If I’ve understood the concern correctly though, I think it’s more about moderators starting to agree with flags because so many people flag the same posts as a kind of subconscious training effect.
So on that basis, the theory is that there might be a feedback effect where people flag, the moderator agrees and then, I suppose, is more pre-disposed to agree with future flags by those people because lots of their flags were agreed with in the past.
If that’s it, I agree that it’s not really something that is much of a concern or at least not one that technology can do anything about.
At the end of the day all systems rely on having someone making decisions about what is ok or not and this system builds in a feature to try to ensure that if decision making starts off right, the positive feedback loop doesn’t even start.
If the posited ‘clique’ flags inappropriately, the moderator disagrees with those flags thus downgrading any future flags unless they start flagging appropriately (well, for the next 100 flags).
And if they’re flagging appropriately, there’s no problem.
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.
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.
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 @chgoliz 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”).
The truth sometimes dosen’t conform to a consensus opinion.
Let’s take the fact that the earth revolves around the sun. That was true before during and after Copernicus proved it. But the consensus at the time was that he was wrong.
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?
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.
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.
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.”
