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: 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.