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0 pointsfzeroracer3y ago0 comments

The problem with your ban/blacklist option is that they first require users to be exposed to that content in order to personally ban it. Either you yourself will have to watch the beheading video in order to know to ban it, or another group of users will need to tag it as 'disturbing' and you will need to ban 'disturbing' content'.

Most people do not like casually being exposed to such content, and so any sort of soft policy against it results in users self-selecting out of the social ecosystem. It's no longer just your decision, but one that affects the entire platform. And soon the entire platform becomes dedicated to that disturbing content because everyone else has left.

You could go to Parler or Gab or whatever site right now to see the results of your experiment in action and see why user self-moderation leads to the destruction of the site. This is why users offload that mental stress to the owners of the site who then hire people to manually filter the cruft themselves (often for the worse of the people doing said filtering, but that's a whole 'nother thing).

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ilyt3y ago

> The problem with your ban/blacklist option is that they first require users to be exposed to that content in order to personally ban it.

If you actually read my comment properly you'd notice that I explicitly said there should be a default ban list blocking that

> Either you yourself will have to watch the beheading video in order to know to ban it, or another group of users will need to tag it as 'disturbing' and you will need to ban 'disturbing' content'.

That's orthogonal problem; If you wanted to get rid of that entirely you'd have to pre-screen every content and that's just not feasible, nor any of the media does it aside from some automated filters on keywords.

Nor it is actual problem if you don't subscribe to people that post that; random nobody deciding to post that won't be featured in any feeds anyway because of how algorithms work so there is very little chance it will land on accident in someone's feed.

Of course someone could play the long con and get popular only to start publishing disturbing stuff, but none of current systems stop that and I'm not sure you even could.

fzeroracerOP3y ago

Your comment goes against what you originally said then, which is that you 'don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office' to decide that. You're making a concession that you do want them to decide SOME content that is by default blocked, which then this becomes a matter of degrees. Some people would disagree with your stance and think that it still violates free speech, hence Parler/Gab etc. Plenty of disturbing content is not illegal, which is where the gray area of moderation comes into play.

Even if you don't subscribe to people that post that, there's still the issue of network effects. They subscribe to someone that subscribes to someone that subscribes to someone that posts a beheading video that gains popularity, and so the algorithm prioritizes that traffic because it's within your graph. You can easily notice these effects just on Twitter if you pay attention closely to what it decides to show you.

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