The March of the Modzi Killbots
There are a lot of reasons why from Dec. 10, The Huffington Post will never be the same again. I could forget the cash-grab member-bullying schemes of demanding your cell phone numbers, birthdays, friend lists and Facebook signups. Done so HP could give you permission to continue commenting and maintain your relations with your HP friends and fans, while they sold your personal information to advertisers to exploit you. I could forget I was ever lied to, and told our real names would never be posted on our comments. I could ignore the massive data trackers they tag on you when you are on, or perhaps off, their site. I could pretend the comment sections were as populated as before Dec. 10, and there was not a fraction of the participation I was used to seeing. I could even ignore the sense of betrayal I feel, and the immense contempt I now have for the greedy callous bastards that make up the corporation that is The Huffington Post.
I could go back to the days before August 2013, when I never really thought that much about how HuffPost works and who was doing what to whom in that company. Where I never thought worse of the corporation that is HuffPost, than “they suck”. But there is one change from Dec. 10 I will never be able to surmount: the moderation nazi killbots. This will never change. Except, to become even more restrictive in the future. Tonight, I share what I know about that, and what I have learned:
The Huffsters have always liked the idea of excessive moderation. Almost as much as the idea of paying little for it (their senior moderator, “Rob S.”, explains they don’t have money for more moderators. Who knew the $315 million AOL invested isn’t enough to pay the staff?). That’s why early on, they bought out “Adaptive Semantics”, who created the “JuLia” bot comment moderating system. Even way back in 2007 and 2008, HP gained such a notorious reputation for unjust censorship, that websites and petitions started springing up around the net.
But by 2010, the “excessive moderation” grew to “unbearable and inexplicable” moderation. Some members rolled with the punches. And as a member of Huffington Post, you could always expect to get punches from the administration. Those members may not have liked it, but they didn’t hate it enough to leave (exactly what HP knew and was counting on). Others reacted with indignation and outrage, to the excessive restrictions of the moderation system. Some posted their outrage where people could hear; on the site itself. But of course, the moderation system saw that most of those were obliterated. Some just left in protest, realizing HP does not care about its members and won’t budge on their policy changes.
All this is bad enough, but it becomes mind-numblingly bad when you find out that…. the “comment nazis” may not actually be human. It appears there is very little of human eyes that reads your comments. Even the responses you get from complaints you make to HP are not likely to be from humans either. Think about it. You have 70 million comments sailing through per year on HP. And there are only 40, maybe 50 moderators handling that.
The Mandate Is From The Corporation
So this “JuLia” modbot system they have in place (“Just a Linguistic Algorithm”)… well it appears from what the moderators themselves are saying, she handles the vast majority of comments. Not just the ones that trigger her flagged word list. The humans are only going to handle the ones that JuLia lets through. This may be why you might think “Wow, one of my comments actually made it up there! I must be special!”… only to find it gone hours later. A human moderator may have decided that JuLia was being too permissive. JuLia is even designed to detect sarcasm. Sarcasm! Yes, The Huffington Post does not even want sarcasm in their comment sections. If you are finding the new Huffington Post bland and vanilla-like, there’s one good reason why. And if you think The Huffington Post cares about your silly opinions of their new moderating system, read this:
” ‘ We have a mandate to moderate’
Really? From who? Have you ever solicited the input of your users? I’ve been on the site since it launched and I don’t recall ever seeing any discussions or solicitation for feedback about the policy. I think this is what bothers me the most, that there is no discussion about the censorship policy. And any comments about it get censored! I think you should have an article posted by you or Ariana or your CTO describing where you are and where you are going and encouraging people to give their opinion.” – Red Dog
“The mandate is from the corporation. I wasn’t aware Huffington Post needed anybody else’s permission for how it moderates comments stored on its servers and displayed on its website.” – Rob S., Senior Moderator, Administrative, Huffington Post
So yeah, that’s your soul-crushing corporation killbot mentality all right. Though they need your pre$ence to $urvive, and attract new client$, they don’t need your unsolicited input on any aspect of how they go about their business. And that’s what pretty much kills HP for me. Because as far as The Grump goes, “a day without sarcasm, is like a day without sunshine”. Indeed, after Dec. 10, I noticed that many of the comments I made that got deleted, had elements of sarcasm. There were too many to be a coincidence. So now I know why HP’s comment section is such a boring read these days! For all the reasons mentioned above, and this one, it is just no fun commenting on HP any longer.
Not only did HP ignore their most serious users complaints about the moderation in 2010, but by Dec. 10 2013, they put it into overdrive. Where people were expecting less moderation due to having to give up their privacy and post under their real names, they got much more. Jokes, poetry, criticism against HP staff or policies, names of certain movies or bands, goodbye letters to your friends, passionate opinions, sarcasm, any mention of Arianna, anything that went against the grain (“grain” to be defined by the corporation)… all of it went into JuLia’s built-in commentary wood chipper. It got to where posting to HP felt like I was on an episode of Seinfeld. But instead of a “soup nazi”, I had to be wary of the “comment nazi”. Follow the line, be still, don’t talk out of turn, speak clearly, have your comment order ready, be prepared with exact change, don’t criticize the establishment…
Related Posts
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- Censorship of Comments About Arianna Huffington
- HP Blogger Authors Censoring Contradicting Comments
- Censorship of Scientific Refutations on Huffington Post
- Petition against HuffPost Censorship, 2010
The Huffington Poster 
signgrrl56
/ January 13, 2014oh crap. you mean using @ for ”a”, and ! for ”i” was the wrong way to go ?
forrest grump
/ January 13, 2014‘Fraid so. As it evolved, their system later looked for keyboard symbols people were using to circumvent JuLia’s grasp. They started programming that stuff into her, and said they knew people were doing it, and if they persisted would eventually ban them. So I just became a bad speller all of a sudden.
StillAmused
/ January 13, 2014Oh, Schadenfreude…
Quantcast has Hufficide poised to crack minus 30% across the demos.
When they hit -50%, I think hors d’oeuvres are in order.
(Sorry for previously missing the tree branches… just discovered that, for some reason, the ‘Reply’ buttons only appear when I roll over ’em. Old browsers are a hoot.)
Had an intuitive feeling that, over time, they’d programmed the Old Girl to sift for extended characters. I’d like to believe I helped inspire ’em.
forrest grump
/ January 14, 2014I would love to share the good news with the people of HP on HP. But every time I post Quantcast rankings and ratings… for some reason, they never show up. Heck of a coincidence, I say.
StillAmused
/ January 13, 2014Another creative approach… always chuckled when I saw your technique in action. Had my share of responses asking, “How did you get THAT one past the mods?”, or some knuckledragger missing the point entirely with an asinine crack about my ‘Chinese’ keyboard.
An old comedy routine — whose provenance slips my mind — commented on the insolence of youth, observing that, if you want them to stop challenging things, you should stop giving them library cards!
Have a good one.
StillAmused
/ January 12, 2014Hi again, Grump.
Your mention of “Rob S.” sparked a long-faded memory. Back in the early days when the Moderatae occasionally communicated directly via e-mail with their ‘problem’ commenters (and vice-versa), ol’ Rob pretty much threatened to keep an eye on me after an especially pointed exchange over some comment or other, including my rather direct vilification of whichever ‘mod’ was causing me grief.
That was long before sentient ‘moderation’ gave way to the “JuLia” autoexecutioner, indefinite sentence in the ‘Pending’ black hole and the highly-prized summary banishment. I earned mine in 2007 with an admittedly injudicious response to a woman with a right-wing tic over Hillary. Think I suggested she have that persistent itch treated by her ‘lady-parts’ doctor, and she went ballistic. It was thus that the 2005-vintage ‘Amused’ was resurrected and trundled onward as ‘StillAmused” until December 10.
“Mem’ries, like the corners of my mind…”
BTW, I became pretty adept at foxing JuLia with the creative use of éxteñded chåraçterš.
forrest grump
/ January 13, 2014Stop it SA, you’re gonna make me cry with all this reminiscing…. I wish I could remember the reason I was banned the first time on Huffington. I do recall one of the moderators emailed me about it. You know, it was like “Well if you change such and such behavior”. All I could think was, “What are you doing in my inbox? Who invited you in my inbox?”. I was in shock at some of the things they were saying was against policy. e.g. They were saying I could not even insult public figures; never mind Huffies! I couldn’t, for example, say “Chris Christie looks like he swallowed Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan for lunch, and is eyeing Ron Paul for dessert”. Naturally I never took heed of any of that nonsense they said I wasn’t allowed to write. And I humored the moderator a bit in email, but I could not care less whether they closed my account. I always had at least 5 other accounts ready to use, so it would take me less time to open one of my others than to play footsies with the moderators, and roll over backwards for them just to keep my current account.
I didn’t care about keeping accounts. I banned myself sometimes, just because I got tired of my user name. The only thing I cared about is having to build up another 100 fans, so I can put a micro-bio up. It just doesn’t seem like a complete identity without a micro-bio. But I usually built the 100 in no time. I learned that if you say the right thing about the right subject that a lot of people feel “right” about… you’ll get fanned and faved like crazy.
And oh yeah, I was very adept at outfoxing Julia. People kept insulting me thinking I was a bad speller (I’m not). When they couldn’t attack my comment they attacked my spelling. They were too dumb to realize I was busy letting things slip under JuLias feet. This is why people were shocked at the things I got through on HP. My opponents were offended that I got things through they could only wish! And they were right to be offended. I never saw anybody get the kind of things I got through. I didn’t like to use weird characters too much, because it reduces the impact of the words. Often I just put spaces in the right place. Ex.: “Sa rah P alin is A ri ann a’s lover”. It just looked like I was a little dyslexic is all. But you could still read it easily. Most importantly, I did not want the modz thinking I was trying to outsmart JuLia. They have openly stated they will ban you if they see you doing that. This way it looked like I’m just a sloppy typist. Or dyslexic!