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New image comment quality filter

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Jul 21, 2022 - permalink

Then the criteria for "quality" should be made explicit before people post. The definition of "quality" is still arbitrary. In fact, if any more of my comments get rejected I will stop using this site and transfer to a competitor. This kind of thing is far better regulated by a human being since we are all human beings using this website and are commenting, subjectively in response to images that have aesthetic appeal. How is that measurable by some clunky, AI bot?

I have not had any comments censored (yet), but I know how frustrating it can be to randomly fail to publish. That's what had been happening with me on Yahoo. Sometimes they allow a remark, but often times they do not. And these are not one-word replies. I quit the platform.

Jul 21, 2022 - permalink

I have not had any comments censored (yet), but I know how frustrating it can be to randomly fail to publish.

Youtube does it even more funny these days. Maybe one out of a hundred comments I try to post I will see disappear after say five minutes. But maybe three out of four comments seem to stick but when I go look at them using a different browser that is not logged in, they're invisible.

Sometimes if I am really interested I try reposting my comment with a few words altered here and there or by referring to contentious issues by this or that or the thing and that usually helps.

Jul 21, 2022 - permalink

I have been getting the “ Your comment doesn't meet the minimum quality threshold.” when I comment & the comment is less than 6-8 words & it is so VERY annoying!.

I just tried to comment on one image & got that message even though there were 9 words.

The comment above mine was “yes”, why are some people getting this message & others are obviously not affected.😡😡😡

Jul 21, 2022 - permalink

> I mean sometimes I make long insightful posts and sometimes I don't. But... who cares.

Sometimes people disagree that a particular discussion should take place, instead of leaving it alone or just participating on the same level with others.

But it's a bit more rare to see a person participate in a discussion while denying that the discussion exists.

> This site is nice because you can relax and say dumb stuff. As long as it isn't offensive to the people here, it serves a useful purpose.

To some people that is a contradiction. To some dumb is offensive. At least if it is avoidable.

Let me clarify. I'm not trying to say that I think the dumb stuff is good, I like intelligent conversation more than most. But I also don't think the dumb stuff is bad. In a way it is just padding and fluff. But leaving it at that is too shallow a view. It is data that is useful and saying something. If people quip 'nice split' well damn, they have just allowed me a way to find posts with split biceps... I thank them. If 20 people make short comments on a post, it's usually because the post if a fantastic image. I want to know about that. Sure, there are plenty of comments that I roll my eyes at, and people's fantasies I just skip over... but it doesn't mean the comments have no value at a meta level. You see this is where dumb = intelligent. Just say you want to add a tag 'bicep peak' (I hope you do one day)... then you can data mine comments for 'peak' and retrospectively tag photos. So when I say I like the dumb stuff, it's because I'm intelligent. If you are trying to control the dumb stuff too much, you lose the true sense of how people felt when they viewed the photo and gave an intuitive quip... and that is important meta data that can be used to improve the site. Google would mine it for value.

However, if you are trying to make this site appear more 'intelligent' well... you've kinda missed the purpose of the site. I agree that lots of intelligent people use this site, but they are probably using it to have a rest from a busy life of intellectual pursuits. If I want intelligent reading, I do not come to GWM... I go to the New York Times, Modern Philosophy Journal or buy a good book. Trying to make out a site like this should and could be more intelligence is a category error.

I do understand the point that monitoring posts manually is a pain, and I am not against filters that help the moderators. But it needs to be done incredibly carefully in order to be useful or fair. Do you have those skills? Maybe you do I don't know, but I spent ages recently trying to make a short comment about something and just got frustrated.

Jul 21, 2022 - permalink

If people quip 'nice split' well damn, they have just allowed me a way to find posts with split biceps.

You got a point there. This works for visual descriptions. One rarely if ever sees someone talking about a redhead when the person in the picture obviously isn't. Except that a split peak is a different thing than a nice split peak and people usually look for split peaks to have their own opinion on a particular split peak.

Maybe there could be a lighter version of the tag system with every imaginable bodily and facial feature included? Freckles? Dimples? Crooked teeth? Missing teeth? Ponytail? Large armpits? Shaved armpits? Unshaven armpits? Adam's apple? Implants?

Maybe a group of serious tags that tell what the picture is about in general and then minor tags or feature tags about individual details?

For biographical details it does not work, because for each girl who is really strong, as in a strength athlete, or a boxer or a fighter, there are at least ten comments that are fantasies of the same. Some here get their jollies by calling almost every girl strong or a fighter and that makes it completely impossible to find any real boxers, judokas, wrestlers, armwrestlers, strongwomen or fighters unless you already know their names.

Jul 21, 2022 - edited Jul 21, 2022 - permalink

I think that if you said to a data expert that you wanted to add a quality filter... he/she would shake his/her head at you knowing and say 'Our research indicates that people's intuitive first reaction to a photo is the most valuable data you have. This data represents people's true feelings about an image and therefore is the most useful data in future Artificial Intelligence search algorithms which soon everyone will be using more and more. A quality filter will skew this data in a way that gives less authentic results. You see, increasingly we are discovering it's all about how people feel, not what they say.'

Tags will die as a way to characterise things eventually. It will be replaced by AI. Future proof your site. Stop the quality control filter.

cgsweat
Jul 21, 2022 - permalink

To quote fellow moderator tamarok from another thread:

...but given that GWM is being developed by a single person, who also has a day job, I’d ask everyone have a bit of patience with features. Sites like Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook and Tumblr have teams of developers with at least 10-20 paid developers minimum, doing it as a day job, and even then features can take months.

It’s sad that there are many visitors to the site who can’t appreciate how much work developing a website is, but then again not everyone has spent time writing code.

Having posted that, I will say that Chainer decided to do this on his own without any moderator input. This may or may not have had intended benefits or detriments because he has been indisposed of for the last several days, and no discussion has taken place.

Jul 21, 2022 - permalink

Youtube does it even more funny these days. Maybe one out of a hundred comments I try to post I will see disappear after say five minutes. But maybe three out of four comments seem to stick but when I go look at them using a different browser that is not logged in, they're invisible.

Youtube is (or was) pretty notorious for shadow-banning. That can mess with people mentally though. It'd be funny if this "filter" just randomly flagged people, so they're jumping around like Skinner's superstitious pigeons.

Sometimes the "cure" is worse than the problem.

Jul 21, 2022 - permalink

Let me clarify. I'm not trying to say that I think the dumb stuff is good, I like intelligent conversation more than most. But I also don't think the dumb stuff is bad. In a way it is just padding and fluff. But leaving it at that is too shallow a view. It is data that is useful and saying something. If people quip 'nice split' well damn, they have just allowed me a way to find posts with split biceps... I thank them. If 20 people make short comments on a post, it's usually because the post if a fantastic image. I want to know about that. Sure, there are plenty of comments that I roll my eyes at, and people's fantasies I just skip over... but it doesn't mean the comments have no value at a meta level. You see this is where dumb = intelligent. Just say you want to add a tag 'bicep peak' (I hope you do one day)... then you can data mine comments for 'peak' and retrospectively tag photos. So when I say I like the dumb stuff, it's because I'm intelligent. If you are trying to control the dumb stuff too much, you lose the true sense of how people felt when they viewed the photo and gave an intuitive quip... and that is important meta data that can be used to improve the site. Google would mine it for value.

However, if you are trying to make this site appear more 'intelligent' well... you've kinda missed the purpose of the site. I agree that lots of intelligent people use this site, but they are probably using it to have a rest from a busy life of intellectual pursuits. If I want intelligent reading, I do not come to GWM... I go to the New York Times, Modern Philosophy Journal or buy a good book. Trying to make out a site like this should and could be more intelligence is a category error.

I do understand the point that monitoring posts manually is a pain, and I am not against filters that help the moderators. But it needs to be done incredibly carefully in order to be useful or fair. Do you have those skills? Maybe you do I don't know, but I spent ages recently trying to make a short comment about something and just got frustrated.

Some really good points here...

Jul 22, 2022 - permalink

Seems pretty simple to me. This is a free site. And it's Chainer's site. He put a lot of work into creating it and he puts a lot of work into maintaining it. So he can do whatever he wants with it. And remember he can completely shut it down if it becomes too much of a problem for him. So the people that can't accept that may just need to find another site. And I don't say that to be rude so I hope nobody is offended...🤔

Jul 22, 2022 - permalink

To quote fellow moderator tamarok from another thread:

Having posted that, I will say that Chainer decided to do this on his own without any moderator input. This may or may not have had intended benefits or detriments because he has been indisposed of for the last several days, and no discussion has taken place.

Sure, these are good points as well. I used to run a couple of very active websites and my basic HTML coding, design, moderating and posting took ages! This is admirable, it's just the method of moderating comments that is a problem. Obviously, there has to be some moderating present as there's always a minority who will cause problems for everyone else.

Jul 22, 2022 - permalink

It seems it is not the number of words you use, but which words you use. I have made comments with three words and four words which have been accepted. I have only had to amend two comments so far, so it isn't causing me much of a problem.

Jul 22, 2022 - permalink
Deleted by damagecontrol
Chainer
Jul 22, 2022 - permalink

Not knowing his algorithm, I can just say I am so tired of seeing 1-3 word responses that equate to the same of the +1 click. If this works I'm all for it.

This is what I'm going for with this new filter. Prior to this there were a lot of comments that just amounted to a "+1" on a pic that even a bot could have made. Some of these were probably made to cheaply bump an image to the front page, but even if they weren't, they just didn't add anything to the site in the same way that if I wrote a script that commented "Wow!" on a bunch of pics, it would just be meaningless noise. As far as I can see the script has been working very well to prevent these kinds of comments. Come up with something more interesting to say that pertains to the actual picture in question, or just don't comment.

Regarding the claims of "this is going to kill image commenting", prior to this we were averaging 700-750 comments per day, and now we are around 500, so I doubt this.

As for the false positives that have been mentioned:

This picture is currently named as 'If you know, add' and I tried commenting 'What are the clues?', and my comment didn't meet the threshold.

Your comment has an unfortunate choice of some very common words, which is why the filter got you.

Chainer-

I am trying to simply post this: Image is from Patti's Instagram @pattiannie_ifbbpro

and it's being rejected. Does that not meet the criteria for some reason

Try posting the direct link to her page.

Regarding false positives in general: Unfortunately some small number are unavoidable, but I am open to further tweaking the filter to lower these as much as possible.

Jul 22, 2022 - edited Jul 22, 2022 - permalink

Let me clarify. I'm not trying to say that I think the dumb stuff is good, I like intelligent conversation more than most. But I also don't think the dumb stuff is bad. In a way it is just padding and fluff. But leaving it at that is too shallow a view. It is data that is useful and saying something. If people quip 'nice split' well damn, they have just allowed me a way to find posts with split biceps... I thank them. If 20 people make short comments on a post, it's usually because the post if a fantastic image. I want to know about that....

@Julian

Very well said! Completely agree.

@Retroman

Seems pretty simple to me. This is a free site. And it's Chainer's site. He put a lot of work into creating it and he puts a lot of work into maintaining it. So he can do whatever he wants with it. And remember he can completely shut it down if it becomes too much of a problem for him. So the people that can't accept that may just need to find another site. And I don't say that to be rude so I hope nobody is offended...🤔

It's not that easy at all I'm afraid. Chainer gave us the framework, but this site is only so popular because of the community using and shaping it. Currently it's the best free site on the net, which is an amazing achievement. And although Chainer is the single, most important person behind this success, it would have been impossible without the community. You can say this for all social media sites of course, that's why they care about their users, and GWM is caring too.

Jul 22, 2022 - edited Jul 22, 2022 - permalink

What I want to know is, if you click on +1 for a pic but don't make a comment, are you notified when someone makes a comment on that pic? The reason being that a lot of the pics I comment on, are because I want to see what other users think of that pic. Absolutely nothing to do with bumping a pic onto the front page. More importantly when you have as many favourites as I do, it is easy to forget about some great pics. So when someone comments on a pic I have commented on, it reminds me of a pic I might have forgotten about.

Jul 22, 2022 - permalink
Deleted by damagecontrol
Jul 22, 2022 - permalink

What I want to know is, if you click on +1 for a pic but don't make a comment, are you notified when someone makes a comment on that pic? The reason being that a lot of the pics I comment on, are because I want to see what other users think of that pic. Absolutely nothing to do with bumping a pic onto the front page. More importantly when you have as many favourites as I do, it is easy to forget about some great pics. So when someone comments on a pic I have commented on, it reminds me of a pic I might have forgotten about.

If you want to get a notification when someone comments on a pic, you can subscribe to that pic. No need to +1 or comment on that pic yourself.

Jul 22, 2022 - permalink

Thanks, I never knew that. So many pointless comments 🤣

Jul 22, 2022 - permalink

Personally I think this is over-doing it. Reporting disrespectful posts should be more than enough. But people losing sleep over harmless eggplant emojis or boing comments? I mean if this is such a big deal why not just remove image comments all together and save all interaction for the forum?

Because our society doesn't have the ability to do that anymore. There is no more "keep on scrolling". They can't leave well enough alone, they have to "speak to the manager".

It's called immaturity and a belief that the world should revolve around them.

Jul 22, 2022 - permalink

From some philosophical, political and religious discussions I have collected through observation a five plus one point method of confounding and manipulating any opponent. This works especially in cult mind control.

First one is to express alarm at what the other person is saying. The point of this is to leave the actual thing unaddressed. The only and final answer will be how surprising or amazing it is that someone could say what you said.

The second one is to exaggerate what the other person is saying, narrow it down or take it to an extreme that clearly was not intended. Then comment on that narrow extreme as if it was what was intended. If the person reasserts his actual, moderate position, just ignore it and state again how such an extreme just can't be.

The third one is to blindly appeal to an authority. Not in the sense of expecting the other person to change his opinion, but in the sense of wanting to be safe and being entitled to trust that authority so much that there is no need to answer any questions or respond to any conflicting opinions. A very upstanding person I know has a different opinion. I'd rather follow him.

The fourth one is to issue dire warnings. If we keep thinking like you do or follow your path, we will all go astray and find ourselves sad, angry, abandoned, extremists, wasting our life, losing all our friends, turning bitter, fighting a losing battle, losing our minds, appearing ridiculous, ruining everyone's erection and so on. I would never want to risk that.

The fifth one is to set an agenda for the other guy. Instead of worrying about such-and-such thing you're better off and will do a lot more good and be a morally upstanding person by worrying about what I tell you now, like this, that and the other thing. You might protest that you were not asking about this, that and the other thing. But rest assured, all the good is done nowadays in this, that and the other and that's where everyone is urgently needed. So be a team player, welcome your new overlords, recycle plastic and whatever.

The bonus technique is to assure that you, the person deflecting the question, are an upstanding, humble, friendly and loyal fellow and wish everyone, including the person you are bamboozling, all the best hugs, kisses, happiness and sunshine.

There is no more "keep on scrolling".

Someone must suffer. Better yet, someone will suffer. The question is, should it be the person who has to wade through a swamp of endless boings or the person who has bazillion boings to spare and has no place to put them into. A perfectly valid question, always been there and has not shown any sign of going away.

Jul 23, 2022 - permalink

The sixth one is to be so incredibly long-winded and meandering that the other person gives up and walks away.

Chainer
Jul 23, 2022 - permalink

The bug that prevented you from editing an existing comment should now be fixed.

Jul 23, 2022 - permalink

From some philosophical, political and religious discussions I have collected through observation a five plus one point method of confounding and manipulating any opponent. This works especially in cult mind control.

First one is to express alarm at what the other person is saying. The point of this is to leave the actual thing unaddressed. The only and final answer will be how surprising or amazing it is that someone could say what you said.

The second one is to exaggerate what the other person is saying, narrow it down or take it to an extreme that clearly was not intended. Then comment on that narrow extreme as if it was what was intended. If the person reasserts his actual, moderate position, just ignore it and state again how such an extreme just can't be.

The third one is to blindly appeal to an authority. Not in the sense of expecting the other person to change his opinion, but in the sense of wanting to be safe and being entitled to trust that authority so much that there is no need to answer any questions or respond to any conflicting opinions. A very upstanding person I know has a different opinion. I'd rather follow him.

The fourth one is to issue dire warnings. If we keep thinking like you do or follow your path, we will all go astray and find ourselves sad, angry, abandoned, extremists, wasting our life, losing all our friends, turning bitter, fighting a losing battle, losing our minds, appearing ridiculous, ruining everyone's erection and so on. I would never want to risk that.

The fifth one is to set an agenda for the other guy. Instead of worrying about such-and-such thing you're better off and will do a lot more good and be a morally upstanding person by worrying about what I tell you now, like this, that and the other thing. You might protest that you were not asking about this, that and the other thing. But rest assured, all the good is done nowadays in this, that and the other and that's where everyone is urgently needed. So be a team player, welcome your new overlords, recycle plastic and whatever.

The bonus technique is to assure that you, the person deflecting the question, are an upstanding, humble, friendly and loyal fellow and wish everyone, including the person you are bamboozling, all the best hugs, kisses, happiness and sunshine.

Someone must suffer. Better yet, someone will suffer. The question is, should it be the person who has to wade through a swamp of endless boings or the person who has bazillion boings to spare and has no place to put them into. A perfectly valid question, always been there and has not shown any sign of going away.

That's very good, but other techniques are available... Whatever our contortions of social interaction to attempt to win an argument, there is a palpable and genuine dissatisfaction with "the bot"! Not that you were, necessarily suggesting there wasn't...

Chainer
Jul 23, 2022 - permalink

I've modified it so that all the false positives mentioned earlier in this thread show now pass. If you still experience it blocking a comment that you're sure is worthwhile, please continue to post that here.

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