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>For example, it would have been perhaps useful to filter out all of the "Funny" replies on Slashdot The interface did indeed allow you to do this. At least, I

>For example, it would have been perhaps useful to filter out all of the "Funny" replies on Slashdot The interface did indeed allow you to do this. At least, I remember it being there in about 2001. Additionally, the metadata on voting was particularly important for meta-moderation which other platforms don't really have. Users were (at random) shown a comment that you've voted on and your vote. They then said whether your vote was fair or not, based on what they see. Stepping back a bit - the most important difference between the Slashdot system (vs something like Reddit) was that votes were much more limited on Slashdot. Not everyone had modpoints (votes) and you only got a handful at a time. This allowed meta-moderation to actually have some impact - if you continuously abused modpoints by downvoting someone as troll just because you disagreed with them then you wouldn't get banned - just you'd get less votes in the future. The system was a little opaque and I've not used the site in years but that was my understanding back then, it may have changed since then. While it's a bit complex I think the fundamental idea is very good. Ok making a distinction between informative vs insightful never seemed that useful to me, but certainly allowing people to hide "Funny" content definitely has value because funny one liners tend to crowd out other content by sheer volume.

JohnBooty 6y ago
I thought metamoderation was a brilliant idea, but I'm not sure if it had practical benefits. It's certainly very interesting to talk about, at least for me! Starting with the results and working backwards, I didn't find the results of moderation+metamoderation on Slashdot to be superior to subsequent sites like Reddit and HN that skipped the metamoderation portion. Why? I think metamoderation on Slashdot was ultimately redundant. The metamoderators were also the moderators. So your moderation was being moderated by the moderators that moderated the posts. The metamoderation was not really of a higher quality than the moderation, so it didn't really add much. Metamoderation was good at flagging grossly incompetent moderation, such as somebody seeing an ASCII swastika and upvoting it. However, as long as the community as whole is relatively healthy, that sort of poor moderation would be rendered moot anyway; such a post on Reddit would receive perhaps 98% downvotes and 2% upvotes, it's not clear to me that preventing that tiny 2% minority from voting in the future would be demonstrably better than simply drowning them out which is what happens by default anyway. Metamoderation could perhaps be useful if the metamoderators were guaranteed to be trusted, high-quality users. Slashdot tried to do something like that; IIRC you got the opportunity to meta-mod after you were up-modded yourself, so theoretically "better" posters were doing the meta-modding, but in practice I think this just added an extra layer of echoes to the echo chamber.
- DharmaPolice 6y ago
  I agree this is an interesting topic. You're right that the pool of moderators + meta-moderators was the same, but I think there's value in a kind of "peer review" for voting. On Reddit almost everyone (who expresses an opinion) complains that people use downvotes to disagree but I suspect that even the people complaining about it do the same thing from time to time (even if they rationalise it). Sometimes it's helpful for someone not involved in the argument to judge what you've done, even if that person is quite like you. It's pretty easy to imagine excluding anyone who replied to that same thread from meta moderating (or maybe doing something more sophisticated than that). It's not really about the trolls upvoting ASCII swastikas but the people regularly downvoting otherwise OK posts because they dislike someone's argument or their name or what they said in a completely different conversation. Or maybe it's about people upvoting low effort content (but for that to work, you would have different people metamoderating like you say). It's hard to judge based on outcomes but I always felt Slashdot made you think about voting in a slightly different way. The system as it was there wouldn't work with Reddit for a variety of reasons but it's still useful to think about.

JohnBooty 6y ago

I thought metamoderation was a brilliant idea, but I'm not sure if it had practical benefits. It's certainly very interesting to talk about, at least for me! Starting with the results and working backwards, I didn't find the results of moderation+metamoderation on Slashdot to be superior to subsequent sites like Reddit and HN that skipped the metamoderation portion. Why? I think metamoderation on Slashdot was ultimately redundant. The metamoderators were also the moderators. So your moderation was being moderated by the moderators that moderated the posts. The metamoderation was not really of a higher quality than the moderation, so it didn't really add much. Metamoderation was good at flagging grossly incompetent moderation, such as somebody seeing an ASCII swastika and upvoting it. However, as long as the community as whole is relatively healthy, that sort of poor moderation would be rendered moot anyway; such a post on Reddit would receive perhaps 98% downvotes and 2% upvotes, it's not clear to me that preventing that tiny 2% minority from voting in the future would be demonstrably better than simply drowning them out which is what happens by default anyway. Metamoderation could perhaps be useful if the metamoderators were guaranteed to be trusted, high-quality users. Slashdot tried to do something like that; IIRC you got the opportunity to meta-mod after you were up-modded yourself, so theoretically "better" posters were doing the meta-modding, but in practice I think this just added an extra layer of echoes to the echo chamber.

DharmaPolice 6y ago
I agree this is an interesting topic. You're right that the pool of moderators + meta-moderators was the same, but I think there's value in a kind of "peer review" for voting. On Reddit almost everyone (who expresses an opinion) complains that people use downvotes to disagree but I suspect that even the people complaining about it do the same thing from time to time (even if they rationalise it). Sometimes it's helpful for someone not involved in the argument to judge what you've done, even if that person is quite like you. It's pretty easy to imagine excluding anyone who replied to that same thread from meta moderating (or maybe doing something more sophisticated than that). It's not really about the trolls upvoting ASCII swastikas but the people regularly downvoting otherwise OK posts because they dislike someone's argument or their name or what they said in a completely different conversation. Or maybe it's about people upvoting low effort content (but for that to work, you would have different people metamoderating like you say). It's hard to judge based on outcomes but I always felt Slashdot made you think about voting in a slightly different way. The system as it was there wouldn't work with Reddit for a variety of reasons but it's still useful to think about.