporate apologetics for bad content management. The pointless timer really drives home that this problem could be solved by spending more money on training content reviewers and hiring more of them. I came away from the game feeling like it's a sequel to Papers, Please.

[sdwr]

"corporate apologetics" - This is pretty clearly about the actual experience of working as a front-line worker in content management. Percieved time pressure, edge cases, lack of context, juggling 100 different priorities.

[schoen]

It's hosted by Engine, a lobbying organization for startups, so it seems likely that they think it will show people that companies hosting user-generated content face a hard situation (and double-binds where whatever they do will anger people).

I was personally more convinced of the double-bind issue after playing: different groups of people (at every level) have different norms, the Internet helps bring them all in contact with each other, and I can see how that's a recipe for making them angry with each other and also with the intermediary.

[shadowgovt]

Moderation is a back-stop service with plenty of candidates in the pool; companies fire new moderators for coming into the job with the wrong "taste" all the time because it's much, much easier to cycle someone out and grab someone new than to train someone who has the wrong "common sense."

[mulmen]

TBH I think this is a feature of human nature. It's impossible to impose your will and opinion at scale because you have to rely on other people with their own will. You can have small, curated communities, but you can't build Twitter without it devolving into, well, Twitter.

The entire concept of modern social media where every site wants to be everything to everyone is wrong. Even the "fediverse" gets this wrong IMHO. There's plenty of room on the web for all of us. Links are features, not a threat to your retention metric.

[tedunangst]

You should intern as a content moderator and create a game based on your real experience.

[stonogo]

I've been involved plenty of content moderation, just not as an outsourcing target for a microblog company. I suspect the job is much easier when the rules are explicit, provided in advance, and the moderation team is sufficiently staffed, which is the environment I worked in. I have other priorities than making a computer game about it, so we'll never know for sure.