Denver -- Working quickly, Photobucket.com employee Jeff Gers can look at nearly 150,000 images on his computer screen during an eight-hour shift, or about 300 a minute. His job is to find and destroy anything that might cause offense, a task that's getting harder all the time.Can you imagine anything more hellish than that guy's job? Not the occasionally "objectionable" images he might see -- it's everything else. It's like that scene in The Fifth Element" when Milla Jovovich gets to "W" in the encyclopedia and all these images of "war" start pouring across the screen -- only damned souls like Mr. Gers see everything. And they can't stop -- must keep up the pace! There's probably some electronic monitoring tool counting the images as he scrolls past them.
Every day, nearly four million new images pour into Photobucket, a Web service that allows people to store images and videos online, share them with friends and display them on other Web sites. He's come across pornographic snowmen, camera-phone snapshots of young people's anatomy and, quite frequently, an animated cartoon of a girl lifting her skirt. Occasionally, he sees child pornography.
The future of one of the Web's newest and most vibrant businesses lies in the hands of people like Mr. Gers. Photobucket is among the biggest sources of photos that appear on MySpace.com.... MySpace's ability to sell advertising, its primary source of income, depends in part on scouring the site for objectionable material.
From lower in the article (I love how predictable WSJ features are -- they always revisit, at the end of the article, the person or scene shown in the lede):
In January, Photobucket installed a team of nine "content moderators" -- including Mr. Gers -- who sit in a windowless office in downtown Denver staring at images all day long. The moderators work in eight-hour shifts and are expected to sift through 200 images a minute (!!!!), plucked at random from images being uploaded to Photobucket's servers.I'll bet he does. Then there's the bit about how Photobucket is opening up another shift of "content moderators" in Iowa, because people from flyover country have "mainstream American sensibilities."
The moderators scroll down screens filled with pictures, looking for obvious nudity as well as nuances like see-through underwear, body paint, silhouettes and thongs.... A bare bottom is not OK, but a bare bottom showing even a tiny sliver of thong underwear is fine. A cartoon that uses the word "nigga" is OK but one that uses "nigger" is not. Nipples and genitals painted or tattooed to look innocent are definitely flagged.
"That's something the computer wouldn't catch," said Mr. Gers, 24, as he zapped a picture of two snowmen sculpted into a sexual position. ... "Some days I wish I had a bottle of bleach under my desk so I could wash my eyes out."
Imagine the reactions of Europeans -- who regularly see nudity on television ads -- to this practice. They'd fucking die laughing.
I mentioned the WSJ story to a software engineer co-worker, and he said he interviewed in 1996 for a job at a web hosting company that distributed porn to as many as 2000 websites. He asked the owner why the salary was 2x the standard salary, and she replied, "Burnout. Most people burn out on this job after three or four months." And that's for website maintenance -- back end work, if you will. (Sorry.)
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