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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 Common Joe on Thursday September 18 2014, @10:55AM
I've been thinking about this for a couple of days since I've seen the article. I like the idea of down modding because without it, there is no way to separate out small gems given out by Anonymous Cowards (which start out at 0) and the spam-obscene-racists-trolls (which can be down modded to -1).
What about displaying two scores for a post? One tally would be for all the negative points and a second tally for all the positive points. No points would ever be taken away. Trolls and spam would receive mostly negative scores while good posts would receive mostly good scores. Contentious posts would receive both. Perhaps a third number could be the average or median score. (Or perhaps this idea could be combined with martyb's idea [soylentnews.org] of a five star rating?)
I suggest two displayed scores, but I have concerns about this idea too. If I'm hated by some people and they give my post negative points before others can give me positive points, then filters would cut me out before my ideas gain traction. (But then again, our current point system can have that problem too.) It could also encourage trolls into a competition to see how low they can get their numbers to go. (Not sure how much that would that really be a problem?)
There are also problems to give generic labels to posts with a two-score system: I really like knowing if a post is troll, interesting, or funny before I read it and the two-score system seems to work against that idea. In theory, more than two posts could be used, but I think that becomes too complicated. Perhaps have a label next to each score?