

SocialMod - automatically moderate the "idiots that rule" - swombat
http://www.socialmod.com/

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chanux
Now the site make sense. A lot better than last time it was on HN.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=628257>

Kudos.

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swombat
Thought this might be interesting to mention as a solution to the Trent Reznor
problem.

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tylermenezes
A cool idea, way overpriced in my opinion, though. $24-$149 a month for "you
moderate" packages? I could roll my own in almost any programming language in
1/10th the time it would take me to integrate with their service.

The MTurk services are a little more reasonably priced, 2.9 cents a comment is
about what I'd offer the users directly.

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anigbrowl
I have my doubts about whether the Mturk payments are going to attract
moderators capable of handling more than the 'LOL I TROLLED U' comments,
though. It seems like more of an anti-spam/swearing tool than anything likely
to elevate the quality of discourse; that's useful enough in and of itself for
quite a few sites though.

I do think it's fairly pricey. 15k messages/mo ain't much on a busy site. Some
political blogs rack that up in a couple of days, but I don't see them putting
down several thousand a month for crowd moderation.

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pacemkr
It is quite sad that we have to use actual people (Mechnical Turk) to simply
filter out the garbage.

We've more or less figured out how to train spam prevention systems. How is
"troll prevention" a fundamentally different problem?

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endtime
Spam is automated, trolling isn't. So it makes sense that spam detection is
easier to automate than troll detection.

A different way to say just about the same thing: Trolling can be customized
to a specific context, it can rely on sarcasm or social references, etc. I
don't think there exists any NLP system that can pick up e.g. written sarcasm.

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jasonkester
Spam is not automated anymore. Automated spam doesn't get through modern
countermeasures such as human-detection and bayesian filtering, so it is not
worth considering. The spam that you actually see today on most sites is hand-
pasted by real human beings (at least the stuff that makes it onto my site is.
I'm sure you can still find plenty of phpbb sites that are overrun with the
old sort).

It's hard to do anything about because they'll simply strip the content of an
article that would fit well on your site, and stick a link at the bottom. Or
maybe they'll skip the link for the first dozen blog entries until they think
they've gained your trust.

Real spam (versus the wikispam v1agra stuff that gets automatically swatted
down) is tricky. And these people are a lot more motivated than trolls, since
they get paid when they get a working link on your site.

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endtime
> Real spam...is tricky

Okay, fair enough, but then it's not the spam pacemkr was talking about.

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pacemkr
I've actually seen my share of this type of spam as well. Lucky for us all of
it came through Indian IPs, while our users were all from the US.

They are really getting creative. They WILL post several messages to "gain
your trust" before they throw in a link. I can't believe all this effort is
really worth it for whomever is sponsoring this "human spam".

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TrevorJ
The biggest risk in this is the stick situation you come to when somebody who
feels that a legitimate comment was moderated and feels the need to make a
fuss about it. It's a little hard to come up with a thoughtful response to
that. "Well, my moderators made the decision." "Who are they?" "I don't know
them."

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req2
What if this service were used to moderate the administration of Adsense bans
by Google?

"Independently verified enforcement of TOS brought to you by SocialMod"

