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Comment by rhema | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or do should we expect that some small population will be naturally equipped to deal with this job? We don't expect everyone to want to be a soldier or medical doctor. These people deal with situations that would make most people throw up. If you can't handle an hour of browsing 4chan, maybe you should know that content moderation is not a good fit for you.

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I'm not sure if that solves the core issue of long term mental effects, even on the "hardest" people.

Stepdad is a retired firefighter, has kind of that old-timey tough guy thing going on (although deep down he's a real softy) - he rarely likes talking about the hardest parts of the job, but the few times it has come up he mentions seeing some things that haunt him.

I remember one time him mentioning seeing something so grotesque when he pulled up to the scene that he started laughing at the absurdity. Sort of in a way that he could do nothing but throw his hands up and say "well fuck this."

He jokes about some of that stuff, but I can sense pain beneath the humor.

Consider that there are people who've only seen a small fraction of what your stepfather has, but can't handle it nearly as well.

The pay is poor, and the population willign to do this may not be in the same region as the jobs, may have better jobs and so on.

The workload is massive. There’s not enough people, and the firms don’t want to pay as much as they need to.

It seems to me (and I’m serious about this) a classic sociopath would in fact be willing to do this kind of thing for money if I understand correctly, with no ill effects. They apparently have conscience and are something like 1% of the population. But I think they tend to be smart, and can probably get higher-paying jobs.

I am probably one of those people naturally equipped to deal with this job, but because i don't find this content shocking, i find it hard to empathize with the people who want it to be censored, so i would not want to take the job.

which might be a good argument for gigification of these types of content moderation positions since the machine learning tech simply isn't there yet and might never be in some cases.

Someone with a strong constitution/stomach (i.e. the people who can browse 4chan while eating) might find this work relatively leisurely/tame for decent pay and flexible hours if adapted to a gig-economy model. I mean, there's a whole class of sick fucks who watch the stuff on reddit's /r/watchpeopledie for no compensation.

Might end up with less mental health problems if this type of desensitized personality was leveraged for this nasty-but-necessary job instead of recruiting from naive 19-year-old kids or whoever in between retail jobs and exploiting them in atrocious work conditions until they get PTSD.

You can't use random people because of privacy concerns - enforcing NDA on random gig contractors would be impossible.

"relatively leisurely/tame for decent pay and flexible hours"

Uhh, this doesn't sound at all like the stories of driving Uber that I've heard.

I don't think any of the people in the article would be doing this job if they had other options that paid as well, so I don't exactly see how your idea would improve their lives.

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