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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, Interesting) by Bob9113 on Tuesday September 16 2014, @03:19PM
So... do you downvote? if so, why? Does this article make you reconsider your down-modding?
I have been a 50 point moderator on Slashdot since you could see your karma score; so more than a decade. I do downmod, but only in extremely rare cases (maybe 3 or 4 times, ever). There is one specific thing that it does well: It reduces the likelihood of a comment to be read.
That is, effectively, censorship. And it is an incredibly weighty responsibility to bear. It is in the same class with torture or killing; a tool to be used by people with great conscience, and under a significant ethical burden every time they do it. Unfortunately, we use such things in a more cavalier fashion sometimes, but that doesn't mean they would always be wrong if we used them rightly.
When I use it is with a specific thing I think of as the "toxic infectious meme." There are specific memes which can infect a host even in the presence of strong countermemes; things like, "Allah will let you have sex with 72 virgins if you martyr yourself." or "God despises abortion, and has called you to be the agent of his wrath." There are some memes which individuals (never collectives, such as corporations or governments) have a just duty to attenuate. In that case fully weighing the consequences, and then casting a small individual vote for speech suppression, can be pro-social.
The only actual example I have done that I can think of offhand is shills; there was a time when it was easy to detect shills on Slashdot; high numbered accounts that would post a cookie-cutter corporate talking point and get upmodded to 5 within a minute of their post. They've gotten a lot more greasy and hard to detect since then, but at its peak, it was not uncommon. I have downmodded a few of those.
Ultimately, I think downmodding is like guns. I would prefer a world where individuals had no cause to own guns, because I don't particularly care for them. Until that Elysian world arrives, however, I feel it is my obligation as a citizen to own guns, to increase the cost of tyranny (or to lower the cost of revolution, if you prefer). The same is true of downmodding; it is, without question, a bad tool. But the alternative, in our pragmatic reality, is worse. Without downmodding, zealots and shills would have too much influence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 16 2014, @09:15PM
I am totally with you here. If you are going to troll, at least be witty and original about it. I might even mod up a particularly original troll post.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 16 2014, @11:09PM
So you'd advocate long prison sentences for wrongful downvoting? Because that's what you'd have to do if you seriously put them in the same class with torture or killing (well, that's assuming you're not advocating that torturers and killers should not be punished that harshly).
(Score: 2) by Bob9113 on Tuesday September 16 2014, @11:35PM
So you'd advocate long prison sentences for wrongful downvoting? Because that's what you'd have to do if you seriously put them in the same class with torture or killing (well, that's assuming you're not advocating that torturers and killers should not be punished that harshly).
Not quite; I'm saying that there is such a thing as justifiable censorship, just like justifiable homicide. The socially correct level of punishment for unjustified killing might be very different from the socially correct level of punishment for unjustified downmodding, because the cost to society of a single instance of each is very different.
This whole "communication" thing works better if you try to grasp what I'm saying instead of trying to find an angle to make a cutesy disagreeable quip about.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @03:18AM
This whole "communication" thing works better if you try to grasp what I'm saying instead of trying to find an angle to make a cutesy disagreeable quip about.
It's called the principle of charity [wikipedia.org] and is woefully absent on the internet.