Nineteen members of Congress are pushing Mark Zuckerberg to explain why Meta has allowed ads for cocaine, ecstasy and other drugs to be shown on Facebook and Instagram.
I strongly suspect that a much bigger fraction of the free volunteer labor moved here, than anyone has realized.
Zuck and Spez know how fucked they are, but they’re motivated to downplay the damage to their platforms.
There’s an unvirtuous cycle where their platforms have under-resourced moderation, which has allowed bot proliferation, which has made unpaid moderation work a shittier job, which causes moderators to leave, which allows more bot proliferation.
Folks here seem to be saying our moderation tools are objectively poor, but are getting better with each release. So it’s the bot spammers whose life gets harder, over time, here.
We get posts here too, and on Reddit
The posts here get reported and removed very quickly, sometimes within minutes of the account being created or the first post.
I searched Reddit for the website they were linking and saw the spam posts on Reddit have been up for months.
Few possible differences:
We have a better ratio of users/moderation, where the lower volume of posts means everything can go through human moderators
Our users are more actively trying to keep the platform good by reporting spam
The incentive here is to create a good online platform. The inventive there is profit. The priorities are different as a result
It isn’t just those factors. There’s also the fact that instance owners would rather moderate than get on the wrong side of the law.
Great points.
I might add:
I strongly suspect that a much bigger fraction of the free volunteer labor moved here, than anyone has realized.
Zuck and Spez know how fucked they are, but they’re motivated to downplay the damage to their platforms.
There’s an unvirtuous cycle where their platforms have under-resourced moderation, which has allowed bot proliferation, which has made unpaid moderation work a shittier job, which causes moderators to leave, which allows more bot proliferation.
Folks here seem to be saying our moderation tools are objectively poor, but are getting better with each release. So it’s the bot spammers whose life gets harder, over time, here.