
Content moderators review the dark side of the internet - lnguyen
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/the-basic-grossness-of-humans/548330/?single_page=true
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pessimizer
Building after building, filled with endless rows of workstations, manned by
groggy censors forever reading notes between people they don't know, deleting
some, changing a few words on more, getting paid half a penny per post
reviewed.

~~~
coldacid
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a nameless wage slave deleting
posts — forever.

~~~
elboru
I'm not saying that's cool, but there are millions of people with worst jobs,
or simply dying of hunger

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DoreenMichele
_Bowden said that her team consisted of the odd conglomeration of people that
were drawn to overnight work looking at weird and disturbing stuff. “I had a
witch, a vampire, a white supremacist, and some regular day-to-day people. I
had all these different categories,” Bowden, who is black, said. “We were
saying, ‘Based on your experience in white-supremacist land, is this white-
supremacist material?’”_

That right there is an incredible vignette capturing the level of diplomacy
and thick skin required to do this job well: A black woman asking a white
supremacist employee to ID white supremacist content so they can create
guidelines and get it off the internet.

~~~
s73ver_
Could you really trust the white supremacist to correctly ID the material,
though?

~~~
DoreenMichele
That depends on a lot of factors.

Some people are into porn. That doesn't mean they want porn everywhere all the
time on all sites they frequent.

This is why we use NSFW warnings on sites like HN: People here are not
necessarily averse to viewing and discussing sexually explicit material, but
they want to make sure they aren't fired for doing so if they are on their
break at work while reading HN.

~~~
dang
That's an interesting observation. There are excellent HN users who are trolls
elsewhere. They just respect the rules here, because they understand the
intention behind them and want HN to actually be the kind of site you get when
the game has those rules.

After encountering a few such users, I got more interested in explaining the
intention behind the site: that it isn't about being nice or virtuous so much
as having a place that isn't boring, and that this only works if everyone
carries their share of responsibility for not torching it.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Metafilter was the absolute worst social experience of my life. When I joined,
it was common for individuals who did not fit in for some reason to be
routinely ganged up on by other people. Mods would ask the person being ganged
up on to stop posting, then let other people continue to make personal attacks
against the person who had been asked to leave the conversation, who could now
not defend themselves. If they did come back into the conversation to defend
themselves, they were "behaving badly" for disobeying mod instruction (but the
people attacking them were never told they were behaving badly).

As someone who was openly homeless at the time that I was gifted a Metafilter
membership (by someone on HN), I ended up on the receiving end of that on
Metafilter. At some point, I stopped participating.

It is clear to me that both Hacker News and Metafilter have a high percentage
of well educated, well heeled members. In fact, there is significant overlap
between the membership of Hacker News and of Metafilter. Some active users of
both sites have the same handle on both sites.

I fairly often see remarks on HN by well-to-do people that strike me as sort
of clueless wrt _how the other half lives._ But I have not been openly,
actively and repeatedly ganged up on and continuously harassed here the way I
was on Metafilter.

Given the similarities of the populations and the actual overlap of
membership, in recent months I have been forced to conclude that the
difference in _culture_ is due to a difference in moderation. So, you do good
work and should be proud of that.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Given the similarities of the populations and the actual overlap of
membership, in recent months I have been forced to conclude that the
difference in culture is due to a difference in moderation. So, you do good
work and should be proud of that."_

Although the moderators certainly deserve credit for contributing to a civil
atmosphere on HN, the users have a lot to do with it too. There's a lot of
self-policing, as it were, going on here, with users who already buy in to
HN's constructive comment ethic downvoting and calling out posts that go
against that. That takes more than mere intelligence or education, but a
willingness to adhere to commonly-shared norms of what's good for the site --
in HN's case it's constructive, helpful comments.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_There 's a lot of self-policing_

The crux of my point is that I was really puzzled for a long time as to how on
earth I could interact in two forums with some of the same members and people
who are openly, persistently and consistently ugly to me in one successfully
self police in the other and refrain from harassing me. That blew my mind for
the longest time. It made no sense at all.

I eventually concluded that a difference in moderation must be the difference
that makes a difference.

Perhaps that should have been said privately. I am not prone to flattery. That
isn't the point of saying it here.

The point is that it is a clear example that demonstrates the power of
moderation. As someone who has done some moderating myself, it is an
intriguing contrast.

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dominotw
Article says most of this work is done in countries like philippines. I wish
they interviewed people from philippines not just people in america. I was
more interested in their view of things.

~~~
mc32
Here's one such article: [https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-
moderation/](https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/)

I think either Vice or MoBo had one around the same time but can't find it.

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callesgg
I find that the Atlantic has to much narrative in their storys.

The articles are more about peoples opinions than they are about the facts
behind those opinions. Its like reading books.

~~~
dsr_
I'm pretty sure that's their view of how the magazine should be. Not
everything is to everyone's taste, and now you know that The Atlantic isn't to
yours.

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intopieces
One of the reasons I stopped eating meat was the that the industry itself is
traumatic to the humans who process the animals and I wasn't comfortable
participating in that economically.

So, I was happy to see that I don't use any of the services listed there,
except a bit of YouTube. If I could avoid that one, I would too.

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danjc
People are basically good, right?

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pmarreck
Both the title here as well as the article itself have "the the" repeated. :O

~~~
sctb
Thanks! Fixed here.

