I'm thrilled to announce that I will be joining KAIST in Fall 2023 as an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing! I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to join a fantastic HCI and social computing community.
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Joseph Seering
@josephseering@hci.social
mastodon 4.7.3Content moderation research, Stanford --> KAIST
56 Followers
46 Following
24 Posts
Joined November 12, 2022
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With that said though, Reddit mods are a different story. The pool of users who have the expertise, the patience, and the time to run the most popular subreddits well is much smaller than people seem to think.
I'm wrapping up my first (official) week at KAIST today. So far it's been a whirlwind of new experiences.
Waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of licking is super creepy if you don't immediately remember that you have a cat.
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For reasons I've discussed before, I definitely don't see Kick as a viable competitor to Twitch in the long term, so I wasn't particularly fazed to see the xQc (and Amouranth now I guess?) announcements.
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I'm sure xQc brought in tons of money, but history seems to have shown that whenever a top streamer leaves, others will rise to fill their place. For this reason, a strong ~farm system~ is more important for Twitch than any particular all star streamer.
@andresmh@hci.social @drewww@social.coop Oh I have many many pages of thoughts on the ethics of platforms relying on volunteer labor. They'll make it into a paper eventually. Brief spoiler though, I actually don't think it's as exploitative as it might seem, at least if structured in particular ways. More detail to come in... CSCW 2025?
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This is really the case for Reddit specifically because of its structure, though less so for some of the other major volunteer-moderated platforms.
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@drewww Either way, that’s just speculation. My original point still stands though I think, which is that taking away mods’ ability to protest is a bad idea. It’s difficult to see the future on this one, but I’m fairly confident in saying that past protests have probably made Reddit more viable as a company, not less. See e.g., the mid-2020 blackout pushing for Reddit to finally actually have a hate speech policy, which really was not an unreasonable demand in mid-2020.
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@drewww (I don't have a problem with centralization of ad control on either Reddit _or_ Twitch, but the latter is a separate conversation.)
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@drewww I read an hour ago that now moderation tools are maybe being exempted from the API charges, but unclear? Also unclear if that was intended all along and just poorly communicated or if it's a course change?
Worth pointing to a historical example as well -- one of the smartest things Reddit ever did, IMO, was hiring the developer of automoderator to make it a core platform feature as opposed to a third party tool. So much of what happens on Reddit wouldn't be possible without it.
@drewww@social.coop Okay, so we should be clear on terms here -- when spez has talked about/shown ~disgust for third party apps, he seems to specifically be talking about full apps that are substitutes for Reddit's own client. He actually praises third party "tools, bots, [and] enhancements to Reddit" (https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762501/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview-protests-blackout). Are you making that same distinction or are you calling all of the above apps?
@drewww@social.coop Was this meant to be a reply in thread or a separate post?