1. Effective moderation can only come from others steeped in the particular cultural context they're part of.
2. Effort should be given to moderate to give communities the ability to moderate themselves at scale.
With that in mind, it may be worth considering Reddit. Each subreddit has it's own moderation team from the community that is charged with enforcing sitewide guidelines like not doxing people, etc.
This lets them penalize and ban at the community/subreddit level instead of trying to interact with individuals.
There are problems, of course, but with 20million people a month interacting with the site you're going to have problems no matter what (as the article explains in detail).
I think this misses why subreddits work. I have seen subs with very inactive mods and ill-defined subreddit rules still flourish.
This is because most content is self-policing by upvotes. Downvoted post dies in new so trolls know they can't reach a large audience. It's actually kind of amazing how quickly can newcomers can learn and adapt to the implicit rules and begin reinforcing it on others.
This does lead to problems when a smaller sub gets brigaded by a larger ones (or ends up on /r/all) and the original community can't outvote the outsiders.
Came here to say exactly the same thing. Look I know Reddit has its ups and downs and there are negative parts of it that I’m likely not experiencing, but I think they pretty much get it and it pretty much works.
The upvote/downvote system is fundamentally self-moderating (same thing as the comments and stories here on HN) and a light-to-medium touch by subreddit-specific moderators means that the good stuff generally rises to the top and the bad stuff generally falls to the bottom.
Is it perfect? By no means. But anecdotally, I find that I get a lot of positive and insightful content out of reddit, whereas Twitter just feels like the YouTube comment section of the world writ large.
I do think Reddit is particularly well suited to having good moderation by virtue of its structure, and Twitter is particularly poorly suited. Twitter is all about decontextualizing what people are saying.
I think a useful somewhat-apples-to-apples comparison for moderation is: Quora and StackExchange. Both websites are intended to be Q&A platforms, but their approach is markedly different and results in different moderation issues.
Quora is heavily centralized - all content must be moderated by the company, there is little to no segregation of questions by dedicated community, and all questions are allowed. Individual users must be name-identified and, importantly, are the core ingredient for Quora - people come to read the content of specific people, not for quality of the content in general. Users have stake but no say in the evolution of the system, and are by design incentivised to not care about question or answer quality but instead about the people they engage with. Further, questions are considered to be "owned by everyone" - so users are free to alter questions indefinitely.
In contrast, StackExchange (not StackOverflow) has similar properties to Reddit - partitioned into smaller communities, reliant on user moderation, equipped with a somewhat reasonable appeals process that relies on a "meta" site where users can contribute to improving the site. Users have both stake and say, and importantly are dedicated to improving the average quality of answers rather than who is answering.
The difference in moderation is stark. Quora's issues with moderation have been legendary - anywhere from an inability to stop sockpuppet voting, pay-to-upvote rings, and reversing helpful edits to outright refusing to take action against documented sexual harassment by users against other users. StackExchange has had no such issues, or rather it has had vanishingly fewer issues compared to Quora.
While we obviously can't compare them on equal footing, given that the sites are so different, this is some circumstantial evidence that community moderation, allowing communities to manage their evolution, and removing the focus on individuals is a better experience between two sites that seek to accomplish the same goal.
I'm not sure what this would say about social networks - which are all about emphasis on other people - but it does seem like a great model for online communities that aren't social network focused.
"Cultural context" but also should include depth of knowledge context (domain expertise, language depth-understanding) - as not everyone's critical thinking is as developed as say "first responder" moderators, and why I believe in many, if not all cases, there should be a cascading process to get verification of actions from a "higher up" - along with an appeal process.
Subreddits allow this to some degree, as you can create two "science" communities with different names, and have different rules held for each. It also somewhat protects against "moderator capture" - though a better job could be done allowing for more fluidity and mobility here; community moderation, trust building, isn't often the leading metric of the founders of large platforms - with Reddit creating fake users to post content to make it look like the site is busy, as one example, and I imagine they did the same once they implemented the ability to "give gold" - giving gold automatically to comments to make others adopt it faster thinking it was a new cultural norm.
A problem I've personally experienced however is moderators of subreddits ultimately have each unchecked dictatorship-censorship powers - and it's clearly a common problem of moderators being on their high horse with no potential of repercussions because Reddit as a platform doesn't moderate the moderators, at least not adequately.
Moderation should really be called parenting, parenting which is the process of role modelling and explaining - to help people or children grow by deepening their understanding by guiding them to appropriate resources to help them understand different concepts, when necessary.
>With that in mind, it may be worth considering Reddit.
Or, you know, individual websites with forums that aren't tied into a giant superstructure and therefore is a constant target of efforts in manipulation and social engineering both from its owners and from third parties.
1. Effective moderation can only come from others steeped in the particular cultural context they're part of.
2. Effort should be given to moderate to give communities the ability to moderate themselves at scale.
With that in mind, it may be worth considering Reddit. Each subreddit has it's own moderation team from the community that is charged with enforcing sitewide guidelines like not doxing people, etc.
This lets them penalize and ban at the community/subreddit level instead of trying to interact with individuals.
There are problems, of course, but with 20million people a month interacting with the site you're going to have problems no matter what (as the article explains in detail).