This is the core of the problem that we're facing on every modern "all the things" platform.

How do you create a general content site, without spending money on human review and curation of all uploads, while segregating erotic and non-erotic content, without having your entire site banned/blocked/gated around the world for hosting erotic content?

This has affected Amazon, Blogspot, Facebook, Google, Imgur, Patreon, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitch, Youtube. Every general content site has this problem. Most try to solve it with "user flags", which are promptly weaponized and abused to silence others. Problems constantly recur around statues, breastfeeding, swimsuits. Advertisers want content to be segmented with certainty, but site operators don't want to pay human beings to do that. Standards of "erotic" vary wildly per city, country, religion. The list goes on.

What if human curation is the only valid solution? We haven't found any other solution that works yet, and AI is barely able to recognize human beings, much less discern whether content is intended to be categorized as erotic, non-erotic, or both.

Do you think this moderation paradox - of needing curation at scale, but automatic moderation + "user flag" moderation being inadequate - is a universal problem, or do you think it's specific to ad-funded platforms?

I wonder if a patron-driven community that sets its own moderation policy wouldn't have this problem, because when a topic gets too large it will inevitably splinter into smaller communities where the preferred moderation style of each subset can be catered to.

Mm, dunno. I suspect it's a universal problem, given that Patreon also fights with "how erotic is too erotic". But the core of today's practical concerns might simply be that advertising doesn't pay enough to afford content moderation.

I agree ai curation doesn't work but I don't think human curation works much better. Twitch has a team of human curators that will ban channels, no one knows who this team is there is no trial or opportunity to defend your self, channel or content. The person judging may be in a bad mood today, often diffrent people will get diffrent ban lengths for the same thing, there is no consistency or review process.

Disagreeing with the decisions of moderators is orthogonal to comparing AI and Human moderation.

AI moderators are terrible at enforcing a complex set of practices and rules.

Human moderators are excellent at enforcing a complex set of practices and rules.

Both are subject to the whims of those defining the practices and rules, and their enforcement will always fall within scope of those definitions. If Twitch’s moderators are given full empowerment to set the rules they moderate by, then it is appropriate to blame them for what is perceived as faulty moderation decisions. Chances are, they do not have any such authority, and at best can “recommend” or “advise” while being compelled to silence by their overlords.

You are absolutely right that humans make biased decisions, no matter how much we work to correct for it; judge sentencing becomes more strict when they’re hungry or their local sports team lost, and referees are less likely to penalize the home team when in the home stadium with home fans yelling at them. But these biases can be documented, studied, and gradually accounted for in training and post-decision reviews. It’s not perfect, but it’s still great.

With AI moderation, we bake the biases into the dataset and training models, and then we throw complex rule making decisions at a nascent ML network that can’t discern the simplest of decisions that any human moderators could: “Is this erotic or non-erotic content?”. Setting aside the biases of any possible training set versus Rule 34, it is dead simple to outwit any AI in this regard, in ways that most human moderators would detect instantly. It’s not perfect, and in fact it’s pretty awful.

I agree that the rulemaking decisions of modern sites are often terrible, biased, and exclusionary of entire categories of human beings and behaviors. However, the errors made by human moderators trying to service the complexity assigned to them do not somehow excuse the staggering naivety and incompetence of AI moderators. The heavyweights in this Ml moderation industry — Google, Amazon, Facebook — have failed to deliver effective ML moderation after billions of dollars and cumulative decades of investment, and paper over their failure by using user flags and human review teams to disguise the sharp edges of their solutions.

Camsites already exist, and there's nothing stoping you from streaming games on them.

The "pools, hot tubs, beaches" exception was a (stupid) loophole and they should just close it (I suspect that this is the end result moving forward, eventually). The hard part for Twitch is figuring how to do this with out appearing sexist.

Well, at least one major adult cam site banned streaming games a few years back due to copyright concerns. Not sure about other sites but I suspect they'd end up having to do the same thing if it caught on there; the plausible deniability of being on a games streaming site is important if you want to be able to stream games, since it's at best a bit of a copyright grey area and developers don't have the same incentive to permit adult streamers as they do plain game streamers.

Twitch does not see it as a problem. Advertisers (the actual important group in this discussion) and the gaming side of the Twitch community do care, for different reasons.

This situation has been ongoing for awhile with individuals pushing the boundary of sexual content, but this response from Twitch only occurred after a partner who creates this type of content pissed off Twitch's advertisers.

Twitch does see a problem. In the past they have handed out bans for people streaming in low cut blouses. Yet somehow now women in bikinis dry-humping pool toys in a portable hot tub set up in their living rooms is cool.

Like facebook or twitter they just need to have CONSISTENT AND CONSISTENTLY APPLIED rules. I can make a judgement on your platform when those two things are happening.

> I think putting this content in the same category as gaming content

This is not happening here. Twitch is not a pure Gaming-site anymore, for several years now. And those hot tub-streams are not listed in gaming-categories, they are in non-gaming-categories like "Just Chatting", "Music", even "Travel & Outdoors" (because there are also legit beach-streams which play the hot tub-routine).

Twitch started as Gaming-Only, and the majority of content is still gaming. But people should realize that Non-Gaming is already big on twitch too, and it grows. Twitch is bringing sports and fashing-events to the platform. Music has grown string the last year because of COVID. And some people have found their niche in tame porn-content. Which technically is kind of a joke, because the biggest Hot Tub-Streamer has sexualized content on Twitch for years. But in the past she used the Just Dance-Game to create sexualixed content, or did some fitness-stuff. She is literally infamouse on the platform for this, and Hot tub is just the latest trend in a series of long running content-attempts. Just because it now is now missing the gaming-part, should make it worse? I don't think so.

>Other women on the platform have complained about their audiences pressuring them into producing similar content.

I'm not at all in touch with twitch stuff, so I'm just reading about this now. That's horrible. Would making stricter bans help?

> "Men garner popularity by exhibiting their skills, women garner popularity by exhibiting their bodies."

In what way does this foster non-productive attitudes in boys and young men?

I suspect it reinforces the stereotype that women who enter "nerdy" spaces like gaming are more interested in attracting the attention of men, than actually engaging with gaming. It plays into the trope of a "gamer girl that sucks at games, but succeeds because she's hot". This leads to women's abilities being doubted, and their intentions often mistaken.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with doing suggestive cosplay or things like that. I also doubt that the average person is going to watch Amouranth, and then immediately assume that all the women interested in gaming are curating the same kind of appeal - this kind of influence is more subtle than that. But I do believe that the juxtaposition of male streamers' content, and many of the most popular women's content likely fosters these stereotypes.

I'd argue the opposite: around half the population of the planet is instinctively and immediately drawn to the sight of a fertile woman with her secondary sexual attributes on display, while the appeal of pixels mashing into other pixels on a screen is much more limited.

Also, Amouranth does actual pornography for a living, her own interest is absolutely more aligned towards getting new OnlyFans subs than some platonic ideal of enjoying gaming for its own sake.

Apparently 65% of users of twitch are men. Gaming and porn are interlinked in internet culture so it's not clear why companies should go on crusades against what is reality.

The whole point seems to be about separating 'child safe' content. This cannot be done automatically, they would have to hire moderators to manually curate channels and then block access by age.