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Comment by mattw2121 | Hacker News Reader

I was recently invited to be a lead on Nextdoor (I know, I know) and accepted so that I could peek behind the curtain. Their process is that any flagged content is voted on by leads to Leave it, Possibly Remove, or Remove. What I've observed is that posts that completely break the rules still have a 50/50 split.

My point being that many people are not able to objectively look at something and make a decision. Their opinions and feelings will always get mixed in. Twitter, good luck with the crowdsourcing :).

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Slashdot had moderation and metamoderation and it worked ... for awhile. Part of the reason was you could still browse at -1 if you wanted to, so there were chances for things that got "attacked" to bubble back up.

Not sure if it helped kill it or if that was incidental.

The "rules" always have interpretations and most people don't steelman posts that disagree with them.

Slashdot's moderation/metamoderation worked fairly well at policing the tone of the conversation, but was worthless for factual accuracy. Troll, flamebait and funny moderations were accurately applied, but the insightful moderation was given mostly given to comments which confirmed the biases of the community.

Past tense because I mostly stopped going to slashdot when cmdrtaco left. I don't really know how the moderation has been going since then.

Most moderation ends that way but yeah, it’s a hollowed out shell of itself now.

> My point being that many people are not able to objectively look at something and make a decision. Their opinions and feelings will always get mixed in.

Isn't the idea that individuals will have biases, but on average they will cancel each other out when aggregated together? I don't think that is necessarily true, but I think it is overly simplistic to say that individuals having biases means the consensus of the crowd can't work.

You can't get a aggregation from the public, not really. Most people won't participate, the only people who will bother are the ones with a axe to grind. Only 66% of people can even be bothered to vote on the president of the us, what's the percent that will spend their free time fact checking on Twitter? Only the ones who really want to push their own facts will do it.

> Isn't the idea that individuals will have biases, but on average they will cancel each other out when aggregated together?

That doesn't work out online when an individual can have 1, 10, 50+ votes depending on how much they care about a topic (or the voting in general).

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