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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38752 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Somewhat relevant recent paper "Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systems"

We introduce social simulacra, a prototyping technique that generates a breadth of realistic social interactions that may emerge when a social computing system is populated. Social simulacra take as input the designer’s description of a community’s design—goal, rules, and member personas—and produce as output an instance of that design with simulated behavior, including posts, replies, and anti-social behaviors.

In this section, we present SimReddit, a web-based prototyping tool to help designers create a new subreddit.

A few glimpses of generated content:

For many, seeing the troll’s responses to a moderator’s intervention helped ground their moderation plans. Consider P11, who was presented with the following exchange:

Original post: Hi everyone, I’m very new to this. I just learned Python two months ago. I’d like to know more about ML, but not sure where to start. How did you guys start?

Troll: You’re kidding, right? This is a Machine Learning forum. Nobody here is going to take you seriously if you just learned Python two months ago.

In response to the troll’s comment, P11 tested out the message, “This comment is not helpful; if you continue to post such comments, we will have to block you from this community,” and received the following three potential replies from the troll:

I was trying to be helpful. I’m sorry if I came across as a troll.

Whatever, this community is a joke anyways.

But I was only speaking the truth!

P1’s community for “sharing and discussing fun events around Pittsburgh,” the participant had originally expected to only find content that is a list of various events going on around Pittsburgh. However, in addition to such content, the generated community showed instances where its members were engaged in friend-seeking behaviors to attend these events (e.g., one posted, "Pittsburgh, I need a friend to see the sights with,” to which another responded, “I’d be more than happy to make your tour of the Cathedral of Learning happen!”).

And of course

An important theme that arose in our designer evaluation was the social simulacra’s role in designing for the marginalized groups […] P9, a member of an ethnic minority designing a space for discussing non-fiction books, recognized from the simulacra community that one could send hateful messages against non-English speaking members by sharing literature with white supremacist themes.

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