
Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf] - EndXA
https://shagunjhaver.com/files/research/jhaver-2019-transparency.pdf
======
EndXA
Study title: "Does Transparency in Moderation Really Matter?: User Behavior
After Content Removal Explanations on Reddit".

Abstract:

> When posts are removed on a social media platform, users may or may not
> receive an explanation. What kinds of explanations are provided? Do those
> explanations matter? Using a sample of 32 million Reddit posts, we
> characterize the removal explanations that are provided to Redditors, and
> link them to measures of subsequent user behaviors—including future post
> submissions and future post removals. Adopting a topic modeling approach, we
> show that removal explanations often provide information that educate users
> about the social norms of the community, thereby (theoretically) preparing
> them to become a productive member. We build regression models that show
> evidence of removal explanations playing a role in future user activity.
> Most importantly, we show that offering explanations for content moderation
> reduces the odds of future post removals. Additionally, explanations
> provided by human moderators did not have a significant advantage over
> explanations provided by bots for reducing future post removals. We propose
> design solutions that can promote the efficient use of explanation
> mechanisms, reflecting on how automated moderation tools can contribute to
> this space. Overall, our findings suggest that removal explanations may be
> under-utilized in moderation practices, and it is potentially worthwhile for
> community managers to invest time and resources into providing them.

~~~
nkrisc
My interpretation of this is most people don't intend to break the community's
rules. That is to say, most people aren't sociopathic trolls.

Most people don't want their posts removed. Informing them of what rules they
broke will help them about breaking those rules again, assuming they wish to
not break rules, which it appears is generally the case.

I've had posts removed on subs for breaking some arcane rule before. On some
subs it wasn't clear why, so I just never posted again. Others told me why,
and even gave directions on how to avoid it again (usually flair related
rules). It was easy to successfully post going forward on those subs.

~~~
jimmaswell
Too many subs have completely ridiculous rules and tyrants for mods. Some
subreddit about interesting pictures didn't want screencaps so they made the
rule say "screens" and then removed posts involving any screen anywhere even
if the contents weren't the focus, like a cool breakage pattern. Such a sad
state of existence salivating at such a tiny amount of power that you ruin a
subreddit for everyone removing valid posts. I honestly wish subreddits had no
mods at all, only spam removal allowed, after having had to deal with the bad
mods that ruin the site.

------
bchimp
The paper (and I only read the abstract) is interesting, but as others have
noted, fairly obvious.

One thing that seems to be an assumption is that the "company" needs to
provide the explanation. I think it is even better if the user provides the
explanation. The assumption a user can't provide it is probably because we've
all seen Terms of Service agreements that are totally opaque.

Back in the day when I was doing a bit of admin work, I decided to simplify
our TOS, and then when I had to block someone, I just kicked the ball back
into their court: "If you would like your account restored, please point out
in the TOS what rule you violated." It worked better than expected. People
that cared enough about their access to the system usually figured it out
pretty quickly, and we got the knowledge that they actually read the TOS to
some degree. They got their account restored and that was the end of it.
Repeat offenders at that point were willfully causing problems, so we just
left them blocked.

Obviously this only works if a human can understand your TOS. Another
interesting line of questioning might be "at what complexity level is your TOS
useful in shaping behavior and where does it just become a legal shield."

~~~
coreyp_1
I'm going through a related situation right now, but I'm the one who is the
recipient of the negative action.

I posted a video of me playing the piano on YouTube. I got a copyright
notification, that I was playing the melody to a song that someone else held
the copyright for.

What's the problem? Well, the melody was published in 1886 (133 years ago)
under the exact name identified in the copyright claim. The composer died in
1901 (118 years ago). It is not under copyright protection in any
jurisdiction! Now, I'm having to appeal the copyright claim... not to YouTube,
but to ASCAP (the company who is claiming the copyright in the first
place)!!!! In fact, because it was MY arrangement and MY performance and MY
production, _I_ own the copyright to that video in every way legally
recognized! In my mind, this is THEFT... from ME!

My point is, if YouTube had not at least told me what I'm being accused of,
there is no way that I would have figured this out! I haven't done anything
wrong! Someone else (ASCAP, ICE_CS) is fraudulently claiming copyright!

Under your system, I would have to "invent" things to confess to.

Of course, now the problem is that I have no power in this situation. ASCAP
must agree that they don't want to monitize my video, and they have no
incentive to do that. I have no protection or recourse. :(

And, for anyone who's interested, this still isn't resolved.

~~~
nokcha
>I have no ... recourse.

In theory, you could sue ASCAP for damages and/or injunctive relief. Perhaps
for libel, for grossly negligently communicating a false and disparaging claim
about you to YouTube. Perhaps for tortious interference with business
relations. But unfortunately, winning such a lawsuit likely requires an
expensive lawyer, and sometimes you can only get as much justice as you can
afford to buy.

~~~
coreyp_1
Exactly why I described it as having no recourse. :/

------
post_break
Moderator of a large sub here. I hate removing content that violates our rules
because of the pitch forks coming out. But it's like baseball and you're the
ump. These are the rules, you broke the posted rules (and it's not wishy washy
rules like /r/politics or /r/videos), and here's the rule you broke. Most of
the time you don't have to eject anyone, but sometimes you do.

~~~
kevingadd
Clearly pointing to rules violations also helps other users understand what to
avoid doing. It hurts when people are trying to toe the line and get away with
violating the spirit of the rules, but the large-scale impact of just
consistently going 'deleted because of rule 3 violation: xxx' works pretty
well and has been proven on ancient forums like Something Awful where bans and
suspensions and post deletions all have clear, publicly listed rationales.

~~~
jeltz
Yeah, most forums I use to be active in were very transparent about why stuff
was deleted while e.g. most sub-Reddits are not. I vastly preferred the
transparency of forum moderators.

------
woliveirajr
It seems so obvious that it's a pitty it wasn't studied before.

It doesn't work just online: ask a children to solve some problem in a
blackboard and then erase it without telling a thing, while leaving answers
from other kids on it. You'll see that nobody likes to be "corrected" without
an explanation.

~~~
Arnt
Noone likes to be corrected without an explanation. That part is fine. But
explaining takes time for the moderators as well as providing value to the
user, and some users try to get past moderation by overwhelming the
moderators. Spamming.

~~~
shakna
The automated removal can also come with broad reasoning in response, and that
doesn't overwhelm the system.

"Violating Policy X" (where X can be something like Twitter's Rules, not
necessarily something specific) is still a terrible explanation, but isn't
nothing either. Vague enough spammers can't use it to game the system,
specific enough that user's can guess they did something wrong.

~~~
totony
I disagree that this is any better, because terms can be so wide as to not
have any meaning

E.g. i was blocked from facebook rencently and all it said is "you are
inelligible, refer to our terms", but reading through them doesn't help at all

~~~
shakna
If it isn't "specific enough the user can guess what they did", like in your
case, then it's a clear failure. So is a lack of a transparent appeal process.

Automation-assisted, not automation everything.

I wasn't advocating for blanket terms that mean nothing. You need to provide
the user with something meaningful.

------
Yuval_Halevi
Comment I saw about the manner from a mod on reddit:

>As a moderator, I will sometimes send a message to a poster whose post is
removed. However, if it is "commercial spam," I don't bother because we both
know why.

Sometimes redditors comment without understanding that they broke the rules.
Sometimes redditors comment using spam and they fully know what they are
doing. In the first case, a message to them to tell them why is helpful. In
the second case, it's not.

I personally (as an active Reddit user), feel that the interaction with the
mods there is always in a negative context. On /r/technology, for example, you
can get ban without any specific reason and messaging the mods won't do
anything.

A few weeks ago I made a silly comment in HN on a post that reached the front
page. My comment got a few downvotes and one of the mods sent me a message
with what I did wrong.

I then went one step back, understood that I wrote something that is against
the rules of HN and sent the mod an email with an apologie. He replied almost
instantly.

That's one of the reasons I prefer HN over Reddit. It seems like the mods are
not here to punish, but to create a healthy conversation infrastructure and to
lead users who are not into the HN spirit yet, into the right path

~~~
Rebelgecko
I agree that even though the HN moderation tends to be more heavy handed, it's
100% beneficial for the community. However I doubt that the HN approach would
scale well for a site like reddit— once you have dozens or hundreds of people
doing moderation it gets hard to vet someone. Eventually you're gonna get a
jerk moderator that goes on a power trip. I was a fan of how slashdot did
"metamoderation" but I don't know if it was actually effective.

~~~
dimino
Could not disagree more; the community is an echo chamber because of how
poorly dang treats dissent, and more importantly how easy it is to silence
alternative viewpoints here.

As a result, growth doesn't happen here, only self validation. Try taking a
nuanced view on privacy if you disagree.

~~~
thundergolfer
Can you be more specific about the “dissent” and the “nuanced view” parts?

~~~
dimino
People will flag a comment they don't like, hop on multiple accounts to spam
downvotes, will downvote everything a person writes (via their comment
history), all kinds of malicious behavior on HN if someone posts something
they disagree with.

It doesn't take many of those people to ruin the experience for others, and
dang doesn't lift a finger A) because he's of the opinion that disagreement
amongst users is bad for HN and B) the software running HN is old and not
sophisticated enough to detect bad actors.

I had to abandon my other account recently because I'd get hit with 10-15
downvotes in the span of 3-5 minutes, multiple times a day as I was using the
site. Many hours of minimal activity and then boom, minus 15 karma, all at
once, corresponding precisely with the number of comments I had that were
votable (less than a day old).

Not sure how to describe a nuanced point of view though, it's a point of view
that loses critical fidelity when generalized. If the generalization falls
into the "dissent" bucket, it's then given the above treatment by bad actors
on HN, which has the effect of only allowing a single specific viewpoint to
exist on HN, because "flagged" messages aren't displayed at all, and downvoted
comments are literally hard to read via fading.

~~~
thundergolfer
I meant specific about the content of your dissent.

Dissenting opinions are basically just different from the majority. Anarchist
opinions are like this, vegan opinions are like this. Fascist opinions are
also like this. Just saying it’s dissent is not too informative.

~~~
dimino
Informative? Seems like you want to mitigate my theoretical dissent, to be
honest...

~~~
thundergolfer
Whether I'd want to migitate it is entirely based on the content of your
dissent. That's my point really.

There's all kinds of dissent which should absolutely be moderated away on a
forum like HN.

------
Ididntdothis
There seems to be a general trend to avoid explanations in a lot of areas. For
example, you often get no feedback after job interviews. Google just canceled
my Drive subscription after 10 years without telling why but they offered me
to sign up again. No idea why and support wouldn’t tell.

How are people supposed to learn and improve without knowing told what they
did wrong?

~~~
saagarjha
I think the reasons nobody tells you anything anymore is because doing so
would open you up to liability. It’s probably a similar thing to why you’re
not told the reasons for not getting a job, even though it’s somewhat
unfortunate that it means useful context is lost…

~~~
kd5bjo
I suspect that often the reason for not getting a job is simply that there
were more qualified candidates than positions. In that case, there may be no
reasons to give; someone else was selected but your application wasn’t
deficient in any way.

~~~
pmiller2
That would be totally valid feedback if it were possible for the candidate to
interpret it at face value. Given that effectively no companies provide
substantive feedback, even if "there was a more qualified candidate" is the
reason, any reasonable candidate is going to interpret that as "sorry, we
can't tell you the reason."

~~~
mjevans
My theory is that companies tend to not have an actual process, or that if
they do it still ends up in the bin of human biases that their process can't
quantify.

There are probably obvious things like "crash and burned on a whiteboard
problem path-finding" or "requested more than was allocated for the position"
(would be nice if possible compensation ranges were required in the posting);
but past the obvious disqualifications (which candidates should get feedback
on) there's that 'fits with the (a) team' phase. Having an 'exit value', even
if generic / approved by legal, would be helpful for everyone including
internal company metrics that might drive a better posting if the job isn't
fulfilled.

------
zndr
Interesting, some of the topics in this paper remind me of this study on the
old Elitist Jerks WoW forum: [http://james.howison.name/pubs/bullard-
howison-2015-elitist-...](http://james.howison.name/pubs/bullard-
howison-2015-elitist-jerks.pdf)

The forums were notable because they were VERY strict, but also every single
removed post, suspension or ban all got cross posted into a specific forum for
all to read. For users who weren't trying to offend this served the same
lesson the Paper here makes: how to not do it again, for everyone else it
served as entertainment while the mods hammered down trolls.

------
Hitton
Giving reason for taken actions seem like it should be common sense, yet for
some reason in many areas just doesn't happen, just muddying underlining
issue.

A case in point, I recently opened a bank account and needed to verify my
identity by taking photo of my id and my face. I did it at least five times
and always got just generic answer that the verification was unsuccessful. I
thought that problem was with bad quality of camera or difference between my
appearance on id and the taken photo and only later I realised that the id has
already expired. Why didn't it tell me first time so I could use passport,
instead of letting me try it over and over again?

~~~
michaelmior
The consequences here are also higher as the purpose is to avoid identity
theft. At some point, I think there is some merit to obscurity. Although it
certainly can result in a frustrating experience for legitimate customers.

------
nm2259
It's an interesting paper, for sure. I think this only works in reality if 1)
there's a clear reason the content was removed that a user could take steps to
avoid in the future, and 2) you're willing to admit that reason to the user.

With so much content moderation these days coming from machine learning
(violates #1), personal vendettas from human moderators (violates #1 and #2)
and quasi-legal threats from third parties (violates #1 and #2), there's not
much room for user education left.

------
tlb
The HN mods generally try to explain why they remove unacceptable comments, if
the comment seems like it's from an actual person trying to participate. Also,
we summarily one-click-delete lots of spam.

Those would also correlate "telling why content was removed" with "reduced
future issues". But the causality goes the other way. Users that are likely to
participate better in the future are more likely to get explanations, while
spammers get nothing.

~~~
tom_mellior
> The HN mods generally try to explain why they remove unacceptable comments,
> if the comment seems like it's from an actual person trying to participate.

This is a good policy, thank you for doing it this way.

Personally I feel that _something_ along the lines of an explanation should
also go with downvotes. When I'm downvoted, I would like some feedback on what
people didn't like about my post -- do they think I was rude? or did I write
something that is wrong, or at least, would need a source to back it up?
Similarly, I would also like to _give_ such feedback when I downvote. But
downvoting and posting about it is not welcomed by the community.

On Slashdot there is (was?) a rough category to go along with votes, so you
could upvote something because it's "informative" or "funny", and downvote
because it's "flamebait" or... I don't remember the others. Something like
this would make a very useful addition to HN, I feel. The feedback could of
course be optional, and only visible to the poster, like the actual score on a
post.

Please?

~~~
tlb
People sometimes seem to think the purpose of the voting mechanism is to
provide an objective evaluation of the quality of their contributions, or even
their inherent value as a human being. It's not.

The main purpose of the voting mechanism is to sort the responses within a
thread, so that someone can skim a large comment section by reading only the
first comments at each level of nesting. If it's working right, it should
include the most interesting/relevant/accurate comments.

Tom_mellior, I can't quickly find any heavily downvoted comments of yours. One
that's slightly downvoted is
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417799),
which is kind of low-effort. A downvote reasonably reflects the fact that it
doesn't belong near the top of any list of the most
interesting/relevant/accurate comments on the subject matter of the paper that
a busy reader shouldn't miss if they're skimming quickly.

Most of your comments are great, so thanks for your contribution!

~~~
tom_mellior
> A downvote reasonably reflects the fact that it doesn't belong near the top
> of any list of the most interesting/relevant/accurate comments

Yes. But often it's not clear, and would be useful to know, whether it's the
"interesting" or the "relevant" or the "accurate" part that was lacking. These
are all along the lines of the categories that I mentioned. I do want to
stress that I did not propose a "you are a worthless human being" category.

> Tom_mellior, I can't quickly find any heavily downvoted comments of yours.

It doesn't have to be _heavy_ for the reason to be interesting. And for
whatever it's worth, there is this one:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21362694](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21362694)
where I was downvoted for explaining why I downvoted someone. This is OK,
since the HN guidelines discourage discussions about voting. Still, I think
some sort of "-1, ad hominem" feedback would have been useful for the original
poster.

------
300bps
I can’t imagine what it’s like to moderate large sites like HN. I read it with
Show Dead turned on and I’m amazed at how many people have been shadow banned
with no clue they’ve been posting frequently for years with no idea 99% of
people will never see what they wrote.

In most cases it looks like dang does give them a reason when they’re banned
but I don’t think many of them read it.

~~~
saagarjha
I make it a habit to check seemingly frivolously killed comments and vouch for
them in the case of apparent shadowbans. You can help too!

~~~
jessaustin
It's a fine idea, but ISTR that if you do this too often to what they consider
validly killed comments then they just tune your vouching value to zero. You
have no way to know this, so it's really hellvouching.

~~~
saagarjha
Can’t you just look at the comment while logged out?

~~~
jessaustin
One vouch doesn't unkill a comment (just as one downvote doesn't kill a
comment). If you vouch and the comment is immediately unkilled, then since you
were probably the person whose vouch made the final difference you probably
_do_ have a positive vouching value. It is rare to see that, however, so you
don't really know your own (or anyone's) vouching value. The term "hellvouch"
was intended to represent that we don't know what our vouching power, not that
we don't know whether a comment has been unkilled or not.

We can see whether someone else's comment has been killed whether we're logged
in or out, so maybe I'm not following your question...

------
codezero
I plan to read this, but after working on content moderation at Quora I have
doubts. Yes, reasonable and more casual content creators like feedback. For
bad actors feedback acts to draw a line in the sand that they constantly toe.

See:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_bean...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_up_your_nose)

But please don’t think I’m stuck on one side, there are good counterpoints
that are similar to those about disclosing security vulnerabilities.

There are definitely different effects to the crowd and to the individual
depending on the approach.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_bean...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_up_your_nose/Counterpoint)

~~~
laughinghan
> line in the sand that they constantly toe

Isn't the problem the binary consequence, complete removal or completely left
alone?

Instead, a continuous incentive gradient can push people away from the line.
For example, comments on HN and Ars Technica that are downvoted are displayed
grayed-out so they're harder to read and more likely to be skipped over when
skimming; on Ars Technica, if a comment is sufficiently downvoted, its
contents are collapsed into a stub, and you have to click the expand button to
read it.

Besides pushing people away from the line, another advantage of a continuous
incentive gradient instead of a discrete punishment is that because the stakes
are lower, subjective disagreements are less divisive. If a comment straddles
the line of violating the rules, and what's at stake is whether the comment is
removed or shown, then community members will argue much more vehemently with
each other and with mods than if what's at stake is whether the comment should
be more or less gray, or whether the comment should be completely removed or
merely collapsed.

(Zuck has discussed similar ideas about "borderline content":
[https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-
zuckerberg/a-blueprint-f...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-
zuckerberg/a-blueprint-for-content-governance-and-
enforcement/10156443129621634/) )

------
rpmisms
Experiencing this now. I produced an instructional video for the non-profit I
work for, and youtube took it down as "spam", won't explain why, and has
terminated our account with no strikes. Why wouldn't I try to get around that
ridiculous ban?

------
faizshah
Does anyone know of any datasets of moderation logs?

Or some way to collect moderation log data for reddit?

------
Braggadocious
The lack of explanation is intentional because they dont want people gaming
the system and getting around the filters. That's the idea anyway.

------
breadandcrumbel
That's why I'm not using Reddit. Mods have too much power, and seems like you
can lose your account if the mod is not a fan of you

------
haunter
Otoh reddit mods has 0 accountability, "if you don't like them make your own
sub" basically that's the official stance

~~~
otterley
Sounds reasonable to me. Reddit is not and never was a democracy; at best it’s
a benevolent dictatorship - just like every other social media platform.

It costs nothing to start a new subreddit if you want different rules. And if
lots of Redditors agree with you, they’ll happily follow you.

~~~
stronglikedan
> _benevolent dictatorship_

Regardless, it's still frustrating. Especially when they cannot tell you which
"rule" you broke, so they resort to telling you they can use their discretion
to ban you for any reason (which is usually some sort of agenda that becomes
apparent after you've tried to have a civil discussion about why you were
banned). It's what drove me away from that platform, and I'm sure I'm not the
only one, so I guess _not_ telling users _also_ prevents future issues, in a
way.

~~~
otterley
In my experience, what often happens is that telling them the reason often
results in a repeat of the same behavior, but modified only minimally in an
attempt to avoid violating the letter of the rules, but not necessarily the
spirit of them. This leads to a constant back and forth and is exhausting to
the community and moderators.

Sometimes you just have to show boorish guests the door.

~~~
zaarn
Well, you sorta posted this on a submission about a paper that indicates the
opposite; telling people why something was removed leads to less content being
removed and other issues, so I think that might be more of a perceptual bias
rather than reality.

~~~
otterley
Good point. :)

------
rhacker
As long as they put the reason inside a PDF things should be ok. That way they
simply won't read it, problem solved.

------
joepie91_
This really shouldn't come as a surprise to basically anyone who has ever
moderated a public community.

------
thiagoharry
Yes, but reduces your power of censoring arbitrarily without needing to
justificate.

------
reitoei
The universal user rule should be "Don't be a dick!".

~~~
laughinghan
Doesn't work: [https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-
conduct-101-faq#coc...](https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-
conduct-101-faq#cocfaqnegative)

> WHY IS THE LANGUAGE SO NEGATIVE/PUNITIVE? THIS'LL TAKE THE FUN/CASUAL
> ATMOSPHERE OUT OF MY EVENT. THE PEOPLE ATTENDING ARE MY FRIENDS, I'LL VOUCH
> FOR THEM. ISN'T IT OBVIOUS/COMMON SENSE WHAT'S ACCEPTABLE? WE'RE ALL ADULTS
> HERE, WHY CAN'T WE SAY "BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER"?

Not everyone understands what is unacceptable behavior, especially when we are
talking about a group of people that is mostly homogenous and has very little
interaction with people different than they are.

We focus specifically on what isn't allowed and what violating those rules
would mean so there is no gray area, no guessing, no pushing boundaries to see
what will happen. "Be nice" or "Be an adult" doesn't inform well enough about
what is expected if one attendee's idea of niceness or professionalism are
vastly different than another's. On top of that, "be excellent to each other"
has a poor track record [link, now broken, previously described a real-world
situation where people holding grudges tried to weaponize a community's sole
"be excellent" rule against each other].

You may have been running an event for a long time and many of the attendees
feel they are "like family", but it actually makes the idea of an incident
happening at the event even scarier. If someone is new and not part of "the
family" will they be believed? Will they be treated like an invading outsider?

Remember that everyone who has harassed or assaulted someone is a parent,
sibling, child, or friend to someone else. We don't always know people as well
as we think we do.

~~~
reitoei
Not everyone understands what is unacceptable behavior?

I mean, if you go to a restaurant, a movie theatre, or a supermarket, do you
know how NOT to be an asshole? It's not hard. Most people can manage it on a
day-to-day basis.

I don't know where you're veering off to in your last sentence either. Weird.

~~~
laughinghan
It sounds like you've never worked in a restaurant, movie theatre, or
supermarket, because I don't know a single person who has worked at one for an
extended length of time who hasn't had to deal with people being an asshole
_and then arguing that they weren 't being an asshole_.

Of course _most_ people can manage not to be an asshole on a day-to-day basis,
but to deal with the small minority of bad apples who could ruin a whole
barrel, it helps to spell out specific banned behavior in detail to quickly
shut down arguments about whether a specific behavior is being an asshole or
not.

The last sentence is pointing out that just because you've only ever seen
someone be a nice person, doesn't mean they've never been an asshole when you
weren't there.

Also, I didn't write that sentence. Everything after the first sentence is
quoted from the link I provided.

~~~
reitoei
I actually worked in one of the most expensive hotels in London. If people
were assholes to the staff or broke any of the hotel rules (which were
extremely lax WRT prostitution etc.), they would be marked in the system as a
"5 star guest". Any time in the future they tried to book a room, the hotel
would simply tell them they had no availability.

------
hordeallergy
Ah, like requiring down-voters to comment.

