Monday poll: moderation schemes I like

in pipedot on 2014-07-14 10:41 (#3QK)

Today's Monday poll looks at moderation schemes. No other aspect of a site so determines its "feel" than the user's ability to comment and for those comments to lead to conversation. Get it right and you've got a great discussion on your hands. But get it wrong and the "right" comments lead to group think, the trolls and kooks take it over, or the place becomes a giant flamewar.

I personally think no site has gotten it just right yet. But we began an interesting conversation about it on this Pipedot article.

There are a lot of models out there, and some of them overlap a bit. OSNews.com's moderation scheme for example is pretty close to Slashdot's, although it gives +1 points for funny. A lot of sites running on modified Drupal or Joomla systems don't even deal with moderation: just provide your comment and it goes on the list, though the site admins have a right to nuke anything offensive to corporate powers, and there's no threading. There's also the Usenet/killfile model, where users decide individuals (not posts) get karma [ed. note: I should've added that to the poll, dang it].

Have your say at the poll to the right. It's a Borda Count, so give "1" to the system you like best, a "2" to the one you like a bit less, and so on.

Not sure whether this was one of the options in the poll, but (Score: 3, Insightful)

by rocks@pipedot.org on 2014-07-14 14:12 (#2GF)

I think I like the idea of being able to identify other users whose judgement you respect (based on their history of moderation) and being able to weight their moderation picks more heavily than others for dictating what you see. Thus, if ContributerIRespect gives 1 upvote for a particular comment, I might want to see it given a rank of 3 upvotes by ContributersIDontKnow and given a rank of 5 upvotes by ContributesIDontRespect. I can see how this system might normalize on a small number of "elite" commenters who most people respect, but it would still be interesting to see if this raised the general level of a comment thread or narrowed the general scope of a comment thread or some other effect and whether these effects added value. Maybe this is the "Following Friends" option in the poll, but I feel like a weighting system is more nuanced than just deciding to follow someone or not. I also realize that this is a subsetting algorithm which presumes the community being moderated is large enough to need subsetting. For small communities such as Pipedot at present, I actually prefer to read everything posted because there isn't enough content to even require moderation.