I'm exploring various systems of community moderation.
Right now experimenting with a "demote" button that people are encouraged to use on: disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, spam, and slop.
Communities' default feed is just chronological, but it also has "Most Active" and "Most Recent Activity". Right now, Demote knocks things down the "Most Active" feed.
Eventually, a high enough percentage of demotes would result in posts being removed from public feeds. A second, higher threshold, would result in it being removed from all feeds.
Demote usage would be moderated, and removal thresholds could be appealed to the official moderation team. Users who abuse or misuse demote would lose the privilege.
It's an experiment and we'll see if it works. It's also really early. But the thing that Communities is doing differently is that the users will ultimately be in control through democratic elections of the board. And I expect moderation to be a frequent and recurring issue in elections. (You know, if the whole thing gets off the ground at all.)
When driving a car, I often wish I could tag other cars with arrows that mark them as bad drivers. These are the ones who weave in and out over 4 lanes on an interstate highway. When enough tags get the car, they have to pull over and take a break or something.
One immediate problem is malicious or over zealous taggers. But it seems easy to build a system that if you are too enthusiastic, then you have to pull over and take a break.
But accumulated reputation seems a thing. And if it is universal read and write it seems beneficial. It is somewhat like reputation in real life.
This depends somewhat on identities with some degree of stickiness. If you can just change who you are then bad reputation is not a big deal. But if there is some cost to establishing and maintaining an identity ...
interesting. I have the theory that most networks, and most social networks, are doomed to tolerate too much or too little deviance - sailing between 4chan Scylla or reddit Charybdis. I hope you manage to thread the needle!
