I'm in two minds about the voting system. In a previous life I was a newswire
clerk on an Indymedia site, one of the volunteers who moderated articles and
comments posted on the site. Some clerks copped lots of abuse for doing their
job, particularly the female ones I noticed. We often debated replacing that
system with a user-moderation system like the ones used here, for the sorts
of reasons given by MagicBanana, but we never did because of concerns about
implicit bias etc.
I've definitely seen the voting system here badly abused. On one potentially
libellous thread about Technoethical, a number of perfectly reasonable
responses by the operator of Technoethical, explaining the circumstances that
let to the complaints in the OP, were downvoted until hidden. On the other
hand, I've also opened up some hidden comments out of curiosity, and found
nonsense and abuse that I am really glad isn't shown to new users who come to
the forums (with JS on) for support and fellowship.
I've suggested in other threads that the mods consider moving the forums to
Discourse, which has a number of baked-in mechanisms for discouraging
unhelpful posting in forums. If we stay with the current system, I would
suggest two fairly trivial changes that might help improve the use of the
voting system:
* change the number of votes required to hide a post to 5. If a posting
really is inappropriate, there are enough responsible regulars for it to
attract 5 downvotes, but posts are less likely to be hidden for trivial or
inappropriate reasons
* put a string of text to the left of the voting buttons saying something
like 'violates community guidelines' (linked to them), and a string of text
to the right of the voting buttons saying something like 'abides by community
guidelines' (linked to them). I think a number of users are mistaking
appropriate / inappropriate buttons for agree / disagree buttons.
BTW At the top of the community guidelines there needs to be a short
paragraph explaining how the user-driven moderation works, maybe linked to
another page with a fuller explanation.
