So this is a half formed idea that might be horrible, I thought I’d throw it out there for critique.
- We have a problem on Kbin.social and probably other instances of under staffed moderation & admin teams.
- Some large magazines have a single moderator
- This will soon lead to *bad-shit appearing here
- We will likely get de-federated at some point
A random selection of peers is good enough for juries. So how about we apply it here?
Every ~100th new user is made a site wide Admin (cannot delete only unpublish content, it remains visible in the backend to other mods)
Every ~100th new Magazine subscriber is similarly made a mod of that space.
A few would go powertripping, many would be inactive, but I think it might build the mod/admin team in a reasonable way.
We have to build the processes for powertripping/inactive admins anyway, so in a sense it’s not extra work.
You’d build in some randomness, so the system was harder to game, it wouldn’t literally be the 100th person. It might be the 80th, or 110th, but averaging out at ~100
No, that is insane. Moderation, let alone administration, is a trusted position of power which also requires interest and commitment towards it from the person in question. You can’t just slap it on a random person and expect them to do a good job, and not the least because they never wanted it in the first place.
@0x yet this is how we make decisions to put people in prison in the UK or US.
Not really. The real life thing is carefully guided process with serious obligations in which the professionally trained and educated judge is still the main arbiter. The jury is segmented to a very specific part of the process with a clear protocol for a reason.
What you’re asking for is giving every Xth rando a police badge because law enforcement is understaffed.
For the sake of the argument, let’s say that you did. How is one system being bad in any way relevant when you’re trying to make up a better system? If anything use it as a way to see what not to do.
This is how you get bad actors spamming new accounts. But a better idea might be to have a central location for trusted moderators to convene and for overwhelmed mods to request short-term assistance modding, until they can find long-term help from within their own communities.
How to find trusted moderators is a bit hard this early on in kbin’s life, it would have to be done based on early comments & perhaps contributions to the issue tracker / the repo itself. Or maybe proof via Discord and/or reddit of good faith.
That said, so far the problem I see seems to be too little content, not anything overrun with bots, so these ideas seem to be solutions in search of a problem, at least thus far.
I think that first, things need to settle down. We don’t have yet moderating tools. And the website is still under construction.
A lottery is not a great idea because just picking up people randomly won’t work, you need to know of the technical aspect of things work. And also some people may join with not good intent at all. So it could have catastrophic results.
I guess it will be pretty simple to come up with mod guiding rules, and if anyone has an issue with moderation you can simply contact the instance admin and settle things.
but as for right now we are still in the early stage of this website, so patience.
edit: just though about the comparison with jury duty, I guess you are talking about the USA in this example. a lot of countries doesn’t have a jury of peer, and they are good reason for that.
Any of this would presuppose the existence of a modlog/ audit system. You wouldn’t grant any delete permissions using this system & changes could always be reverted by those higher up the food chain.
I’m interested to explore the assumption that the correct people to control discourse and have some censorship power are those that seek to control discourse and have censorship power.
I don’t thing that your assumption is correct. One can open a magazine without the envy to control discourse and have censorship power.
So for me your thesis is therefor already flawed.
That being said I think that the lottery system is very interesting. I know some politic and apolitical groups who use it, and the ideal is appealing. I’m also very curious about how effective it is in reality. It may be counterintuitively worst than most classic systems of representation. (I personally don’t think that it’s a good system for justice.)
But as for right now, it’s too early to try to implement such a things, in my opinion. But I welcome the conversation and I’m thankful that you started it.
>new user is made admin/mod
I wouldn’t like this. People who are admins/mods should be those who care most about the community and have a vested interest in making sure it’s good. If you give that to some random anon who happens to sign up for 2 seconds that can easily lead to the site being trashed.
I had a discord server where I gave mod perms to someone without careful checking. woke up in the morning to find every user banned, every post/channel deleted, and the server dead. prior to that it was thriving.
How would this solve anything? This would most likely get people to spam account creations for mod then trash the magazines. Just having a magazine dedicated to requesting mod access to magazines would be a better system.
@–@kbin.social this would also be good.
Huh, that’s interesting. This definitely requires a set of robust moderation tools that kbin definitely doesn’t have yet, but I like the thought experiment!
I’d consider using actual activity as the lottery pool, so that we’re more likely to promote a user that actually wants to participate. This encourages spamming unfortunately, so it might have to be something like “Every week, collect the users from all threads and comments from that week. Those users have one ticket added to the lottery pool. Draw from the lottery pool every four weeks, and promote that user.” No need to spam, just show up lol.
Actually, to mitigate account spam, let’s make it so that accounts only start adding tickets to the lottery pool once they’ve reached a threshold number of potential tickets, let’s say 12? So only accounts who were active for 12+ weeks are considered valid participants.
I think this could be used to decide a pool of participants whose opinions are polled for the direction of a magazine. I’d consider that (expanding) list to be a higher quality than just blanket polling the magazine as a whole.
@shepherd it could exist alongside, rather than instead of organic mod growth. The owner and other mods may be great at on boarding new mods. The actively recruited ones are supplemented by the lottery mods in this scenario.
Where a singleton owner disappears, or does not recruit any mods in the first place the lottery mods could run the show.
@Sam_uk Yeah, that’s pretty much how I was imagining it. If a bot could maintain the threshold checks and ticket pools, then just automatically promote someone (and send 'em a nice template message lmao), then I’d consider implementing this in my own magazine. I’d only need to review the users approaching the 12-week threshold, which is likely to be a fraction of the whole magazine even during peak growth times. If there’s anyone concerning (like a bot), I have 12 weeks to filter them out of the pool. Eventually the lottery mods can filter themselves lol.
Assuming it actually works, the pool of lottery mods could be allowed to choose/replace the actual mods too, which is approaching how democracy actually works lmao. That’s kind of fun!
Have you read The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith? I think you may enjoy it. Very grossly oversimplifying here, but broadly, as more people have a say in who holds power, corruption becomes increasingly difficult. It eventually even stabilizes into being a competitive “who has the best idea” game, which is really good for society lol. If your goal is healthy societal growth, see if you can always be pushing for more people to have a relevant vote!
