Content Filters: Drop the Message or Replace it With An Overview

[andersonnnunes]

There was news that Microsoft is offering some new way of content filtering for its gaming service.
It seems to just cover the potentially unwanted message with a placeholder and you can click to view.
Seems a bit like a waste to me, they could at least have a level of filtering that gave an idea of to whom the message could be offensive and how it was expressed.
So the original text itself would not pass, but one could get the general sentiment behind the message and react appropriately without risking exposure to any harmful effect that the original message could trigger.

Ideally, they should lay the plumbing so that other developers could attach and let users have a single point of control for setting the filters for all their games.

They still aren't doing it for voice. For something they have been working on for 20 years, it surely could be better by now. But I guess it will get there, eventually.

 

[Arnox]

Control in the hands of users? Noooooo, we can't do that. Absolutely haram.

 

[andersonnnunes]

Control in the hands of users? Noooooo, we can do that. Absolutely haram.

Pinterest seems to be okay with it:

[...] the company will roll out a feature designed to address perhaps its algorithm’s most visible flaw: its tendency to draw the wrong conclusions from users’ past behavior, and pollute their feeds with stuff they don’t want to see anymore [...] The feature, which Pinterest is calling the Home Feed Tuner, will let users review and manually edit their activity history and interests, essentially telling the algorithm what to remember and what to forget.

It’s a feature that Pinterest expects will reduce complaints and raise satisfaction among a small subset of power users. But it will do little to help the site expand, and could even reduce engagement for those who use it by limiting the information available to the algorithm. It’s the kind of trade-off the company says it’s willing to make, especially since early tests showed no significant drop-off in user activity.

The first shot has been called. Maybe others will follow suit. I never gave a chance to Pinterest (layout and content always seemed too geared towards women), but now I maybe I will (not that I need their filtering, I got my own).