<story><title>Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?</title><url>https://moultano.wordpress.com/2019/10/02/why-do-companies-with-huge-resources-still-have-terrible-moderation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wvenable</author><text>There are two classes of users: normal people who want to use your service and people who actively weaponize it for their own ego. Those latter users have all the time in world and can defeat any attempt to stop them.  This is because, online, time is the only resource that matters.  You have a limited amount of this resource.  Your company has a limited amount of this resource.  Your normal users have a limited amount of this resource.&lt;p&gt;There is a discussion below about Flat Earthers having every right to speak -- and I agree.  And in fact, I doubt anyone would truly care about Flat Earthers having their Flat Earth forum or even adding an occasional Flat Earth comment whenever NASA posts a round Earth photo.  That&amp;#x27;s never been the problem.  The problem is that some users don&amp;#x27;t stop there -- they&amp;#x27;re on a mission to change the world.  They going to abuse your platform to the extreme to promote their views.  Most big platforms right now have a huge mess of people tossing free bytes at each other.&lt;p&gt;If a small group of dedicated people wanted to ruin Hacker News for the rest of us, I have no doubt in my mind that they could.  No amount of moderation could stop them.  I&amp;#x27;ve seen it first hand a few times with other services.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattigames</author><text>&amp;gt;They going to abuse your platform to the extreme to promote their views.&lt;p&gt;Facebook and twitter _encourage_ people to abuse their platform, that&amp;#x27;s why you can write 100 tweets from one account on a single day and they don&amp;#x27;t try to stop you at all, they know all that content will show up in their statistics, it will also make other users reply to those comments and so on; so in the end they have all incentives to keep their platform filled with people enraged with each other.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;If a small group of dedicated people wanted to ruin Hacker News for the rest of us, I have no doubt in my mind that they could.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not so sure, unlike Facebook HN is not a for-profit (Ycombinator is, Hacker news is not) so something as simple as only allowing comments from user accounts created before the attack started would mitigate the problem until a better solution is slowly deployed.&lt;p&gt;Also, Facebook cannot ban an IP because other non-attacking users may be using that very same IP, a little site like HN loses nothing by banning offending IPs, a site like Facebook would get a gigantic backlash that would hurt the bottom line: Their valuation.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?</title><url>https://moultano.wordpress.com/2019/10/02/why-do-companies-with-huge-resources-still-have-terrible-moderation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wvenable</author><text>There are two classes of users: normal people who want to use your service and people who actively weaponize it for their own ego. Those latter users have all the time in world and can defeat any attempt to stop them.  This is because, online, time is the only resource that matters.  You have a limited amount of this resource.  Your company has a limited amount of this resource.  Your normal users have a limited amount of this resource.&lt;p&gt;There is a discussion below about Flat Earthers having every right to speak -- and I agree.  And in fact, I doubt anyone would truly care about Flat Earthers having their Flat Earth forum or even adding an occasional Flat Earth comment whenever NASA posts a round Earth photo.  That&amp;#x27;s never been the problem.  The problem is that some users don&amp;#x27;t stop there -- they&amp;#x27;re on a mission to change the world.  They going to abuse your platform to the extreme to promote their views.  Most big platforms right now have a huge mess of people tossing free bytes at each other.&lt;p&gt;If a small group of dedicated people wanted to ruin Hacker News for the rest of us, I have no doubt in my mind that they could.  No amount of moderation could stop them.  I&amp;#x27;ve seen it first hand a few times with other services.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>colechristensen</author><text>The latter type who gain an outsized dopamine shot from whatever game your platform is tend to be what keeps your platform going and drives your revenue.  It’s just that some of them you like.  There’s a big drive to optimize your platform to those kinds of lowest common denominator users until it is ruined and worthless.  Just A&amp;#x2F;B test maximize some metric to make sure it happens.&lt;p&gt;You can fight back by intentionally disadvantaging the top percentiles of an important metric, finding out a few things that are the most common complaints with what you are and making maintenance of those core values, and limiting the amount of effort you put into being generally appealing.</text></comment>