Behind TikTok's Boom: A Legion of Traumatized, $10-A-Day Content Moderators – Slashdot

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I guess I should move there and live like a fucking king while teleworking…
I guess I speak for everyone here when I say that nobody gives a fuck about him or your little vendetta.
No kidding.
They can always go back to digging ditches or whatever they were doing before.
Oh look, it’s a Canadian shitting on America again. How unusual.
Your president or dear leader or whatever the fuck you call him wore blackface in public and everyone saw it and you still re-elected him. You have absolutely zero standing to call anyone else ridiculous. To everyone else: Canadians were born without any sense of self awareness; that’s how they can so closely resemble what they profess to hate without their tiny minds imploding
Whataboutism to distract from repeated sexual assaults because you derive identity from your choice of shitty presidential candidates.
I can’t in a million years figure out why you posted this drek anonymously. You stay classy, now.
… he says while the man we’re talking about is exiting a courthouse where he just gave a deposition in a sexual assault case.
Hey, I say orange man bad for being an immoral crackhead with a thing for young bimbos
Overgrown Oompa Loompa IS bad.
Hey! Be reasonable with your comparisons, the Oompa Loompas worked their ass off and were generally loyal to their employer.
Don is loyal to his “employer”: himself. And he works hard at golf practice.
A very broken orange clock is still correct twice a day. TikTok, and the copycat services it has spawned, are fucking useless trash meant to reinforce instant-gratification zero-attention-span highly addictive behavior for data harvesting and unapologetic willful exposure to advertising. Ban it, as well as Meta and Google’s versions on Insta and YT.
> A very broken orange clock is still correct twice a day.
You missed a Clockwork Orange joke there.
Don wanted to ban it because it’s from Jiiiihna, not because it’s slavery.
It was called “Clockwork Orange”.
I was thinking South Park [fandom.com].
This sounds like torture. Are we sure they aren’t being forced to do this work on threat of violence?
Could you imagine watching hundreds of video clips for 7+ hours a day, every day? But even better, TIK-TOK clips. That’s a punishment worse than death.
I went to tik-tok once and after watching half a dozen videos I wanted to stick hot pokers in my eyes. Stupidest content on the planet. The human race is doomed.

Could you imagine watching hundreds of video clips for 7+ hours a day, every day?
Plenty of first world social-media-addicted dumbasses happily do that for free.
I guess if I had to do the job, the quality of my moderating would suck. Unless something really jumps at me as bad, it would be “it’s OK”, click, “it’s OK”, click, “it’s OK”, click…
Why did they compare that to US dollars? Are the Columbians being paid in USD? If not, comparing the inflation in Columbia to the inflation in the US is terrible journalism.
but luckily the TikTok moderators only have to watch 15 second videos.
Imagine being a Facbook moderator having to watch hour long videos on all kinds of nonsense like bird watching.
That’s why they should have Slashdot-style moderation, where the site users themselves upmod or downmod content, so that bad content quickly gets buried and good content gets promoted. This has been working great for Slashdot for decades: I literally can’t remember the last time I saw a GNAA membership offer, a penisbird or a svastika on here.
“Any sufficiently optimistic statement is indistinguishable from sarcasm.”
Slashdot’s system leaves the bad content available. Illegal stuff needs to be purged, not buried.
Also, Slashdot’s system results in good, well-written and relevant content modded troll for political reasons.

Also, Slashdot’s system results in good, well-written and relevant content modded troll for political reasons.
To be fair, Slashdot at least doesn’t let a post fall below -1. On some other forums (Red*cough*dit), a sufficiently unpopular post can burn an incredible amount of the poster’s karma, usually resulting in the poster self-censoring by deleting the post to prevent further karma loss.
When you consider how relatively small Slashdot is compared to sites like Facebook and TikTok, and yet how much effort trolls and shills put into farming mod points and pushing their political/commercial agenda… The scale of the problem for bigger sites would be insurmountable.
Correction, *is* insurmountable. None of them seem to be able to stop it.

I literally can’t remember the last time I saw a GNAA membership offer, a penisbird or a svastika on here.
Then you’re probably also missing out on posts that ran afoul of the groupthink, and anons who actually made a good point but didn’t get modded up because the crop of moderators du jour were too busy blowing their moderator points censoring opposing political views.
Originally, Slashdot’s moderation system did take into account that some people would moderate in a biased fashion, and had meta-moderation so moderators with an axe to grind would eventually be removed from the moderation pool. This site has changed hands so many times though, that part of Slashcode is likely broken.
Ultimately, you’re still left with the problem that only some people are really qualified to be good moderators, and you’re not paying them for their efforts. I suspect as time went on, it may have also been possible that there aren’t as many people who are willing to do a good job cleaning up Slashdot’s trash, for free.
CmdrTaco has spoken about this on Twitter. Still hoping he does a memoir. Anyway, apparently there is some mechanism by which the site can perma-ban accounts from getting mod points. He mentioned auto-generated fake posts that were either obvious trolls or not trolls, and if the user moderated them the wrong way their account never got more mod points.
I’m not sure how it related to meta-moderation though. There is an obvious flaw in the scheme as well – users can just create new accounts.
I browser at -1 specifically because a decent amount of on-topic stuff gets modded down because of groupthink. Other times, the person really is an idiot but the comments before and after the idiot make more sense when you also read what the idiot wrote.
With that said, I’m sort of surprised I haven’t seen some of the prior spam. Figured people got bored and quit after so long. Like GNAA I assumed just got bored or died or whatever.

That’s why they should have Slashdot-style moderation, where the site users themselves upmod or downmod content, so that bad content quickly gets buried and good content gets promoted. This has been working great for Slashdot for decades: I literally can’t remember the last time I saw a GNAA membership offer, a penisbird or a svastika on here.
Spammers are still around, here’s one I flagged and downmodded most recently https://slashdot.org/~Antonsax… [slashdot.org] and what happened here I don’t know but also downmodded https://hardware.slashdot.org/… [slashdot.org] But with that said I pretty much concur.
It’s more that if this was about the Metastasis, people would just go “duh, what else is new?”
Jesus Christ that would absolutely wreck your brain, can’t even imagine the brutal shit they have to watch, and in tiktok lengths no less. That absolutely has to fuck you up.

Jesus Christ that would absolutely wreck your brain, can’t even imagine the brutal shit they have to watch, and in tiktok lengths no less. That absolutely has to fuck you up.
I’d figure the robotic voice and terrible background music would be what destroys your sanity first. Especially that “oh no” song.
OMG, I hate that I unfortunately know EXACTLY what you are talking about.
I can’t believe there are that many sinister videos created. An occasional cat in the dryer maybe, but most are just dancing or taking on mostly harmless acrobatic challenges. Are there really that many morons? What is the vid rejection rate?
Are there really that many morons?
You’ve never dealt with humans before, have you?
Are there really that many morons? What is the vid rejection rate?
We don’t know, but TikTok has over one-billion users worldwide.

Even if 0.001% are uploading CSAM, torture and violence videos daily then that’s 10,000 videos per day.
The worst thing I could imagine must be that on TikTok, a fad takes off and everyone and their dog (quite literally in this case) do the same kind of video. Imagine watching the same bullshit video from a million people, all doing the exact same silly movies. It’s not even interesting the first dozen times, now repeat that another thousand times.
Facebook has the same problem, and I expect most social networks do.
In Facebook’s case they not only had problems with moderators getting traumatised, they had issues with not having moderators familiar with languages and events in certain parts of the world that allowed Facebook to be used to organize genocide.
It’s an unsolved, maybe unsolvable problem.
Yep, and imagine we only see what they approve. Who wants to see a best of banned tik tok?
Haven’t played that game in ages!
Just let people post the videos they want and let other people watch the videos they want.
That’s nice and all ’til the first asshole labeles his gore video “my cat being cute and funny”.
Because all the other people who think CP is cool would get them in trouble
Great. There’s no problem at all with 15 year olds getting a solid diet of anti-semitic racist bigoted short-form videos being served up algorithmically, is there?

…besides TikTok, Teleperformance also provided content moderators to Meta, Discord, and Microsoft.
Well, if that is what they want to call “moderation”, at least they’ve explained the consistency between major platforms. Same company behind all of them.
How utterly convenient for those who wish to control or manipulate a narrative across the masses of most major countries. When you own social media moderators, you control the winds of content.
Wait, you mean “AI” and “algorithms” don’t do all this shitty work for us, so humans don’t have to? But i was told that AI and algorithms were solving all the world’s problems right now!
Replying to myself… I guess the AIs are too busy shooting Palestinians: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor… [slashdot.org]
It’s AI, can’t it do both at the same time?
“We didn’t swipe your land, the bots did!”
Best thing for the people is more competition, so I for one welcome our new overlords. They may add nothing but they keep Facebook on their toes.
Yeah $10 a day seems low for us, but it’s more than a lot of people in Columbia will earn with a legal job. So there is no problem with the wage that they get so stop acting like it’s awful how low they get paid to do their job.
And I’m still wondering if they are actually training AI at the same time with all the moderators so in the near future they can put those moderators out of a job. I wonder how those moderators like it when they have to find another job in a country where jobs are already hard to fin
You mean all the horrible TikTok videos I see online are the ones that made it PAST the moderators?
It’s proven hard to automate stupidity.
Let’s suppose that, to post a video, a poster had to be verified with an ID such a driver’s license. The ID would be kept private between the company and the individual, unless law enforcement had a subpoena.
This would eliminate bots, and help law enforcement track down the criminals behind the posts.
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