- if there are sufficient flags, trigger a moderator review
- flaggers who correctly flagged content get +1 score or -1 score if not
that would make it harder for people to consistently flag content maliciously. Like age-old moderation systems such as calling 911 or police. If you abuse calling 911, you can get fined.
I imagine this has been tried before, and am genuinely curious why this is worse than flawed ML.
But at some point, sites decided that experimenting with stuff like that was unimportant compared to just bringing in more users. Letting everyone vote all the time obviously has huge issues, but it's emotionally satisfying to downvote, so it keeps users engaged.
The people most prone to dominate the site with voting on everything and coordinating efforts, are also the ones which will complain most loudly if they don't dominate the discussion. So just give them what they want.
It worked. Experimenting with self-moderation mechanisms went extremely out of fashion.
I'd love a system were you could get 2 vote choices per post and then have 8 or more vote options.
Like/dislike (or agree/disagree), off topic/on topic, factually correct/factually incorrect, funny/hateful, user is a prick/user is a swell guy, or whatever seems like a good option for the discussion forum.
I mean, something can be funny, but off topic at the same time. Or something can be factually correct but the person making the post can be a real jerk about it.
I also have a hard time believing the GP that there is no experimentation anymore. Probably a lot more subtle, but you can do a lot of stuff behind the scene without giving feedback to the user. I'd be shocked if there is not at least some form of shadowbanning bad actors.
https://www.adweek.com/digital/youtube-heroes-will-let-users...
But it didn't work. YouTube is too diverse and too popular, it has no clear "naturally" anointable moderator types.