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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 16 2014, @12:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the mod-me-up! dept.

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.]

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Tanuki64 on Tuesday September 16 2014, @04:25PM

    by Tanuki64 (4712) on Tuesday September 16 2014, @04:25PM (#94100)

    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.

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