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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.]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:40PM
The question I keep in mind as I mod is, "Does this post add value to the conversation?"
The right reason to include posts.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:49PM
And then there is the dilemma of off topic posts, is a good enough one OK or is the act of wandering off on a tangent grounds for downvoting? Not to mention the (mis)application of humor to a situation.
Its an easy spec to describe, but doesn't eliminate challenges to implementation, just changes what the challenges are.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday September 16 2014, @04:40PM
One can then ask the question "Does this add sufficiently to the associated subject of the discussion". Not all contributions has to be right on topic. They can very well be a good addition to a subject which is associated with the one which is being discussed.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday September 16 2014, @06:49PM
And then there is the dilemma of off topic posts, is a good enough one OK or is the act of wandering off on a tangent grounds for downvoting?
I just leave those alone. Don't mod them either up or down.
That way, they naturally fall to obscurity, unless a lot of people jump on the thread. If lots of people pile on and want to fork the conversation, why should the mods try to prevent that?
The best way to handle off-topic is not to reply to it, rather than trying to mod it out of existence.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by J053 on Tuesday September 16 2014, @08:09PM
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Tanuki64 on Tuesday September 16 2014, @08:16PM
I think down-modding for off-topic is ok when it is the start of a new thread. It is perfectly understandable that discussions in a thread begin to drift and slowly spread in all kinds of directions. But I think a thread should at least start on-topic to the given article.