Of course, you don’t have much time to make your decisions

May 11, 2023 9:59 AM

Moderator Mayhem is a game about moderating a fictional social network. It's hard! And that's the whole point. It was co-written by Techdirt and Engine as a way to help inform emergent conversations about content moderation.
posted by bwerdmuller (24 comments total)

Minor correction: Mike Masnick from Techdirt was an author, but under his Copia Games label, in conjunction with Randy Lubin and Engine.
posted by bwerdmuller at 10:00 AM on May 11, 2023

I did six rounds and did fine overall (above 80% on the last three rounds, decent/good pace).

I can definitely see why it would suck to do a job like this: too much pressure to be perfect in too little time. (But the team building was fun!)
posted by oddman at 10:24 AM on May 11, 2023

The problem with this that it's not "try moderating", but "try moderating to the standard of Mike Masnick, whose view on moderation you may have severe disagreement with." For example, I tossed a comment that used profanity targeted at another user, only to have the game chide me about "it's politics, you should use a light hand."

Sorry, but fuck that noise. If you're going to have civility standards, then you should stand by them, especially on the contentious issues.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:36 AM on May 11, 2023 [25 favorites]

The problem with this that it's not "try moderating", but "try moderating to the standard of Mike Masnick, whose view on moderation you may have severe disagreement with."

It's an attempt to simulate the actual job of content moderator. Where do imagine you could work as a content moderator, where you would have either complete freedom to apply your own personal standards, or would be in complete 100% agreement with management at all times?

I have to imagine that one of the most frustrating parts of the job is getting frustrated at content policies you personally don't agree with but have to enforce anyways. To get mad at the game creator for accurately capturing that facet of it seems to me to be missing the point entirely.
posted by mstokes650 at 10:51 AM on May 11, 2023 [33 favorites]

I have been a mod for 15+ years, and it can be quite challenging at times. Some calls are of course easy-peasy, others really take some time (and sometimes consulting with boss/es) to consider.

As for the game - it was decent and presented some legit issues that I deal with. But it seems like a lot of effort went into creating it - worth it? Dunno. But hey, I got a promotion!

I won #ModeratorMayhem on Round 8
Promoted to moderator manager!
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐◾️
Total reviews: 125
posted by davidmsc at 10:58 AM on May 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

I did 6 rounds - was definitely struggling to make quick enough decisions.

I lost #ModeratorMayhem on Round 6

I quit!
Rating: ⭐⭐◾️◾️◾️
Total reviews: 73

Safety: ⚖️
Speech: 📣

Achievements: 🥉3️⃣🤖5️⃣
posted by COD at 11:00 AM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm trying to think about how you'd build the Nextdoor "Neighborhood Lead" functionality into a game like this, but I keep looping back to War Games and ""the only winning move is not to play."
posted by straw at 11:17 AM on May 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

It got across the point that moderating can be difficult and nuanced, but overall felt very forced. It only allowed you to look at one issue at a time, instead of being able to quickly scan several items and prioritize. The interface for reviewing the queue wasn't optimized or flexible.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:18 AM on May 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

To get mad at the game creator for accurately capturing that facet of it seems to me to be missing the point entirely.

The point of the game according to Masnick is to promote conversations about content moderation, and yet that promotion seems to be myopically focused on "isn't it really hard to do a job that is only half defined and can change on a whim?"

To which the answer is "no fucking shit."

From my point of view, the more interesting discussion to be had is "how can we improve content moderation?" But that's not a discussion this game is really interested in having, given its structure.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:39 AM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

My in the moment thoughts elsewhere when I played it a bit earlier:

I got through three rounds with a B+ ish employee review at that point. I would not stay at this particular job for reasons that are hard to fully extricate from the necessarily absurd time and context constraints of making it a fast-paced game.

For one thing they're clearly wildly underresourced, and also there's no clear structure for prioritizing reports. The project manager handling their moderation queue should be fired.

My policy accuracy could have been better if I wasn't actively defying some of the shittier / more regressive policies, but, hey, fuckin' fire me.

Which, its hard to condense either the content or the vibe of dicey moderation policy and jobs into something short and gamelike, so as a kind of point-making exercise I can forgive it for being so hamhanded. But while too much volume and not enough staffing/support is absolutely an issue in large-scale moderation contexts its gonna be a slow-burn grind in practice, not an artificial and impossibly decontextualized panic attack.
posted by cortex at 11:39 AM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Like ultimately this game pushes the timeline constraint so far that it's on the level of the "it takes four hours out of your Sim's day for them to take a piss" issue. You lose sight of the actual time pressure issue at that level of absurdist abstraction.
posted by cortex at 12:07 PM on May 11, 2023

NOT FUN.
posted by snofoam at 12:21 PM on May 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was starting to wonder how long it would keep going, but like davidmsc I won a promotion after Round 8 and the game ended.

I won #ModeratorMayhem on Round 8

Promoted to moderator manager!
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐◾️
Total reviews: 116

Safety: 🦺
Speech: 📣

Achievements: 🥉3️⃣🤖🤬5️⃣🥈🗳8️⃣🗓
posted by solotoro at 12:21 PM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

The point of the game according to Masnick is to promote conversations about content moderation, and yet that promotion seems to be myopically focused on "isn't it really hard to do a job that is only half defined and can change on a whim?"

Seemed to me the POV being promoted was that the company's financial incentives are going to conflict with your ability to provide quality moderation, because for all that they say that's what they want, they only want it to the extent that it keeps folks participating in a way that generates more profits while keeping costs low (hence being so overworked and being forced to make decisions without enough information). With a side helping of recognizing that acting "within policies" is always an interpretive exercise. The only part that seemed to me unrealistic in a way that pulled me out of the game was that you could actually pause your day to review the policies without having yet more cards flow in while you did.
posted by solotoro at 12:28 PM on May 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

(And a dessert of ignore the AI, it's worse than useless.)
posted by solotoro at 12:29 PM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

I liked how the further I got into playing it, the deeper the queue got and the faster new items were added to it.
posted by Well I never at 3:53 PM on May 11, 2023

I got fired the first time so it’s realistic. Fun!
posted by slogger at 7:09 PM on May 11, 2023

It felt like more of a game than a simulation. I started off with a fairly low % alignment with policy, but quickly figured out what the game wanted me to do and just did that, with little reference to policy. It does do a good job of demonstrating that a moderator has to act in accordance with the policy regardless of opinion and also regardless of whether someone is a friend of the CEO!
posted by dg at 7:16 PM on May 11, 2023

I have long considered building a game like this, but my design is entirely different. I want something like Staying Alive, which probes the edges of the player's desired policy by asking about various edge case tweets. "Oh, so your policy is that promoting violence is unacceptable? Great. What about promoting war? Even defensive war? What about linking, approvingly, to an article about a woman who kills a rapist in self defense? Celebrating Cinco de Mayo?"

Then at the end, it would show you what percent of people agreed with you, mostly to make the point that the decisions are as not obvious as you think they are.

The big problem with my design is that to build it, I would have to compose a bunch of yucky tweets, and players would have to experience them. This seems deeply unfun.
posted by novalis_dt at 8:37 PM on May 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

see now you're giving me some proper PTSD, novalis_dt

a moderation game shouldn't be Diner Dash, it should be slow-burn survival horror
posted by cortex at 10:07 PM on May 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

I am a content moderator! But there's a huge difference between moderating content on a platform and moderating in a community, and it's pretty clear that the priorities expressed in this game are about getting rid of the worst of the worst in a situation with a lot of randomness rather than fostering a community with a pleasant or collegial environment. The difficulty of moderating a community is almost directly related to its size and subject matter (that is, because I'm running a community where everyone knows each other and the rules are mostly common sense, mods very rarely have to step in more than once a day -- we do have to monitor constantly to be sure we don't need to step in, though).

Re the game, I did OK but I got bored and quit after a few rounds. Some of the difficulty of moderation queues like this may have to do with the randomness of the cases rather than assigning moderators to clusters of groups arranged by subject matter.

Note that, yes, the queue size and speed pressure are realistic, but only because the parent company needs to hire more moderators. (From the trees that well-trained mods grow on, I guess.) You get my point though -- the employer itself is exploitative of moderators, and the rounds of the game that I played don't really acknowledge that.
posted by verbminx at 3:35 AM on May 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

fascinating! thanks for sharing
posted by ellerhodes at 6:10 PM on May 12, 2023

cortex: a moderation game shouldn't be Diner Dash, it should be slow-burn survival horror
Are the jump scares from opening the bank account? Is the terror the slow realisation that a beloved companion has to be cut because they're a drag on the team with that poison/zombie bite/dysentery/fascism/transphobia?

Plus now you've made me remember Tapper.
posted by k3ninho at 10:31 AM on May 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

This was great fun even though I did pretty terribly.

I lost #ModeratorMayhem on Round 7

I quit!
Rating: ⭐⭐◾️◾️◾️
Total reviews: 87

Safety: 🦺
Speech: 📣

Achievements: 🥉3️⃣🤖5️⃣📰

Play: https://moderatormayhem.engine.is/
posted by Xany at 6:55 PM on May 16, 2023