Jake McKee asked a brilliant question on Linkedin: Answers yesterday. Well, ask a brilliant question, get a brilliant answer (or ten).
Jake’s inquiry:
What kinds of tools, processes, games, and anything else do you give to users and/or moderators to help check large amounts of content? What have you seen or heard about that’s a unique approach to online moderation?
Some of my favorite answers thus far:
1. B5 media CEO Jeremy Wright points out that NG4 uses a numbered commenting system. New users start out with 5 opportunities to speak in any new conversation. Users whose commentary is rated highly get more turns to speak. Those with poorly rated commentary get fewer boxes. Wright points out that, “This system has greatly improved the quality of the posts since people only have a certain number of turns to speak, encouraging them to put more thought behind their comments.”
2. LEGO’s Cecilia Weckstrom points out a similar version of this phenomenon at GarageBand.com where users are asked to leave thoughtful critiques of other bands’ music before being allowed to post their own. New users earn points toward posting their own songs by having their reviews marked as useful by other members of the community.
3. New Media Medicine CEO Chris Paton explains their all-volunteer moderator community within a community. All moderators are auto-mailed whenever a post is flagged. This ensures that offensive comments are dealt with quickly, while more controversial posts are discussed in-depth by the moderator community before a decision is made.
4. The most amusing technique overall came from Intunet developer Adrian Howard, who wrote that moderators often “disemvowel” posts and entries by forum trolls.
The Wikipedia article on disemvowelling says, “When used by a forum moderator, the net effect is to mark the original text as deprecated; after disemvowelling, the text is still legible, but only through significant cognitive effort, and disemvowelled text has the advantage that it will not cause offence to anyone who does not stop and invest that effort in reconstructing their message. The presence of disemvowelled messages in the board also helps other visitors to see, by example, what kind of behaviour is not considered acceptable in the forum.”
5. Howard also mentioned the practice of placing The Troll Cap next to questionable posts. While I find this strategy highly amusing, I know well that Internet trolls generally enjoy attention. They would probably get a big kick out of wearing the troll hat and find it encouraging rather than stifling.
I liked freelance Web developer James Bennett’s answer better. He said that the best way to deal with trolls is to “psuedo-ban” them, “Normally, banning an abusive user is pointless, because he’ll just come back five minutes later with a new account, but this trick involves a special flag on the user’s account which lets him to continue posting, but leaves him as the only person who sees his comments.”
For the latest awesome answers — or to submit your own — check out Jake’s question.
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