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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: 1) by VLM on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:53PM
We could play this game all day, I kinda like it. I propose another counterexamples. "that beta site" vs the GNAA
On his side, I think stack exchange in general is the premiere example of toxic downvoting, much better than throwing in a reddit to be trendy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday September 16 2014, @09:14PM
I have downvoted and here is why..when the poster is obviously trolling or refusing requests for citations and instead returning with strawmen and logic fallacies, or are obviously trying to derail a thread as we saw on slash all the time with post after post of you are lynching negroes [wikipedia.org] then yes I WILL mod down, because the entire appeal of a site like this is discussions and when you trash the discussions on purpose you are ruining the site.
Now this does NOT mean downvoting people you disagree with, in fact I have upvoted people whom I thought were completely full of shit because they made a good concise argument for their position and even though I don't agree with their position I am 1000% for freedom of speech and exchange of ideas so I'm gonna upmod those that make their case well, even if I don't agree with their position. Sadly we have seen how badly mods can be abused here the other day with the Brown article, that frankly shouldn't have been here in the first place as it was HuffyPo flamebait, but in that article EVERYBODY that didn't follow the left wing groupthink, hell even those that simply asked for more details because they hadn't kept up with the story? INSTANT MODBOMBING. It was like something off of HuffyPo or FauxNews where you had to stick to the party line no matter what or be attacked and it was frankly disgusting and just shows why those kinds of articles have no place here.
But at the end of the day downmods, when vetted by a working metamod system or by readers being diligent by undoing bad mods, which frankly I've done more times that I can count, do serve a VERY important purpose, they keep the threads from devolving into flamefests or circle jerk karma whoring. Just look at the OS articles on the green site for why that's bad, they USED to have in depth discussions about the OSes, the positives and negatives of changes, hell there was once a 300 post thread about fricking FILE SYSTEMS and what advantages each brought when compared to the others...now? Now its all flag waving and flame fests, that's it. You'll see a bottom of the thread post copypasta'd upthread for karma whoring, you'll see a million shills, trolls, vampires [tmrepository.com] thrown at anybody that doesn't jump on the bandwagon, its just a nasty unhealthy cesspool. I don't know about everybody else but I came here in hopes of getting away from that HuffyPo flamebaits and bandwagon hopping and downmods at least help weed out the worst of the worst...or do we really want this site to have threads with 300 "CleanMyPC" posts in a row, followed by such 'insightful" retorts as "you must be a nigger" and "get lost raghead, go man a helpdesk"?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.