Should jellies be allowed to moderate their own general questions?

The OP shouldn’t have that power any more than staff moderators should.

Here’s a better idea:

Another Q&A site (that shall go unnamed) had a system that worked very well for many years. Instead of heavy-handed moderators, answers were rated up and down. Answers that received excessive down ratings were eventually removed (but stayed up long enough so that people couldn’t gang up on an unpopular person and downrate their answer off the site immediately). No ONE person could solely remove an answer. Of course, personal attacks and spam could be flagged and would removed by the mods immediately, but the mods there couldn’t use the “guidelines” as a thinly veiled excuse to censor comments they didn’t like.

I dislike the idea of questioners trying to control answers.

I think it should be left in the hands of the moderators.

If you, as the questioner want less strict answers, put your question in social.

I don’t think any of us should be modding others without being mods (especially if it would show who modded the response). We’ve all already seen the amount of crap the mods get for doing their job. I really doubt people would hesitate to make it personal if we started modding each other.

If the questioner thinks a response is off topic, they can flag it and the mods will take care of it. If a response is removed that the questioner didn’t think was off topic, they can PM the mods and ask them about it or ask them to put it back in place.

As far as the rating system @HungryGuy mentions, if an answer meets the guidelines, I don’t think it should be hidden just because there might be 20 people on the site that don’t agree with that one answers viewpoint. Some of our converstaions get into pretty heavy debates and sometimes it seems like there is one person posting for one side while there are 10 or 15 posting on the other side. If those 10 to 15 people negatively voted on the other person’s responses, they would end up being hidden, and I don’t think that’s right (just because their opinion was in the minority on the site).

No. That would lead to OP’s deleting answers just because they don’t like the Jelly. Someone has already asked if they can keep certain Jellies from even answering their question(s).

Sounds like a great way for us to maintain our own ignorance.

If you want to restrict the set of acceptable answers, ask a more specific question. So long as it’s in general, all responses that stray out of bounds may be flagged for moderation.

Hey teacher, leave those mods alone. Would be one way of addressing it. In short, I think the right people are already holding their position safely & fairly securely. Happy for it to remain so.

I wondered the same thing a little while ago.

It seems like an unnecessary complication to me. And an opportunity for personal animosities to intrude.

And if you want more strict answers, just say so. Say I wanted advice on how to follow a diet of vinegar and pebbles, I know people will immediately jump in and write, “That’s a dumb idea, don’t do it, you will hurt yourself!”

So I would state, “Please understand the question is not IF I want to eat vinegar and pebbles. The question is HOW. Please don’t comment if you don’t have advice.”

I’ve held my tongue in a few threads when people did that. I thought it was a smart way to keep out the riff-raff.

Yes, it’s unnecessarily complex. But it wouldn’t be a problem if the mods here weren’t so heavy-handed.

Alternatively, if they don’t want to give us the power to collectively self-moderate, another idea would be that a comment can be removed only if at least TWO mods flag it, or maybe three.

Or maybe it should require as many mods as GAs the answer has. For example, if an answer has 3 GAs, it takes at least 3 mods to flag the answer for it to be removed, but always a minimum of 2 mods at least to remove any answer.

I try to do this. I almost always ask questions exclusively in general, and there is always, always off-topic, chatty comments. I try to flag or make a comment that the question is not in social. Most of the time people get back on track, but sometimes any attempt to have drivel removed is completely ignored.

What @psychocandy said is probably the best solution. If you want a tailored response, tailor your question to get one and ask it in the general section. Think of it as “front end” moderation.

No, because answers can be helpful to others even if they’re not helpful to the OP – anyone that thinks fluther is about answering a person’s specific question only is delusional.

@HungryGuy From my understanding, all of the mods see what is modded and if there is a disagreement amongst the mods about moderation, the look at it as a group and make a decision that way.

According to the announcement, don’t look for further development of this site.
I am happy with it the way it is.

They kind of already do – they get to flag posts that are unhelpful or off topic or personal attacks.

LIsa and the mod squad are volunteers and doing this out of the goodness of their heart. I cannot imagine asking them to take on a heavier and really unnecessary work load.

No rating up and down. How many of us are pure enough to resist all temptation to misuse that power? Yarnlady might be, but I know I’m not.

But any requests for modification to Fluther functionality have pretty much been made moot by the fact that we are no longer in development mode but have moved on to caretaker mode with the departure of the fluthergods to other mountains.

@Jeruba

You can’t stop us from developing the site ourselves, given the chance…dammit. ;-)

?? We don’t control the software. Why would you think I was trying to stop development?

Sarcasm. But mostly commenting on the fact that if development is impossible, you’re right. But if it’s just in holding as the transition settles, etc., any discussion about development isn’t moot…but it should be recognized that it won’t happen for a while.

Just to clarify… the mod team consists of 15 people with diverse viewpoints and backgrounds. We all see every action taken by every mod, so there really isn’t any way that one mod could go rogue, or mod to suit their personal agenda.

I also want to dispel the myth that Fluther has been abandoned by it’s founders. it has not been abandoned, is not neglected, is sustained and perfectly functional in the design the founders created. The only change is that active development of new features in on hold.
The founders have even been participating in the discussions and asking questions. If anything they are now able to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

I also want to say- as I just did on another question- that we always err on the side of keeping content over removal. If it is not a clear we confer with one another or ask @augustlan to make the decision. @augustlan is fair and usually leans toward keeping the content.

Finally I want to point out that if a user wants to know why a quip was removed all they need to do is contact moderation and ask. :)

Of course jellies should be able to do that. I vote yes!!..whose with me?

It works on Newsvine. But they don’t really have mods so it seems worthless here. It would just be abused.

But the beauty of it is that it can’t be abused!

How it works on most other sites is that you rate a quip either up or down. We uprate quips already, it’s called a Great Answer. And we already downrate quips, too, it’s called Flag As…

Now, how self rating would work is that if a quip garnishes more Flags than Greats, it’s automatically deleted. But a single Flag won’t delete a quip…at least two or three Flags are required and must outnumber Greats. Quips are also not deleted immediately upon receiving sufficient Flags. To prevent abuse, 24 to 48 hours must pass to give a quip a change to earn both Flags and GAs so that a few people can’t gang up to remove a quip from someone they don’t like. Also, the mods can still be alerted to spam and personal attacks, which can be removed immediately by the mods.

@HungryGuy Even with a time delay, the feature can still be abused. It could be used to remove broadly unpopular opinions that have nothing worth moderating in them but that people just don’t want to bother dealing with and want to pretend were never written.

I agree with @SavoirFaire about the way down rating could be abused. As I said in the other thread, we’ve had many debates on Fluther that seem to be one person against many other people. The many other people could easily down rate the one person with an opposing view and cause their post to become hidden just because they were out numbered. To me, that would take away from the quality of the debate and Fluther.

Instead, there could be more focus on the really great answers to draw more attention to them (such as some kind of highlighting once they receive a certain number of GAs).

Also, if we (as in all of us here on Fluther) were really good with self-moderation, the mods wouldn’t have any work to do to begin with. We aren’t though. I’ve seen numerous jellies say they posted things even though they knew they would be removed for being off topic or whatever reason, but they just had to post them anyway. I’ve even done so myself because I just had to address something someone has said before that was very incorrect (even though it was off topic) because I didn’t want others to see the false information and think it was accurate.

Interestingly, I’ve seen quite a few personal attacks receive an enormous amount of GAs… far more GAs than flags, in fact. If a lot of people believe the member under attack is an idiot, for example, those attack answers would likely remain under the “self-mod” system proposed here. That just wouldn’t be cool.

@augustlan – Not only do a ton of personal attacks get a Great Answer. A lot are given after the quip has been removed. Days later. I wonder how that happens?~

It would relsult in a bias, and possibly “nazi-regime” attitude around answers. People with personal grudges, people who don’t like being wrong or people who are just plain jerks would be moderating answers willy nilly. I believe something like this could result in the death of fluther. Definitly a bad idea!

@augustlan – I’m not talking about personal attacks. I did say that the mods should remove personal attacks and spam immediately, didn’t I?

@HungryGuy Ah, ok. I was thinking it was totally flag-and-GA-driven.

@Not_the_CIA Magic?

I am totally going with that * magic * thought… ~