So as a long-time subscriber to the online version of “Tages Anzeiger” I’ve occasionally been commenting below their articles for quite a few years now. Their comment moderation always has been cause for confusion and a certain amount of discontent, as it usually was completely “random”. Meaning they refused a lot of comments for violating their rules, despite those comments did in absolutely no way and not even remotely violate any of their rules. Now they have always claimed that all the comments are manually moderated by humans. This brought me to the conclusion that many of those humans either didn’t read the comments they had to moderate at all and just clicked randomly on “accept” or “refuse” (because there also often were comments published that clearly did violate the rules) or that the comments weren’t understood (e.g. because moderation outsourced with bad “auto translate” to some 3rd world country). However recently it completely changed. Now the comments appear instantly after I send them. Typically I receive the confirmation mail with the “decision” within 3 seconds of sending the comment. This alone makes it obvious, that there are no more humans involved. And since this change, all of my comments (except one) have been approved. As they should, because none of them (except the one) did violate any rule, of course. (The one that was rejected was in fact a snarky comment, so it’s absolutely okay to view it as a violation of the rules.) This brings me to the theory, that Tamedia has switched to AI for comment moderation and that - shockingly - AI ist doing a much better job than the humans. Because so far the (suspected) AI moderation has a 100% hit ratio in identifying whether my comments do violate the rules or not, while before the (allegedly human) hit ratio was so bad, that it couldn’t be distinguished from a random generator. Anybody has a similar experience or has some insider info from Tamedia? submitted by /u/b00nish
Originally posted by u/b00nish on r/Switzerland