Simon Willison’s Weblog

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9 items tagged “moderation”

2024

Spam, and its cousins like content marketing, could kill HN if it became orders of magnitude greater—but from my perspective, it isn’t the hardest problem on HN. [...]

By far the harder problem, from my perspective, is low-quality comments, and I don’t mean by bad actors—the community is pretty good about flagging and reporting those; I mean lame and/or mean comments by otherwise good users who don’t intend to and don’t realize they’re doing that.

dang # 19th February 2024, 3:57 pm

2023

I remember that they [Ev and Biz at Twitter in 2008] very firmly believed spam was a concern, but, “we don’t think it’s ever going to be a real problem because you can choose who you follow.” And this was one of my first moments thinking, “Oh, you sweet summer child.” Because once you have a big enough user base, once you have enough people on a platform, once the likelihood of profit becomes high enough, you’re going to have spammers.

Del Harvey # 22nd November 2023, 4:59 am

2022

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience.

Nilay Patel # 28th October 2022, 3:45 pm

Welcome to hell, Elon (via) If you only read one thing about the Elon acquisition of Twitter make it this, by Nilay Patel. Outstanding insights into what it actually takes to to run a commercial social media service. # 28th October 2022, 3:16 pm

2020

“I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation (via) Sophie Zhang worked as the data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team. She gave up her severance package in order to speak out internally about what she saw there, and someone leaked her memo to BuzzFeed News. It’s a hell of a story: she saw bots and coordinated manual accounts used to influence politics in countries all around the world, and found herself constantly making moderation decisions that had lasting political impact. “With no oversight whatsoever, I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time". This sounds like a nightmare—imagine taking on responsibility for protecting democracy in so many different places. # 15th September 2020, 9:11 pm

I’ve found, in my 20 years of running the site, that whenever you ban an ironic Nazi, suddenly they become actual Nazis

Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka # 8th January 2020, 4:11 pm

2019

Lots of people calling for more aggressive moderation seem to imagine that if they yell enough the companies have a thoughtful, unbiased and nuance-understanding HAL 9000 they can deploy. It’s really more like the Censorship DMV.

Alex Stamos # 21st April 2019, 4:36 pm

In January, Facebook distributes a policy update stating that moderators should take into account recent romantic upheaval when evaluating posts that express hatred toward a gender. “I hate all men” has always violated the policy. But “I just broke up with my boyfriend, and I hate all men” no longer does.

Casey Newton # 25th February 2019, 2:09 pm

2007

How to Moderate a Panel. By Derek Powazek. I tried to follow this advice a couple of days ago. # 20th April 2007, 7:41 am