Griping about moderation, bias, et cetera

[L0ki]

@AndreStmaur

This thread is about moderation and “echo chamber” bias. From previous messages, I understand that higher trust levels are given extra weight when flagging messages and possibly extra features. On which exact criteria the higher trust levels are attained is thus essential to understand possible moderation bias.

This might help:

TL3 Status restoration

Hello, happy Sunday! I’m going to be restoring TL3 “regular” status today. This will cause many of you to receive notifications regarding the status change, likely this evening. Discourse weighs flags from TL3 users differently than “normal” TL2 users, especially in regards to new users, spammers, and other troublemakers, all of which are valuable tools to help with moderation. It also provides another tool, along with anniversary badges and activity, for the community (and us mods!) to better…

There are quite a few topics around on the various ins and outs of Discourse as put in practice on BoingBoing.

We had a fairly large kerfuffle (henceforth to be known as “The time we do not speak of” shortly before/just as I started posting here about TL3 and the existence of a “secret” lounge (you should remember that) for TL3 users and there was a lot of discussion about these sorts of points at the time.

There is a search feature which is how I found that topic again.

Best person to ask though as I said before is @orenwolf (since he actually runs the software for the BBS) or @codinghorror (since it’s his baby).

@AndreStmaur

For example: if level raises when moderators agree when one flag or report messages, people who do not flag many messages will not raise to higher trust levels.

I don’t think that’s the case. Flags that are agreed with don’t count extra; flags that are disagreed with count against. ETA: Actually, I’m not sure about that.

So the best way to achieve a higher Trust level is just to read lots of topics regularly, and post inoffensive stuff.

So yes, there will be a degree of echo chambering in the sense that people whose posts get liked will get to higher trust levels than people posting a load of stuff that nobody likes but that’s the nature of any system that’s built on some sort of community.

TL3 really doesn’t give anyone magical powers. The unshielded radiation from my monitor gives me mine…

Taken from Jeff’s post I linked to above:

Users at trust level 3 can…

• Recategorize and rename topics
• Access a secure category only visible to users at trust level 3 and higher
• Have all their links followed (we remove automatic nofollow)
• TL3 spam flags cast on TL0 user posts immediately hide the post
• TL3 flags cast on TL0 user posts in sufficient diversity will auto-silence the user and hide all their posts
• Make their own posts wiki (that is, editable by any TL1+ users)
• Daily like limit increased by 2×

We no longer have a “secure category” aka ‘the special place for cool kidz’.

I have no idea what the links following stuff means or why or how one would want to make one’s posts editable by others.

So basically, all a TL3 user gets is more likes (is there actually a like limit?) and the ability to zap stuff posted by a new user which they think is spam. If enough TL3 users don’t like stuff posted by a new user, that user gets a time out - unless presumably a moderator thinks the stuff was actually ok.

@AndreStmaur

For example: I notice that there are 13062 users in TL1, 5321 in TL2, 80 in TL3 and 23 in TL4. The highest two levels are thus reserved to a tiny proportion of members. I don’t know whether that is significant, whether all discourse forums are similar in that respect or else, but I can imagine it could be important to this discussion.

I believe that is deliberate. You’re supposed to be dedicated to get TL3…(cue ‘Eye of the Tiger’ training montage).

Really as best I can tell one’s Trust level should be the least of a user’s concern. It goes up, it goes down, c’est la vie.