Moderation moderation moderation . It’s a big problem
I have similar moderation concerns in my browser game/engine but I only ban offensive slurs not swears, but I give no visual affordance that the word is not allowed
The only surface where players see the input content is in a share card, and if they finish a game and get to the share card they will find the offensive word has been REDACTED lol
So it’s a long feedback loop just to find out your hijinks lead nowhere
…or you could just let people talk? People who engage with social features generally do so because they want to talk to other people. That carries some inherent risks.
I agree with getting extremist racists and misogynists, bigots and homophobes out of social spaces! So tell me, how do I make sure that supporters of Hamas and the Iranian government have no ability to write comments online?
Or, do you grasp the nature of the problem of free speech, or don't you?
>> they can fuck off from any spaces I have a voice in.
This also sounds like you (a) don't really have a "voice", since you're only comfortable talking to people you deem acceptable (b) call people racist who you are afraid of talking to (and they're almost certainly not all racist, given your criteria that anyone who disagrees with you is racist, and given that disagreeing with you would almost be required out of pure logic), and (c) are only comfortable in an echo chamber where your opinion, such as it is, has no impact whatsoever.
If the history of the internet is to be any guide, it won't be the slog of racism that will shut something like this down, it will be a firehose of penis pictures.
Somewhere, someone will figure out how to create a bot that floods this with penis pictures, and that will be the end of it (or the beginning of the end, where a short period of anti-penis-pic defensive patches will be made until the software maintainers just give up)
There are people so worthless that the only reason not to put them between 2 buns instead of Bessie the cow is how disgusting they are. We are morally obliged to respect their human rights we aren't obligated to listen to them.
You are morally obliged to not assume a person's character until you have actually listened to them and their story as a person, even if they seem to be in an opposite political camp, and even if they show hallmarks of being in one you consider evil. Thus I can be a Jew with Israeli family and have had honest conversations with people who had fought with Hezbollah.
If everyone did what you are saying here, peace would be impossible. For in your limited framing, they are racist against me and I against them and so no conversation would be possible.
To judge a person before listening to them is the worst sin of all... and shutting anyone out of the conversation based on your assumption of what you think they think is morally bankrupt and, frankly, the root of all evil.
>> There are people so worthless
You have no clue how to judge that, so assume a position of humility.
when I entered site, all bubbles contained dicks/balls and combination of these... so... someone found words that are not banned, but still abused forum in most primitive way ..
you're wrong, moderation is needed in ventures like this
The demo widget right now is botted with people spamming nonsense to the point of breaking browsers, much less the intended use. "let people talk" is not the same as "give disruptive people the tools to prevent others from talking"
After having been a moderator for a number of communities over the years—BBCs in the 90s, niche forums during the 00s & 10s, Reddit boards in the 20s—I’ve come to believe that running shadow services where disruptive individuals can comingle may be the best way to handle this.
The advent of LLMs really opens the door to shunting off these “community members “ who’d rather contribute in misanthropic ways for the lulz than either leave or not contribute at all. They can take part in an interactive echo chamber that gives just as well as they can. You don’t even need a powerful model so the overall costs to the community are probably lower than the alternatives of trying to coexist with community-arsonists.
I spent years trying to find ways to bring people productively “into the fold” but eventually realized that it is futile in some cases because there’s zero value to the individual or the community to find a middle ground. They want to see things burn, and the community simply wants them out.
If they don't know they're being quarantined, there's no reason for them to find a way around their block. They'll eventually tucker themselves out and move on to whatever their internet equivalent of burning ants with a magnifying glass is.
I used to run a small MMORPG. I only had to ban a player once but when I did they made it their life's mission to get around it and spam profanities. They went through every proxy in existence and I had to resort to banning whole IP ranges to keep them out.
No matter how cheap per request, someone will figure out a way to DoS that endpoint, and it will be extremely pricy unless you have effective rate limiting.
Love it, also love that there's one HN visitor just hanging out typing "dick and balls" over and over again. That's unmoderated anonymous public squares for you
I made something similar last year: A p2p chat popup (that sits on bottom right of the page as a bubble) that allows all visitors to chat with each other. It had simple keyword based moderation in-built (can be easily bypassed though).
Was planning to add github oauth to get a known identity and persistent messaging so visitors can chat with each other across sites.
Instead of a webmaster adding script to their site, it was a browser extension.
The intent was two folds:
1. Get to know other people having similar interests,
2. Try something on the lines of a decentralized chat/messaging system.
It sounds like a nice idea, but probably only one of those things that work only once at scale - with hundreds of millions of pages, you will only meet others on the most common ones unless the extension is already very popular?
Site-local chat was meant to be the default way. But, was not restricted to that. People could keep whitelisted list of sites that they are open to get pings/DM's from.
I was still not able to figure out the privacy-focused, and local, interest matching part since it was meant to be p2p (without any server storage), and local storage can easily be tweaked.
If this was solved, my plan then was to automatically suggest people who may have similar interests depending on the sites they browse, for how long, and the messages they generally send.
Kinda like tinder, but, you don't have to sign-up and install no app.
To paraphrase, there's no scheme for moderation / censoring / filtering that survives contact with the Internet. It simply can't be done. People take it as a challenge, and you can't design a system that handles it while remaining useful.
If you ban words, people will introduce typos / different spelling. If you ban concepts people will change the concepts (see the "unalive" thing that's popular now). If people want to be miserable, they will be miserable. And they'll invent new words, or use euphemisms to get their point across.
People are flooding the channel with messages, causing the widget to use too many resources on ios; and the website is being endlessly reloaded.
Any idea how to fix this? Bonus points for user friendly non technical solutions, ie is there a way to design an online social space where people want to collaborate and their first thought isn’t trolling?
Built something like this for the v1.0 launch of RedwoodSDK in March; but it's a popularity graph (like the time scrubber on YouTube). I figured that it could be useful to myself, and others, to aggregate the information that people find most useful.
Neat idea! It's simple but very effective - and I really enjoy the detail of the benches and the tree. Very nice.
I wouldn't add it to any of my sites due to the unmoderated nature of it - seeing some fairly unsavory things in your demo - but that's just a little tweak, I'm sure!
openai has a free moderation endpoint. no reason to not use it.
edit: downvoters either know something I don't about its unsuitability, or have outdated info on it and think it's against terms to use it for reasons unrelated to GPT. it's not against terms.
Make a MapleStory-like one where each website can design their own room, and you can kill mobs and bosses and stuff. It would be neat if the characters and items persisted between.
Edit: a super smash brothers-like would be fun too. Maybe the page itself could be the platforms.
I've always wondered if we could find a way to add content website's content without it turning into a shitshow. MLS listings / Zillow is an interesting use-case. A realtor might describe something as "sun-filled" but omit that the home is next to a 24/7 dump truck repair warehouse.
Yeah. I also don’t like the fact the dev posts the link and doesn’t interact with anyone here at all, so the link posting is effectively spray and pray abandonware too. Easy come easy go like they say
I've been playing with presence too...! I def am thinking about using it more for real-time motion communication (which is largely missing from web) rather than text (which is very overrepresented, and where most moderation comes in).
I was toying with the idea of making a little crowd representation sticky at the bottom, like watching a screen together :)
this is a very clever concept. I'll keep it in mind for the future - when my app site has persistent amount of visitors. Are there some rules/settings for stop words to prevent some types of abuse? Or is it planned?
This is actually really cool. We’ve needed this concept everywhere in technology. Something like this would have prevented the isolation and loneliness technology and the internet has created.
I don’t know all the answers, but joining people together, and reminders there are real people still there as we’ve moved from the physical world to the virtual world is an important part of the progression. In 50-100 years we will either have this epiphany or we will fail miserably.
Oh what the heck? That's super cool! Awesome idea. Possible future enhancement: some basic day/night (or even weather?) design elements that match the timezone of the person whose site it is? Still, doesn't even need it, it's really cool as-is!
I could see it being used as some avenue for saying toxic stuff, so I'm suddenly feeling like the only allowed actions should be ones that can never be harmful (like text interactions are just choosing from a pre-set list)..
Neat idea, but there seems to be zero defense against spammer scum. One jerk with a bot script seems able to make it totally useless for everyone else there.
First saw this on lobste.rs . Great idea, perhaps allow for a little customisation? I'd like minimal animation, just a counter of present people and a green dot that vibrates when someone is typing. Clicking either opens a chat box with last 20 minutes.
I have similar moderation concerns in my browser game/engine but I only ban offensive slurs not swears, but I give no visual affordance that the word is not allowed
The only surface where players see the input content is in a share card, and if they finish a game and get to the share card they will find the offensive word has been REDACTED lol
So it’s a long feedback loop just to find out your hijinks lead nowhere
Having my game aesthetic + slur on a sharing artefact is a great way for people to think my game encourages that crap and to “cancel” the game.
Not that I agree with, or care about, cancel culture - but I don’t want people in general associating my game with slurs.
I’m all for swearing and saying funny things that are not pc, but I draw the line at harmful offensive content.
Do what you wish but do no harm unto others.
Being a racist asshole carries some inherent risks too, like people choosing not to let you enter their spaces.
I said they can fuck off from any spaces I have a voice in.
Social pariahs are people. Doesn’t mean I’m going to tolerate them around me.
You choose to be a social pariah, you live with the social consequences of that.
They should have food, water, shelter, and healthcare. They don’t get my attention, respect, or acceptance.
Or, do you grasp the nature of the problem of free speech, or don't you?
>> they can fuck off from any spaces I have a voice in.
This also sounds like you (a) don't really have a "voice", since you're only comfortable talking to people you deem acceptable (b) call people racist who you are afraid of talking to (and they're almost certainly not all racist, given your criteria that anyone who disagrees with you is racist, and given that disagreeing with you would almost be required out of pure logic), and (c) are only comfortable in an echo chamber where your opinion, such as it is, has no impact whatsoever.
Cool, got it.
edit: on second thought this is way too obvious ragebait
Somewhere, someone will figure out how to create a bot that floods this with penis pictures, and that will be the end of it (or the beginning of the end, where a short period of anti-penis-pic defensive patches will be made until the software maintainers just give up)
If everyone did what you are saying here, peace would be impossible. For in your limited framing, they are racist against me and I against them and so no conversation would be possible.
To judge a person before listening to them is the worst sin of all... and shutting anyone out of the conversation based on your assumption of what you think they think is morally bankrupt and, frankly, the root of all evil.
>> There are people so worthless
You have no clue how to judge that, so assume a position of humility.
you're wrong, moderation is needed in ventures like this
The advent of LLMs really opens the door to shunting off these “community members “ who’d rather contribute in misanthropic ways for the lulz than either leave or not contribute at all. They can take part in an interactive echo chamber that gives just as well as they can. You don’t even need a powerful model so the overall costs to the community are probably lower than the alternatives of trying to coexist with community-arsonists.
I spent years trying to find ways to bring people productively “into the fold” but eventually realized that it is futile in some cases because there’s zero value to the individual or the community to find a middle ground. They want to see things burn, and the community simply wants them out.
Further it may still make sense to use human reports to gate some automation even if it slows response.
Was planning to add github oauth to get a known identity and persistent messaging so visitors can chat with each other across sites.
Instead of a webmaster adding script to their site, it was a browser extension.
The intent was two folds:
1. Get to know other people having similar interests,
2. Try something on the lines of a decentralized chat/messaging system.
Site-local chat was meant to be the default way. But, was not restricted to that. People could keep whitelisted list of sites that they are open to get pings/DM's from.
I was still not able to figure out the privacy-focused, and local, interest matching part since it was meant to be p2p (without any server storage), and local storage can easily be tweaked.
If this was solved, my plan then was to automatically suggest people who may have similar interests depending on the sites they browse, for how long, and the messages they generally send.
Kinda like tinder, but, you don't have to sign-up and install no app.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice
If you ban words, people will introduce typos / different spelling. If you ban concepts people will change the concepts (see the "unalive" thing that's popular now). If people want to be miserable, they will be miserable. And they'll invent new words, or use euphemisms to get their point across.
People are flooding the channel with messages, causing the widget to use too many resources on ios; and the website is being endlessly reloaded.
Any idea how to fix this? Bonus points for user friendly non technical solutions, ie is there a way to design an online social space where people want to collaborate and their first thought isn’t trolling?
Is there a way to throttle iframe cpu usage ?
You could probably queue messages, cull old messages, cap concurrent connections. That may be the issue is too many peers
I contemplated implementing it on my site for a while but decided I didn’t want to add the JavaScript. Still find it a really cute concept.
https://rwsdk.com
I wouldn't add it to any of my sites due to the unmoderated nature of it - seeing some fairly unsavory things in your demo - but that's just a little tweak, I'm sure!
edit: downvoters either know something I don't about its unsuitability, or have outdated info on it and think it's against terms to use it for reasons unrelated to GPT. it's not against terms.
Also, it seemed to be disconnecting quite often, maybe a hug of death thing.
Edit: a super smash brothers-like would be fun too. Maybe the page itself could be the platforms.
I deeply appreciate the honesty here. I’ll pass based on the vibecodedness of it but perhaps it won’t be a dealbreaker for others.
Also, in this context, security.
I was toying with the idea of making a little crowd representation sticky at the bottom, like watching a screen together :)
Regardless, I love concepts like this. Thanks!
I don’t know all the answers, but joining people together, and reminders there are real people still there as we’ve moved from the physical world to the virtual world is an important part of the progression. In 50-100 years we will either have this epiphany or we will fail miserably.
I could see it being used as some avenue for saying toxic stuff, so I'm suddenly feeling like the only allowed actions should be ones that can never be harmful (like text interactions are just choosing from a pre-set list)..