Rant: My uncle's pasta recipe comment got zapped by a mod

He wrote 'this sauce is criminal' under a cooking video and it got removed for violent speech. Took me forever to explain that automated filters don't get humor.

3 comments

3 Comments

the_margaret1mo ago

Tbh, that "automated filters don't get humor" thing is so real. I started putting joking comments in quotes with a wink face, it helped.

skyler_mitchell1mo agoMost Upvoted

Back in 2022, I saw a study from some university about how often jokes get flagged by content filters. Your method with quotes and winks, @the_margaret, makes total sense because those filters look for key words without context. It's wild that we have to basically write for two audiences, humans and bots, which takes the fun out of joking around. I remember my friend got a comment deleted for calling something 'ridiculous' in a joking way, and it took ages to appeal. So yeah, little signals like winks or quotes seem to be the way to go until the systems learn sarcasm.

cole_lee91mo ago

Honestly, I get why the filters are so strict though. If you let every "criminal sauce" joke slide, where do you draw the line? Real violent speech hides behind "just kidding" all the time. The mods have to deal with way too much stuff to check every single joke by hand, so they set the bots to catch anything that looks bad. It's a pain for us, but it probably stops a lot of actual nasty comments we never see. Maybe we just have to accept that public forums aren't the best place for that kind of humor anymore.