I’d take a WAG that… 75%? of flags are either drive-by trollies, or spammers.
That means 75% of the community time flagging is spent on this issue, as is some amount of Mod time (it’s less than 75% because less “work” is done by mods on obviously inappropriate posts, and Discourse makes nuking spammers and TL0 drive-by’s from orbit simple, but it’s still easily 50% of time).
On top of that, there’s the much more annoying problem that drive-by-trollies inevitably derail conversations, whether it’s because of counter-trolley posts, derailing jokes, or lost effort from collateral deletions when the user is removed, affecting users who spend time trying to formulate a legitimate response to the issue.
This second issue - derailing - would indeed be solved by some sort of TL0 approval queue (since their posts wouldn’t be seen), but with the added cost that 1) the community would be approving first-time posts instead of flagging them, and 2) there’d obviously be a delay before first time users’ posts would appear (since they’d need to be approved).
I’d happily pay a subscription fee to help keep the lights on, but this concept of “pay-to-play” makes me uneasy. I think it would limit the diversity of voices here on the BBS, and IMHO, that’s a bad thing.
For example: at least twice in the last seven days, I’ve seen people involved in featured stories join the forum to discuss their work. I love this! It adds another layer of knowledge and experience to the discussions. Would they be less likely to chime in if they had to pay for the privilege? Possibly… and I’d hate to lose their input.
And forgive me if I don’t word this well… but there’s also an implication that, under this kind of policy, our words don’t matter unless we’re willing and able to back them up with money. That rubs me the wrong way. There are likely people here who don’t have room for many extras in their budget; does that mean their opinions aren’t worth reading? (Yes, I realize that wasn’t the intention behind the suggestion-- I mean no offense in pointing it out.) I am just not comfortable with the idea that money=speech; it feels antithetical to the spirit of the Guidelines, where all are free to express an opinion as long as they follow the rules.
I also don’t see it as a successful troll barrier. As others have said, professional trolls would consider the entry fee a bargain, or a write-off. Others won’t care, as long as they get to “troll the libs” (or whatever they’re calling it these days.) And our system already works fairly well at schooling the problem children as they pop up, so I feel the potential costs of “pay-to-play” would outweigh the benefits.
Please no entry fee. Boing Boing is the only community online that I feel safe contributing to. As someone on a disability/fixed income with no credit card or online payment option available to me, I would not be able to join. I have no idea how many here are in similar situations, but I would hate to lose their voices.
I feel it would only marginalize people who are already marginalize by society rather than be a barrier to trolls.
Many thanks to the wonderful moderators and regulars that make BBS as awesome as it is.
I like that idea a lot. I know one of the goals here has been to allow trusted community members take some of the smaller moderation tasks off your hands on occasion, so that would accomplish the same goal as an entry fee of catching the drive-bys, spammers and news-alert fanbois.
A feature that might be useful in regard to this user-based approval would be the opportunity for TL3 or TL4 people send the new user a note if needed for borderline cases (e.g. maybe the first comment is a good contribution, but there’s an aspect that breaks the rules or takes the wrong tone that might need to be edited before approval).
I know there have been a few times I’ve privately DMed a new user via the flagging mechanism with a “nice post, but…” suggestion – usually too late to prevent a derail when others responded badly to the problematic part.
I think most long-time community members with TL3 or above would be fine paying cost 1 for a BBS with fewer drive-bys. Cost 2 is a reasonable one for any new member of a community to pay.
It’s limited to first posts only. I think that’s reasonable. Drivebys and such the cause of a lot of flags and needless derails, as @orenwolf mentioned above. That’s why I suggested the Metafilter-style one-time fee, although I like this current suggestion for dealing with drive-bys more (probably easier for @codinghorror and team to implement, too).
Now that I think about it, management might also want to require the same user moderation hold on comments by users who haven’t posted in a long time (say two years) – I’ve noticed some years-old “sleeper” accounts set up by dwellers under bridges for future use (another option to achieve this might be to just automatically demote such long-inactive accounts to TL0, which may be happening in Discourse already).
I’m inclined to believe that people who stick around here long enough simply learn not to make waves. Because some people are just itching for the slightest excuse to steamroll someone else. Even if nearly everyone already agrees on nearly everything. Perhaps especially because nearly everyone agrees on nearly everything.
Anyway, this is the only thing that comes to mind when I think of successes in charging money to let people post on a forum:
I’ve never had a problem with boingboing comment sections. it seems really civil and the few times people are real jerks, they get moderated away pretty quickly. This idea seems like a solution to a nonexistant problem to me…
SA could get away for this for many reasons. Notoriety, influence, and most importantly, a profit motive built off of its reputation. They specifically wanted to exclude anybody that’s not willing to pay to play for the privilege of being part of the “in crowd”.
I would argue none of these things are what BoingBoing is about.
Still no. I remember that rash of snarky “Welcome to Boing Boing” responses from veteran BBS members that assumed that any new poster they disagreed with was a trolley.
I could do without those, too, which is why what @orenwolf suggests for first posts of TL0 users is a better option. The snarky “Velcome, comrade” messages can be fun (especially when aimed at new users from the I.R.A. factory in St Petersburg), but they have a tendency to derail topics.
Entry Fee, a.k.a. “Unless you have a valid credit card and money to spare (which may include conversion fees on non-US currency) you are not allowed to have on opinion. No poors allowed.”
Sure, it doesn’t seem like much for a one-time only admission but there are probably people here who couldn’t afford even that. Even though I could, I am not sure I want to hang around somewhere that only values you if you can.
I still think Slashdot still has the best user-moderated comment system of any forum and I’m certain you have considered adapting that for Discourse. Maybe it’s time to revisit that idea?
Specifically, I think you could let users tag a comment with more than just a heart. Why not have a row of buttons for troll, funny, agree, informative, etc…? Users that are here just for the lulz could sort by funny. I might be interested in contentious comments and could find them by listing for comments deemed by the community as both trollish and insightful.
The slashdot meta moderation system is very cool, but it requires a very large number of active users to work, more than most forums have. You have to have enough users to make a small number of users temporary mods, and enough users to make some meta moderators. And you still have to have actual mods. And even when it does work, the upvotting system favors early posts over quality posts. And when decent posts get upvoted “too high” they can get retributive down votes that take the posts way below their actual value. So as impressive as I think the slashdot system is, their threaded, ranked comment system has its own issues.
Any moderation system can only act on the comments that are there. It’s like Facebook having some of the most talented software developers on the planet, yet they are making something many of us think is bad.
That’s true. The exact system wouldn’t work here, but I think it does show that there are other idea out there other than the Facebook/Twitter model that Discourse is stuck on. All I’m really asking for is more buttons to click and some filters that use that data. For example, Jason’s dog recently died and it feels bad clicking on a “like this post” button. A more Boing Boingish button might be a hug button.
