[oldtownroad]

Visit a platform like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook and try to report content: the complex decision tree of what to report and why will be a good demonstration or how unintuitive the reality of content moderation is. Every user of every platform has a different understanding of even simple concepts, like “scam” and “spam”. Report reasons are not an accurate classification from a trained expert, they’re a thing a user chooses from a list that has to be designed to both provide valuable context to a moderator and capture the wide range of different understandings different users have.

Suggesting that a reason should be added for the specific situation you’ve encountered demonstrates the naive understanding most people have of moderation and that’s what this game is good at.

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter will have spent tens of thousands of people hours thinking about something as simple as the list of report reasons.

[ianferrel]

There are plenty of difficult judgment calls in content moderating.

But the difference between "illegal content" and "content that promotes breaking the law" isn't really one of them to be made by the moderator. This is just bad instructions from the game maker.

[ethanbond]

You don’t think content moderators have to deal with: “hey kid, you should go shoot up a school?”

Just cleanly not in their domain?

[ianferrel]

I think that content moderators often have to deal with that issue, and they are given rules like "remove posts that suggest that others commit violent acts" or something like that. And those are reasonable rules for moderators to enforce.

But the rules that this game give do not include that rule, and it's a mark of a poorly designed game that the rule says "don't allow illegal content" and then when you (correctly!) apply that rule, the game says "you should have not allowed this because it's suggesting that someone do something illegal". Those aren't the same rule!

ETA: Like lots of places have rules against reposting copyrighted content. But a post that said "Psst, kid, you should go download a movie from the Pirate Bay" should not be removed under that rule. Because the content of the post isn't copyrighted. If they also had a rule that said "don't encourage piracy", they could reasonably take it down under that rule.

[ethanbond]

I see I see now what you’re saying. You’ve convinced me :)

[ianferrel]

Always great to have a discussion with open-minded people. Cheers, internet buddy!