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founded 1 year ago

Moderate by lottery? (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

@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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

@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!