Gonna be my last WSO post for a while. Really a shame that one Buzzfeed reporter, seizing on a hand-full of shit posts and w/ a completely transparent agenda, cajoled WSO into creating an opaque, completely arbitrary, and inconsistent content moderation program. Have had several posts recently, which are as uncontroversial as it gets, get removed. I don't know if WSO poached the Twitter content moderation team on their way out the door, or came up w/ a completely subjective and highly frustrating content moderation system all on their own, but the end result is the same.
The content moderation has been a huge net negative to the quality of the site and the ability to shoot the shit / joke around has completely gone out the window. This coinciding w/ the proportion of UG posters going up exponentially has fundamentally changed/diminished the site from what it used to be, which is really a shame.
TLDR; The new content moderation is shockingly poorly executed & frustrating. Site sucks relative to what it used to be. Content moderation team took the sledgehammer from Buzzfeed "journalist" and said "allow me."
Sounds good don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out
Buzzfeed is based. Censoring speech from one side is the basis of a democracy.
~Liberals
'He who sacrifices freedom for safety, deserves neither' - Benjamin Franklin
WSO must be mighty proud of themselves for cowering over wokeness, let alone by a cringe site like Buzzfeed
I wonder - what other overly dramatic fever-daydreams do you spend your waking hours working yourself into a tizzy over?
I think that the Buzzfeed issue prompted WSO management to reevaluate the kind of content it wants on this site. At first, the moderation was out of control but I think it is is getting a little more lenient lately. It would be helpful to know what is allowed and what is not allowed.
They said at one point they use HiveAI
https://thehive.ai
Wow, look at that - a balanced and good opinion on this simple matter. Thank you from a fellow user for not unplugging your brain and typing up some idiotic slop about how the liberals are trying to make WSO woke.
Everything all right at home?
I love the new moderation. There is basically zero racist shit posting now. In the old WSO, the entire off topic section was about “WASPy broads” and white supremacy.
If your post getting deleted is a byproduct of removing all of the spam on this site, then oh well 🤷♂️
I agree with you. I think WSO's objective is a good one. It was far too fucking easy is to create multiple accounts here and use a few of them for the purpose of posting racist garbage. It is kind of weird game though. The main benefit was being able to vent about groups of people. I am confident that the some of the most vocal proponents of extreme free speech are the ones who posted racist stuff.
“I love not having a bug problem anymore.
If having to burn my entire house down is a byproduct of getting rid of all the bugs, then oh well”.
Of course it’s not quite this serious, but the average quality and quantity of quality posts on this site has taken a real nose dive, IMO. It can’t be that hard to delete racist shit without removing legitimate posts, however controversial they may be.
I used to play an online game way back in the day, almost two decades ago. One day, they decided to blanket ban anyone who had ever cheated in the game, because they believed cheating was ruining it. The game died within the following year, because it lost a core part of its player base (including influential players) and it just wasn’t the same. Now, the cause is slightly different, but I’m watching the exact same thing happening on WSO in real-time.
It’s not dying, I’m for sure posting more now that the trolls are gone. I really don’t notice a difference other than political threads not devolving into advocating for hate crimes
Important to note I have never had a post removed - I wonder why?
December 10th, 2007. Pour a sara brew out for the homies.
What content is it that you're missing? Seriously. A certain vocal number of users have been complaining nonstop about how the "quality" of this site has gone way downhill, but never seem to actually have any examples of what it is they miss.
Seeing as the shit that gets moderated is the bigoted, sexist shit... well, if the shoe fits, wear it.
People complain about the moderation policies, but they're getting better and more transparent. In other words, exactly what you'd expect from a policy that's barely two months old. As a rule of thumb, anyone complaining about the new moderation policy is one of the people who had been posting or supporting the absolutely cesspool of bigotry that used to exist in the Off Topic Forum in particular. There isn't and hasn't been a single reasonable criticism that doesn't boil down to "I miss my hate speech"
I very rarely comment on threads like these. I've never been one to get salty about 'free speech' and other stuff. I'll also be the first to admit that there were some heinous comments from either a) mentally disturbed racists or b) really bad trolls that turned me off from this website. Hell, a lot of it was why I never told my friends I even have a WSO account - I wouldn't want to be compared to some of the stuff I've seen in the off-topic forum in the past.
Now, there's that. But that's me playing devil's advocate for a small piece of the pie which is not the purpose of this comment. The moderation here isn't what I'd call 'censorship', it's not what I'd call 'totalitarianism', and I don't even think the main problem lies with the number of rules that are in place, but rather the QUALITY. Yes, I am a red-blooded capitalist, but I'm an agreeable person. I am willing to compromise and find a common solution for a variety of things: be it business, politics, or even more casual social stuff. Why can't that be implemented here?
For a quick example, let me think of a really hot-button issue that has nothing to do with this website: gun control. As a gun owner, I am in strong favor of SMART gun regulation. I think that people need to be seriously checked for mental health issues, proper training and certification, and past offenses. Does our current regulation do that? No, it doesn't. It's complicated, expensive, and confusing for anyone to navigate. Rather than introducing new stuff on top of this, why don't we AMEND the current legislation that we have to make it work? Why don't Democrats get off their high horse and accept the fact that guns will always be a part of our society and there is nothing they can or should do to blanketly remove them? On the flip side, why don't Republicans stop pushing the notion that the slightest amendment to stop Terry from getting his 32nd AK-47 at age 17 will lead to the collapse of society as we know it? If a medium can exist within an issue as polarizing as gun control, we can surely come together to fix a damn finance forum.
In the past two weeks, I've had three comments removed. All three comments were helpful, relevant, and provided great insight into the topic at hand. I'm thorough in a lot of aspects of my life - I'm thorough when I send work emails. I'm thorough before I open my mouth at a meeting. I am confident in my answers, and that doesn't stop when I leave the office. I only wish to provide thoughtful, helpful, well-reasoned, and the occasional funny comment whenever I respond to something on this website. Lo and behold, I have to now triple-check every word that I type now, for fear that I'll spend ten minutes responding to something only to have it blanket-removed by a robot. I'll consult the rules and comb over the confusing and repetitive paragraphs, only to come to some conclusion: I maybe broke a rule? It could be this one? Or maybe another... no, not that one. I never even get a person sending me a message. There is zero clarity and only a jumbled mess of text to help save face from some article that was never written.
Patrick, Andy, and the WSO team - yeah, I get it. There was some truly despicable stuff on this site before. But when the evidence overwhelmingly presents itself as being limited to a couple of users, you can't go overhaul the entire website and diminish the experience for everyone else. By doing that, you've let them win. Trolls exist to be trolls, and their primary goal is disrupting the prime function of any segment's operations. I'm sure that if they happen to be reading this comment, they're smiling in their stained chair in their parent's basement, happy that they've succeeded in something for once in their life.
I'm open to criticism and await some WSO team feedback. However, if past history shows anything, it's impossible to get an answer from an actual human being. Seriously considering taking a step back from this website as well, which is such a shame - I've learned so many great things from here, have met so many great people, and I've seen how WSO at its best can truly benefit a tremendous amount of people.
Let them win, lol, this is a business being operated. The WSO team does what is best for its brand and user base. This isn't some childish game of winning and losing. Also, no, extreme trolls are not smiling because they changed they content policies...they are annoyed bc their drug of choice is attention from agitation, which they can no longer receive. If anything, content moderation that bans trolls forces those people to take a step back and potentially disengaged and realize what they were doing was as waste of their own time.
As far as the moderation, frankly I'm surprised it took this long bc all the trash that was on here was a ticking time bomb for the brand. Of course moderation is extremely hard and this site is likely limited in resources, but thankfully for all involved its cleaned up for the better. Well done WSO team.
As I clearly stated, I get the point of what the team is here to do. I understand the rationale for their decisions, but like any user here I'm allowed to air my dissatisfaction with the new system. I'm just trying to do it in a healthier way, rather than joining the "HAHAH MODS SUCK" bandwagon.
You're welcome to disagree.Just feel like it could be better implemented. I don't have the answers, but I know it's there
100% agree with the most upvoted post above - excellently put. I generally always enjoyed the off-topic forum as it felt like one of the last places on the internet (at least places that I cared about) where you could have rational, reasonable debate - which is something that has sadly disappeared in recent years. Twitter = cesspool, Reddit = echo chamber etc - basically people go on there to post their own views (however misguided) and get tons of affirmation. Anyone who posts a rational response even slightly disagreeing gets downvoted and/or abused to hell. So off-topic here was a very refreshing change - for instance whenever there was a political event (especially US-related) I’d go there to see a nuanced debate from both sides.
Having said that, I’m genuinely not surprised at the changes by WSO - in recent weeks/months prior, I’d noticed more and more genuinely batsh*t posts/threads on there. And I have to say that it was mostly right-wing sh*t getting posted (I say this as a centrist who doesn’t like either the current Democrats or Republicans). Stuff that definitely strayed beyond rational debate territory. So I’m not sure what the right answer is - but I can completely get why WSO did what they did. If WSO gets labelled as some “right-wing/incel” site by the media (however much it is an unfair characterisation caused by a minority of posters) - then everyone on here will lose out.
Agreed, it's quite unfortunate. Definitely has killed my vibe and desire to be as active on here. Can't emphasize enough how pathetic it is that a site filled with actual finance professionals was brought to it's knees by some halfwit working for Buzzfeed, not the NYT or WSJ, the same news company that tells me 11 ways to trim my ball hair to impress modern women. Then there's the utterly nonsensical new banana/monkey shit adjustment (all bananas in Off Topic are 1/4 the value but shits are the same as before), I can't even use the anonymous commenting feature despite previously having an >5:1 SB/MS ratio, which eliminates my interest in participating in a number of topics I see in the professional forums. I could be alone in this, but I doubt it. And the sad part is looking at the upcoming demographic of college students (the real revenue drivers of the site), this will likely stay the course. All I can say is well done WSO.
Agreed too. I'm gonna do the "therapist ordered " and at least sit this one out a week or so. See what you kids come up with kind of thing. Good luck everyone who hangs on.
I want to have a party for all the great people on this site. It's very unfortunate how it's turning out, but I'm an optimist a la Candide and remain hopeful.
The site was "brought to its knees" by allowing unfettered access to trolls and bigots who turned some of the Forums into cesspools of hate speech. It's amazing to me that anyone legitimately looks at the last several months and thinks "Buzzfeed did this."
The Buzzfeed guy pointed out a very real problem on WSO; that a problematic number of users were here to be bigots or sexists or what have you, and far from trying to moderate that, WSO was tacitly encouraging it. No one ever even ran the supposed article, so how can you say with a straight face that "Buzzfeed won" or "Buzzfeed brought the site to its knees"? What happened was that the owners of this site were alerted to something they may not have consciously realized - that it had slipped away from being a resource for people in finance and become a haven for white supremacists and bigots, or at least was increasingly trending in that direction.
The sheer lack of critical thinking required to take this position is impressive, but not unexpected considering who it's coming from. The idea that at any point this forum was a cesspool of bigotry or that the entire purpose of the site was straying to become some alt-right forum is idiotic. The only forum that had this issue with constant shitposting from racist morons (on almost exclusively new accounts) was the Off Topic forum which is inherently not the professional side, hence the name. In nearly every instance of one of those posts managing to get engagement, ALL of the top rated comments were people refuting, arguing with, and denigrating the OP who was engaging in the hateful behavior. When they made spurious claims that could be refuted by data we had folks who would do just that and make the OP look like an even bigger fool. I don't even know what to say about your claim WSO was "tacitly encouraging it" - that's a stupid opinion (in my opinion) and echoes the equally stupid "silence is violence" mantra.
Numerous alternatives were suggested and available to the admins by veteran users over months before the current system was implemented, some in the original thread that Patrick posted about the journalist reaching out. In fact if you just use the search tool you can see some of these fixes being suggested well over a year ago. Just a few of the ones I personally thought had some merit:
Were any of these explored? No - [I stand corrected, there was in fact an update posted which applied several of the above suggestions]. I used to moderate smaller forums that I would bet were generating considerably less than this one and they had some of the above capabilities, so I just don't buy it being an expense issue. Instead we got some trigger happy new moderation team that seemingly half the time is taking down wholly innocuous posts and comments, in some cases ones that are actually value-add and contribute to the conversation and debate being had. Then we got the wonderful idea that now SBs in OT are suddenly worth 1/4 of those from anywhere else on the site, retroactively penalizing 100s if not 1000s of users for literally no reason and in many cases removing their ability to use the anonymous commenting feature anywhere on the site (which, unshockingly, reduces the information some are willing to share on the professional forums). We are still in the early innings of the new system implementation, but to argue that this isn't going to have a negative effect on future engagement is in my opinion incredibly short-sighed.
The only people cheering this new format on are the lefties like you because, just like on every other corner of the internet, if you disagree with it you would rather have it banned and be out of sight then have to engage or deal with it in any way on your own. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the trolls were in fact leftists looking to spur this EXACT type of over-moderated reaction from the admin team - trolls literally exist to disrupt existing systems and provoke a reaction. By that definition, they have undoubtedly won. Perhaps that's what the OP's title should be changed to.
I used to love this site. Now it’s boring as hell and unnecessarily aggressive against anything potentially considered counter to the mainstream narrative. Xi Jinping blows
What is an example of a topic that you loved that is now being moderated?
I keep seeing people say "the site used to be good" without providing a concrete example of what it is they'd like to be able to say or read about. Say the silent part out loud, please.
Wonder how many on here who love the curtailing of speech and increased moderation are simultaneously crying about Elon and new Twitter policies. It’s at least a couple in this thread alone
There isn't a single liberal person I've seen who is upset about content moderation on Twitter. What people are pointing out is the absolute hypocrisy of Mr Musk buying Twitter because of it's moderation policies, promising truly unfettered speech, and then immediately banning any content which is even remotely critical of him.
It's doubly amusing that you are trying to push this narrative when it's super easy to just CTRL+F for "Twitter" and see that no, there is no one in this thread complaining about Twitter policies (or not as of the time I'm writing this). I mean, if you had a shred of common sense you wouldn't make this obviously bullshit argument in the first place, but maybe try not to use such an obvious lie to support your (inaccurate) point?
It's amazing the degree of projection you're engaging in here. It's conservatives who seem to get their undies in a twist whenever someone does something they don't like. Business doesn't want to cater to LGBTQ couples or provide contraceptive healthcare to employees? That's the free market. Business doesn't want to platform hate speech and bigotry? All of a sudden it's the end of the world. Can't have it both ways.
Liberals seem pretty united in saying that you shouldn't be a bigot. If Twitter doesn't want to moderate hate speech, that is their choice - but Mr Musk doesn't get to whine about advertisers leaving in droves as a result. WSO can use whatever moderation policies it pleases, up to and including banning specifically liberal viewpoints if they want. I won't get too heated about it, I can always leave. The fact that they decided to moderate hate speech, bigotry, and misogyny and you are claiming you're being silenced says way more about you than it does about WSO, or liberals, or anything else.
And once again, let me reiterate that you completely fabricated this fictional "idiot progressive" because you don't have a valid point, and your anger only works when it's directed at a straw man argument.
This shouldn’t be happening.
Your post above is vague nonsense that raises the specter of some nonexistent, dummy liberal straw man that you constructed in your head. Your post above is of zero value or consequence outside of the masturbatory exercise taking place in your own mind, so please don’t get carried away with the notion that yours is a “key argument” that needs to be aired, let alone defended from suppression.
But just in case I’m wrong…how about you prove how good faith your discourse is, by painting the commentariat of this thread an equally ridiculous and hyperbolic picture of a conservative bogeyman? That would at least give us one piece of evidence that your purpose on WSO isn’t simply to make up offensive tribalist fantasies in order to demonize huge groups of people you disagree with.
I don’t think you will do it, because I think you’re just another bad faith troll that’s trying to demonize people you disagree with. I think it’s likely that you spend an unhealthy portion of your time daydreaming about elaborate grievances against made up liberals, but for some inexplicable reason you never seem to find time for the same exercise with respect to the other side of the aisle. But let’s see if you prove me wrong.
I find it hilarious that people try to argue that this moderation is great and that if you had a comment deleted then out with the trash you go. I think many people would argue that all bigotry and racism be banned, but that's just not what's happening in the execution. Point in case, my comment on another thread which I've pasted below was deleted within 5 minutes of originally being posted... verbatim... without explanation. It was then re-instated once I added another comment @ ing Patrick.
Original Comment:
If you haven't come across their content I would recommend reading OneMileAtATime (website / blog) / ThePointsGuy (website / blog) / ZacharyBurrabel (tiktok / website / blog). They have really great examples of how and when to use your points. Zach does this cool segment where he takes follower's comments and shows them how to optimize their points (e.g., Wife and I have 200k points with Chase and 350k with Amex and want to go on a honeymoon to France -> He shows them how to optimize points usage).
The math is easier and I can explain that. Typically when you book in the travel portal, you can use points at 1.5cents / point with CSR and 1.25 CPP for CSP. Now, let's say you want to visit a destination that one of Chase's transfer partner has routes to. Well, based on tables you'll find on webpages like the one listed below, you'll see most airline miles are worth anywhere from 1.2-1.5 cents / point. Typically, these airlines also 1) sell points and 2) run transfer promotions (typically, a Chase UR point transfers to all partners at a 1:1 rate. Sometimes they run 3:2 or 2:1 promotions. If I transfer 100k points to book an international flight the face value might only be $1,200-$1,500 depending on the airline partner at a 1:1 rate. The value I get goes up by 1.5-2x ($2.4k - $3k) if I take advantage of promotions.
As you mentioned, it is easier to optimize for the pricier, upper cabin, longer haul flights because not only can you take advantage of the above, but these are the seats that airlines will "discount". Oftentimes you might see a ticket for $2.5k offer an alternative option of 200k pts + $250, which, at a 1:1 rate is a bad deal, but if you can accumulate those 200k points during promotions then you're MUCH better off burning the points instead of spending $2.5k
You definitely have to spend some time optimizing, but I'd much rather spend my time optimizing here where the ROI for time invested is much higher than optimizing every last dollar I spend on a daily basis across a bunch of different cards.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/airline-miles-and-hotel-points valuations#:~:text=Most%20airline%20miles%20are%20now,%3A%20American%2C%20Delta%20and%20JetBlue
Completely agree, I made a post about realistic annual return during retirement and it got taken down, like wtf
can you link me to the thread please? thank you!
MB, just realised it's still up, but I got warned that it got flagged or something
Dude Patrick doesn't care about free speech, he cares about the money this site generates for him. And I can't say that's totally wrong because it's his livelihood, but this was one of the few corners of the internet where you could really have liberal and conservative voices meet together for intelligent discourse on challenging topics. If Reddit was ever that place that died out a long time ago and I won't even dignify 4chan. Now it's like the CFA analyst forum, no real discussion beyond CFA stuff. The quality of posts have come down a ton, my engagement personally has probably dropped off to 20-25% of what it once was and frankly I'm considering quitting at some point
Yeah it’s exactly like what happened to analystforum. I used to be on there all the time on the Water Cooler, but now it’s dead there except for CFA exam discussion.
really interesting actually...they run on same platform (Drupal), so I wonder if they were dealing with a lot of content moderation issues as well. Curious when things changed there?
Except, every one of those "challenging topics" would be invaded by a bunch of trolls and anonymous accounts insisting that minorities are inferior and that "woke" people are the real racists and etc etc.
I can name plenty of examples of "challenging topics" which are still being discussed, just without the bigotry and hate speech. Either your so hot and bothered about even the possibility that someone might limit what you get to say on their website that you've decided to ignore all the evidence that you still have considerable latitude to say what you want, or you actually want to post that shit. Either way, the only oppression here is in your imagination.
You can't spew hate speech, and you can't personally attack anyone else. That's it, that's the new moderation policy. What is your objection? Given that you and those who agree with you didn't give Patrick 5 freaking minutes to work out the kinks in the new policy, it's clear that your issue is with the underlying parameters by which your posts get moderated, and not anything to do with transparency or how the system works.
Why shouldn't you be allowed to say "woke people are the real racists"? It's an entire ideology centered around blaming white people for various social ills lol. Before the left was completely radicalized normal liberals made fun of it. Obama himself called it kooky campus activism.
I don't think i've ever seen a post from you on left wing tech censorship made in good faith.
As someone who was a proponent of the changes, I’ll make a few comments:
1 - Some threads went well beyond free speech. I lean conservative and generally don’t care about what people say, but one guy was taking things way too far. So far that I thought the only appropriate course of action was for WSO to track his IP and provide it to the police to investigate because he was literally encouraging and threatening to go out and murder minorities. There should be zero tolerance for these comments and I think there should be real-life consequences for the people who make such posts, trolling or not. Regardless, these threads and comments needed to be stopped cold. Most of them originated in off-topic and political threads.
2 - I can see a lot of the moderated posts. The reason they are getting flagged seems to be because they contain swears and insults. I know a lot of people disagree with me, but my personal belief is that such comments add no value to this website. Some comments just say: “You’re a (bleeping) moron.” No argument, no anything, just a random insult hurled at someone. Some comments have an argument, but they decide to throw in a personal insult alongside an otherwise rationale argument. Is it that hard to make your point without swearing or attempting to insult someone? If anyone ever walked into a meeting with me and acted the way a lot of people act here, I’d certainly lose respect for them and correct the behavior.
3 - I agree that there are a bunch of pretty normal posts that seem to get flagged by the AI. It’s an unfortunate but potentially necessary tool to moderate out the bad posts. If you find this happening to you, I recommend you remove the swears from your comment and try to repost. Like the poster above who used the “b” word and his post got flagged — just use the word ‘complain’ instead and you’ll be fine. I know that the context made the word innocuous, but you know there is an AI censor, so choose another word if you think you might get flagged.
I understand it is frustrating, particularly for genuinely normal posts that get flagged, but I don’t think it is an unreasonable solution to what was a very big frustration for some of the longstanding users who had withdrawn from posting due to the above dynamics.
I don't condone swearing like a sailor, but if otherwise normal posts/comments are being removed simply for having one swear word here or there, I think that's a huge problem since it at least the current iteration of the site you do not get a notification your comment was removed, nor what it was. If you type out a thoughtful response a la Stonks1990 mentioned and then it gets deleted for seemingly no reason, that's insanely annoying. It's also a bit ironic for an industry that otherwise has a lot of expletives thrown around (cue Liar's Poker and virtually every finance movie). Again, not that I condone excessive swearing, but having to tip toe around every single thing you say is a bit puritanical.
Completely agree on point 1, that was getting egregious and unsafe. Good on you for doing that and looking out for the community. I, and I hope others as well, sincerely appreciate it.
Right, but maybe don't get all twisted up, because that isn't how it works. You can swear all you want, or to some degree at least - you just can't swear at anyone. No personal attacks, it seems.
Again, anyone complaining about the system of moderation doesn't care about niggling little details like that. Because any honest assessment would show that (a) the parameters for moderation are pretty broad, in that you can post a lot of shit as long as it isn't hate speech. And also, every butthurt user who has been complaining about this has been doing it since the day of it's implementation, which is the surest proof that they never really gave a shit about the goals and methods here, or gave the site an honest chance to implement and fine tune a reasonable system of moderation. What they're upset about is they can no longer be assholes or bigots without repercussion. Losing those people is addition by subtraction.
Like, sure, maybe you have some insight into PE... but if you can't separate that from your burning hatred of minorities, I'm not sure that opinion is worth it (or how one could trust a bigot in the first place).
Yes, finance movies such as The Wolf of Wall Street show an overly dramatized version of finance that quite frankly might exist in very small segments of the industry. I'd argue this isn't the norm and regardless, it doesn't mean it should be condoned on this website. Perhaps I had a different experience, but I rarely ever heard swears throughout my entire career and certainly not swears directed at individuals themselves. Dropping F bombs and insulting people is not viewed positively in the industry and only senior professionals can get away with it on a regular basis. As someone who never swears I'm definitely more aware and sensitive to it than most -- I accept that.
That said, I don't think swearing should get your post removed. As I understand it, posts that violate the AI screen get queued for review by an actual person who then makes a judgment call on whether to publish the post or not. I'm not sure what is actually done in practice, but I would imagine the moderators could just delete/change the swears if the rest of the post is otherwise additive to the discussion. Of course this is a drain on resources and cash so I imagine only Patrick can make the call on what is appropriate expectations for the moderators. I know that political posts in particular had an ungodly number of violations and therefore required a significant cost to moderate appropriately -- one of the many reasons I believe they are now disallowed.
Actually, a few of the comments that should not have been removed (one of my mods alerted me to it even though I missed it about a week ago) were from Stonks1990. The devs think it wasn't automated and it was a mod and none of the mods are saying it was them... point is now we have a view and we're tracking what mods send what violations so we'll have a better window into if something is mistakenly being removed or if there is a system rule that is getting triggered unexpectedly.
I think on Dec 18 there was a fat finger error (one of our mods was trying to mod on mobile which we've since banned) and I think sent ~30 comments to the trash by accident... but no way to know for sure now.
Thanks,
Patrick
I’m just going to keep saying this as a fellow entrepreneur that has run communities @ decent size.
Put up your own $$$ or GTFO lol.
Seriously, these guys trolling off topic do not spend $ or contribute meaningfully and there’s no 3p platform like AdSense running here so they provide 0 benefit but tons of risk to the business.
RE: implementation, Patrick isn’t running this site with a huge dev budget. Yeah shit is going to be messy, it’s a bootstrapped business not some 300 year old multi B co.
Kind of surprised by how many people here have difficulty understanding the above? This is a business forum and hopefully most of you have more than room temp IQ that makes it possible to understand the business case for his actions. This isn’t “feels based business” lol. He has a family to feed and has a decade+ into the co. Use your brain for 12 seconds
I agree. The trolls want a free community tailored to their needs. If they want a say in moderation, they should contribute $$$ or work as a volunteer for the site
Plus didn't he say a lot of the devs are from Ukraine? I imagine they have more important stuff to worry about right now.
Yeah fair points and all but it took months of atrocious implementation to realize that flagging any post with a curse word for a person to then objectively determine "yes / no" based on ambiguous rules wouldn't be a good way to moderate? I understand and unequivocally support nuking the truly hateful posts to kingdom come but you can't filter out "don't be a soft bitch" from that process?
You're not stupid, while those troll posts have no value, making poorly thought out changes that might ostracize a portion of your community isn't good for long term growth either is it? After all, nobody would buy a random career development or interview prep course before vetting it and I bet one of the primary ways kids do that is by reading through the comments.
The Buzzfeed journalist was the tipping point for a known problem that was turning off a number of users and is a WSO business risk. Won't repeat the many commenters have stated but I believe the cleaned up site is much improved as an Off Topic debate doesn't need to devolve into a cesspool. I had suggested just removing OFF but WSO said they believed it had entertainment value.
What is a common thread is many users come to WSO to have a reasoned and informed conversation/debate on certain topics. If someone really wants that, and truly wants to solve that problem rather than just complaining, then just create a private group in Reddit and invite people for political, religious, free speech, etc... debates from this site. Not that hard of a problem to solve if you can't get that discussion anywhere else on the internet, you just won't get any WSO bananas.
Agree the content moderation needs to improve from here. But I’m seeing some effort to improve. Namely, I had one taken down last week and shortly after I commented to that effect, it was put back up.
Also, because a lot of the comments being taken down are 100% innocuous, it makes me think it’s some sort of software bug. I’d be more concerned if the comments taken down were lightly controversial; that would really mean it’s the PC police hard at work.
I do think Patrick should update us on the state of the matter, give a bit of detail on how it’s being done and why certain things get taken down for no reason.
I think there is a bug as well... my team knows not to remove posts for cursing and some of the comments that have been removed are totally fine. That leads me to believe that it's something else. Devs looking into it more tomorrow (overnight we got more visibility into every action every human mod takes so we can make sure it's not one of them making mistakes).
Balanced view here from someone who likes to comment on political posts....
I actually think the moderation has been OK and the topics have been cleaned up. However, I'm finding myself using the site less and less and not as some sort of protest.
Beforehand, I might get into a political argument and post 10 comments back and forth with someone, but I would also check more on the website. Hence, my 10 political comments would also inadvertently create 4 or 5 career oriented responses as I visited WSO more often.
Now, I'm engaging in only a comment or two on politics and am checking the site less so only a comment or two on career related matters. This is just my case - not sure how widely it applies to others, but strangely enough, the negative posts had a positive post spillover as well.
I'm not surprised to hear this. I think people who say WSO should focus on career advice are failing to fully understand the business model.
The career advice function is a two-sided market. There are always enough job seekers, so the amount of interaction will be constrained by the number of advice-giving professionals using the site.
The main way to entice them is to have other reasons for them to use the site. Namely, other topics besides career advice.
Yes exactly. As an older user, I'm not a robot who writes thoughtful, well-written, and free career advice. Sure that in of itself can be rewarding but there has to be something else that keeps people like me entertained and coming back to the site.
Except, there were lots of long time "advice givers" who left the site because the bigotry and hate speech made them uncomfortable. You cannot sit here and pretend as though we as a site weren't losing anything by allowing the old way of doing things to continue; that is actively and demonstrably untrue. The question becomes, who do I want to preserve as active participants here - is it people who won't stay if they have to wade through a pile of trash opinions and trolls every time they read a topic, or those who won't stay if they aren't allowed to post that kind of content? If WSO decides that they want to keep the latter at the expense of the former, then the next Buzzfeed writer (or whoever) can credibly allege that this site made an active decision to prioritize alt-right hate speech. I don't blame Andy and Patrick for deciding that if they lose the people who spend 95% of their time complaining about diversity hires, that they haven't lost a valuable contributor at all.
It’s really sad to see what happened to this place. When I first joined about 6 or so years ago, there were so many OG’s here - legends in the industry that were more than willing to give back. That’s what kept me here. I don’t know where all these guys went. Really hard to see it go this way
A lot of them left because they didn't want to deal with the rampant bigotry and hate speech. But we aren't supposed to care about them, it's the people who may leave because they can't curse at other users with impunity who we should be most concerned with keeping around. Or something like that. It's never quite clear what half these people are upset about except that now someone can take down a post that is basically angry garbage.
No, you’re literally making things up and claiming it as fact. How typical of you...
I have to toss my 2cents in too. I’m not an og, or a frequent poster but I’m pretty sure I’m one of the very few people with a healthcare background.
I usually limit my posts to what I know. But now that off topic has been nerfed and even fun/hypothetical responses on a thread are met with overweighted ms.
so really, What’s the point anymore of hanging around? Can’t joke around, cant rack up points.
it feels great to share some wisdom and help out but we’re not paid. And it feels more like work when that’s all we’re “rewarded for” is on topic responses.
I came and stayed for the banter .. answering hungry kids questions was the bonus ….
The issue is that the people who are most opposed to moderation are not really interested in joking around and banter. They are much more interested in personal attacks on individuals and disparaging remarks about groups of people. If joking around and banter were all people were interested in on here, there would not be much need for moderation.
Anyone have a link to this article? I can’t find anything about it
It doesn't exist. Someone from Buzzfeed reached out and basically said "hey, we've noticed that you guys are hosting a lot of white supremacist and incel types on your platform, and not moderating any of the resulting hate speech, care to comment on an article we're thinking of writing about it?" And when WSO decided "hey, it kind of sucks that we're starting to be known as heading towards a cesspool of alt-right anger in the public eye" a small number of users decided that was absolute tyranny and that now we can't have any interesting discussions. Despite, you know... the fact that the only things that seem to be consistently removed are hate speech and personal attacks.
People are taking issue with random innocuous stuff being captured by the filter and deleted. It's a bigger issue on the actual career boards than here. People have repeatedly pointed this out, i'm not sure why you're acting like everyone is just upset that they can't use racial slurs or argue that Jim Crow was a great idea.
Like CompBanker, or perhaps earlier in that original thread, I was a proponent of changes.
Since then I have seen a lot of the worst stuff (that most people seem to agree was inappropriate but not everyone seemed to agree merited action) disappear, which is great. I have also seen a lot of the unpredictably funny stuff dry up, which is a shame because I agree the banter is one of the reasons to be here.
Like CompBanker, I seem to have some kind of special view where I can see the moderated comments; they show with a red banner at the footer with something to the effect that "This comment has been flagged for violation". 80% of them seem to be entirely innocuous except for profanity. 10% are short one-liners that are simply insults. 10% I can't figure out why they were removed.
My suggestions: WallStreetOasis.com
I recognize and appreciate all the work you and the team have done. If you made changes like these, I think more of the community would appreciate or give you space to work out the inevitable kinks that come with overhauling numerous aspects of how the forums work.
I also commend your patience. I saw several instances where someone wrote a pretty irate note, you replied with facts, and that elicited a mature and real response from them. Everyone here is a human, and I'm glad you treat people like that.
1. Done (see my comment at bottom of thread)... agreed 100% on the profanity, so I think we have an error / a bug. All of the mods know profanity is not a violation by itself, so I'm surprised to hear this. Either way, we have better tracking as of today so we'll be able to see more what is going on.
2. We have a site suggestions forum here: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum/feedback Agreed that this could have been announced much more broadly. Issue is we attacked the moderation stuff fast in in Oct/Nov and then devs primarily moved onto other things and then some of the mod tasks that had taken longer to implement didn't roll out until December and so it was disjointed (especially on the communication front). I will now have the moderation changes thread stickied to the top of that forum and will link it here
3. All of the policies and rules come from me and are implemented by my dev team. There are currently 3 paid moderators and they check the flag table (potential violations) 6 times per day (in shifts) which includes reviewing submissions to the WSO Company Database. Typically there is anywhere from ~20 to ~100 flags per shift, most of which are not violations and the flags are cleared without notice.
Thanks for the patience while we get better,
Patrick
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