Facebook pays 150 employees ~$50K to keep the site clean

http://www.newsweek.com/id/195621

by breck • 17 years ago

55 38 17 years ago

Sidnicious2• 17 years ago

I dig the clearly-visible 2600 shirt up front. Nicely done.

madair• 17 years ago

I guess Newsweek doesn't realize the irony of a porn 'cop' wearing an old school hacker mag t-shirt :-) Excellent. The dude gets props from me. I hope his coworkers realize the awesomeness of sneaking that into the photo and buy the drinks for a week or two :-)

octane2• 17 years ago

Quite honestly I think that guy is a grade A loser.

zackattack• 17 years ago

I met him the time that I snuck into the Facebook building, two years ago, right before the F8 conference where the platform launched. He's good at physical security, too, because he tried to kick me out right away. I refused to leave, demanding a tour. Dave Morin got pulled out of a meeting with Mr. Zuckerberg and gave me one. To this day I still think very highly of Morin and Facebook - and the guy in the shirt? Well, I don't think we'll ever be friends, but I do think he's probably good at his job.

tdavis• 17 years ago

So by wearing a hacker t-shirt he is a "grade A" loser, but by reading and posting on Hacker News you are not? Your line seems arbitrary.

tokenadult• 17 years ago

"'If [Facebook] got polluted as just a place for wild and crazy kids, that would destroy the ability to achieve the ultimate vision, which is to create a service for literally everyone,' Kirkpatrick says--and then its potential for profits would disappear, too."

So this is what Facebook views as the real threat to its future viability. Interesting.

jmtame• 17 years ago

The dude is wearing a 2600 blue box shirt, and he's on porn patrol?

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

Definitive proof that just having the t-shirt doesn't mean you're cool. I don't know whether to be depressed or amused that a degree from Stanford is good for becoming an internet mall cop.

markm• 17 years ago

When our apps were running 50K+ visits a day 99% of my time was spent policing our users. And I wasn't even on salary :(

jhamburger• 17 years ago

"The Nipple Patrol: Kelly (front) and team"

"...Max Kelly, 39, a former FBI computer forensics analyst who is now the site's head of security..."

Decide for yourself whether he's a tool or not, but he's a bit more than a porn cop.

smanek• 17 years ago

That would be an interesting AI problem - "Does this picture contain a female areola?" ;-)

Although, it does kind of raise the sexism question - why is a topless male OK but not a topless female? Didn't NYC recently lose a lawsuit for that same sort of discrimination? I understand that facebook is a private entity and held to a different set of standards, but even so ...

curoi• 17 years ago

As the article states, Facebook is trying to bill itself as the social networking application for everyone. Like other pursuits dependent upon the majority, pandering to the lowest common denominator is a required strategy. Since the at-large societal norm in the United States is that female nipples are inappropriate, so must Facebook align.

jokermatt999• 17 years ago

Actually, I've seen a few attempts on this problem. I wish I'd saved them now, as my attempts at googling them are failing me. It certainly would be an interesting problem to work on, but it would probably get rather dull after a while, sadly.

rudyfink• 17 years ago

What an intentionally terrible photograph.

loincloth• 17 years ago

i dunno, it gave me a chuckle. and then a good laugh. and then a hearty cackling. it's a gift that keeps on giving.

zain• 17 years ago

"Since the site tracks the geographic locations of log-ons..."

Wow, that's scary. Did you know that Facebook has a database of every location you've logged in from?

dsil• 17 years ago

This is very common, essentially the default, it's just a matter of whether a site uses the information or not.

Consider, by default apache logs have IP address, and IP address approximately equals location. Actually, that article probably means IP when they say "geographic location".

mahmud• 17 years ago

I just wrote about that earlier. Paypal locked me out after I logged in from 3 different countries in less than 48 hours (I wonder how they handle their Benelux users.)

miracle• 17 years ago

I'm a benelux user and I only log in in one country ;)

robryan• 17 years ago

Unless specifically stated otherwise most major sites would be tracking and storing IP addresses.

spoiledtechie• 17 years ago

I log my users every step in my site along with all the browser information I can. It does help with tracking and I can see some neat demographics!!!

chime• 17 years ago

> The 26-year-old Stanford grad is one of some 150 people the young company employs to keep the site clean—out of a total head count of 850.

I wonder if a Stanford degree was a necessity for such a job.

myoung8• 17 years ago

It's a tough economy in which to find a job and Stanford doesn't have any pre-professional majors.

We should all consider ourselves lucky that we have a skill-set that is in high demand.

neilc• 17 years ago

> We should all consider ourselves lucky that we have a skill-set that is in high demand.

I don't think it's really "luck": if you love what you do and you make sure you are very good at it, you're going to be in pretty good shape no matter the economy. Outside of technology, there are many different fields that reward skilled workers: law, medicine, engineering, etc.

kurtosis• 17 years ago

Hey as long as he's not breaking a law, it's a free country he can do whatever he pleases. I think I understand the origin of this sentiment - $tanford has people beating down it's doors to get in and 10 ambitious amazing kids were rejected so that this guy, who ends up doing a job anyone could do, could go. I for one hope he ignores all of this social pressure to do what other people want him to do with his life. It sounds like there's an attitude of noblesse oblige towards smart people with prestigious degrees here. Give the guy (and everyone else) a break.

endtime• 17 years ago

I'm with you on this...there's a perception that everyone at Stanford should work for Google or start a company, and I'm pretty sure Stanford grads do those things disproportionately, but I've met plenty of people at Stanford who wouldn't get hired by Google and aren't interested in a startup. You only hear about the Stanford grads who do cool stuff, and you hear about Stanford people doing that more than you hear about other people doing it...but don't let that lead you into thinking that everyone at Stanford does cool stuff.

neilk2• 17 years ago

Maintaining community standards on an international site with 100M+ members is a complex job. Even if you could Turk out 99.5% of the cases there will be hundreds of borderline issues every day that need more careful evaluation.

To really do it right you'd need a background in anthropology, sexuality, psychology, and international law. Such a degree program will probably never exist, so you need to go for a generally smart and adaptable person.

Is that person necessarily a Stanford grad? Certainly they are smart and driven, but personally I'd look for the person who was more exploratory and meandering in their self-education. My guess is that would negatively correlate with a Stanford degree.

mikeyur2• 17 years ago

Since when do you need a background in anthropology to decide whether an image has nipple showing or not?

tlb• 17 years ago

I think it's important for them to hire people from the same demographic as their most valued users. Policing content is very culturally loaded, so you can't just automate it or outsource it to a low-wage country and get the same results. They mention knowing the difference between pot smoke and tobacco smoke, but I'm sure you also have to recognize every celebrity photo and "the shocker", and 1000 other culturally relative things.

sketerpot• 17 years ago

This is actually pretty interesting: how do you keep a site clean enough that the porn doesn't drive people away, without alienating your users?

Personally, I like the way Google's image search does it: the furry vore porn still there (hoo boy is it ever there), but it's hidden unless you turn the filter off. And it's easy to turn the filter on and off. Unfortunately this sort of thing has a lot of overhead, which Google only gets away from by using some very clever image recognition algorithms.

Another way is that you could establish a sub-site especially for porn. That works for reddit (NSFW reddit is a porn index and nobody tries to deny this anymore), but it would kind of break the UI of sites like Facebook.

Does anybody have a better way to more-or-less please everybody?

patcito• 17 years ago

> Google only gets away from by using some very clever image recognition algorithms.

Not sure about that, they check the site the picture is hosted on.

quellhorst• 17 years ago

$7.5 million to police the site? Sounds like they need some mechanical turks instead.

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

Hmm, $50K seems like quite a lot for a dead simple job that could be done by just about anyone.

Facebook pays 150 employees ~$50K to keep the site clean

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