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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @03:26AM
> There needs to be a systematic discouragement of downvoting.
While I agree that if something must be done, making downvotes half-strength is probably the way to go. But I don't necessarily agree that down-votes need to be discouraged. In the last couple of days the people complaining the loudest about being down-voted turned out not to be the ones who were actually downvoted the most.
I would like to see meta-moderation working. But I have not seen anything close to a problem with downvoting here so far. Lots and lots of complaining, but minimal empirical evidence. If there were an ongoing and systemic problem, then I would think different. But that's a long way off.