Another moderation risk is that whoever is moderating has an incentive to delete people’s potentially successful posts and repost under their own or a friend’s alt account
People attach a lot of value to fake internet points, so these bad behaviours are already incentivised.
What will be interesting is how they are incentivised differently. Different people attach different relative value to fake internet points and less-fake currency points, so you'll get different behaviour from different sets of people.
But it will be gamed and abused by people that care about fake internet points. Those are very different people from those who want to extract as much money by any means available
If it gets successful enough that people really want to game it, the creator will have proven their concept and can try to tweak it as necessary. I think that would be a fine problem to have.
The basic incentive of money drives all sorts of things. Maybe the best “exploit” will be to find interesting and novel links.
I think the simplest around that is to pay the moderators. So given the $2
- $1 goes to the server
- $.67 goes to the users you upvote
- $.33 goes to the moderator(s) of the group you upvoted in.
So there's actual incentive to want to mod to begin with, and less incentive to risk that by trying to game for post votes as well.
Now ofc I already see a half dozen issues here, so we'd need to deviate strongly from reddit to make this work:
- you can't just create subs willy-nilly. You don't even want that in the beginning anyway because you shouldn't splinter a small community. There would need to be a formal way to talk to an admin and request any new sub. Or at least, we need to delineate from a monetized sub vs. non-monetized, with ways to transition from one to the other.
- This encourages small mod groups and you don't want mods to be able to pick/kick at will now that money is involved. Again, new mods would need some more admin intervention for moderator changes.
- As you can assume, A senior mod won't be equal to a newly recruited mod. So it probably isn't the best idea to spread that mod fund equally per se.
- Mod posts would need to be taken into account as well. Maybe moderators (and possible alts) can't make money off their own posts to avoid double dipping
Lot of interesting ideas to go about. So I hope this site does at least get some visibility
That sounds good on paper, but I can only imagine it would lead to even worse lowest-common-denominator chasing than exists on reddit right now. Why would the moderators choose to enforce quality standards when crappy (but highly upvoted) memes make them more money?
Ideally that's up to the community. The ideal counter-reaction of this is "Well I'll make my own sub, and attract people tired of memes". In this model, there will hopefully be a sizeable subscriber community, so you don't need to appeal to the masses if the ones willing to put their money where they mouths make the move.
But if not, and if memes are what subscribers want to use all their votes on, well... the experiment fails in my eyes (even if it may be a success as a business).
That's also why I feel we need at least two tiers of votes, personally. There will be times where you want to vote on a cheap but funny meme but you don't exactly want to say "yes, this is the content I pay for". A version of vote that says "I don't mind it but obviously you shouldn't make money on this" may help curb that as more of the super votes go to actual quality content. But nothing is bullet proof when you let the people decide.
Perhaps meta-moderation would work in this scenario? Randomly assign previous moderation choices (anonymizing the moderator) for users to rank. This could to identify moderators that are out of line. It could also lead to echo chambers though.
If meta-moderation powers were assigned randomly and uniformly, this could be gamed by just spam-creating tons of accounts. Any system that accepts user input needs to have a robust answer to the question "What if a significant percentage of my users are actually bots under control of a single person?"
I wonder how much would a government intelligence or defense department who controls millions of bot accounts be willing to pay per month in order to have even a small percentage of power over who gets to mod (for example) r/ukraine?
Yes, and to some extent, what's at stake is to get to choose the next president (or future dictator) in the US.
What's that worth for, say Xi in China - look at how much he is ok with spending on invading Taiwan. And how much he'd save, if a to him a more friendly person (Trump) became the president. Then compare that with $2
I do like /. meta-moderation, but I also feel that the ones contributing the most, interacting the most (via votes/comments) should have a vote to who they want their moderators to be on a regular basis.
when you dont rely on advertiser support you arent beholden to their desires of moderation
when a sub-forum crosses a threshold of insensitivity, just remove it from search and let those fans direct link
sub forums can remain popularity contests where community decides if anything there is a good fit. theyre already echo chambers and nobody is aiming to solve that so just run it that way
