(This is adapted from my post on AIDL, I decided to turn it to a blog message such that I can easily refer to.)
In this post, I just want to address the issue on posting at AIDL. And more particularly, why sometimes your posts are deleted, have comments stopped, or why you sometimes see sad faces from me.
To premise this: we are now are fairly big group (6500+) and both Waikit Lau and I want to keep the group be public. What we want to let you have certainly freedom to post your thought first without going through us, the administrators.
Of course, “with great power, come great responsibility”. Such freedom of posting brings a lot of abuse. AIDL is constantly spammed. Or at the very least, the forum is over-posted. So our counter-measure is to check all posts by whether they are 1) relevant, 2) non-commercial, 3) correct. All these 3 criteria requires some judgment calls, but this is how I interpret them
- Relevancy: Your post has to be related to AI or DL. Since ML is a fundamental skill of DL and could be a part of AI. So ML post is welcomed. This rules out many posts, albeit they can be “interesting” by other standard. Note that we are always a *niche group*. So even your post has very interesting theory about general relativity, we can’t quite keep your post.
- Non-commercial: If you post anything which is related to $, we can only allow them on Saturday. Your solicitation of survey, conference, reading your sites which require signups. They all implicitly include money. We have very strict rules on such commercial posts. So be advised you should only post them on Saturday.
- Correctness: This criterion is to tackle faked news, which is rampant on Facebook. This is perhaps the part which frustrates most people. Because if you are not careful, the web can easily trick you to believe in falsehood. Just consider the recent news about “AI is causing job losses”. Once you go into the sources, most of the reputable sources were actually arguing “Automation/ Computerisation is causing job losses”. “Automation” and “AI” are very different concepts, and I can’t quite see discussion of “automation” relevant to us (Back to Point 1).
Now not meeting these 3 criteria usually explains why some posts are gone. If the post has many likes/shares, I might consider to just give a “sad face” comment. Most of the times though, I would just delete them. Sorry this appears to be rude, but it’s a necessity given our group’s volume.
So how do you avoid these issues? My suggestion is that you should make sure you check your post carefully. Was it the original source? If it is not, does the text distort the originals? Does the post has any click-bait? Remember if you post something at AIDL, you will be asked to give us the source. From time to time, I will also fact-check some sensational statement.
One last point, admittedly such curatorship requires subjective judgment. And frankly I could be wrong. So if you feel strongly about your post, do PM me. You will have my time to review your post together.
Thanks,
Arthur Chan