What is the scalability of dang?
For deeply indebted and cash-flow poor companies like Twitter is about to become (at the surprisingly high--and positive--$1.5B EBITDA, interest is going to erode that by upwards of 60%), is there an equivalent service offering? dang-as-a-service, or "daas", if you will?
I guess the real question is: are dang's parents still alive or do we have to clone him? Hopefully Twitter can wait for the minimum 18.75 years it'll take to scale out.
That's a super interesting question. In my idealist mind, if one person can do something, anyone can do it (given reasonable levels of teaching and learning ability).
I don't think it looks like DaaS -- each company must curate their own "dang" group that has an almost gut-level understanding of the site's "sinew", or the ideals that it lives by come hell or high water.
Maybe Twitter doesn't even have a philosophy. Maybe it ought to.
Nope. I can't be dang.
I can learn the tools he uses. I can learn the procedures he follows. But I don't think that I can learn his patience and his charity toward people who are being flaming trolls. I mean, I've seen him model it. But I can't imitate it for long.
Train AI model based on HN moderation by dang
Sell high quality moderation as a service for other plaforms
Profit?
"Assume good faith" is one of the HN Guidelines[1].
I think dang walks the walk and applies that principle himself during moderation, to a rather amazing degree considering how long he's been at it and the challenges of the job.
My sense is that Musk earnestly wants to do something similar at Twitter, and that he's motivated by a kindred idealism.
However, assuming good faith on the part of forum participants means that outgroups end up having to tolerate a lot of unpleasantness, so long as that unpleasantness is couched civilly enough and could possibly be interpreted as well meaning. (For example, whether women are biologically predisposed to be less ambitious than men is considered fair game on HN and gets debated ad nauseam.)
It's obvious that dang passionately wishes for people from all backgrounds to feel welcome, but that wish exists in tension with the lenient moderation philosophy.
I've come to believe that HN's demographic skew is a direct and predictable consequence of the moderation philosophy, and that ultimately the skew is endemic and won't budge over time. I'm occasionally troubled by my own participation here because of it, as much as I enjoy and appreciate the positive aspects of the site.
I expect something similar will play out at Twitter, with outgroup participation waning as Musk shapes it according to his utopian vision of what he calls "free speech".
Yes but isn't that a good thing for a public forum/town square, given the alternatives (censorship, politicization, etc.)? Shouldn't it be exactly the sort of place that people feel unafraid to discuss controversial subjects?
If the choice is between some outgroups feeling uncomfortable with civilly-expressed criticism of themselves and their worldview, and draconian, politicized, highly subjective, moderation foisted on everyone, I know where I stand.
And private fora are not town squares. The rules for actual town squares have to be lenient because government suppression of speech is problematic. The relevant freedom for private fora is not freedom of speech, but freedom of association.
Why not? At what point is it OK to let people exclude each other? We don't all have to be friends and play together, do we? We're discriminatory, hierarchical, social animals. Some people will always be excluded. Using authority to try to solve this problem is futile and draconian.
> And private fora are not town squares
I agree, but the question here is whether it's worthwhile for this particular private forum to operate under the same principles of free speech. Certainly some people seem to think so.
> the sort of place that people feel unafraid to discuss controversial subjects?
> If the choice is between some outgroups feeling uncomfortable with civilly-expressed criticism of themselves
So this is the key tension. Outgroups get criticism of themselves every-bloody-where. As you noted, "We're discriminatory, hierarchical, social animals". One more place doesn't make the difference. What good moderation does is provide an opening for an outgroup to issue its own civilly-expressed criticism, with a chance of being listened to instead of reflexively ridiculed and dismissed.
I'm not sure that's true at all, lots of fringe views gain traction on Twitter. I'd imagine more of them still are moderated out of existence.
> So this is the key tension. Outgroups get criticism of themselves every-bloody-where
Yes, and by being a digital town square, Twitter, or any similar platform, would become part of everywhere, with the same consequences for outgroups.
> provide an opening for an outgroup to issue its own civilly-expressed criticism
I agree that outgroups should have this opportunity, but it must be applied to all the outgroups, including those who have a mutual loathing for each other, and those whom we loathe ourselves. Fairness dictates we shouldn't play favourites, in the same vein that the ACLU defended the a Nazi group's right to march through Skokie.
If an outgroup wants a private, safe space to express themselves, that place cannot also purport to be a public square of free expression. It's one or the other.
That's not particularly close to what I said. I am talking about the outgroup being able to participate in the "public square of free expression", in a way that is actually free for them to speak to the ingroup.
These conditions do in fact represent "actual" freedom. Basically if you support people insulting and ridiculing Nazis (which I do), you should support them insulting and ridiculing anyone else on the same principle.
> civilly-expressed criticism of themselves and their worldview [0]
or where they should expect to be ridiculed and insulted? And why would anyone sane want to regularly participate in the latter?
As to why people would want to participate, I suspect it's for the usual reasons: to accomplish a goal, or to gain influence and social status.
Edit: Surely you agree that sometimes rudeness is warranted, and that people in fact are rude on Twitter?
Also, it's not clear how to do it well. I do have some ideas which I'd like to try someday. Here's one: people work well with feedback loops, so telling them that they're penalized and giving them a way to fix it could be a good thing. Unfortunately, it could also just be awful. This place is always one step away from sudden decline, and when walking near a precipice one wants to step carefully.
I've been a moderator before, within a team of moderators. There were varying views within that group from 'ban the slightest aggression or just disliked person' to 'give people as many chances as can be afforded, ban is last resort (my view).'
Members got 'banned for nothing!' or regarded as 'why is that person still here?' Depending who you asked both statements were wrong...
It just doesn't scale massively without something like Reddit's subsite moderation structure. FB, Twitter, etc all can't do it at scale across one public community and algorithms can never be nuanced enough and are extremely vulnerable to political/ideological bias ('misinformation' labels are a simple example of this, regardless of what you think of their accuracy or usefulness).
It’s quite possible that an AI could learn to do all this but I suspect that a big part of modernism that participants in a community know and respect the moderators. Not many humans respect AI in the same way.
An algorithm can't ask itself for feedback. I hope Musk does make the Twitter algorithms open source, that would be fascinating and put pressure on other platforms if it turns out to be eye opening or useful
But I think a more refined version of my initial comment is that if the users respect moderators, then moderation will be much more cohesive and well received.
Twitter clearly has utility. But it will never be a nice place to hang out except in some very localized parts of it.
It was built in America, by Americans, and now, is about to be owned by an American. And like America, everyone is (should be) welcome... provided you honor our Western traditions of free speech.
I like what Musk said about free speech within the limits of the law. I think that's a good place to settle things.
A lot of stalking and harassment laws are state level and not the same in every state. Since online harassment is a common problem on Twitter, which state’s laws would you like to apply?
Spreading misinformation that results in violence towards an individual is not governed by federal laws unless it falls under the definition of a hate crime.
Spreading misinformation about results of elections isn’t illegal but is very obviously quite damaging and has real world consequences. How do you tackle this issue?
That’s just a very very small sample. The problem you are going to face with your approach is that the US laws were not designed with the idea of governing stuff on Twitter.
You don't. People are legally allowed to spread misinformation.
> The problem you are going to face with your approach is that the US laws were not designed with the idea of governing stuff on Twitter.
Yes they were... you just don't like the way American laws handle these things.
Difference.
Twitter is not purely a US forum. In some places the law may say that "hate speech" is illegal, or that politically dissident speech is illegal... what then? Are you presuming that US jurisprudence should be the standard for all of humanity, worldwide?
"We" is only "citizens of the USA". Other countries have quite a different tradition regarding this, and citizens of such countries often quite a different understanding than USA citizens of what is considered as "free speech" in the USA and what does not.
How do you avoid the problem of thousands of accounts from Russian-funded troll farms pumping out millions of disinformation tweets on everything from vaccine conspiracy theories, Ukraine wars, lies about elections and so on? Do you just accept that Putin gets a free ride to influence public opinion, destabilise the liberal democracies and nudge close elections in his favour?
Muting accounts might be good for my blood pressure (if I can mute thousands of accounts) but it doesn't fix problems like the above or interesting people getting bullied off the platform (it's bad enough already).
> No mora bans on so called "hate speech"
Why is hate speech "so-called" hate speech rather than just hate speech? Do you think Twitter would be a better forum if anyone can e.g. bombard a Black professor with racist abuse when they share some research?
Do you think HN would be better with no moderation?
> or politically dissident speech
This is not banned.
Moderation is a solved problem. Replace the entire team with dang. Bam. Good forum.