[wruza]

I’ve never moderated, but participated a lot in forums and boards. First thing to know is that bad players are a lazy impulsive attention-seeking mob, so if you want them to back off, then restrict their abilities and feedback. Old users (even if sometimes misbehaving) are the core that is (1) conscious of their role and status, (2) assimilated and can decide what’s right or wrong for themselves.

For example, if a forum allows voting for everyone, it allows voting wars (+457 -371). But if it doesn’t have a score at all, there’s no feedback for a user. HN only allows downvoting after a good while, and I suspect that it amortizes upvotes after some limit. Some forums allow for weighted voting - this creates score monsters and wars between their armies. Forums that do not rank posts by f(time, score) suffer from “first” syndrome when most active neet users mark the tone for every discussion.

Moderation and self-moderation is a second important thing. Moderation should not be offensive or too strict - that simply enables a counterattack. Self-moderation allows to leave bad posts without attention. A moderator should advise good users to avoid bad discussions every time they appear and leave them as is unless the post is really destructive. Silent moderation isn’t future-proof because the message becomes hidden. But silent deranking works, because it’s unclear to abusers if their content was moderated or was simply not interesting.

Reddit is a classic “anyone up-down score” forum, it never ought to be successful in this regard, considering the scale. Boards provide no feedback at all except for illegal content.

[ted_bunny]

"Most active neet users"

If that's a typo... no, it isn't.