1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Previewing Upcoming Changes to Blocking
I don't have any back channel communication with admins. I've just been working it all out for myself from what I and other moderators report.
We know that a large amount of harassment gets passed over simply because there's no atomic metric data that constitutes direct proof of harassment.
We know that ban evasion and mute evasion and suspension evasion are atomic metric data points that demonstrate direct bad faith engagement.
"This person is talking critically about me" is not harassment. "This person is continually doing everything they can to evade access control technologies in order to harass me" is atomically metric data. "This person and their support group are continually doing everything they can to evade access control technologies to interact with individuals and communities that clearly do not want to associate with the harassers" is atomically metric data.
Those are data points that not only can be readily captured, and readily assessed by automated means, but can also be used to measure other problems and assess how significant those other problems are, and importantly *do not rely on someone reading a ten-thousand-character comment in under thirty seconds, without context, and inferring intent of the author from it*.
They'll do more because they'll have isolated, atomic, consistent and distinctive data points about the specific behaviour.
Comment by Anomander at 21/12/2021 at 23:38 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I don't really know how to bridge the communication gap here.
If you have cause to believe that Admin are somehow going to magically become more proactive in resolving brigading/harassment/evasion issues as a result of it becoming harder for mods to report instances of those behaviors to Admin - you have a radically different experience of dealing with Admin than I or the peers I interact with do. The tone in this community or other mod communities has been for almost the entire time I've been a mod that Admin escalation is only going to work for the most egregious and clear cases, anything borderline is simply not getting action.
We know that a large amount of harassment gets passed over simply because there's no atomic metric data that constitutes direct proof of harassment.
We know that ban evasion and mute evasion and suspension evasion are atomic metric data points that demonstrate direct bad faith engagement.
But both of these things have been true since Subreddits launched. A change to the block system isn't also announcing that Admin are going to do a better job of tracking when users are evading, or detecting evasion on their own - nor has the two-years-ago change to that system been so successful that the problem is solved today. While we do indeed know that those things can be data points, we also know that things like "ban evasion" are not an isolate data point - determining evasion needs to be a confidence score based on other variables, as Reddit has been very clear over the years that identifying ban evasion algorithmically is more complex than many mods like to believe. Based on the responses I've got to reports of evasion, their software tools have some significant blind spots in them at the moment.
Evading accounts are not simply flagged and unactioned, waiting on a possible mod report.
"This person is continually doing everything they can to evade access control technologies in order to harass me" is atomically metric data.
The system currently cannot determine that's the same person all along, and the system can only barely determine that those accounts are *probably* linked after the behavior has happened enough to build a baseline. Once Admin has identified, those accounts can become data points, but they are not in and of themselves and definitely not simply and evidently at an algorithmic level. There is significantly more "atomic" data required to determine a linkage between accounts, or patterns of behaviour, while any given account specifically being a piece of data is secondary or tertiary at best - I think defining this as "atomic" per se is oversimplifying both how that determination is made and whether or not the software can realistically make that determination unassisted.
"This person and their support group are continually doing everything they can to evade access control technologies to interact with individuals and communities that clearly do not want to associate with the harassers" is atomically metric data.
No, this definitely is not atomic data. Each of those individuals or the "support group" are their own data point, and all are made up of myriad other more granular data points all required to make the determination that they do actually fit the label you would paint them with. You're describing complex social behavior undertaken by a group of people specifically looking to avoid both algorithmic detection and subjective determinations - simply stating it's 'a data point' doesn't fix Admin's own backend software.
Those are data points that not only can be readily captured, and readily assessed by automated means, but can also be used to measure other problems and assess how significant those other problems are, and importantly do not rely on someone reading a ten-thousand-character comment in under thirty seconds, without context, and inferring intent of the author from it.
I can say all sorts of things are easy or "readily" accomplished, but that doesn't mean they *are* easy. Slapping "atomically metric" on things doesn't make it so - while I agree that Reddit should track harassment campaigns and should collect more data around problem accounts, it does seem like you're doing some pretty broad handwaving here. In response to someone asking: you haven't identified what has or will change that would make that algorithmic identification better, you've just talked instead about what you think should happen *after* identification.
Because the current reliance on manual review of content is based in that still being the *best* method they have, despite algorithmic solutions being the preferred method. What you're experiencing and striving to solve isn't a failure to automate, but is the conduct and users who have successfully bypassed the algorithmic controls.
They'll do more because they'll have isolated, atomic, consistent and distinctive data points about the specific behaviour.
How, though? That's what I was asking prior. How does *this* change to the block system provide them with the data? What else has changed, if not this?