Moving on from a dedicated staff team

[Thomasss]

What if online communities were moderated..by themselves? Members using a reputation system to flag inappropriate content, and the system hiding said content from the public. From members being banned because of their negative reputation, without the ability to appeal. Your account, content, and ultimate fate on that site, completely determined by the community members instead of just a dedicated staff team.

A lot of sites use it, honestly. Stack Exchange for example uses it, and I remember a game that I looked into long ago that had a system like this where community members would vote on if they think their guilty or innocent (basically like a jury) and the system would go based off of the majority vote. They would get into the system by being reported for something.

Do you think this is the new beginning to how communities will work in the future? Do you think forums would end up adopting this system so they don't have to worry about hiring moderators, let alone training them?

Do you think a system like that in-of-itself is at all reliable?

 

[Shannon Apple]

No, absolutely not. We need mods.

You have a handful of people that of course none of the staff like... probably no one likes them, but they haven't done enough to get banned. Maybe the community would get rid of them and you'd no longer have to worry about dealing with their semi toxic presence, but then again...

Back a few years ago we introduced the reputation system, which became known as "e-peen" within the community. Of course, these people are creative. haha. They had a competition going on for the most e-peen. lol. People were complaining about comments left and vBulletin had no options for mods to remove unfair bad rep, so it was removed and replaced by the voting system. Members could upvote good posts and downvote bad posts. Bad posts would be hidden from view after so many downvotes over upvotes.

Guess what happened lol. They mass downvoted all administrator posts and some mods too. That had to go lol. We had a very silly community. I think they matured past that somewhat, but I wouldn't put that on the new site haha. Just don't feel like testing it again. XD.