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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 Tanuki64 on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:56PM
I don't really understand how sites still ask to up-vote good and down-vote bad posts. I never works. There are enough sites, which ask not to vote depending on agreement/disagreement, which have shown over the years that it does not work. There is always a large enough percentage of members, who vote according to sympathy, to devalue the whole idea. So why not say from the beginning: + = I agree, - = I disagree? This definitely works and is unambiguous. In Ars you can see the number of up- and down-votes. And perhaps it is only me, but I take a "I don't agree with you" much easier than a 'Your post is crap'.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Buck Feta on Tuesday September 16 2014, @04:03PM
What would happen if you had two parallel modding systems - one for agreement/disagreement, and one for quality of post? Would this arrangement also get abused, or would people feel more empowered when they could vote "crappy post, but I agree with you" or vice versa?
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 2) by Tanuki64 on Tuesday September 16 2014, @04:25PM
Your guess is as good as mine. I doubt there are any 'experts', who can exactly predict what will happen. From my gut feeling: I am not long there now, but from what I have seen, I think at the moment it could work. However, communities always go down the drain when they grow. SN gets more known and popular. I gets cool to be here. Less disciplined members pour in. The signal/noise ratio goes to hell. Sooner or later, hopefully later, we will have a not neglectable number of members who think: Boah, this post is so bad, just saying "I don't agree" is not enough, this must really be punished. Or... I don't agree, so this post must be bad.
Really, under all old forums I know, there is not a single one, where I believe something like that could work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @09:28PM
Separate agree and disagree votes from the educational/interesting/funny votes work for Ravelry. Which is a knitting site that is well-moderated and skews much more heavily towards little-old-lady demographics. I'm not sure if it's applicable towards a site like this.