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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: 1) by J053 on Tuesday September 16 2014, @08:09PM

    by J053 (3532) <dakineNO@SPAMshangri-la.cx> on Tuesday September 16 2014, @08:09PM (#94199) Homepage
    I don't think I've ever down-modded for off-topic. I will occasionally downmod obvious trolls or flamebait, but I'd have to say that 95%+ of my mod points are upvotes. I do believe it's important to up-mod interesting points, even when I don't agree with them.
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Tanuki64 on Tuesday September 16 2014, @08:16PM

    by Tanuki64 (4712) on Tuesday September 16 2014, @08:16PM (#94202)

    I think down-modding for off-topic is ok when it is the start of a new thread. It is perfectly understandable that discussions in a thread begin to drift and slowly spread in all kinds of directions. But I think a thread should at least start on-topic to the given article.