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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 basicbasicbasic on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:54PM
Or maybe people who post controversial posts that get downmodded are more likely to already be the type of person who gets a persecution complex and to continue posting controversial posts. If you assume that only half of the people who are downmodded are downmodded justifiably, that's still a lot of assholes, and they were probably going to continue being assholes in their subsequent posts regardless of whether they were downmodded once.
It's possible, even, that downmodding is a wake-up call to someone about their behaviour and without it there would be even more assholes.
No I didn't read the article - maybe they covered that.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday September 16 2014, @02:19PM
You say "controversial" like it's a bad thing, and are implying that "controversial" equals "shitposting." It doesn't. Controversial posts often spurn discussion and provide alternative and potentially mind-opening points of view, even if just to allow the reader to entertain the thought rather than accepting it.
The problem is that certain people can't handle reading points of view alternative to their own. They want a safe little circlejerk free of controversy with no real direction, consisting of nothing but positive feedback. If you're talking about shitposting, call it shitposting, or call it trolling or flamebait if you're afraid of mommy walking in on you and washing your mouth out with soap. But don't be in such a hurry to equate "controversial" with "requires downmodding."
(Score: 2) by basicbasicbasic on Tuesday September 16 2014, @02:22PM
No, I specifically used the word "controversial" because not all posts that get downmodded are bad posts - good posts get downmodded, too.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 16 2014, @03:15PM
And in the process you provoked someone's persecution complex.
Funny that.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 16 2014, @04:44PM
Except in his case, its not really a complex; people really do downmod him just because its him posting and have admitted as much.