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‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

Your entire comment reeks of "we shouldn't fight fire because that puts firefighters at risk".

There are no 100% ethical solutions to every problem, real life is a compromise. You can get better ethical results by allowing those workers to get adequate monetary compensation for their work and seek medical help if they need it. Otherwise what's the solution, allow everyone to read the same stuff? Why is that more ethical? Is it more ethical for the random user (who may also be a suggestible kid, or a person belonging to a persecuted minority) who reads it? Is it more ethical for the developers who get their game review bombed by fascists and bigots, and see their source of revenue diminish or fizzle out because of it?

As for the legal responsibility, it becomes so when the platform is complicit with the users writing hateful stuff. You are not responsible for the random shithead declaring his love for Mein Kampf. You are responsible for the hundreds of users who do, while you repeatedly ignore the reports of their misconduct, thus implicitly accepting and normalizing their behavior.

Additionally, when hateful behavior is accepted and normalize, human shit stains will come in drove and multiply the problem tenfold. By moderating their spaces, they would prevent a lot of those hateful messages from being written in the first place.

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  • [–] -1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    I think thats quite an unfair characterization.

    Primarily because firefighters, firefighting, tends to be a fairly exclusive field, that requires a lot of training, that tends to pay pretty darned well.

    Whereas the armies of content moderators tend to be incredibly poorly paid. The entire way this kind of work is done is that it nearly always either entirely or largely is done by the lowest bidder, in the poorest places possible.

    As compared to firefighters, who... at least in terms of municipal firefighters, well that tends to be fairly local.

    (* * * With the massive glaring exception of using prisoner labor to fill in gaps in often extremely dangerous firefighting conditions, which is more comparable to exploiting those who don't really have better options * * *)

    I am pointing out that yes, the problem exactly is that none of the potential solutions here are ethically wonderful, that this is not a kind of 'oh well obviously they could just do this simple and easy fix and everyone would be happy' kind of situation.

    So... your ethical calculus seems to conclude that stopping the spread of bigotry and fascist rhetoric in richer countries is worth the cost of the sanity of workers in poorer countries.

    Your ethical calculus seems to be that if 100s of users of a website/platform don't get banned rapidly for violating TOS, then the website/platform should be held legally liable for that, which would mean that you believe that basically every website platform with over roughly half a million DAU, that doesn't use a complex layered system of LLMs with absurd economic and environmental costs, or have a sizeable to massive human moderator team, that they should all be sued or fined into non existence.

    ... Unless you maybe want to clarify more exactly what you mean here.

    You also don't directly address at all the idea of using an LLM for these tasks... which is what all of the megaplatforms with much more active consistent, rapid, and often overzealous or erroneous moderation do.

    I'm just trying to present the actual totality of the moral ramifications of the involved systems and practices relevant to this topic.

    If confronting the actual ugliness of them challenges you, makes you defensive and accusatory, good.

    That means you likely never thought about the totality of the situation here that deeply.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    I already answered your questions, but you seem more intent at discussing abstract ethics like an armchair philosopher rather than the real problem at hand.

    Whereas the armies of content moderators tend to be incredibly poorly paid. The entire way this kind of work is done is that it nearly always either entirely or largely is done by the lowest bidder, in the poorest places possible.
    [...]
    So... your ethical calculus seems to conclude that stopping the spread of bigotry and fascist rhetoric in richer countries is worth the cost of the sanity of workers in poorer countries.

    Why is the assumption that those workers must be poorly paid? If Valve, the multi billion dollar company whose owner owns multiple yachts as well as the company producing them, doesn't pay its workers adequately, then Valve is at fault. The solution shouldn't be to throw up hands and go home. There is a solution but they aren't willing to take it because it would require them to spend money, which is what I said in my first comment.

    Your ethical calculus seems to be that if 100s of users of a website/platform don't get banned rapidly for violating TOS, then the website/platform should be held legally liable for that [...]

    You know damn well what I meant but you keep this enlightened bullshit going on.

    Valve literally got reports about those reviews and ignored them. They are at fault. Full stop.

    If confronting the actual ugliness of them challenges you, makes you defensive and accusatory, good. That means you likely never thought about the totality of the situation here that deeply.

    Please stop this enlightened philosopher bullshit. It's painful to read and makes you look dumb.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Why is the assumption that those workers must be poorly paid?

    Because that is how this always works out, in practice, under the currently existing economic reality.

    Human content moderators basically work on the same paradigm as Amazon MTurk'ers, as DoorDash drivers. Independent subcontactors of contractors.

    Its not a job that needs highly trained people. Its a job that needs a massive volume of people to handle a massive volume of content, then you have a tiny number of data scientists running analytics on associations or trends and patterns, to fine tune and condense an aggregate of many human decisions into systems of heuristics for an auto content moderating system.

    This just is how this industry works.

    Having some other kind of paradigm with say, less, more highly paid human content moderators is not scalable, it does not work to handle the sheer volume of shit being squeezed through the pipes.

    That is just the practical reality as it currently is.

    If Valve, the multi billion dollar company whose owner owns multiple yachts as well as the company producing them, doesn't pay its workers adequately, then Valve is at fault.

    I mean, to an extent, I agree with you, see my original post that you responded to you where I said Valve should absolutely place more focus and effort on developing better automated systems and changing up the paradigm of how all of it works, so that its more effective.

    The solution shouldn't be to throw up hands and go home. There is a solution but they aren't willing to take it because it would require them to spend money, which is what I said in my first comment.

    Mhm. Yep. Anyway, your now seemingly proposed solution of... I dunno, paying Valves existing human moderator team more money?

    Won't solve the problem.

    Or... do you want them to just hire thousands to tens to hundreds of thousands of human moderators?

    Because that is the scale of the # of humans Valve would need to hire.

    What should their wages be?

    Should they just burn through all of the money that they have set aside to throw at developing innovations in the industry, should they stop inventing/manufacturing Steam Machines, Steam Frames, Proton, etc?

    Valve is estimated to have a net worth of roughly $10 billion. Estimated yearly revenue in 2025 of $17 billion. No estimates exist of their yearly costs, as far as I can tell.

    So ok, lets say they have... $1 billion a year, they can devote to paying an army of moderators.

    If you pay them $25 an hour, thats $52k for a full time year. Thats 19,230 people.

    That also makes ~98% of their employees those people.

    Thats a massive shift to what the company even is.

    ... this is another huge reason why companies use contractors for this.

    Also, 20k people might kinda help, but you'd probably need more like 5x to 20x that.

    You know damn well what I meant but you keep this enlightened bullshit going on.Valve literally got reports about those reviews and ignored them. They are at fault. Full stop.

    Did they intentionally ignore them?

    Or is their moderator team and automated systems maybe stretched beyond capacity, and needs a comprehensive overhaul?

    If you are talking about this:

    https://bsky.app/profile/alienmelon.bsky.social/post/3mc2eaesex22u

    Yeah that's a bot response, an automated response, with a random first name attached to it.

    I've had several encounters with Steam Support before.

    This is how it works, you have to keep poking and pleading pretty damn persistently to get any kind of response that does not read like a standard boilerplate canned response to a set of basically most prominent tags as to the type of thing you are contacting them for.

    Now, is this a shitty thing to do, have a bot pretend to be a person?

    Yes.

    ... its also extremely common, across all kinds of industries, to do this.

    Hence, why my initial comment, again, called for overhauling this system.

    Please stop this enlightened philosopher bullshit.

    You may note that I've made nearly 0 attempt at actual philosophy, an actual prescriptive system to define and evaluate morals and moral decisions.

    I am just describing the complexity and details of the situation.

    Meanwhile, to you, this is 'rich company bad, can fix if wanted to'.

    ... While I'm giving you the specifics of ... well it matters what exactly the situation is, how you solve the problem is the important and also complicated part.

    Just identifying that a thing is bad and should be fixed is facile, obvious.

    Trying to come up with a potentially feasible solution, muchless an optimal one, is complicated, involves nuance and detail that you seem to be offended by.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    No, I'm offended by you talking like a 17yo who just discovered Kant.

    But go on, please, talk about the ethics of moderating hateful, bigoted, racist rhetoric on the biggest gaming platform.

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