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What is the best moderation system for a social platform? (programming.dev)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by CoderSupreme@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

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One of the main features of my site will be Discourse-style trust levels, the higher your trust level, the more moderation privileges you gain. I'm also considering either a jury system, where multiple users collaborate on moderation decisions, or a meta-moderation system, where users can vote "fair" or "unfair" on moderation actions taken.

Someone mentioned to me in another post that Bluesky also has a very good moderation system, but the best one I've found so far is Discourse. What I really like about it is that you earn trust levels by reading posts, not by taking moderation actions. I definitely don't want to gamify moderation the way Stack Overflow did, that was the worst I've ever seen.

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[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

"best" is relative, and while moderation can achieve a great deal of success on a smaller scale, it's proven to be extremely tricky at large scale. Mike Masnick of TechDirt (and on the BlueSky board of directors) has documented this rather well, using some very notable case studies.

For example, moderation is both necessary and complex (Twitter post buyout): https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/

Decentralized moderation like Mastodon is good (by blocking Gab from the get-go) but requires active coordination from federated operators: https://www.techdirt.com/2019/07/16/gab-mastodon-challenges-content-moderation-more-distributed-social-network/

At a slightly larger scale, volunteer moderators can be overburdened and lead to adverse infrastructure shutdowns (Parler getting bumped for violating AWS policies): https://www.techdirt.com/2021/01/13/parlers-laughably-bad-antitrust-lawsuit-against-amazon/

My point with these examples is that a moderation system solely based on volunteer effort can be: 1) overwhelmed, 2) manipulated, or 3) antithetical to the purposes of the community and/or platform. There is no magic moderation system that will be 100% effective for your environment at all times.

[–] CoderSupreme@programming.dev 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I think we can most agree that while "best" may be relative Disourse is definitely better than StackOverflow in regards to moderation system.

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 0 points 5 days ago

By what criteria do you say that? You might be right, but without any qualification for how one might be better than another, it's as useful as saying "purple is better than yellow".

But ultimately, you're looking for a moderation paradigm and don't owe me or anyone else a criteria or explanation for what you ultimately choose. It merely means that the question as posed is unanswerable, no different than "why is green the best color?".