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Require sign-up. Implement karma, with voting. Restrict user commenting to 1/day until karma > X. No downvoting possible until karma > 2X. Put temporary blocks

Require sign-up. Implement karma, with voting. Restrict user commenting to 1/day until karma > X. No downvoting possible until karma > 2X. Put temporary blocks on users who derail threads or attempt to people-please with one-liners, etc. Ban users who attack other users. Most importantly, make downvoting cost one karma point per downvote.

rhizome 15y ago
signups are fine, karma is fine, but killing anonymity is not necessary. i read plenty of sites that allow anonymous commenting and the lynchpin for success here is the rarely-considered feature of user flagging. metafilter does great with this, though they don't allow pure anonymity. if you have a way for people to flag what they think is bad stuff, you don't have to moderate every comment (a la boingboing and others) and you don't give people a free-for-all. additionally, it allows a user culture for the site to emerge as a collective tone is carved through the kinds of posts that get removed or downvoted. this is a big thing. i think a lot of sites are jumping on the no-anonymity bandwagon because that's what third-party commenting sites push in order to pump up (i'm speculating) registration numbers. disqus allows (or allowed at the beginning) anonymous commenting, but i haven't seen any site that uses disqus to allow it. i think this is a market failure. i saw third-party commenting as a way for sites to no longer have to implement their own user registration facilities regardless of whether they allowed anonymous commenting. they just figure hey, we can have our bloggers be able to log in, keep that part simple, and then throw the rabble to disqus for them to deal with. typically i've found this causes the commenting culture to shrink a great deal. i think there's space for a third-party comment provider to allow arbitrary name/email(will not be shown)-type anonymity, while still implementing flagging, voting/karma and, perhaps most-importantly, IP-banning. it wouldn't be perfect, but i do think it would allow more freedom on both sides: to comment, and to be (more) free of moderation overhead.
arkitaip 15y ago
"Restrict user commenting to 1/day until karma > X. No downvoting possible until karma > 2X" Which would mean that your comment wouldn't be allowed as your account was created two hours ago ;)
- Joakal 15y ago
  Also would mean that spammers would create multiple accounts while the 'good poster' typically only wants one. Scenario; Spammers can then upvote each other in a circlejerk while the good poster is downvoted heavily.
nkurz 15y ago
Why do you feel that paying for downvotes is important? It's possible we're looking at the same problem differently, but I'd be just as excited about limiting the number of upvotes. I feel it's the ratio that matters, not the sheer numbers.
cmars 15y ago
on a per-site basis? coming from google & aggregators, who would bother to sign up? similar reason I don't contribute on SO... I don't have anything to prove, I might have wanted to share some help, but I don't need to waste my time jumping through their hoops and silly badge games to contribute.

rhizome 15y ago

signups are fine, karma is fine, but killing anonymity is not necessary. i read plenty of sites that allow anonymous commenting and the lynchpin for success here is the rarely-considered feature of user flagging. metafilter does great with this, though they don't allow pure anonymity. if you have a way for people to flag what they think is bad stuff, you don't have to moderate every comment (a la boingboing and others) and you don't give people a free-for-all. additionally, it allows a user culture for the site to emerge as a collective tone is carved through the kinds of posts that get removed or downvoted. this is a big thing. i think a lot of sites are jumping on the no-anonymity bandwagon because that's what third-party commenting sites push in order to pump up (i'm speculating) registration numbers. disqus allows (or allowed at the beginning) anonymous commenting, but i haven't seen any site that uses disqus to allow it. i think this is a market failure. i saw third-party commenting as a way for sites to no longer have to implement their own user registration facilities regardless of whether they allowed anonymous commenting. they just figure hey, we can have our bloggers be able to log in, keep that part simple, and then throw the rabble to disqus for them to deal with. typically i've found this causes the commenting culture to shrink a great deal. i think there's space for a third-party comment provider to allow arbitrary name/email(will not be shown)-type anonymity, while still implementing flagging, voting/karma and, perhaps most-importantly, IP-banning. it wouldn't be perfect, but i do think it would allow more freedom on both sides: to comment, and to be (more) free of moderation overhead.

arkitaip 15y ago

"Restrict user commenting to 1/day until karma > X. No downvoting possible until karma > 2X" Which would mean that your comment wouldn't be allowed as your account was created two hours ago ;)

Joakal 15y ago
Also would mean that spammers would create multiple accounts while the 'good poster' typically only wants one. Scenario; Spammers can then upvote each other in a circlejerk while the good poster is downvoted heavily.

nkurz 15y ago

Why do you feel that paying for downvotes is important? It's possible we're looking at the same problem differently, but I'd be just as excited about limiting the number of upvotes. I feel it's the ratio that matters, not the sheer numbers.

cmars 15y ago

on a per-site basis? coming from google & aggregators, who would bother to sign up? similar reason I don't contribute on SO... I don't have anything to prove, I might have wanted to share some help, but I don't need to waste my time jumping through their hoops and silly badge games to contribute.