[There are] no stupid questions, but there sure are questions with an obvious axe to grind.
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
-49 points (14.5% liked)
No Stupid Questions
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Because without mods, people tend to be horrible to each other. Just read through the modlogs sometime, it's depressing how unpleasant some people choose to be.
Having moderated for a while, it's surprisingly sad with the kind of stuff we have to remove from even small and low stakes communities
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(13 replies)
I think you're starting from a false premise. "All power corrupts" is a demonstrably untrue maxim.
If it were true we would never have anyone with power over anything. Being the one in charge of taking the cat to the vet would somehow be corrupting.
Unchecked, unanswerable power corrupts. On lemmy everyone is free to create their own sub. Heck they're free to create their own instance. That makes the "power" of moderators pretty tame.
Compare that to the power a corporate CEO has over the typical employee. Especially since the 1970s and 1980s redefinition of the primary responsibility of the directors of a corporation to be "maximize shareholder value" instead of "maximize stakeholder value."
Even in (small d democratic) politics, at least an aggrieved voter can run to replace a corrupt, abusive politician. Not many companies, probably no publicly traded ones, have a mechanism for the workers to replace the management. That's where major corruption by power can be witnessed.
Because some of us remember how the internet was without moderators, and how it went to shit early 2000's when "everyone" started using it.
20-25 years ago mods were rarely needed beyond booting a couple of spammers and getting rid of the occasional goatse and tubgirl. Now platform-wide efforts are needed to combat csam and gore.
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Too limit the number of people getting PTSD from terrible images.
Just because some hall monitors let their title go to their heads, that doesn't mean they wield power in any meaningful way.
You're confusing petty tyrants and actual tyrants.
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I don't think that the type of power that a janny has is able to meaningfully corrupt the janny. At least, not in most cases; because it's practically no power, like it or not your online community means nothing in the big picture.
Instead, I think that bad moderators are the result of people with specific moral flaws (entitlement, assumptiveness, irrationality, lack of self-control, context illiteracy) simply showing them as they interact with other people. They'd do it without the janny position, it's just that being a janny increases the harm that those trashy users cause.
Why the alternatives that you mentioned to human moderation do not work:
- Bots - content moderation requires understanding what humans convey through language and/or images within a context. Bots do not.
- Voting - voting only works when you have crystal clear rules on who's allowed or not to vote, otherwise the community will be subjected to external meddling.
Bots - content moderation requires understanding what humans convey through language and/or images within a context. Bots do not.
so, like. bots are programed by people. all they really do is put a buffer between the actions of a moderator and the (real) moderators.
The origin (being programmed by people) doesn't matter, what matters are the capabilities. Not even current state-of-art LLMs understand human language on a discursive level, and yet that is necessary if you want to moderate the content produced by human beings.
(inb4: a few people don't understand it either. Those should not be moderators.)
all they really do is put a buffer between the actions of a moderator [user? otherwise the sentence doesn't make sense] and the (real) moderators.
Using them as a buffer would be fine, but sometimes bots are used to replace the actions of human moderators - this is a shitty practice bound to create a lot of false positives (legit content and users being removed) and false negatives (shitty users and content are left alone). Reddit is a good example of that - there's always some fuckhead mod to code automod to remove posts based on individual keywords, and never check the mod logs for false positives.
even if that hypothetical AI could understand human language- and you're right- it's coded by people, and it's actions will be predicated on what those people coded it to do.
Meaning that the AI gets it's sense of appropriate from those people. Which means, those people might as well be modding it. or seen as the mods. bots are all-too-frequently used to insulate the people making the decisions as to what should be moderated from those actions. in the case of reddit automod bot yeeting content based on included words... most of that is stupid, I agree, but then it's those mod's community.
Now I got your point. You're right - the AI in question will inherit the biases and the worldviews of the people coding it, effectively acting as their proxy. IMO for this reason the bot's actions should be seen as moral responsibility of those people (i.e. instead of "the bot did it", it's more like "I did it through the bot").
in the case of reddit automod bot yeeting content based on included words… most of that is stupid, I agree, but then it’s those mod’s community.
Even if we see the comm as belonging to the mod, it's still a shitty approach that IMO should be avoided, for the sake of the health of the community. You don't want people breaking the rules by avoiding the automod (it's too easy to do it), but you also don't want content being needlessly removed.
Plus, personally, I don't see a community as "the mod's". It's more like "the users' ". The mods are there enforcing the rules, sure, but the community belongs as much to them as it belongs to the others, you know?
Nicely rendered. You have given me food for thought.
To quote Dr Cox: "People are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling."
So we elect some people to be chief jerkfaces against all the other miserable sods, then the rest of us pricks have to bully the mods to keep things fair... or unfair in so many directions at once that the scales still balance out. Thus turning our weakness into strength.
Or at least, that's the plan.
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Power corrupts, but that doesn't mean that we don't need positions of power...
Because for anything that is built, someone else will set out to destroy or manipulate it for their own purposes. For example, spammers will use social media to try to boost their SEO and as an avenue for free advertising.
As much as I'd love if everyone could act with the best intentions towards others at all times, there is too much motivation and reward for anti-social actions. As a result, we have to have a complex system of rules and enforcement.
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I feel like you are close to asking good political science questions. Close. Are you advocating for anarchy? Or communism? No? Just a technocracy that "works"?
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