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April 25, 2014, 01:07:53 AM |
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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.
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