What about spam?
And would this extend to marketplaces? If a company allows users to sell educational resources for kids, what would happen if they start removing items that clearly don't fit?
> And would this extend to marketplaces?
I believe these are already considered publishers ? In any case it's no different than how traditional bookstores work
People say this, I don't think it's true.
I think there is ambiguity around when marketing crosses into spam. If you look at different communities, even HN and Reddit, you'll find different opinions about what kind of promotion crosses that line.
Individual communities need to be able to make their own decisions on that, they don't need blanket rules applied across the board to all platforms.
Is it OK to do that to a marketing post?
(Incidentally i started using twitter in "view latest" mode and i prefer it - turns out their expensive algorithms were pretty useless for me)
For an example to the contrary, look at how many Wikipedia articles get deleted as 'self-promotion' even when they're just simple informational entries about a business or semi-notable person.
I couldn't disagree harder. I'd go into detail, but a) I'm at work, and b) the fact that we disagree is evidence that there _is_ ambiguity.
Generally (and perhaps ideally), I like the idea of more visibility/transparency into what algorithms (and human moderators) do.
But I think it's worth noting that, pragmatically, there are at least a few minefields here...
- Providing full transparency into what gets flagged as spam is going to make it a lot easier for spammers to model, evade, and notice changes in the spam-identification code and practices.
- Perhaps you were imagining this being temporary, but the operational feasibility of keeping all of this spam in-platform ultimately depends on signal/noise ratio, scale, profitability, and time horizons. It's one thing to bear the burden of storing 1% of your plaintext post volume for one year--it's quite another to store 20 or 30% of your video upload volume in perpetuity.
- I'm having a hard time imagining the proceedings of the court-of-legal-vs-illegal-spam-filters. Without a lot of technical training (or a lot of reliance on expert testimony), the simplest way for an average person to grasp whether a spam filter is biased or not is going to be either looking "back" at what it did/didn't flag, or "testing" it with some sample corpus. In both cases, this process will be fraught with interpretation and sampling bias issues. This may hinge on a judge, panel, or jury being able to see through a bombastic argument that trots out the most respectable {ideology} opinions from the discard pile--they have to realize that nothing in the discard pile can be interpreted without a really good understanding of the input pile. (They'd have to be so good at this that they could spot someone who is trying to score political points and manipulate opinion by intentionally mounting an adversarial campaign that intentionally crafts seemingly innocuous ideological content that also gets flagged as spam).
- Likewise, there's probably no great way to make a litmus-test corpus. Spam looks very different in different contexts. A useful Amazon review or tweet may both look like spam if someone emails or DMs them to you. Even if you can create a set of corpora that cover the bases, they'll probably be useless if they don't evolve, and very vulnerable to political and ideological manipulation if they do.
- If there's a lot of legal fear around getting sued because your spam-filter has a taste for how {ideological subcommunity} likes to phrase its opinions, I'd expect spam filters to accumulate safe-words and rules that cause them to back off of charged topics. It'd only be a matter of time until legit spam/manipulation ops infer the existence of those rules and move to exploit them.
but how would this "solve" spam in any case where the ratio of spam-to-signal crosses whatever threshold it takes to start breaking a platform's network effects, reducing engagement, driving out existing users, warding off new ones, shifting how the community views what the platform is for, etc.?
This is partly because email isn't "for" anything except communication. The idea that platforms must stand for something is new and wrong. A good platform stands for nothing and is open to everyone.
It's one thing to have the platform equivalent of a spam folder for new top-level posts that smell like junk. But these platforms have more significant design challenges: to cleanly handle replies, retweets + commentary, mentions, comments, threads, and anything else that is sort of inherently contextual (including the possibility that there are legitimate non-spam posts that interact with a spam post to quote, comment, reply, warn others, and so on).
I'm a little skeptical about how well anyone can meet that design in a way that makes it easy to see what was flagged as spam and isn't also sensitive to the ratio of spam to legitimate posts...
Its possible you're imagining that spam posts don't show up at all in a thread unless you hit a single toggle that re-renders the thread with any pruned replies and branches in place. Interfaces like this don't spiral out if the ratio changes, but I also don't think they make it easy to spot the flagged posts.
An interface that marks the posts in-thread can make it easier, but they're sensitive to that ratio. Very sensitive if they shows the full post, and a little sensitive if they replace the post with a clickable indicator that there's suspected spam there.
My point is a more general one: people argue for censorship as the only way to maintain a workable forum, but, I don't believe that, based on my prior experience. I'm not saying it's easy to build a really great spam filter for social forums, but Slashdot proved out a lot of good techniques, and anyway censoring stuff en-masse just creates a different set of problems: social rather than technical.