The Moderation Problem?
During the development of Balloons! I would tell people about the idea and they would occasionally come back with “But what about abuse? Isn’t it going to be filled up with porn/spam/etc… within a few days?”. We also got the similar concerns when reviews started appearing, in fact the first comment on the TUAW review was:
How long until porn ruins it?
With the immediate follow up being:
Or spam?
So, we are now one week in to being live on the app store and with over 11,000 balloons launched I thought I would give an update on what has happened on this subject. The good news is that so far it has not been the huge problem that people predicted. In total, about 1.2% of all balloons have been reported and we ended up popping about 0.5% of all balloons and virtually all of them have been spam rather than inappropriate content.
Why isn’t it full of porn?
I believe that it is at least partly because of the design decision to only allow photos taken with the onboard camera to be attached to a balloon rather than images from the library. This has frustrated some users but I believe it was the right decision to make. Mainly because we wanted the photos to be taken in the here and now while you were launching a balloon, but also because of this issue.
So, no problems then?
I wouldn’t go that far but it is not an unmanageable problem so far but even so it has certainly been the subject of many conversations here in Shiny HQ this week. Sure enough even before we came out of beta we had our first spam balloon which was kinda depressing with it being from a beta tester. After launch, we continued to get a few spam balloons here and there but nothing really serious.
The spammers arrive.
The first problem we had was a couple of users who were just catching every balloon they could find, taking a picture of their spam web site and adding a link. This was our first serious problem and had the potential to easily ruin the service for the other 99.9% of our lovely users. What did we do? We decided that if someone has proven that their only use of the app is going to be for abuse and are repeatedly launching balloons with spam tags then we really have no option but to permanently ban their device from accessing the service. The iPhone is an expensive device and that is the only way to launch balloons at the moment, so banning a device should be very effective. This is absolutely a last resort but we felt it was the right decision to take to make the service sustainable. The bigger problem at the time was that we unfortunately did not have the ability to ban devices at the time so, it was time to get my head down and it was hastily implemented and deployed and the offending users banned.
On the subject of banning, we decided to make the server pretend that a balloon launched or re-launched by a banned user was successfully launched but just to drop the information before it gets written to the database. The alternative was to let the server return an error message to the user which would have only resulted in support queries and we would rather not waste time on people who choose to abuse the service. With all of that said, we have had to ban only three users so far so this kind of abuse is far from widespread.
So, banning was implemented for persistent abusers and moderation is in progress for everyone else. Everything is good, right?
One bad apple spoils the bunch?
Unfortunately there was another small problem with our moderation system. Because we were doing moderation at the level of an entire balloon rather than an individual tag, people could completely ruin an entire balloon with just one inappropriate tag. This causes the original launcher of the balloon to be confused as to why their completely innocent balloon has been reported for seemingly no reason and it was just plain sad when an amazing balloon was ruined by an idiot attaching a spam link as the last tag.
So over the last couple of days, I have implemented a new moderation system on our back end that allows individual tags to be removed as well as entire balloons and so we have a much more granular choice of whether to pop or re-launch a balloon. So, if all goes well with final testing we will have a new moderation system by the end of the day. At this point, we will re-moderate all of the flagged balloons so that we can re-launch those balloons that were ruined by a single bad tag.
So banning is implemented, moderation is now finely grained. That’s it now, right?
False positives.
Not quite! We also have some balloons being reported for seemingly no reason with no spam or inappropriate content to be found. Why? Well sometimes users are not personally happy with the content that they submitted (either location, text or photo) at the time when they launched a balloon and so they report their own balloon, simply to take it out of the sky. This is absolutely reasonable but not something we thought would happen. The problem is that it is incredibly hard for us to tell a balloon that has been accidentally reported from one that has been reported for something like this.
The solution to this one is not quite as simple as the others unfortunately and to really solve it in a satisfactory way we need to give people the ability to write us a little comment when they report a balloon. We are going to try and push out a new version of the client ASAP that asks for a reason when reporting a balloon allowing people to explain the problem with a balloon and solve this one too.
Summary
This ended up being a long post so here is the TLDR.
- The decision to not allow users to attach photos from their library seems to be sound.
- Spam is the biggest moderation problem so far and we have received almost no inappropriate content at all.
- Farming the moderation out to the users by letting them flag balloons for moderation is working well.
- The effort required to moderate the system at the moment is very manageable (a few minutes a day).
- Banning users is a last resort, but we do occasionally have to do it.
- We should have thought more about how our moderation system would work before we launched.
- We are going to be pushing out a maintenance release of the balloons client that asks for a reason for reporting a balloon.
I don’t suppose I can change your mind about banning spammers?
It would be much more satisfying if it just dropped (quietly) anything they posted, so they kept wasting their time taking those pics and pasting in their websites – without knowing that nobody was actually seeing it. Anything that slows them up :)
That is exactly what it does, the ban doesn’t give them an error it just makes the server eat their balloons silently.
First of all let me say I’m fascinated by Balloons!
I’m also impressed with the level of transparency you’re showing your users, with solid reasoning behind your decisions. I’d never even thought why I could only take piccys there and then!
Also I’m glad you’re looking out for the growing community that Balloons! has by ridding the skies of spammers and the like.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks Richard, that is appreciated.
I was wondering when you were going to give us the ability to choose photos from our library, but I completely see your point.
As for falsely reported balloons, what about giving the Launcher the option to ‘pop’ their own balloon if it hasn’t been caught by anyone else yet?
Thanks for your effort in creating and improving this great app. I’m totally addicted!!
Hi Dave
The problem comes with that when it is the person who is replying to a balloon who has second thoughts about what they posted rather than the original launcher. I think if we allow a text entry as to why the balloon is being reported then people can just explain their reasons and remove any ambiguity from the process.
Obviously the reporting “reason” text would be optional so tags that are obviously spam do not need to be explained. :)
Dave
Can you give feedback to people who have their balloons reported? I went to track my balloons and one was reported! I have no idea which pic it was b/c I’ve launched like 20, but I am absolutely, positively sure that none of my ballons contained inappropriate material! I’d like to be able to see which balloon was deemed inappropriate, but I cannot open it. It just tells me to read the terms (all of which I have followed!)
BTW, I love this app!!!!
Hey Beth
Apologies, I have been out all day and only just had chance to moderate the reported balloons for today. It is possible your balloon was reported for no good reason. Let me know if it is still showing as reported now and I will check it out further.
Cheers
Dave
BTW. I love that you love the app :)
It’s Beth again. Thanks for replying to my post! I have one more question for you: Why do balloons pop? I haven’t seen that question addressed anywhere on the website, but if I just missed it, I apologize.
Enjoy your weekend!
Hi Beth
Balloons pop currently after being caught a few times, we are working on a better algorithm that works on how interesting a balloon is though.
Dave
Hi Dave
Great job with balloons! I’ve also built a virtual balloon race (balloonrace.com) – the balloons fly across real live websites. I have a button for the balloonist to press if the content on the page they are flying over is not cool. Even if the sites are OK this button gets pushed twice a day – the user just can’t resist but click on something to see what happens.
You can have a free play on my race at balloonrace.com/beta (I really need to make the whole thing free and build up some traffic). My race seems to be a bit too confusing for the average user, I spend half my time trying to explain how it works. The idea is a charity or school (or anybody) builds their own race and sells virtual balloons.
I’ve put a link to your balloonsapp site from balloon.com & balloon.co.uk
Good luck & nice job.
Regards
David
Great job on this app! I have a question about your approval process — did Apple ever contact you while Balloons was waiting to be approved, asking you about your policy about offensive content? It’s quite impressive that you’ve been able to sustain a 4+ “kid friendly” rating on the AppStore with an after-the-fact moderation system in place.
Hi Steve
No, we had no communication from Apple about the moderation system or the 4+ rating, we were expecting them to raise questions about it but they didn’t. They also approved the 1.1 update as 4+ too.
Dave