The issue is that this is adversarial in nature. Certainly there are ML systems catching content before moderators.. however since it is adversarial people are pivoting to circumvent the automated systems.
It's the algorithmic selection of the most shocking posts that aggrevates the problem. They know what ends up getting promoted, and they don't care about the damage.
The "algorithm" is that I read your comment and saw that it was obviously breaking the rules. I wish I knew how to write software to do that correctly, but I don't.
Re other commenters: everyone always feels like the mods are singling them out personally and treating the other side with kid gloves (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). That's a universal bias, same as it always feels like the cops are singling you out for a speeding ticket when lots of other cars were going fast too.
> They can push a post up or down the feed's algorithm
This is not, and has never been, the case. Moderators can remove posts and ban users, but they cannot affect the scoring or placement of posts (short of pinning up to two posts to the top of the page, which visually distinguishes them from other posts).
Curation of shitty content is also built right into the algorithm.
They'll hide behind "But people are voting for this mindless content" but that's not the full picture. A vote after 5 seconds is actually weighted higher than a vote after 5 minutes.
It's specifically because Reddit the company is against too much engaging content. They want people to smirk, chuckle, acknowledge, and move on. Engaging content means fewer pages viewed, which means fewer ad views.
I don't think it's quite malicious but if I'm a mod and it's common to suppress anything election related then I could see that applying here. But according to the comment you linked their algorithm only targets upvote/downvote wars, I did not observe that happening here at all.
"Popular things go to the top" is a pretty good first approximation of the algorithm. You have things getting flagged to death for generating bad conversation/flamewars (kinda like parents telling kids to stop playing rough since people are getting hurt). There's the hiring posts. At least to me, it's always felt like moderation is happening at the margins.
They are trying to train their user base to moderate content correctly. If it's against the sites policy, users should down-vote the content and report it.
If it looks that way, you should question your assumptions, because that's not what's happening. What's instead happening is that a controversy-du-jour is spawning lots of little stories, and the mods are working to make sure they don't co-opt the front page, which (because it is a linear list of individual links) is especially vulnerable to controversies-du-jour.
This raises a really interesting question. It’s quite possible that an algorithm tuned to predict which post most users will engage with learns to boost posts of people in bikinis without being explicitly programmed to do so.
Yup, it's manual intervention by dang or other mod. Happens every day so you shouldn't be surprised. Front page is not entirely what we vote for, it's also a function of what dang likes and dislikes.
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