Re: Testing Discourse for Debian - Moderation concepts
On Mon, 2020-04-13 at 19:56 +0100, Neil McGovern wrote:
> Instead of explaining it here, please have a
> read of the following:
> https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/
> The short version is that the more a particular account interacts with
> the community in a positive way, the more trust the system has about
> them, and the more privileges they are afforded to assist in
> moderation.
I think some features of Discourse can be useful, for example moving
messages to new topic, simple polls (I don't like "like" buttons...),
or even editing messages to make the wording clearer instead of sending
further follow-up messages. Trying to experiment with Discourse for
this seems useful to me.
The "trust levels" though are one of the features that I don't like: in
particular "Trust Level 3 - Regular" mostly requires to constantly
visit the site every day (or every other day), read x% of all posts and
topics (even though they might not be relevant to your interest or in a
foreign language you don't speak), ... to not get demoted again. It
feels more like a customer loyality program to try to bind users to the
Discourse service, like rewards for daily visits in mobile games, not
anything that implies trust to somehow govern the system. The system
also requires tracking active read time and such; I don't really like a
system doing that...
The notifications to welcome new people or that the system hasn't seem
someone for some time[1] also seem designed to manipulate people into
spending more time on the system. Such psychological tricks are
something I would more expect from Facebook than Debian :-/
[1]: https://discourse.debian.net/t/likes-per-post-ratio/152/2
The claim of Discourse having an excellent email interface also feels
exagerrated: unless I missed something[2] it seems very basic. One can
send and receive messages, but quoting in replies already doesn't work
as usual and any additional functionality isn't exposed at all as far
as I can tell. That said I'm in principle fine with trying a mostly
web-only system; just like GitLab also really needs to be used over the
web.
[2]: I couldn't really find much Discourse documentation, even less
than for other things in Debian people say are underdocumented.
> Instead, it encourages community members to flag posts. If a post receives
> sufficient flags, it is then automatically hidden. Users may chose to
> "unhide" the post for themseleves if they wish to view it.
>
> These are then sent to the moderating team to agree, disagree or
> ignore the flag.
What decides who is in the moderation team? That seems to be something
different from the trust levels?
I would also expect Discourse to have some way to entirely remove
messages, or at least remove the original content fully and replace it
with a notice that the message was removed; who can do that? Also the
moderation team?
Ansgar
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