Programming

"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.

Had a quick look at your doc, and the juries idea does not sound good.

• Moderation is not something loads of people want to do. Take a look at the list of unmoderated communities: https://programming.dev/u/Vacant - Forcing random users to be involved would likely annoy your users.

• For certain types of reports, CSAM, gore, etc, you absolutely do not want to share that to random users. If your users are underage, it could be illegal to do that anyway, but sensitive users may not want to be exposed to triggering content.

Maybe you make being in the jury opt-in, but if most don't opt in your back to regular old moderation by the few who have the stomach for it.

I tend to like systems that give the user tools to moderate their own feed and content they see. Then it's up to me to decide what I want in my timeline and what I don't want. This can be a bit heavy on the system though, especially if you don't have lot of metadata and have to rely on full-text search blocking. Seems to work on Mastodon though.

This then leaves only certain moderation tasks to the server admins (automating CSAM scanning/reporting) - and filtering out content that breaks the server ToS.

Back in the days, Slashdot had a system where you could "opt-in" as a moderator, and this would randomly give you "mod-points" every now and then. You could use your points to up- or downvote posts and comments. I quite enjoyed it and it didn't feel like I had to apply for a 2nd job (which is the case with lot of other moderation systems)

Slashdot did it best.

This is how bluesky does it. So as I mentioned earlier, it is the user that opt to be moderated and they can choose their moderator.