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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: 4, Insightful) by TK on Tuesday September 16 2014, @03:28PM
There are two other major distinctions between Slashcode moderation and Reddit's* moderation systems.
Slashcode moderation has a floor and a ceiling. You can only downmod something so far, there's no kicking a dead horse. Sure your poorly researched, flame-baiting diatribe about $Ethnics may be downmodded to -1, but that's as far down as you can go, and your next rant may be more accepted by the community.
Slashcode moderation is more permanent. You can undo it (well, not any more on SN), but you can't change your positive to a negative or vice versa. Unlike Reddit, where every week or so someone's human interest story at +3000 gets called out as BS by someone looking through their comment history, then the tides shift and it goes to -5000. The closest analog to Slashcode would be a comment below the OP explaining why it's wrong and deserving of downmods, and then a plethora of -1 Overrated mods.
*I can't speak for other voting systems, but I am fairly familiar with Reddit's system, and as I understand it, the basic concept is the same for a lot of sites that are relevant to this article.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum