It seems inactive now but Edward Tufte's forum was a great example of this – https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard – with every single post or comment being made via a basic HTML form and Tufte would then approve everything manually. This resulted in nothing but high quality (and often authoritative) discussions as you knew Tufte was directing it. Indeed, the forum even discussed the topic of content moderation once and Hacker News popped up: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
This can't really work at scale, but then would I prefer to frequent a handful of gigantic forums or many Tufte sized hyperspecialized forums..? In any technical field, the latter.
https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogr...
However, while it is easy to measure, I'm not convinced that "number of good contributions" is a valid proxy for "quality of discussion" or "quality of content".
For example, some of those good contributions might have been repairing the damage made by bad ones. And on a less heated/combative forum, users may feel comfortable consolidating multiple small contributions into fewer but more well-thought out contributions. And perhaps even the good contributions that were prevented were (while good) on average lower quality than the ones that remained.
Like, hacker news almost allows anonymous posting because the account creation is so simple.
For example there were multiple "name a product" contests raided by trolls- because nobody moderated the inputs.
HN has its own problems: the "flag" feature is abused by brigaders to censor content.
That doesn't make it impossible to have anonymous accounts, but it is a high tradeoff decision and likely a defining one.
I think it's more applicable for sites that have somewhat more objective and/or legible goals. Wiki-ish sites, for example. If there's a lot of free form discussion... anonymity is probably a bad decision for the site owner.
Allowing individual subreddits to enable anonymous posting lets the market decide if the pros outweigh the cons. (If the subreddit has a history of bad moderation, ban the subreddit)
I feel like giving communities more options in customizing the algorithm that dictates the discussion is powerful.
Gab, the free speech social network, deals with this topic a lot... and likewise does moderation with a flagging system, volunteers, group mods, and site mods. The community is far larger, but our policies are much simpler to compensate.
"Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to."
The second part of implementing this is to increase the cost of producing bad content for a particular identity. Using a proof of stake type system based on the identity and content, not the coin itself, might allow decent scaling of moderation.
> work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings
In this particular case, the comments on the content (holdings) become the selecting validators. The more high quality validations through consensus of other identities, the cheaper it becomes to comment as a particular identity. If the identity becomes a bad actor later, subsequent consensus from other identities increases the cost of that identity posting new content related (through identity) to their older, higher quality content. In a way, the content an identity produces becomes their "ego" or "account".
But, by using crypto identities, no "account" is needed. A tag may be added to the content in a particular system to indicate which transaction and identity was responsible for paying to add that content. The system remains secure for privacy of participating individuals, other than what they leak through posting their thoughts to a public forum.