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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: 2) by Popeidol on Wednesday September 17 2014, @03:24PM
I was a professional moderator for years, spending a lot of my time responding to reported content. They quickly become used to report people and opinions you don't like and generally dick with the moderators ('hey everybody let's just report every post for 5 minutes and see what happens'). You don't have long to spend on messages, and you tend to miss background information and err on the side of caution.
With crowdsourced moderation, you get fairly quick responses - the first person who scrolls past can handle it while understanding the context. If you make a mistake, somebody will probably fix it while calling you an astroturfing asshat.
Commercial spam mostly comes with scale or site type. If you make a dating or chat site, you get spam incredibly quickly and in quantity. If you throw up a default webform on whatever platform you're using, millions of bots will start to hammer it with their default-form-data. Soylent is a moderate-sized tech community with high rates of skepticism running on a modified 5-year-old unpopular codebase. Spam that arrives here is the result of a personal effort on the part of the spammer. it's an intimate touch.
tl;dr: Report buttons are great for some sites, but not here. We already have a better system.