The horror of being a Meta content moderator

The horror of being a Meta content moderator(english.elpais.com)

47 points by FernandoMax 2 years ago | 14 comments

So... are the humans being used to train AI or not? The article seemed vague on this. It makes sense that they would be, if only to eventually lay off the humans to save costs. (Assuming that the AI inference is actually cheaper than employing humans to do it. Maybe if the models are complex enough it wouldn't be.)

The thing I find confusing is this: if an AI were being trained, I would expect it to quickly get good at distinguishing the extremely obvious bad content from obvious acceptable content. So over time, you would expect the human moderators to only need to make calls about borderline cases. I.e., over time what the humans see will tend to become less horrible, and the AI will eventually get good at making those calls as well. If this isn't happening, why not?

Terr_ 2 years ago | |

I suspect part of the problem is that AI uncertainty and failure still doesn't always work the way humans expect, so what's "borderline" for the AI isn't necessarily borderline for human, and vice-versa. This leads to a problem when it comes to reliably detecting and escalating issues. (Especially when something slipping through might have large legal repercussions.)

Imagine a recognition task where both machines and humans have the same X% false-[positive/negative] rate, but where there's zero overlap between the cases that each system considers uncertain. Failures by the algorithm would proceed without being flagged for review, and all the human reviews would be of "obvious" things.

1letterunixname 2 years ago |

I met a content moderator manager. Even they said theirs was a shitty job, and theirs was one removed from having their eyes bleed from the nonstop firehose of human excrement.

The problem AI cannot solve is it doesn't get sarcasm, and probably never will.

Perhaps crowdsourcing other users as moderators is a way out and less painful than foisting in onto other human beings as their primary means of survival.

They will keep catching flak because of the lack of moderation that enabled 1 genocide so far.

emestifs 2 years ago | |

What makes HN different from FB? Is it just the scale? You see stupid stuff posted here. You even see things get flagged fairly quickly. Crowdsourced moderation. But I can't imagine that would work for FB. Is it that there's literally no bar when it comes to who can post what on FB? Whereas on HN there's a bar, and often the bar is dictated by the nature of the post itself (popular topic vs some niche where only a small subset will comment anything).

StackOverflow and all the other Overflow sites also crowdsourcing moderation, but there you get you question getting flagged because you didn't look hard enough or your question is too similar to one asked 8 years ago.

There's also tons of niche forums where maybe a few dozen or a few hundred people visit and participate. They likely get some spam, but never really the type of stuff you see (in my case hear about) on FB.

Another extreme example maybe 4chan. Some boards of course are filled with stupid people, but others are quite tame. Such as stark difference on just one site.

jareklupinski 2 years ago | | |

> Crowdsourced moderation. But I can't imagine that would work for FB.

its used to work. incredibly well, in fact, but only for the first few years or so

back when your entire feed was just the contents of your friends list, if one of those 'friends' starts posting things that get a little too crazy, you could unfriend them in two clicks, from the same dialog as the post itself, and you wouldnt have to worry about it ever again

try to unfriend an ad or 'promoted content' tho haha

voxic11 2 years ago | | |

I think one difference is on facebook you can choose who sees your posts. Whereas on hackernews everything is public to everyone. Inevitably by accident or by deliberate choice some facebook communities won't end up with enough people willing to perform the community moderation role, at least not to the standard that facebook needs moderation to be done.

tamimio 2 years ago | | |

> What makes HN different from FB? Is it just the scale?

The userbase.

vdaea 2 years ago |

If you are not cut out for this kind of job, why don't you just leave? I don't understand, making all this big fuss, with medical leaves, suing the company, etc. Taking advantage of the fact that it's extremely hard to fire someone in Spain.

me_me_me 2 years ago | |

oh wow, who would have thought of that!

You need to share your ideas with government, if you are homeless just buy a house. If you don't like your dead-end job just quit. If you can't pay bills just stop living.

People who get those jobs in the first place are going to be pressed for money in the first place. They are not at liberty to cheat or use system like you suggest. A lot of people have morals and consider you suggestions unacceptable.

Log_out_ 2 years ago | |

They do.. and usually turn to groups that are against the society that barraged them.