Moderators protect us from the worst of the internet. That comes at huge personal cost.
Moderators protect us from the worst of the internet. That comes at huge personal cost.
Internal data from the ABC show the harmful content moderators are exposed to weekly, sometimes even daily. But the organisation’s response is one many others can learn from.
I was a moderator on a web forum many years ago. I also had my own forums for a while. Some of the stuff that people would post probably scarred me for life. It was a time when things like rotten.com and goatse were popular. I can only imagine what it's like now on a big web site like reddit where they probably have a lot more traffic.
Right there with you. I moderated on Gaia Online back in the day, and every now and then someone would get their jollies off by posting gore and CSAM. And of course, the mod team would have to clean it up because that’s what they do.
I actually had a better time modding on Reddit. At least no one posted CSAM once a month.
Though Reddit is the place I ended up modding a video that fucked me up for a little while…
Well, it's one of those things where you either learn to compartmentalize, or you quit fast.
I moderated forums back in the early days of the internet. It was rough some days, to the point I had someone show up at my house because I wouldn't let them abuse other users.
I moderated on reddit, and it was both easier and worse. People like to complain, but automod being able to filter out so much of the worst without having to see it at all made the job bearable. If I'd had to wade through the bigotry, the worst slurs, and similar stuff that a well crafted automod rule could magic away, I wouldn't have done it at all.
But the fact that you have to constantly adjust the automod to catch up with the most persistent assholes is draining.
And that's not getting into the stuff that isn't hate speech, misogyny, bigotry, and that kind of infection. People think they can say anything they want, any way they want, and you stopping them means you're the asshole, even after that went on a rant about fucking someone's wife and kids (seriously, that's a ban I had to make) because someone didn't agree with their opinion of a flashlight. Seriously, that fucking happened.
Point being that while there are mods that go too far, the internet, and places like reddit or lemmy, would be unbearable without it. There has to be someone making those calls, keeping things from turning into the non stop scroll of venom and porn that used to be way too common back in the day.
As a moderator and admin for countless Discord communities, yeah, I've seen some vile shit.
Pretending that it doesn't have an impact doesn't help in the long run. Secondary Trauma is a thing. Create a workflow to distance yourself from the content, plan breaks, and please talk to someone (qualified) about it.
Thank you for your service o7
I can imagine having to go through hours to days worth of post related to hatespeech alone. How many months has Lemmy been around now?
Having done it for a living for a few months, you cannot possibly imagine how bad it gets.
No, seriously. I already had very little faith in humanity going in, and thought I'd seen the worst the internet had to offer. Scraping the actual bottom of the barrel is difficult to even describe. I had to force a stunned sense of humor about it to detach myself a bit as a coping mechanism.
Automatic moderation has been a boon in that way. A decent portion of it gets caught by the automatic procedures, instead of having to deal with CSAM and spam yourself.
You get paid a living to moderate Lemmy?
I think it's actually been around for three or four years, but I didn't start using it until the Reddit API stuff last June (2023).
I tried to moderate in a large subreddit and all I did was protect people who I did not like, or who got into slap fights. Quit after a few months.
You did the right choice this is not a proper thing to waste your life on and the people you did it for don't want it either.
You'd think, as a terminally online person and a moderator (not just here but I was one on some Reddit communities, too), I'd run into the super awful shit like CP once in a while. I haven't accidentally stumbled onto shit like that since I was, like, 15 and the Internet was like the Wild West.
I don't really think that's all moderators doing. There's a ton of automation in a lot of shit now that can detect CP and other illegal content and prevent it from showing up. The humans doing the job tend to be the most literal-minded dipshits that can't grasp the concept of context, satire, or sarcasm.
On the other hand, I'm a mod for /r/GameCubeHacks and it's great because I have access to all the piracy links the other mods remove. 🤙
When making even the slightest expression online treat it like you were working in a sewer running through an insane asylum connected to a prison.
kinda nice to know i am the worst of the internet. hope it costs them a lot more for the priviledge
Apparently I would make a really awesome moderator because seeing gore and shit doesn't "scar me for life". In fact, I seek it out out of morbid curiosity. Too bad I don't have the requisite lust for power needed to be a moderator.
That’s like saying ‘I would be a great candy store clerk, because I love eating sugary snacks.’ Eventually you end up sick or diabetic.
The human brain can only handle so much. While we all have different tolerance levels, we still have a breaking point. We’re just primates, after all.
I'd make a really awesome candy store clerk too, btw, because I love eating sugary snacks.
Probably wouldn't be such a high cost in ð first place if ðey didn't hoover up every open mod spot for ð power trip
Unrelated, but genuine curiosity - Why the usage of the
thorneth rather than spelling the word "the" out? Ain't bothered by it or nothin', just interesting to see out in the wild online!I was only a mod on 1 subreddit and the vial stuff people would post to be assholes was sad, like they had nothing better to do then search for nasty gore shit to post on a nice meme sun because they were offended by others happiness.
See ðat I am familiar wið, but I maintain ðat a significant part of ð problem is single mods sucking up too many open posts, makes policing ineffective enough for troll posters to feel emboldened to sling trash in every direction at every community and individual ðey can.
But this isn't voluntary moderation (though that might also have that issue), this is about the people who moderate for a living. So people on Facebook, or X (formerly known as Twitter), who see the posts that you report, and have to work with all of that.
Those people typically aren't going around just hoovering up a mod spot for the fun of it.
I detest moderators, I do not trust them, I do not want them skewing my reality, get out GET OUT, I don't want your help, I don't want you, I don't like you I rather wade through a terabyte of spam and cheese pizza than tolerate you silently altering my worldview one more fucking time.
It's literally crazy to say something like this on Lemmy of all places.
Don't like moderators? Fine, try to host your own instance and your own communities. You'll find quickly that it turns to shit because it's actually pretty hard to do well.
Don't like moderators? Fine, try to host your own instance and your own communities. You'll find quickly that it turns to shit because it's actually pretty hard to do well.
Not really. You'll just always have to deal with people who hate you because they wanna break the rules and hate facing the consequences. That isn't hard. It's just annoying.
It especially wouldn't be hard if you hate "censorship" and let everyone just say whatever they want, even if they're bigoted pieces of shit and posting CSAM. You literally just do nothing. Doing nothing is easy!
I miss when signal-to-noise ratio was common parlance of the Internet.
Making usable spaces is tough work, but having worthwhile content drowned in an ocean of noise is seemingly the default of corporate controlled media anymore, so much have they abandoned paying attention to what they publish. That you don't know who is editorializing and moderating the places you frequent and have opinions on the job they're doing says to me that you're not doing the work that being media literate requires, which is all the more important when so much of it is generated content with no consideration given to reality.
I somewhat agree, but I do think there needs to be some form of moderation.
I'm interested in individual-directed moderation, where you can pick your own moderators and have your feed be altered based on how people you trust have moderated content. My issue with moderators isn't moderation itself, but with biases that I disagree with. If I could swap the moderators of my favorite communities, I think I would have a better overall experience.
Yes, moderation filtering as a subscription service.
Crowd sourced moderation.
Raw feed always available on my device, I get the last word at all time on my moderation filters and content discovery algorithm,
offline, on device and nobody else ever knows what my choices are.
That's the absolute bare minimum that I would find tolerable.
Unfortunately unless you are a tiny niche community that isn’t ever targeted by spam or idiots (and how common is that really), moderators are a necessary evil. You probably don’t hate moderators. You probably hate bad/aggressive/biased/etc moderators. Or maybe sometimes you are the problem, I don’t know. It is not a problem with an easy solution. Usually large forums with no moderation become quickly unbearable to most people. And then moderators become in turn unbearable to some people.
Maybe a trusted AI can do a better job at this - like give it the community rules and ask it to enforce them objectively, transparently, and dispassionately, unless a certain number of participants complain, in which case it can reverse its decision and learn from that.
I must always have the last word on my local filtering. The raw feed must be available to all.
Filtering and discovery algorithm, offline, on device, private, transparent and easily auditable.
All Moderators Are Bad, That's the null hypothesis.
They do not get the benefit of the doubt, it was always laughable to think they wouldn't immediately abuse their position to shape and manipulate the public with their power while constantly acting like the victims.
No more !
This power should never have been allowed to hide in the shadows and concentrate in so few unaccountable individuals.
The jannies make me sick !