So it sounds like thoughts on moderation are fair game for this thread, so a couple thoughts from my experience as part of a moderation team for one of the soc.religion.* USENET newsgroups back in the day. As you can imagine (religion!), there was a lot of fraught-ness (to coin a word) going on there.
But you know what made it work? It was that we had three rules:
- Clear outlawed topics: There was precisely one topic that, for historical reasons, was simply off-limits.
- No insults: No insulting other participants in the newsgroup, and insults directed toward public figures had to be either generic or framed explicitly as opinion.
- Topicality: Posts were, in general, required to deal with the topic of the newsgroup. We did allow posts that weren't particularly on topic for the newsgroup, but we required them to be explicitly labeled NNOT (for Not Necessarily On Topic).
But crucially, we did not have any rules that thread drift was impermissible, because those sorts of side conversations were part of what created a community and made people want to stay.
(The frequency with which NNOT threads that had any real length to them ultimately turned to the topic of the newsgroup, BTW, was higher than one might have expected.)
Those rules were easy for people to understand, and so it worked. Sometimes posters argued “Hey, that wasn’t an insult, it was a fact!” which was usually laughable, but sometimes they won on appeal, and we admitted we’d been overzealous.
We also, due to our topicality rules, didn’t allow discussion of politics—unless it was politics that dealt in some way with the topic of the newsgroup, in which case it was game on! And you know what? Some people went overboard with it occasionally, but the social norms of everyone else on the group ended up taking care of that naturally. It was kind of an amazing thing to see, honestly—emergent order is a very real and powerful thing.
Also, as moderators we did not appreciate people who tried to tell us that certain posts were wrong for the group. There were two main reasons for this: One was that we were after a community, and having people anonymously report on each other seemed wrong for that; and the other was that anyone who did that was basically trying to impose their ideal structure on the group, when we wanted a structure that the community developed.
This last one is related to something that’s been alluded to a few times in discussions of, e.g., the covid threads—there are people who are flagging lots of posts as inappropriate for the group. In a system like CC, where there’s no up-front moderation, flagging posts serves a useful end—but unlimited anonymous (to other users, that is) user flagging incentivizes a certain sort of person to go overboard with it. Maybe a (low) limit on the number of posts someone can flag in a single day? That would help limit the people—and let’s be honest, we know they’re there—who are out there flagging posts not because those posts are inappropriate, but because the posts disagree with their worldview.
p.s. During my 10 years minus one day as a moderator of that newsgroup. we banned precisely two people: One for consistently attempting to post personal insults and clogging up the moderation queue with them, and another for misrepresenting themself as a (topical for the newsgroup) public figure who they weren’t. Outright trolls eventually got tired of it and went away, or wised up and started actually interacting.
