Concepts / Moderating

Moderating is the name we give the subset of governance that structures participation in a community to facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse (Grimmelman, J. 2015). It is a feature of all community, digitalized or not. It’s part and parcel of being social.

To date, social network moderating is taken on by a small minority of users and / or paid moderators focused on global content removal.

Decentralized social (dsocial) networking is more likely to encourage all participants to play their part, amplifying and attenuating behaviours, locally and contextually. The diligent digitalization of human identity will be critical.

Community entails conversation and other interactions. Moderating may then be framed as conversation about the conversation (first-order feedback loop), and governance more broadly as conversation about the conversation about the conversation (second-order feedback loop).

🔗 LINKS

• Grimmelmann, J. (2015). The virtues of moderation. Yale JL & Tech., 17, 42.
• Seering, J. (2020). Reconsidering Community Self-Moderation: the Role of Research in Supporting Community-Based Models for Online Content Moderation. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact, 3.
• Chandrasekharan, E., et al (2018). The Internet’s hidden rules: An empirical study of Reddit norm violations at micro, meso, and macro scales. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2(CSCW), 1-25.
• Sheldrake, P. (2021). Community Moderating — Bringing Our Best. Ethereum World blog.
• Sheldrake, P. (2021). Two Concepts of Liberty and Infinite Permutations of Moderating. Ethereum World blog.