Hi,
The CSAM scandal the other day got me thinking about the (often lacking) capability of the Threadiverse to deal with quickly with content moderation, and since PieFed has already been a bit experimental in this regard, I figured maybe this is a place where I could ask if an idea is feasible. Sorry if it’s a bad match!
The idea is to identify trusted users, in the same way that PieFed currently identifies potentially problematic users. Long term users with significantly more upvotes than downvotes. These trusted users could get an additional option to report a post, beyond “Report to moderator”: Something like “Mark as abuse”.
The user would be informed that this is meant for content that clearly goes against the rules of the server, that any other type of issue should be reported to moderators, and that abuse of the function leads to revoke of privilege to use it and, if intentional, potentially a ban.
If the user accepts this and marks a post as abuse, every post by the OP of the marked post would be temporarily hidden on the instance and marked for review by a moderator. The moderator can then choose to either 1) ban the user posting abusive material, or 2) make the posts visible again, and remove the “trusted” flag of the reporting user and hence avoiding similar false positives in the future.
A problem I keep seeing on the threadiverse is that bad content tends to remain available too long, as many smaller instances means that the moderating team might simply all be asleep. So this seems like one possible way of mitigating that. Maybe it’s not technically feasible, and maybe it’s just not a particularly good idea; it might also not be a particularly original idea, I don’t know. But I figured it might be worth discussing.
I like this spin on it!
I guess it would have to tie in with the existing report function - it doesn’t make much sense to have users report something as abuse if they don’t think it’s worth warning a moderator over. At that point it sounds like a downvote should be enough.
It could also be a challenge if it is taken too lightly - say someone posts something wildly controversial but within the boundaries of free speech, such a post about pineapple on pizza in a foodporn community. A large number of users might report it to moderators for more or less serious reasons, but it would be unfortunate if this caused the temporary removal of the post without moderator action.
It should probably be established in the reporting procedure not only that the user is credible, but also that the user actually believes that it is necessary to remove the post as opposed to other moderator action.