wait, what? what feature of the system are you using to see who flagged a comment? is that on the mobile version? i can’t see anything like that on the site with my desktop and chrome. i can’t even see if a comment has been flagged unless it’s hidden.
tell me more about how this works so that i too can see the flags and those who place them.
Feel free to flag for being off-topic:
I’m a little bothered that people who are so concerned about these hypothetical scenarios haven’t actually checked to see if they are possible.
It’s certainly not on mobile. I can see if I flagged something, but not if anyone else did.
AFAIK, that power is only available to moderators.
So if multiple people flag something, it’s more likely that the post was considered truly inappropriate by multiple people, each coming to that decision independently.
Right that is the important bit. Multiple unrelated people reaching the same-ish conclusion after looking at the situation.
It’s not a feature on either mobile or desktop, unless one happens to be an admin or a mod.
Yes. Regulars or Leaders can’t see who Flagged what. It’s a Mod/Admin-only power.
Edit: clarified sentence.
In addition, TL4 and lower users can’t see that a comment has been flagged at all until it’s been hidden, which takes at least two and usually more anonymous flags depending on trust-level weight and other trust metrics (I assume this is the not exactly secret “hierarchy of trust” to which @anon67050589 was referring). Also, if I recall correctly, while a comment is hidden it can’t be further flagged until the user edits or the moderator takes action.
Yes, and they reach that same-ish conclusion because they’re active and involved members of the community who understand its basic standards (which, it’s important to emphasise again, is not an “echo chamber”).
Oh nice ANOTHER DISPATCH FROM THE ECHO CHAMBER @gracchus 
Yes, thanks, you put it so much better.
3 posts were split to a new topic: Any recent issues with the ignore feature?
I am not sure that I understand this system completely. Please correct me if I am wrong.
There are 8 members in the moderator group. Most of them are also authors. This would make sense as the main function of this “bbs” is to discuss articles posted on the companion page.
There appear to be 4 levels of “trust”: “empty” (probably for new members), “member”, “regular” and “leader”. There is no list of the users associated to a given level or any indication of the number of users in a given level.
All “moderators” appear to be at the “leader” level.
I was not able to find out how a trust level is assigned, what requirements there are, etc…
I was also not able to find out what is associated to a particular trust level. From the cited discussion, it seems that higher trust levels have more powers when flagging a post.
Can we please have more details on this hierarchy of trust levels?
Here you go:
Now, I’m not sure if the level requirements have been tweaked for use on this BBS. I believe they were at least once, just before I hit Regular. @orenwolf or one of the other @moderators could answer that better than I could.
You’re better off asking @orenwolf or @codinghorror about the details but
has some useful info.
Trust levels except level 4 are automatically applied by the software. The admins get to tweak what the requirements are.
There are a few posts around the BBS on what the requirements are here but I don’t think they’re much different from the default - basically just spend far too much time here without getting flagged and moderated, i.e. flags a moderator disagrees with don’t count.
You can go up and down trust levels quite easily so who is at what level will change constantly.
You can see what level any given user is currently on by clicking on their profile (just click on their user name on any post). for example, at the time of writing this you are at TL2 - Member.
If I click on the ‘Member’ badge, it gives me an option to see everyone with that badge, i.e. all users on TL2.
I can also click on ‘Badges’, scroll down to Trust Level and find all the different Trust level badges which I can click on to see everyone on any given trust level.
https://bbs.boingboing.net/badges
So for example Leader:
https://bbs.boingboing.net/badges/4/leader
It turns out we have some. 
There are also groups:
It is all fairly transparent.
ETA:
Ninja’d!
That’s okay. I like your answer, it was more thorough than mine. 
Thank you for the explanation and especially the list of badges, which I did not think about checking for trust level.
That’s apparently the default, and most are like that.
A user can choose to hide that info (the choice is found under Preferences>Interface>Other), and then all that can be seen is “This user’s public profile is hidden.”
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.
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. That alone would bias the system towards more flags.
As another example: I would also imagine that a system which rewards time spent per day as opposed to a system where users would raise level after a fixed amount of months, regardless of participation, would increase the “echo chamber” moderation effect.
It is the little details which count. 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.
This might help:
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).
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…
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.
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.
another facet that i’m not sure you’ve mentioned yet is that once a comment has received enough flags to be hidden it can no longer accrue additional flags. add to that the fact that only moderators have the ability to see whether a comment has been flagged short of being hidden and only moderators can see who has flagged a comment and one is faced with the realization that “piling on” because of who has flagged a comment is not a real thing.
