Topic: Selfmoderation - a bad idea? (Read 545 times)

Naturally, that is what I would do. But I was thinking on a larger scale. If people never cared about issues that needed fixing, nothing would ever happen.

He is actually right. There isn't much that you can do otherwise. You should just ignore the power hungry abusers.

So just ignore everything you think is a problem? Got it.



Yes, same as I suggested, and I agree 100%.

Don't post in self-moderated threads then.

Just put the people on ignore and let others decide if they want to read or ignore the comments. A feature I've suggest before is comments that are deleted in self-moderated threads become hidden to everybody and they can choose wether to view them and make their own mind up. Self-moderated threads are usually just abused by tiny tyrants.

some people just don't know how to act and respect others threads so there is a use for self moderation.  But this like anything else can be abused and used to mislead people from info the OP doesn't want others to know.  I think it is up to the readers to do their own due diligence before believing everything they read.

I think there can be good and bad things about selfmoderation of a thread.

I would think there are several reasons why anyone wants to selfmoderate, and while some are legit, others are not.

Here is some of the pro's and con's I can think of for selfmoderation:


PRO'S:

* Signal to noise ratio can be increased.



CON'S:

* OP in position of conflicting interest, while he might be pro free speech, he might censor content he himself don't like or which puts him or his ideas/services in a bad light, even if the critisism is justified.
* We need to trust OP (a random internet stranger) to be a good and just thread mod.

I can see the usefullness of selfmoderation for someone wanting to share some concept and to avoid all the troll input.

It could be a dev having worked on a concept for a length of time and only wants serious input on it, and don't want to waste space or time on idiots.

However if someone runs a scam service a self moderated topic serves to suck in more people to a scam or gives a skewed picture of the reality or simply wants to push some agenda, in a self moderated topic there will be no way to give counter-arguments, and this is imo bad.

The current solution is that you start a new thread about the issue if you don't like the fact that the OP self-moderates the thread, however I think this is insufficient, and I think it should be allowed to give input in the thread for anyone especially to correct false statements.

Perhaps the OP could be allowed to 'hide' annoying messages instead of altering/deleting it. That way the thread would show "Alice(-1) hidden post." And you would need to click on it to expand it and read it in full. So the OP could hide it, but not delete it.

I would rather prefer there's no selfmoderation, and that one could rather ignore users, with current ignore feature, who have a high noise factor.

While selfmoderation could be justified in some cases, I'd rather have free flow of information.

So my proposal is to disable selfmoderation, perhaps some voting system like on reddit could be used, but lately I've seen many reports of it being misused.

Edit: While I'm not pro-babysitting, we don't need to push the baby onto the road. Putting a fence next to the sidewalk would not hurt anyone.