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Pros and cons of comment moderation technologies (+ Poll)

"Truth is born in dispute . " The phrase is old, but still true. The advent of digital technology has opened up new opportunities for discussion. And it gave rise to a new problem - online culture observance. In this post, we discuss current online moderation technologies aimed at identifying information that violates the rules for conducting discussions. Various advantages and disadvantages of these technologies are considered.





Currently, there are three main approaches to the moderation of information presented in the figure below.





The fastest method and relatively cheap approach is automatic moderation. To which include the development of various kinds of spam filters, training of neural networks to detect violations. However, automatic tools have difficulty understanding the nuances of human communication. As a result, this leads to the fact that automatic tools have difficulty identifying a number of unlawful comments, for example, off-topic, useless or offensive, comments related to trolling other users, comments inciting hatred or hatred, inciting to something illegal etc.

Another not expensive and effective approach can be considered a collective moderation, in which the debate on their own, collectively remove the violation or source of the violation from their environment. However, collective moderation technology also faces some challenges. For example, this technology implies a sufficient number of voting users, which may simply not be typed to organize voting on a specific comment. Questions are also raised by the objectivity and impartiality of the ratings of voters based on a specific user comment.

Most widely in the field of moderation, the practice of attracting a designated moderator is used. This practice is effective and allows you to identify violations very accurately. However, the problem in using this practice is that not all Internet sites have the ability to pay for the work of a designated moderator, and therefore the administrators of many Internet resources are forced to independently perform this laborious work. Another problem is that in most cases, the appointed moderator and administrator do not participate in the discussion, which leads to certain time delays during moderation and the long-term presence of infringing information on the Internet resource that users cannot influence in any way.

Also, in addition to the listed approaches, a user moderation approach was proposed, which allows creating mutually beneficial conditions for ordinary users of digital platforms, in which they themselves, without involving a moderator, can maintain a culture of online communication. At the same time, the technology allows you to moderate comments objectively, without organizing a collective vote, attracting even just one user to moderation.

The proposed approach is based on the following:

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For greater clarity of user moderation, Habr’s readers can use a small test case in which this method is implemented. An example is a comment feed, in which there is an opportunity to try user moderation.

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