Moderation is a big topic in the community management space. For many, it automatically conjures up images of trolls and ban buttons. However in reality, high quality moderation goes way beyond that, and is equal parts an art form, psychology and science.
In a Google Hangout on Air yesterday as part of CMAD, modern community moderation was the hot topic discussed by Justin Isaf, Darren Gough, Caty Kobe, Sarah Hawk, Jenn Chen, Randy Farmer and Aurelia Butler-Ball. While I could easily write several long form posts around this topic, one specific debate caught my attention. That’s to downvote or not to downvote?
In theory, allowing community members to self-police their community with the ability to up and down vote posts is a great idea. The creme of the crop posts rise to the top. And, the spam and super negative whiny posts get filtered to relative obscurity at the bottom.
However for many community pros, like Randy Farmer, are adamantly against downvoting features.
“Don’t do it,” he said. “Downvotes are very difficult to get right.”
As Justin said, downvoting are rarely used as the community team envisioned them to be used. It’s most often used as a disagree button.
Take Facebook for example. The like button is everywhere. And, many people have been asking for a dislike or thumbs down feature on Facebook for years. However, there’s a reason there is no thumbs down feature yet. It undermines people’s motives for sharing content.
Everybody says they want a dislike button. Until, someone dislikes one of their posts. No one wants to have people judging them with one click without any explanation to why. It’s being judged without any reason. That becomes very problematic and damaging.
The same logic can go to just about any branded online community. According to Randy, regardless of how it’s worded (ex: like/dislike, upvote/downvote, or helpful/unhelpful,) most people instantly associate the latter option with disagree by default. That becomes almost impossible to interpret why they are disagreeing without some additional context, like in the form of a mandatory comment.
There’s certainly plenty of examples of communities struggling with all kinds of community issues caused by unintended downvoting consequences. One example that Darren brought up was hotukdeals.com. Community members vote on daily deals through a common hot/cold feature. When deals reach a certain level of hotness, it gets promoted to the front page of the site. However, this feature doesn’t have much utilitarian value and is easy to game. Once it hits the main page, the comments for each deal often divulge into mud-flinging.
That said, there are still some communities that manage to thrive even with downvotes. The biggest two being Reddit (which is it’s own beast, and I’ll save for another post) and Stackoverflow.
Stackoverflow has a very clever community strategy for tacking downvotes. A user can down vote another member, but it will cost them karma/reputation points. It creates another level of accountability and requires them to think before pressing the thumbs down feature.
For additional moderation tips, I strongly encourage you to check out this video recording of the modern moderation hangout. Some great tips and information in here.
Are you for or against downvotes? Do you have a downvote/dislike feature in your community? Why or why not?
