jbrennan

Ireland springs to mind, and in fact has strong ties to Indigenous nations in the Americas for their similar struggles

This is a great point, and I’m curious to hear what would be better alternatives. Like obviously there’s something great about having online connections with other people, but how could we do it better without surrendering to some big platform?

hi, author here :) happy to answer any questions! it was extremely fun to write a little browser, highly recommend it

I’m actually not proposing shutting down any website that allows uploaded content, just large / public sites that require this sort of moderation. Not every site gets this stuff uploaded to it. The more private the network, the less need for this kind of company-led moderation.

As far as “worth it” goes, some people have to be exposed to it so long as we have law enforcement (but I’m certainly open to alternatives here). I’m not sure the train operator is a fair comparison, because seeing a suicide is an exceptional circumstance in their job, it’s not the norm. The content moderators, however, are sadly expected to be exposed to traumatizing content as part of their job description — it’s essentially the point of their job.

There are plenty of kinds of work we deem as hazardous to people’s health, and thus are either banned or regulated. I’m not sure if there’s a healthy way to expose people in these moderator jobs to the traumatizing content they face. It just doesn’t seem worth the tradeoff to endanger them like this.

I think there’s a difference that depends on scale and privacy. If your network is private (or something more akin to p2p / messaging) this is much less of an issue, especially if you have strong blocking controls. Users moderate themselves.

I think the problems that Facebook, Youtube, etc are seeing stem from the fact that the content is much more public, thus in much more need of moderation.

In my opinion this is an argument in favour of shutting Facebook (and every other large social network) down. This sort of work is damaging and abusive, and nobody should have to endure it just so we can have social networks.

I understand there are some jobs in the world that need to deal with dark stuff (like law enforcement), but social networks just aren’t worth the human cost.

I think this line of reasoning is victim blaming. It’s not the author’s fault that Instagram works the way it works. I think she’s entitled to want them to do a better job.

Yeah, it’s too prevalent. We best not talk about it.

Great article although I think it’s worth mentioning the pattern of checking the iOS system version for method availability (e.g., `if ([[[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion] floatValue] >= 8.0)`) should be avoided.

I think it’s a better practice to query the object in question if it responds to the desired selector. This way, if the method ever goes away (in say iOS 10), you won’t send the wrong message to the object/class.

The one thing I wish Objective C (or other languages, too, unless I’m missing some [totally possible]) is that the abstractions of metaprogramming are often hard to follow. You get to a point where you’re working entirely with abstract symbols (method or class names, for example), and it becomes difficult to track down problems.

I’d love to figure out a nicer way to deal with this.

Sean, I’ve read some of your research and it’s great! I agree completely. Hell, even the concept of “to create software means some set of sequential steps” is presuming quite a bit. Although I don’t have too much experience creating software otherwise, I at least acknowledge we really barely have any concept of what we’re doing and what’s possible.