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EnergyNumbers's avatar

I was a moderator on one of the StackExchange communities for a year or two. The StackOverflow/StackExchange management team had put a lot of thought into moderation, and set up a framework that seemed reasonably successful.

They'd realise that moderation effort had to scale with community size, so volunteer moderators were drawn in from each community's most responsible and dedicated users, as it grew. They shared a single online chat-room ("The Teachers' Lounge") for moderators across all Stack communities, where they could support each other and seek advice from their peers, and from staff members. And the staff members acted as supervisors, and Appeal Judges, when a moderator's judgement was questioned.

And crucially, there was quantitative support too: any user could raise a flag for content to receive a moderator's attention: the handling moderator would mark the flag as helpful or unhelpful; and a user's running proportion of helpful flags, weighted to more recent results, was used to prioritise that user's future flags.

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Edward Harrison's avatar

One other thought here, Travis. I liken comments to shopping. If you go to a discount retailer looking for clothes, you find a lot of gems in a mass of stuff. But it takes hours and hours to sift through. If you're time constrained, sifting through stuff is something you just can't do so you shop somewhere where you're likely to find good stuff in a very short period of time even if it is more expensive to shop there. If you take the same thought to comments, then Twitter is like the discount retailer but one with tons of stuff you don't want. The key for Musk should be to make the 'shopping' for replies to power users beneficial enough to keep them on the platform because I think a small subset of active non-company users drive engagement. And it's those users who are least likely to get quality mentions.

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