I think it's important for them to hire people from the same demographic as their most valued users. Policing content is very culturally loaded, so you can't just automate it or outsource it to a low-wage country and get the same results. They mention knowing the difference between pot smoke and tobacco smoke, but I'm sure you also have to recognize every celebrity photo and "the shocker", and 1000 other culturally relative things.
Hey as long as he's not breaking a law, it's a free country he can do whatever he pleases. I think I understand the origin of this sentiment - $tanford has people beating down it's doors to get in and 10 ambitious amazing kids were rejected so that this guy, who ends up doing a job anyone could do, could go. I for one hope he ignores all of this social pressure to do what other people want him to do with his life. It sounds like there's an attitude of noblesse oblige towards smart people with prestigious degrees here. Give the guy (and everyone else) a break.
I'm with you on this...there's a perception that everyone at Stanford should work for Google or start a company, and I'm pretty sure Stanford grads do those things disproportionately, but I've met plenty of people at Stanford who wouldn't get hired by Google and aren't interested in a startup. You only hear about the Stanford grads who do cool stuff, and you hear about Stanford people doing that more than you hear about other people doing it...but don't let that lead you into thinking that everyone at Stanford does cool stuff.
> We should all consider ourselves lucky that we have a skill-set that is in high demand.
I don't think it's really "luck": if you love what you do and you make sure you are very good at it, you're going to be in pretty good shape no matter the economy. Outside of technology, there are many different fields that reward skilled workers: law, medicine, engineering, etc.
Maintaining community standards on an international site with 100M+ members is a complex job. Even if you could Turk out 99.5% of the cases there will be hundreds of borderline issues every day that need more careful evaluation.
To really do it right you'd need a background in anthropology, sexuality, psychology, and international law. Such a degree program will probably never exist, so you need to go for a generally smart and adaptable person.
Is that person necessarily a Stanford grad? Certainly they are smart and driven, but personally I'd look for the person who was more exploratory and meandering in their self-education. My guess is that would negatively correlate with a Stanford degree.
Some lower-level employee just banned the entire Outer Limpopo Breastfeeding Advocacy discussion group because there are a couple of photos where the nipple is peeking out around a baby's mouth.
There's a couple of protest groups starting up; some are angry and say that breastfeeding isn't against the TOS at all, since it's not porn. You are becoming a laughingstock among your more liberal members. Some members are posting even more breastfeeding images, in solidarity, generating even more complaints.
Another is claiming that this is a continuation of colonialism, since your company accepts advertisements from Nestle, and that your executives just want to see little Limpoponese babies die because more mothers accepted the use of formula instead of breast milk. Apparently this is a huge issue of national identity in Limpopo, blaming infant mortality on formula-pushing conglomerates. The Limpoponese health minister denounced your company in a prepared statement while your entire team in North America was asleep. Six hours later, it's front page news in Europe.
I guess Newsweek doesn't realize the irony of a porn 'cop' wearing an old school hacker mag t-shirt :-) Excellent. The dude gets props from me. I hope his coworkers realize the awesomeness of sneaking that into the photo and buy the drinks for a week or two :-)
I don't think he is a loser because of a t-shirt, but working for facebook in the anti porn division seems like an epic fail for someone that likes to hack hw or sw. Yet, the perception of what you do often changes when you dig a little deaper.
I work for the army.
I work for the army anizing violent crime.
I work for the army building tools to help people analize violent crime.
I work for the army building tools to help people analize violent crimes commited by people in the army.
I met him the time that I snuck into the Facebook building, two years ago, right before the F8 conference where the platform launched. He's good at physical security, too, because he tried to kick me out right away. I refused to leave, demanding a tour. Dave Morin got pulled out of a meeting with Mr. Zuckerberg and gave me one. To this day I still think very highly of Morin and Facebook - and the guy in the shirt? Well, I don't think we'll ever be friends, but I do think he's probably good at his job.
You're one of those name-dropping douchebags who likes to go out of his way to post in a thread where he can drop a bunch of names like he's an important person.
That would be an interesting AI problem - "Does this picture contain a female areola?" ;-)
Although, it does kind of raise the sexism question - why is a topless male OK but not a topless female? Didn't NYC recently lose a lawsuit for that same sort of discrimination? I understand that facebook is a private entity and held to a different set of standards, but even so ...
As the article states, Facebook is trying to bill itself as the social networking application for everyone. Like other pursuits dependent upon the majority, pandering to the lowest common denominator is a required strategy. Since the at-large societal norm in the United States is that female nipples are inappropriate, so must Facebook align.
Actually, I've seen a few attempts on this problem. I wish I'd saved them now, as my attempts at googling them are failing me. It certainly would be an interesting problem to work on, but it would probably get rather dull after a while, sadly.
"'If [Facebook] got polluted as just a place for wild and crazy kids, that would destroy the ability to achieve the ultimate vision, which is to create a service for literally everyone,' Kirkpatrick says--and then its potential for profits would disappear, too."
So this is what Facebook views as the real threat to its future viability. Interesting.
Definitive proof that just having the t-shirt doesn't mean you're cool. I don't know whether to be depressed or amused that a degree from Stanford is good for becoming an internet mall cop.
This is actually pretty interesting: how do you keep a site clean enough that the porn doesn't drive people away, without alienating your users?
Personally, I like the way Google's image search does it: the furry vore porn still there (hoo boy is it ever there), but it's hidden unless you turn the filter off. And it's easy to turn the filter on and off. Unfortunately this sort of thing has a lot of overhead, which Google only gets away from by using some very clever image recognition algorithms.
Another way is that you could establish a sub-site especially for porn. That works for reddit (NSFW reddit is a porn index and nobody tries to deny this anymore), but it would kind of break the UI of sites like Facebook.
Does anybody have a better way to more-or-less please everybody?
This is very common, essentially the default, it's just a matter of whether a site uses the information or not.
Consider, by default apache logs have IP address, and IP address approximately equals location. Actually, that article probably means IP when they say "geographic location".
I just wrote about that earlier. Paypal locked me out after I logged in from 3 different countries in less than 48 hours (I wonder how they handle their Benelux users.)
