I’ve already badgered you on OSNews conversations about the moderation there. Now you’ve asked for it!

My theory for approaching this problem is to introduce consequences to the act of moderation. Specifically, make the content you see be based on the way you moderate. I.e. you see content that’s been voted up by people who voted up the same stuff as you did in the past. This way, you can effectively end up with many different communities on the same site, partly interacting, partly segregated. Those who tend to vote down comments with bad grammar will tend not to see such comments, but everyone else will. The degree to which people are protected from stuff they won’t like can be varied by the sysadmin, so democrats may still see the odd right-wing comment or story, for example. Just to liven things up. Equally, you can calm things down by increasing segregation between groups.

The trick here is in implementing it of course. Basically you have to have the server create it’s own nameless groups, and automatically add users to them, optimising for the number of groups each user belongs to, and the size of the groups. You could let users create their own groups but this can be easily broken, by communists joining the facist group to intentionally undermine it, for example. Personally, I’d quite fancy the combined mathemaical and programming challenge. So if you want some help, feel free to get in touch.

The alternative, which evryone uses at the moment, is to have one moderation system for all. If you had a well behaved user base, you could provide seperate moderation for “I agree with this.” and “This is of high quality.”, which might encourage an environment where people respect those they disagree with.

The only other thing I would suggest, is enabling users to easily reference other content within their own content. That way, I could create a page summarising what I think are the best of recent debates and articles. Such a system would take the idea of threaded conversations to a whole new level, turning the traditional hierarchical system into an unlimited directed graph, except that loops would not be possible (unless people are able to edit their content, though if loops are a problem it’s controllable). I’m sure there’s a name for this type of graph but I can’t be bothered to lok it up right now.

That’s enough isn’t it.

Well, you did ask.

–
Michael