What is the difference between moderation and mediation on question and answer sites?

I have never seen anyone attempt mediation. I was thinking about that earlier today. My feeling is that if there was no moderation, that some people might start trying to mediate. Maybe if they had enough status, they might get somewhere.

The problem is that you can’t mediate if you have power. Mediators must exert power through persuasion. Most people don’t have the patience and tolerance for that, and in the end, they resort to moderation. If you do that, no one will have any trust in you, and there’s no point.

My guess is that most sites use moderation because that’s the only thing they can control. If people won’t behave in an acceptable way, they will be deleted.

What you do depends on what the owners of the site want. I think most owners want people to be nice—although what nice is, is kind of hard to define. Some people have much thinner skins than others.

But I don’t know of any sites that use mediation. They must be out there. Any examples?

@wundayatta I have an example where a site owner responded to an comment on the sites moderation and explained that the site is free of charge, and that his staff make every effort not to be biased towards religion, or belief as long as the two sides don’t overly attack one another. The owner received some comments back about the users providing a service to the site free of charge as well.

Before I was a mod, I would try to mediate issues between users sometimes when questions got out of hand in order to try to restore the question. It was usually done in PM though and not right in the question as to avoid causing more off topic chatter. For example, there was one time when two users were not getting along at all and accusing each other of following each other from one question to the next just to harass each other. It was really spreading across multiple questions and messing up people’s questions. I spoke with both of them in PM to try to get them to just ignore each other. It worked for that night and from then on as far as I’ve seen. I did it because I was getting tired of seeing them mess up so many conversations with their bickering. There have been time in questions as well that I have tried to mediate issues with users ganging up on someone as well. It just depended on the mood I was in at the time and was nothing official with Fluther.

The mods here do attempt mediation, it’s mostly done privately and in conjunction with moderation when things get out of hand in a question.

To me, the difference is the overall outcome.

With moderation, things that are off topic or attacks are removed, hopefully before they can cause more off topic remarks or attacks. Moderation is a quick fix.

Mediation is done behind the scenes to try to restore peace on the site and get users who are at each other’s throat to calm down a bit. If the mediation was done in the question, it would cause more off topic conversation, so it really has no place to be done in public. Mediation is meant to have a long term fix.

I would think the goal of mediation would be to get people to gain some communality of purpose, not to “calm down” folks. If you’re just going to calm people down, you only need moderate them.

@wundayatta Not all people are calmed down from being moderated alone. Actually, for many, it gets them more riled up and they often come back with more comments/PMs because of the moderation. Simply removing the offending comment does not solve the problem at hand, it’s meant to preserve the question and hopefully prevent more issues from coming up. Mediation helps calm people down because it discusses the situation and tries to get at the big issue instead of just what is seen at the surface. For many people, when a disagreement gets to the point of attacks, there are other issues at play other than just what was read on the computer screen at that one instance. Sometimes there isn’t a communality of purpose to be had and the mediation leads to people just having to ignore each other if they can’t be civil toward each other.

Sad.

Mediation: ”[mod says] Flame off, folks. There’s no need to make this personal.”

Moderation: Removed.