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[Idea] Player Mods

Hyrum Graff·6/23/2014, 2:49:52 PM·2 votes·321 views

Edit: I have since come up with a better idea, IMO, which is here. OP at bottom.

Last week, a rioter (I don't remember who) made a comment to the following effect:

Player: If a thread is in the wrong sub-comm, why do you close/delete it, instead of just moving it to the correct sub-comm?

Rioter: It's a more sustainable long-term practice. As the CB's current size, we could do what you proposed, but when GD migrates over - the extra couple seconds to do this per post adds up into thousands of hours of work; we just won't have the manpower. Furthermore, we want to encourage people to post in the right sub-comm to begin with; if we make a practice of moving posts, it encourages the mindset of "I'll just post this wherever because I know it'll get moved to the right sub-comm."

The fundamental issue here is scaling - as the CB population rises, Riot just can't do so much involved moderation. The problem with their intended approach, though, is that many people who post, aren't regular posters, and are liable to make mistakes. Having your post deleted because of an honest mistake, isn't a good experience.

So, with that in mind, what if we had a network of Player Mods, who are normal community members who are able to move content to the correct boards, while Riot Mods were looking for inappropriate content, spam, etc. The larger the community gets, the larger the pool of potential Mods, so there's no scaling issue. Here's how I envision it to work:

Right now, there's a "Report" button for posts, and one of the options is "Incorrect Board".

  • Under the new system, when you click that option, it will also ask you "What board does this post belong in?"

Riot and Player Mods can look at a list of posts that have been flagged as being in the Incorrect Board (I'll just call these misposts/misposted from now on), and move them to the correct board. When they move the post, the CB keeps track of which players reported the post, and which selected the sub-comm that it was actually moved to.

  • When a player consistently reports misposts and reliably selects the correct board for them, they are automatically promoted to player mod status. Now this player can go look at the list of posts that have been reported as misposts and move them.

If this player moves a post, and after they move it, it is reported as a mispost again, this post will be brought to the attention of the other player mods (put at the top of the listing of misposts), where they will vote on the sub-comm it belongs in. If they vote that it was moved incorrectly, the player who moved it will lose their mod privileges (maybe they'll get two strikes).

  • Now we have an automated system for the community to self-promote and self-regulate mods. Riot can adjust their algorithms so that they always have the optimum number of active player mods to keep the forums well-, but not over-regulated.

If this promotes the mindset of "It doesn't matter where I post it because it'll get moved to the right forum anyway," I don't think this is a problem. It's only a problem in the current situation because Riot lacks the manpower to regulate misposting of that magnitude.

Moreover, I think that mindset is preferable to the mindset of "Riot's Mods are evil dictator police who over-regulate their forums and delete constructive threads just to enforce their forum rules," which is something that could arise from Riot's current vision of Mods.

####OP Below

What if there were a group of known, trusted, constructive, active forum users (like the lovely Sir Armamalum) who were given SOME mod privileges (ability to close/move threads for being in the wrong sub-comm; NOT the ability to ban/restrict players' access)?

They could potentially alleviate the amount of work that the paid mods. I also feel that "Community regulating itself" is a nicer way to have things than "Riot regulating the Community."

Thoughts?

10 Comments

12tales6/23/2014, 3:17:25 PM1 votes

It seems to me that this would only be necessary if the current moderators were unable to adequately cover the entire community beta, which would surprise me - with the exception of the posts that show up in the client, the community beta seems to be relatively low activity.

It's also worth asking yourself - if Riot would have the power to instate the members of the community who would do the regulating, and would presumably outline exactly what is expected of said memebers - is there any meaningful distinction between Riot[whomever] and Community Member [whomever] doing the moderating? It seems to me that exactly the same things would be done either way.

12tales6/24/2014, 1:28:57 PM1 votes

re: Hyrum Graff

I have no clue. I assume not, though. 100k threads/week -> 14.3k threads/day -> 600 threads/hour -> 10 threads per minute. GD's frontpage has 50 threads. I just did a test bump. There were around 24 threads that were bumped to a higher position than the one I bumped, in around a minute. While the average number of replies was 9 (not inc OP), 14 posts had 3 or fewer replies: 6 of those were 1-reply threads and 4 were no-reply threads. 10 posts with only 0 or 1 reply in a minute - considering how unscientific this was, that's close enough for me to say that Tamat's estimate isn't completely out of the ballpark.

This is difficult to address without the real statistics on thread creation in front of me, and even with those numbers I'd need to know how the mod interface works on this platform to weigh the amount of work involved.

Still, let's assume that the Community Beta will be getting 100k threads a week at some point in the future, and use Tamat's numbers (10% of them are misfiled, it takes 30 seconds to move a thread). At the moment, there are 7 permanent subcommunities that have significant activity. If we assume that threads are misfiled indiscriminately, that gives us ~1400 misfiled threads per subcommunity, or just shy of 12 hours of work per week per subcommunity. We then end up with 1.7 hours of maintenance per subcommunity per day, which we can divide by the number of moderators who will be performing that maintenance. With three mods per sub community, for instance, that totals to just over half and hour of work that each person needs to do each day. Naturally, all of these numbers are halved if his lower estimate (15 seconds) is correct.

Of course, that half hour is the difference between moving misfiled threads, and just throwing up your hands and never touching the mod interface again. In evaluating how much extra work would need to be done, you'd have to subtract the amount of time it takes to delete all of the threads.

So, at worst, with a community beta that gets 100k threads every week, it takes 20 bros willing to put in ~20-30 minutes per day to completely resolve the issue of misfiled threads. That can be weighed against the frustration and cynicism that deleting content people have put time and effort into causes, and the negative impact inspiring such feelings has on user retention.

-snip nazi mods-

The Tribunal was anonymous and at least nominally democratic. If you've ever seen how a kid in school gets treated when he tells someone off to the teacher, you know how a lot of people react to being 'moderated' by one of their own.

Do they react to player moderation the same way, though?

I'm inclined to say so. The forum I moderate uses volunteer mods exclusively, and we've still been accused of favoritism, communism, fascism, nazism, and simple dickishness on a regular basis for as long as I can remember.