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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 16 2014, @12:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the mod-me-up! dept.

An article posted by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2014/09/15/downvoting-considered-harmful.html has interesting insight into moderation:

A study http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/disqus-icwsm14.pdf [PDF] published in a journal of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence found that sites that have a "downvote" button to punish bad comments lock the downvoted users into spirals of ever-more-prolific, ever-lower-quality posting due to a perception of having been martyred by the downvoters.

Cory continues: What's more, positive attention for writing good posts acts as less of an incentive to write more good stuff than the incentive to write bad stuff that's produced by negative attention.

How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/disqus-icwsm14.pdf [Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec]

Why Reddit sucks: some scientific evidence http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/09/09/why-reddit-sucks-some-scientific-evidence/ [Henry Farrell/Washington Post]

So... do you downvote? if so, why? Does this article make you reconsider your down-modding?

[Editor's note: I offer for your consideration and commentary our very own SoylentNews Moderation FAQ.]

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Lagg on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:16PM

    by Lagg (105) on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:16PM (#93975) Homepage Journal

    Like I said I don't really do any downmodding and when I get the timing right and have mod points I generally try to find good stuff to mod up. It just works better that way. I do however see the point in downmodding even though it's subject to abuse and encourages people to mod down in disagreement instead of modding up a good point. It also stops much of the asshattery that occurs on forums like this so the way I see it you either need to have a really good spam filter, a really draconian everything filter or you need to figure out a way to make up mods have such a huge effect that each one bumps them to the top of the discussion and keeps them there. You also need to allocate more points or infinite points so that people can actually have room to make the good points seen and not worry about their allocation.

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    http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
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