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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 martyb on Thursday September 18 2014, @02:03PM
I'd seen "star ratings" before, but never made the connection between that and what I proposed; thank you for the insightful observation!
I've struggled for years to escape my innate perceptions of a black/white, true/false, all/nothing world. Shades of gray cause the permutation space of possibilities to escape my ability to envision all of them, so it continues to be something with which I struggle. I find I am getting better at escaping that objective perception bias and embracing a more subjective perception. On occasion, I even get glimpses of color... wow!
Yet, when it comes to rating things, I seem to have no difficulty in iterating through the choices and finding a non-extreme value. I have absolutely no idea why that is comparatively simple. As you point out, though, many others just reduce the choices to like/dislike, agree/disagree et cetera and thus dramatically skew the weightings.
I fear this is an attempt at a technical solution to a social (for lack of a better word) problem. Do you recall that old checkbox chart from back in the old /. days? My immediate thought is to throw back a dialog box "You are proposing to rate a comment at +5 when it is currently rated +1; do you REALLY think this is one of the best quality posts you have ever seen on this site?" And down the rabbit hole we go!
Mayhaps this is where meta-moderation would come to the rescue? You raise an excellent point and, at this moment, I have no solution to offer. I suppose one could ask a different question: "Given the foregoing, is the proposed solution any better than the existing moderation mechanism?"
Separately, I've been toying with the idea that each comment presented on the site be enclosed by an HTML DIV whose class specifies the comment's current score. Using your reply as an example, where we currently have:
Would instead be presented as:
Where: "p" == "plus" and "m"=="minus", so we'd have: mod_m1, mod_p0, mod_p1, mod_p2, mod_p3, mod_p4, mod_p5. Them, I could apply a user style sheet (yay CSS!) and present each of those with a different background-color or a different font-size, etc. This would provide a subtle visual cue wherein I could readily discern comments whose moderations were inconsistent against other comments on the site. Yet another embryonic thought, but I toss it out for your consideration and feedback.
Wit is intellect, dancing.