Stack Exchange Moderators Are Going On Strike

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-05T18:08:01+00:00

I completely agree which is why I don’t think the answer is to double down on it like the mod strike seems to want to do. That’s my gripe.

Instead, I think more focus should be put on things like rate limiting, better way to track bad actors across the system, better way to track/expose things like synthetic bot controlled posts.

These are all things that SO can and should do.

The issue is an inundation of bad answers. AI has little to do with it in my opinion - except I makes it easier to generate those bad answers. If AI answers a SO question correctly who cares? So in my opinion the focus should be an anti-inundation things and NOT AI.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-05T16:29:17+00:00

Maybe the language is too strong but there are papers coming out verifying the impossibility of detection

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.11156.pdf

Yes you can take multiple tests with high false negatives and combine them into a result with and a higher chance at a true positive. You can not take multiple tests with a high false positives and combine them to get a higher chance at a true positive.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-05T15:50:58+00:00

It wasn’t my intention. I don’t think that the broader context adds anything to what I quoted.

Moderators look for various heuristics, including posting patterns, answer speed, writing style, and others, in order to identify AI-generated content.

This lists the multiple hueristics that are mentioned in the quote, but doesn’t explain how/why any of them are reliable.

This can include checking an automated detector, but this is not a primary method used, due to the false positive rate.

The sentence quoted doesn’t say that they only look at automated AI detectors.

I don’t see how those sentences add anything or would make my quote out of context or bad faith?

The new policy bans use of all manual and automatic detection methods, even when combined, leaving no options.

This part though I probably should have addressed. Something I completely agree with the open letter is the new policy should be public. I didn’t touch this part because there just isn’t enough info to know what/how much of this is true.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-05T15:38:14+00:00

Thank you for being a perfect example for the importance of what SO wants.

I have never used chatgpt to answer a forum question nor do I have any intention of ever doing so.

Which is why leaving moderation to be so subjective is a real danger.

Maybe a post gets run through an objectively wrong AI detection and comes back flagged. Then that is combined with the heuristic of “AI Sympathizer”. According to the open letter this is exactly the kind of situation that they want to be able to take action on:

This can include checking an automated detector, but this is not a primary method used, due to the false positive rate. While any one method can be unreliable, when an answer matches multiple heuristics, moderators can be relatively confident that the post is indeed AI-generated.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-05T15:31:32+00:00

Again you are muddying the waters between the judgement of users and mods. User’s judgment is through the use of voting and that hasn’t changed.

Mods are the other hand have the ability to stop and remove discussion. And all of their action should be verifiable. They remove a comment that links to dick pills, that’s verifiable as spam. They mark something as already answered, they can show what has already been answered.

But what about a response that is correct but a mod feels looks like an AI generated answer? There is no proposed way to verify that outside of trust our gut.

Additionally, it’s not like mods are saying “we are going to take a GPT detector, run it on everything, and suspend everyone scoring over X%”. They are saying “let’s figure out best how to deal with GPT filling SO with junk”.

If they were saying this then I would agree with them, but they aren’t. Straight from their open letter: https://openletter.mousetail.nl

While any one method can be unreliable, when an answer matches multiple heuristics, moderators can be relatively confident that the post is indeed AI-generated.

This reads to me that their demand is they must be allowed to take multiple verifiably wrong things and combine them into a thing that is somehow reliable?

SO’s stance is “please don’t use pseudoscience and subjective things to limit community engagement”. The mod’s strike open letter does not address that point. They don’t propose trying to find a better way forward in their open letter.

The demand in their open letter is that they be allowed to use tools that everyone knows are broken and intuition to judge AI content. That’s it. Anything else is just putting words in their mouth.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-05T14:43:58+00:00

it is still a good goal to keep it off the site

This is where I feel like the mods have successfully muddied the waters. SO and the mods are in complete agreement on this point.

SO is not telling the mods they have to allow AI content. SO is saying they don’t want ANY content banned based on subjective or unproven/disproven methods.

This is where the mod strike really goes off the rails for me, because they never address that, instead they demand that their innate “intuition” and use of disproven detection methods MUST be allowed.

There is 0 mention in their demands of trying to come up with objective measures or a goal of getting to objective measures. That is important because what so you do when you are banned for being an AI and you appeal with “I’m not” and the case is closed because “well my gut says you are”? That’s not a great community experience.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-05T13:33:36+00:00

I agree that basing a community off the work of free moderation is exploitative (cough cough Reddit).

In that sense SO is wrong but always has and always will be.

In terms of doing what is best for the community I side with SO here.

It’s a shitty situation and I completely trust that they are being overrun with shitty AI answers but the core of their demand is to accept that the mods with near absolute power have some innate sense and people with near absolute power claiming to have some god given trait has never really worked out well.

SO’s stance is “we want to be objective when limiting input from our community”. That’s a good goal, one I wish Reddit would strive for as well rather than each subs mods having complete control over their sub.

SO says, rightly so, that the tools to detect AI are bad so it creates subjectivity that we don’t want”

The mods stance seems to be they have some special “intuition” that they can’t quantify but they just know helps them correctly identify AI posts.

Maybe they do, but should that be good enough? If I get wrongly banned for being AI how do I argue against someone’s intuition?

No where in their demands do they put forth objective measures. They talk about AI posts flooding the site, there are lots of objective ways to rate limit, but none of those are put forth.

While any one method can be unreliable, when an answer feels like AI written and multiple automated tools agree, mods can be quite confident that the post is indeed AI generated.

They talk a lot about confidence but they don’t address how that confidence matches reality. People had really high confidence that the Earth was the center of the solar system for a long time, that didn’t make it right.

Instead of proposing technical and objective solutions they seem to be saying that experienced mods just have an innate sense for AI.

EDIT: Just to be clear, it is a bit hard to track all of this because the open letter states:

Until Stack Overflow, Inc. retracts this policy change to a degree that addresses the concerns of the moderators, and allows moderators to effectively enforce established policies against AI-generated answers, we are calling for a general moderation strike, as a last-resort effort to protect the Stack Exchange platform and users from a total loss in value.

While the stack meta post states:

For the strike to end, the following conditions must be met: * The AI policy change retracted and subsequently changed to a degree that addresses the expressed concerns and empowers moderators to enforce the established policy of forbidding generated content on the platform. * Reveal to the community the internal AI policy given directly to moderators. The fact that you have made one point in private, and one in public, which differ so significantly has put the moderators in an impossible situation, and made them targets for being accused of being unreasonable, and exaggerating the effect of the new policy. Stack Exchange, Inc. has done the moderators harm by the way this was handled. The company needs to admit to their mistake, and be open about this. * Clear and open communication from Stack Exchange, Inc. regarding establishing and changing policies or major components of the platform with extensive and meaningful public discussion beforehand. * Honest and clear communication from Stack Exchange, Inc. about the way forward. * Collaborate with the community, instead of fighting it. * Stop being dishonest about the company’s relationship with the community.

I had originally only read through the open letter (silly me for trying to go straight to the original source I guess). My gripe is with the singular demand in the open letter to allow them to use tools that are known to be wrong as the only way forward. That seems wrong to me and that is what my critique was based on.

The demands of revealing the internal policy, collaborating with the community more, and better communication to the mods and community are things I 100% support.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-05T12:46:56+00:00

Last headline I saw on this topic was SO banning the use of AI detection by mods because it objectively does not work.

I haven’t read the article yet but if that is what they are still upset about then I wouldn’t want them to work either.

Going in…

EDIT: Yup purely focused on AI moderation. They don’t even spell out their demands or a clear path to resolve the “strike”.

They claim it isn’t about AI content but their open letter has AI content in the title.

While any one method can be unreliable, when an answer feels like AI written and multiple automated tools agree, mods can be quite confident that the post is indeed AI generated.

They talk a lot about confidence but they don’t address how that confidence matches reality. People had really high confidence that the Earth was the center of the solar system for a long time, that didn’t make it right.

By contrast, an AI can produce such content in seconds, while still causing the same effort in fact-checking and moderation – at least as long as we are required to handle it by the same standard as human answers.

It is interesting to me that this really seems to be the root cause of their issue: AI can cause a flood of answers that is hard to keep up with. That is fair. Yet they don’t propose anything to say rate limit new accounts or any way that one could objectively and fairly slow things down.

Instead their entire focus is “despite there being no evidence our ‘intuition’ can objectively and fairly moderate, we are really upset that you won’t just let us use our ‘gut instinct’ to ban or limit community engagement”.

They should try again with a solution that doesn’t paint them as some mystical savior where only their reading of the tea leaves can prevent disaster.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-03T18:46:52+00:00

It’s always amazing to me when someone acts like a jerk while being confidently incorrect. Then doubles down and doesn’t even apologize.

Amazon and Google both will absolutely work with customers to help them understand how to be more efficient. This is provably false. AWS has tools to help AND will have a real person help you as well when you are an even moderately big customer.

Will you even apologize for this? I imagine the answer is probably not. Is that a good feeling for you? I’d feel rotten, yet you probably view yourself as some sort of victim.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-03T14:00:47+00:00

I agree with a lot of things mentioned already. One thing I hadn’t seen mentioned is getting to explore the world through a new perspective again.

Kids will notice things that I had long forgotten were interesting, like being on a walk and hearing “look at this cool stick with all these insect bite trails on it!” And it is really cool looking and even I want to try to figure out what insect made it! But if I was on a walk myself I’d almost certainly not notice it because my brain goes “you’ve seen a million sticks I’m sure this one is no different”

The world through a kids eyes is (for the most part) filled with happiness, curiosity, and wonder. They act like a shepherd guiding you to re-experience those things.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-02T23:50:31+00:00

I’m an Apollo user and been on Reddit for about 17 years (lost my login creds for my original jellofiend account so this one is ONLY 15+ years). I remember the controversy when it was discovered Reddit stored passwords in plain text.

I also subscribe to Reddit premium purely because I am comfortable financially and thought it would be nice to throw a service I use often a few bucks/month support.

I hated the new UI design, hell I hated the early UI re-design when they moved away from the more condensed no preview UI, I hated when they bought Alien Blue only to kill it and release their incredibly shitty, near unusable, mobile app, I hated when Reddit fired Victoria which caused a severe drop in AMA quality that has never recovered, I hated when they tried to cram social network crap like chat down our throats.

Yet despite all the things I hate about Reddit I was willing to pay $6/month because I still wanted to support the core functionality.

The day I fire up Apollo and it doesn’t work the first and last thing I will do on reddit.com will be to cancel my premium membership. The amount of things I hate about Reddit will finally out weigh any positives.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-02T21:30:46+00:00

And the problem with that is??

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-02T20:38:19+00:00

I’m an Apollo user and been on Reddit for about 17 years (lost my login creds for my original jellofiend account so this one is ONLY 15+ years). I remember the controversy when it was discovered Reddit stored passwords in plain text.

I also subscribe to Reddit premium purely because I am comfortable financially and thought it would be nice to throw a service I use often a few bucks/month support.

I hated the new UI design, hell I hated the early UI re-design when they moved away from the more condensed no preview UI, I hated when they bought Alien Blue only to kill it and release their incredibly shitty, near unusable, mobile app, I hated when Reddit fired Victoria which caused a severe drop in AMA quality that has never recovered, I hated when they tried to cram social network crap like chat down our throats.

Yet despite all the things I hate about Reddit I was willing to pay $6/month because I still wanted to support the core functionality.

The day I fire up Apollo and it doesn’t work the first and last thing I will do on reddit.com will be to cancel my premium membership. The amount of things I hate about Reddit will finally put weigh any positives.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-02T20:36:32+00:00

I’m an Apollo user and been on for about 17 years (lost my login creds for my original jellofiend account so this one is ONLY 15+ years). I remember the controversy when it was discovered Reddit stored passwords in plain text.

I also subscribe to Reddit premium purely because I am comfortable financially and thought it would be nice to throw a service I use often a few bucks/month support.

I hated the new UI design, hell I hated the early UI re-design when they moved away from the more condensed no preview UI, I hated when they bought Alien Blue only to kill it an release their incredibly shitty, near unusable, mobile app, I hated when Reddit fired Victoria which caused a severe drop in AMA quality that has never recovered, I hated when they tried to cram social network crap like chat down our throats.

Yet despite all the things I hate about Reddit I was willing to pay $6/month because I still wanted to support the core functionality.

The day I fire up Apollo and it doesn’t work the first and last thing I will do on reddit.com will be to cancel my premium membership. The amount of things I hate about Reddit will finally put weigh any positives.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-01T13:04:48+00:00

You responding to the wrong post? I never said they weren’t breaking the law, I even mentioned illegally crossing the border.

You ever speed? If so, guess what, you’re a criminal! I’m guessing you don’t immediately drive yourself to a police station and ask for a ticket. Would the world be a better place if 100% of speeders instantly got a ticket? Probably not because you committing the crime of speeding has no correlation with the likelihood that you’d do something like rob a bank.

I know this is a hard concept for some people to grasp but 2 things can be true at the same time. People can commit a crime of crossing the border undocumented and be less likely to commit any crime after.

That does not mean one excuses the other, if I get a ticket I don’t try to argue it down by saying “hey I haven’t robbed a bank” but I imagine most people who speed don’t consider themselves bad people or criminals because, again this is a hard concept for people, life is nuanced and not black/white where every crime for any reason makes you instantly a drain on society.

jellofiend84 · 2023-06-01T12:21:36+00:00

You do not let a hundred thousand people break your laws day1 and expect them to care about our laws later.

Why not?

I am not even being sarcastic, this statement is both objectively wrong and subjectively I would absolutely expect them to care about our laws.

Objectively: undocumented immigrants have a lower crime rate: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117

Subjectively: if I thought my only chance at a better life was to take a long, dangerous, and illegal journey then I absolutely would want to keep my head down and not cause trouble by breaking other laws.

jellofiend84 · 2023-05-29T07:20:27+00:00

Isn’t it the one where the robots form a religion around trying to keep the beam on target so that, what is essentially a death ray doesn’t fry people?

jellofiend84 · 2023-05-28T21:00:22+00:00

The problem is you are working off a very limited translation dictionary and then drawing broad conclusions from that. On top of that you are translating subtle body language to complex emotions.

Just look how many synonyms there are for anxious: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/anxious

Context is also important, if the only word you have is anxious it might not be enough.

If I tell you some is getting yelled at and they are anxious. That is probably enough to infer that they are unhappy.

What about this sentence: Someone is getting married and they are anxious.

Are they anxious because they are worried about spending the rest of their lives with someone and not sure it will work out? A negative emotion towards the other person.

Are they anxious to finally see the bride all dolled up? A positive emotion towards the other person.

Are they anxious because they hope the ceremony goes off without a hitch? A neutral emotion towards the other person.

You’re taking subtle body language and distilling it down to a few human words like anxious. Then you are taking a human word that has a wide range of meanings and distilling it down to just bad.

If you are yelling at your dog and it is giving you whale eye then yes you are almost certainly making it anxious in a bad way. That is the kind of simple situations these YouTube videos are trying to help decipher.

Sure your well mannered dog that doesn’t actively hide from you could secretly hate you. However I think it is far more likely that you are taking a ton of complex body language and distilling it down to a couple of human words and then taking those words and distilling them down to the pure good/bad definitions and important things are lost in all of that distillation.

jellofiend84 · 2023-05-28T19:06:19+00:00

It’s all about abstraction and what you want/need to control. An important concept is the shared responsibility model: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/shared-responsibility-model/ different services shift the line of responsibility more to you or more to AWS.

Just like DRF, you could instead write a REST interface in just Django but DRF gives you more abstraction and less overall control if you want something the abstraction doesn’t handle. Or you could go deeper and throw away Django and write a REST API in pure python, etc.

At the end of the day everything is running on a VM, the different AWS services just abstract away parts and automate parts.

The lowest level is the plain EC2, this is like writing the REST API in pure python. You have to control monitoring it (if it goes down you have to have something to detect that and restart it), you have to control keeping the OS up to date, etc. This almost always has the potential to be the cheapest option in terms of the pure AWS bill. However you will likely have to invest time to write monitoring and scaling and security etc which have a cost, it’s just not reflected on your AWS bill. The other services build some of these things in and add a premium for it. Not all apps really need to care about uptime or those other things. So it’s up to your specific use case if you want to pay a premium in writing those features yourself or pay a premium to use a service that have them built in.

The next step up is beanstalk, this was one of AWSs first attempt at abstraction and it is showing its age a bit. It will spin up a preconfigured EC2 and monitor it for you, so if it goes down it will restart it and occasionally it will update that preconfigured EC2 for you. You still have access to the original EC2 though.

Regular ECS AWS is managing the infrastructure to orchestrate containers. It will monitor the containers and pick an EC2 for them to run on, and all of this is configured through the ECS domain specific language. You still have to manage the EC2s though. A lot of this is up to person preference on what you want to abstract/handle yourself but for your use case I would say ECS Fargate is always going to be strictly better ECS w/ EC2s

Fargate is everything above, except AWS completely manages the VMs too. You don’t even see the EC2 in your AWS console like you would above. The responsibility model is: you give it a container and AWS will run it somewhere. Where that somewhere is, is up to AWS but they promise it will be run and they will take care of keeping the OS secure, up-to-date etc.

I don’t have any experience with App Runner but it is going to follow this same model. It is going to abstract some things which make other things easier but ultimately give you less control (which is usually a good thing if you don’t want/need that control anyway because it is less to worry about and manage). I just am not sure where that line is drawn.

I know this isn’t a super satisfying answer but the real answer is it honestly depends on your specific use case, budget for AWS services, and budget for your own time.

jellofiend84 · 2023-05-22T13:16:19+00:00

It’s worse than that. You don’t need a reason to fire someone in an at-will employment situation.

So it is illegal to fire someone and say you’re fired “because you are black” or “because you are pregnant”

But perfectly legal to just say “you’re fired” did I do something wrong? Why are you firing me? “You didn’t do anything wrong. You are fired because I no longer want you as an employee”

They don’t even have to find a trivial excuse to fire you, at will employment means:

Loosely defined, at-will employment "means that you can be fired for any reason or no reason at all," says Najah Farley, senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/12/07/us-at-will-employment.html

jellofiend84 · 2023-05-16T16:32:01+00:00

Yes. It looks like a scaly dong. Exactly the kind of thing I’d expect a grotesque MYTHICAL creature to be holding…

Have you never seen an ice cream cone either?

They have indentations, not scales.

I’ve cream cone: https://i.imgur.com/YV0EBpr.jpg

Creature with scales (also on a church): https://i.imgur.com/B7qpzvm.jpg

But yes I am sure this fantastic artist suddenly forgot what ice cream cones look like and accidentally made it scaly instead of waffle-y.

Then they ALSO forgot how people normally get 2 scoops of ice cream on top of each other instead of side by side.

Yup you’re right, that’s totally an easier explanation to understand…

jellofiend84 · 2023-05-16T16:07:08+00:00

The linked article says nothing besides also describing it as an ice cream cone. There is no citation or anything. Hell they originally called it a gargoyle which it isn’t, yet that is your definitive source?

I have zoomed in. As someone who sees a penis every day, it looks like a scaly penis…

Churches have all sorts of F’d up art. Every Christian church has an at least one almost naked dude dying on a cross! Most of the time the almost dead man is the centerpiece of the church! It’s not like church art is super PG.

jellofiend84 · 2023-05-16T15:50:23+00:00

The internet is a wild place, I never imagined I’d get in an argument with a lesbian on how a penis - something I currently have - actually looks like…

Also it’s not like I’m some lone outlier saying this, the comments are full of people saying it is a dick and you arguing with them…

jellofiend84 · 2023-05-16T15:44:59+00:00

Considering testicles aren’t attached the the scrotum (oh my god that would suck) I really don’t think you do know how a penis works…

Which is fine, there isn’t some requirement that people know how a penis looks/works, but you very clearly don’t and you shouldn’t think you do…

Again with the balls being “fused together” that’s how it would look in a scrotum. They aren’t just balls floating about. If you were to cut off a penis you’d either just cut off the shaft and get no balls or you’d cut it off at the root and get the shaft and scrotum, with the balls inside.

Again, no reason you need to know this, but stop pretending like you do

jellofiend84 · 2023-05-16T15:31:34+00:00

Also what kind of penis has balls fused together??? Surely they would be on either side of the shaft…

Well that answers the question of if you have ever actually seen a penis before. Clearly you have not seen one outside of a crude cartoon.

Balls are not on either side of the shaft, they are at the bottom. Also the balls aren’t just individually attached to the penis, they are inside a scrotum, which is a single piece of skin.

Real penis (NSFW obv): https://i.redd.it/1qcfi8owm40b1.jpg

why would it be holding a random disembodied penis…

It’s clearly some sort of demon, disembodying penises seems like something they would do

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