aeling

If you work for Facebook, you may want to disclose your affiliation (at least in this thread).

If not, I'm sorry for the mixup - I'm just guessing based on your username.

I haven't used Mastodon, but this is kind of the reddit model, right? Obviously some subreddits are >>> 1k subscribers, but they typically scale the quantity of moderators up accordingly.

Do Mastodon admins share common blocklists or anything? If a bad actor decided to start posting offensive content to random instances, I assume you can ban that {username | IP} from the instance used by you and your users, but would they then be able to just iterate through the other n Mastodon instances? Is there anything in place to prevent them from creating a new account and repeating ad nauseam? (not that there is on Facebook, necessarily)

(I don't know anything about Mastodon, which I'm sure is obvious from some of my questions - if they're incoherent in the context of Mastodon that's totally fine)

Are there examples of decentralized/unmoderated platforms with similar popularity (= success for the purpose of this conversation) to Facebook?

I suspect reddit is the best example of blending "something for everybody" with "default users don't see offensive things", while also being able to remove things like the content in the story, but obviously they still have human moderators.

I think the ultra-open / libertarian model is fundamentally incompatible with broad acceptance, personally [1], but I'm happy to be proven wrong. Early IRC/BBSes aren't very convincing to me because even if they were unmoderated the barrier to entry (knowledge, hardware) was high enough to limit adoption.

[1]: I think sites like Gab indicate that even if you clone a successful product and market it as "<x> but with free speech", the free speech part winds up being a negative factor, concentrating elements that will scare off mainstream users.

If I think this is unacceptable[1] and I'm skeptical of the nebulous "AI will do this job in the future" claims, are there conclusions to be drawn other than "UGC isn't sustainable on a global, public platform"? That is, are there serious alternative options, or anybody working on ideas in this space?

I think it's readily apparent that "just show everything" doesn't work if you want to attract a mainstream audience, but I'm reluctant to just give up on the global public platform that FB was originally idealized as.

[1] I think I'd still find it unacceptable if the moderators were being paid 6 figures, had extensive 1:1 counseling, or any other perks - selling mental health for money is something I'm happy saying a utopian society wouldn't include.

I didn't read the Google Cloud part as an assertion of authority, just as a disclosure - if they're talking about competitors (and especially how the choice of competitor negatively impacted GitHub) I appreciate it.

(disclosure - I work for a competitor, not on cloud stuff)

The $25 admission gets you in for 3 consecutive days, which seems like it should still (mostly) support your way of using the museum?

You still do an on-site with the hiring company, which in my experience is the best place to evaluate soft skills anyway.

I had a great experience, even as someone primarily working in embedded development. They only targeted SF & NY when I went through their process, which wound up unexpectedly being a dealbreaker for me, but if it weren't for that I absolutely would've taken one of their offers.

Thanks for everything you do - your app is a huge part of the reason I can live in the Seattle area without a car.

One note - I just donated, but I almost bailed out when I saw I had to go through the whole UW process (especially when I then paid with PayPal, which has all of that info anyway....). I'm sure you're restricted to using their platform, but even better PayPal integration would go a long way.

Thanks again!

I had extremely positive experiences with Triplebyte, FWIW.

It's worth noting that technically 20 is only an auto-success on attacks and saves. The way you describe is a very common house rule, but it seems to frequently be an accidental house rule (more of a misreading).

I believe this requires the attacker to have access to the ASR neural net's weights, so Mozilla's seems like the only popular framework that's vulnerable right now (not that I'm opposed to them keeping things open).