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Comment by seph-reed | Hacker News Reader

I still theorize crowd-moderated platforms are possible, as long as there's really good gate-keeping.

My bet is some real-world tie, one which is time consuming and expensive to create. From there it should be possible to create moderation tools that keep the rest going.

An example of a real world tie would be a trust network that requires status with in-person communities and local businesses. And not just "accept the hot chick friend request," but an explicit "I'm staking my reputation by saying this person is real."

But once you let bots in, it's over.

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Slashdot’s meta-moderation system worked well for a long time. One set of people could make moderation decisions directly on content, and then another unrelated set of people would review the moderation decisions and support or revert them.

It was all tied to karma and permissions in ways I can’t quite remember. But essentially there was no way for a motivated bad-faith group to both moderate and meta-moderate themselves, and the incentives marginalized bad faith actors over time.

You had limited resources to use (5 moderation points at a time for example), at least in theory. Having moderation be moderated was a great idea though I think should come back in some form.

Moderation is labor and you get what you pay for. Which is not that crowd-moderation cannot work, but that for good crowd-moderation you still have to treat it as a labor pool, have a very good idea of how you are incentivizing/paying for it, and what "metrics/qualities" those incentives are designed to optimize for.

(In some cases it actually is far cheaper to pay a small moderator pool a good wage than to pay an entire community a bad wage to "crowd-moderate" if you actually test the business plan versus alternatives.)

Whatever happened to Something Awful? Are they still around?

They charged a one-time $10 fee to access their forums. If you got banned, you could pay $10 to get a new account. It made being a total dick expensive. I've heard it get called the Idiot Tax.

Here's a concept for a moderated deliberation platform:

https://bytebucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/raw/master/doc...

It's like StackOverflow + Reddit + Wikipedia. Section 3.1 is what makes the concept fairly unique. Most moderation systems require known moderators; the proposed system uses random selection. Eligible moderators could require a minimum reputation to further reduce the possibility of bad actors. Using something like Slashdot's interaction limit may be helpful.

The nearest was Advogato; it didn't have an abuse problem, but it did end up as a ghost town. https://web.archive.org/web/20170715120119/http://advogato.o...

IIRC it was based on a web of trust.

Webs of trust are awesome, but call for a lot of investment from users. I think they are more viable if they are independent of any one website, so all that effort isn't flushed down the drain if the guy who owns the domain goes incommunicado.

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