Self-Moderating

Cronyx

I've had an idea rolling around in my head for a while now that I bounced off a few friends irl, and from what I know, I don't think it's ever been attempted. I thought I'd bounce it off the people in here to contemplate.

Basically, the idea is that when you create a thread, you become kind of a micro or mini-mod, over just that one thread. You can lock it at will, or even ban someone from it. It would, in theory, make self-policing more of a practical possilbility as well as making thread-derailment almost impossible.

Asshattery would, I think, almost drop to nonexistant, because people would learn over time who the asshats were, and just not read threads authored by those users. Likewise, good thread authors who usually were seen as fair, and who's threads had good content, would get more hits.

I'm sure, very sure, there are things I'm overlooking here, but, that's why I thought I'd pitch it.

Coding (im)practicalities aside (if any), what do you think a system like this would do in a real-world practice? Would it do more harm than good, or might it be some kind of revolutionary new concept of expresive democracy?

Please don't assume I'm outright advocating the idea. It's just an idea, and I'm curious if anyone's ever thought of it, and if not, what people think about it. I'm not even sure myself.

Anyway, discuss?

Seattle Thread

I think all this would do is make our existing mod team's job more difficult. In addition to watching for rule violations, trolls, flame wars, obscenely huge images, shock images, sitewhores, porn, roms, warez, illicit links, thread assassins, and posts-for-the-sake-of-maek-poast, they would now have to keep an constant eye on each thread and make sure that the forumers aren't abusing that small power given to them. And that sounds like more trouble than it's worth.

It's a nice thought, but the current system has worked well enough, so why fuck with it?

Smasher

This would be a terrible, terrible thing if it were implemented. In D&D people could just ban people they didn't like from their threads instead of responding to their arguments, and god help us if SE had this... I don't even want to talk about it. Even in the other forums, drama and petty squabbles would escalate exponentially as people banned each other for stupid/no reason, or deleted/edited posts to say whatever they wanted. Plus, you'll have people making tons of stupid threads just so they can be mods in them. Thread derailment is the norm (and totally acceptable) in SE, and mods deal with that just fine in the other forums.

Asshattery would, I think, almost drop to nonexistant, because people would learn over time who the asshats were, and just not read threads authored by those users. Likewise, good thread authors who usually were seen as fair, and who's threads had good content, would get more hits.

I'm not sure what makes you think this. People already know who the asshats and good posters are... adding modding to threads wouldn't change this. The only asshattery that might drop in frequency would be thread-mod asshattery, and you'd be creating that out of nothing with this change.

Deusfaux

on a side note, being able to search by thread creator (Self and others) would be awesome...


....someday

Toast

Totally incompatible with the "no duplicate threads" rule.

Jasconius

lern2play

aelio

Cronyx and I have discussed this in other venues, so I think that I might both add my .02 as well as clarify, I think, some of his ideas.

Asshatry would of course exist, it is, unfortunately, a function of the "human" program. Some of us are just better as suppressing this function than others. Where this self-moding *might* be beneficial is that it might allow us to avoid said asshatry. For example, if I read a thread authored and moded by hypothetical user "asshat" and I find that said user is being, well an asshat, as a moderator, then I can simply avoid threads over which he has sway. If user "asshat's" asshatry continued, then no one would patronize his threads, so no one will be exposed to his asshatedness.

This might seem to create more work for overall forum mods, but, if this works, it might even eliminate the need for overall mods. Every author would just police his own thread. If an author is abusing that power, posters would quickly learn this and could avoid his threads altogether.

Of course, the apprehensions expressed in this thread complete have merit, but the most applicable one is that authors would not allow dissenting viewpoints if said authors are in fact asshats, so we could not disagree with asshats (they tend to frown on that sort of thing) but they could be avoided completely. You would then, basically, have an asshat talking to him in his threads; in which case, he would be harming no one.

Like Cronyx, I'm not sure that I would advocate this self-moding, but I do wonder if we think it would work or not.

Furthermore, Cronyx has another idea concerned with limiting his exposure to Asshats (he's apparently thought about them a lot) that would be a sort of "Asshat rating" for each poster. I won't go into the details, he can elaborate if he wishes.

Orikaeshigitae

I imagine that such an extensive overhaul of the forum software would delay the arrival of newer, stabler software by quite a while.

Plus it's not going to happen on account of we'd have a lot of jailed users running around and I really don't want to deal with that.

More trouble than it's worth.

Thanatos

So, what if the creator of, say, the American Politics thread in D&D is an asshat? Then we have like three running AP threads in D&D at once, because a couple of them are created by asshats, or one is created by a Conservative and another by a Liberal?

Also, we're going to give someone the power to shape threads at will, maybe make people look like they're saying things they aren't?

If it ain't broke, why fix it?

Orikaeshigitae

Quite.