Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

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This seems like something specific to the individual. Maybe this isn't the job for you, but there's probably enough people "made of different stuff" that could handle it? I feel like there's a subtext in this discussion that "nobody can handle it" or "you have to be a monster to work this job" but that's just not true.

Just out of college in the mid-90s, I worked for a few months at a small local software company in the last throws of death. As a last grasp at survival, all the programmers switched to doing cold call sales. With phones.

I would stare at mutilated children all day long rather than go back to cold calling. I was miserable and I hated every moment of every day until the company (happily, for me) closed up. Yet I know people who somehow think it's perfectly normal to dial random numbers and try to pitch them something. They're made of different stuff.

I've talked to people who make the same claim about computer programming. They'd rather starve.

Facebook has 10,000 moderators. I'm pretty sure there are at least 10k people in the world who are psychologically fit for content policing. It's doesn't have to be for everyone.

Have you ever had a job where you have to look at pictures of mutilated children all day long?

I don't think many people are immune to PTSD, but I suppose sociopaths need jobs too. But I'm not sure you want to hire a department of sociopaths.

> But I'm not sure you want to hire a department of sociopaths.

Why not, if they do the work well?

And anyway, they'd be working from home, these days.

Is this not the same type of thinking that’s convinced people who do all sorts of dirty but necessary jobs are “real sickos”? Jobs like homicide/sex crime investigation, fixing the sewers, exterminating pests, and so on. I would probably get PTSD if I had to investigate bleeding anuses digitally but my doctor seems to manage and I doubt she’s a sociopath.

My point is, some people simply aren’t traumatized by photos/videos, either via talent or training, and because of this they can process it enough to categorize it and keep their emotional/social/intellectual distance. That doesn’t make them sociopaths and it certainly doesn’t make them bad people.

> I would probably get PTSD if I had to investigate bleeding anuses digitally but my doctor seems to manage

A bleeding anus is just a thing that happens to people. It's a bit gross but I don't know why anyone should be traumatized by it.

The kind of content that these moderators have to deal with goes well beyond the mere abject.

You seem to be confusing any exposure with constant exposure, and also type of gross/messed up. Nothing you listed compares to content moderation in severity and volume.

Fixing a sewer is gross. Extermination is gross, not traumatic, unless you have extreme empathy for small rodents and insects. Doctors deal with very few remotely bleeding anuses on the order of one a week/month maybe versus one a minute. None of these should be called real sickos, but none would be expected to develop PTSD either.

A significantly bigger portion of the population would be traumatized and develop PTSD by the level of exposure of content moderation. While not nearly all are sociopaths, they 100% will be represented higher even without factoring in selection bias. Hiring a department of them would not be inconceivable, putting the validity of that aside.

You also make the jump from sociopath to bad person, which many I'm sure would have some qualms with as a categorical.

> I don't think many people are immune to PTSD

PTSD is real but lots of people still go to war and not everyone comes back a basketcase. Most don't, in fact.

No, I've never had a job watching pictures of mutilated children all day. But like a lot of naturally curious people, I've searched out and watched bloody videos of beheadings and car accidents and whatnot. It wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't really traumatic either. If I didn't already have a much more lucrative career, I don't think I'd suffer too much as a Facebook censor.

Does that make me a sociopath? My wife and son don't think so, nor do my close friends. I'm not sure if I should feel a little offended here.

On the other hand, I may still have PTSD from those days of cold calling as a junior software engineer 25 years ago. I hate phones. Maybe people are just wired differently.

I get what you're saying, but you would have to look for traits and develop processes to make an environment that people could do well in.

Big companies like Facebook (although they are not alone) don't do that. That costs money. They use disposable workers, like on-shore or off-shore contractors, and do industrial-style quotas/piecework methods to maximize productivity.

When you hire like that, you'll have a normal distribution of people. On the left there will be pre-broken people who get pleasure from watching decapitation videos and nasty shit, on the right you'll have people who are traumatized and broken by the work, and in the middle you have people who will cope for some period of time, and burn out.

It doesn't seem to be specific to an individual when there are class actions lawsuits and many people reporting to suffer from it.

There exist jobs, like slaughterhouse knockers, which are linked to causing PTSD and increased criminal behavior. It's not far fetched to believe these moderator jobs do too.

Yeah, and they made an interesting point about how these problems are compounded by the lack of mental health awareness and the difficulties of defending mental health trauma in a court of law in countries like India and the United States. I didn't think of that before.

Before I accept this is a serious problem, I'd need to see some statistics. The article is just a bunch of anecdotes. If this job is hazardous, quantify it?

It wasn't that long ago HN was abuzz about large numbers of suicides at Foxconn... until someone realized that the suicide rate was actually slightly below the community average. I simply don't trust arguments without statistics anymore.

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