[atweiden]

Social bookmarking site moderation is in need of an overhaul. Moderators have turned into gatekeepers who can’t be unseated.

I’m dreaming of an “old Reddit”/HN-esque discussion board where moderation policies are opt-in. E.g. submit a thread to /r/bayarea, users compete to moderate e.g. ban/censor content. Users “follow” moderators to opt-in to their moderation policies. Basically upvoting/downvoting but for moderation itself.

Even better if a user’s moderation policies could be forked and lightly edited. I even think there’s room for a learning curve here, given how thoroughly social bookmarking sites have trounced traditional media.

[handoflixue]

I think the big problem with this is that very few people actually want to be moderators, and the people who do want the position are often least suited for it.

Smaller communities can rely on simple upvote/downvote, possibly with some intelligent logic to notice who you tend to agree with - I think Slashdot was primarily this?

But past a certain scale, just dealing with spam is a huge deal. Plus you need 24/7 coverage, and you want mods to be reasonably responsive. Assuming each person can put in 42 hours/week of moderation that still means you need four moderators.

And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post.

[atweiden]

Not to belittle the problem of spam, but spam isn’t really what people are increasingly taking issue with. “Political” moderation or just plain obstinance are the biggest shortcomings of present day moderation policies. It leads to de facto namesquatting of popular topics the moderators of which have unfettered power to control the narrative surrounding it.

I bet fame and karma points could counteract the disincentives to moderate. What if opting in to a particular moderator translated into 1 karma point per week for that moderator? Moderators of popular topics (e.g. topics with 100k+ subscriber counts) would quickly become some of the most highly upvoted users on the site.

And if commenters could “layer” opt-in moderation policies one on top of the other, moderators could specialize then. Much of the specialization could be done by bots. Anti-“flagrant spam” policies would be easy to bot and easy to combine. The moderation policies left to be done by hand would largely amount to narrative control.

> And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post.

That choice could be left up to GUI frontend maintainers, assuming the site itself were open source.

Really I just think social bookmarking has the clearest signal for human communications in general, by far — by leaps and bounds in fact. It’s a public service for such a thing to exist in modern pop culture.

[handoflixue]

Anecdotally, I've heard that spam is actually a pretty serious issue and keeping Reddit clean of it is fairly difficult (since you want to take it down ASAP to minimize it's audience). Obviously, the system works pretty well and we rarely see it, but I'm given to understand that's because of a LOT of behind-the-scenes effort.

The problem is, anyone who can eliminate spam can also eliminate posts that disagree with their politics, so you also need a supervisory layer above the spam-cleaners.

This is all pretty easy to balance in a smaller community, but spam is exponential to size: larger communities attract significantly more spam than smaller ones.