<story><title>You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation</title><url>https://mux.com/blog/you-either-die-an-mvp-or-live-long-enough-to-build-content-moderation</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seph-reed</author><text>I still theorize crowd-moderated platforms are possible, as long as there&amp;#x27;s really good gate-keeping.&lt;p&gt;My bet is some real-world tie, one which is time consuming and expensive to create.  From there it should be possible to create moderation tools that keep the rest going.&lt;p&gt;An example of a real world tie would be a trust network that requires status with in-person communities and local businesses.  And not just &amp;quot;accept the hot chick friend request,&amp;quot; but an explicit &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m staking my reputation by saying this person is real.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;But once you let bots in, it&amp;#x27;s over.</text></item><item><author>michaelpb</author><text>Yeah, there&amp;#x27;s an entire category of &amp;quot;idea guys&amp;quot; who don&amp;#x27;t get this. They repeatedly try to crack the code on a truly moderation-free or purely crowd-moderated platform, and it never, ever, ever works.&lt;p&gt;It almost always boils down to a poor understanding of how humans work (usually some sort of &amp;quot;homo economicus&amp;quot;) or how computers work (usually some sort of &amp;quot;AI magic wand&amp;quot;).</text></item><item><author>jfengel</author><text>If you host blobs for free, somebody is going to use you as their host. Even if you just hosted audio, I&amp;#x27;m sure somebody will quickly come along with a steganography tool to hide their content on your site (and use your bandwidth).&lt;p&gt;Similarly, if you make compute power available, people will use you to mine cryptocurrency. Even if all you host is text, somebody will come along to be abusive. When you put a computer on the Internet, it&amp;#x27;s open to the entire world, including the very worst people.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re hosting a community, start from the beginning by knowing who your community is and how they will tell you who they are. If the answer is &amp;quot;everybody&amp;quot;, then know what &lt;i&gt;everybody&lt;/i&gt; means -- it means some people won&amp;#x27;t want to be there, because some people will make life hard for them.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s no longer 1991, when you could assume that such people wouldn&amp;#x27;t find you. They &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; find you -- for money, or the lulz. You have to plan for that on day 1. You can&amp;#x27;t fix it after the fact.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>snowwrestler</author><text>Slashdot’s meta-moderation system worked well for a long time. One set of people could make moderation decisions directly on content, and then another unrelated set of people would review the moderation decisions and support or revert them.&lt;p&gt;It was all tied to karma and permissions in ways I can’t quite remember. But essentially there was no way for a motivated bad-faith group to both moderate and meta-moderate themselves, and the incentives marginalized bad faith actors over time.</text></comment>
<story><title>You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation</title><url>https://mux.com/blog/you-either-die-an-mvp-or-live-long-enough-to-build-content-moderation</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seph-reed</author><text>I still theorize crowd-moderated platforms are possible, as long as there&amp;#x27;s really good gate-keeping.&lt;p&gt;My bet is some real-world tie, one which is time consuming and expensive to create.  From there it should be possible to create moderation tools that keep the rest going.&lt;p&gt;An example of a real world tie would be a trust network that requires status with in-person communities and local businesses.  And not just &amp;quot;accept the hot chick friend request,&amp;quot; but an explicit &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m staking my reputation by saying this person is real.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;But once you let bots in, it&amp;#x27;s over.</text></item><item><author>michaelpb</author><text>Yeah, there&amp;#x27;s an entire category of &amp;quot;idea guys&amp;quot; who don&amp;#x27;t get this. They repeatedly try to crack the code on a truly moderation-free or purely crowd-moderated platform, and it never, ever, ever works.&lt;p&gt;It almost always boils down to a poor understanding of how humans work (usually some sort of &amp;quot;homo economicus&amp;quot;) or how computers work (usually some sort of &amp;quot;AI magic wand&amp;quot;).</text></item><item><author>jfengel</author><text>If you host blobs for free, somebody is going to use you as their host. Even if you just hosted audio, I&amp;#x27;m sure somebody will quickly come along with a steganography tool to hide their content on your site (and use your bandwidth).&lt;p&gt;Similarly, if you make compute power available, people will use you to mine cryptocurrency. Even if all you host is text, somebody will come along to be abusive. When you put a computer on the Internet, it&amp;#x27;s open to the entire world, including the very worst people.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re hosting a community, start from the beginning by knowing who your community is and how they will tell you who they are. If the answer is &amp;quot;everybody&amp;quot;, then know what &lt;i&gt;everybody&lt;/i&gt; means -- it means some people won&amp;#x27;t want to be there, because some people will make life hard for them.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s no longer 1991, when you could assume that such people wouldn&amp;#x27;t find you. They &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; find you -- for money, or the lulz. You have to plan for that on day 1. You can&amp;#x27;t fix it after the fact.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WorldMaker</author><text>Moderation is labor and you get what you pay for. Which is not that crowd-moderation cannot work, but that for good crowd-moderation you still have to treat it as a labor pool, have a very good idea of how you are incentivizing&amp;#x2F;paying for it, and what &amp;quot;metrics&amp;#x2F;qualities&amp;quot; those incentives are designed to optimize for.&lt;p&gt;(In some cases it actually is far cheaper to pay a small moderator pool a good wage than to pay an entire community a bad wage to &amp;quot;crowd-moderate&amp;quot; if you actually test the business plan versus alternatives.)</text></comment>