The social Internet's linchpin has almost always (since as long as I can remember) been that it requires a certain kind of person to be an unpaid community manager (by any name), and nearly every site you visit (wikipedia, stackoverflow, reddit, etc) makes use of these nonployees.
Oh man I volunteered to moderate on a large gaming related forum ages ago. The amount of BS you deal with along with personal attacks and etc is pretty high. I never felt emotionally upset by it as I felt you had to maintain an even keel .... but it certainly is not a job for everyone and the rub is the folks who WANT to do it the most are often the worst at it. Being a good moderator is not a skill everyone has, but it's also not valued in any real way by most communities / companies.
Really the most frustrating aspect were the non trouble users who seemed to go to bat for the folks who were truly bad actors because of some perceived injustice (lie)... and all the meta that goes into that.
- an administrator completely shutting the board down overnight because of a romantic encounter that went down poorly.
- a prolific troll - who finally finally got enough of his accounts, sub-accounts, and sock puppet accounts banned that he effectively lost access to the site - texting me late at night demanding an explanation for why he was banned.
- people being outraged that we asked them to donate a small amount of money (somewhere around a hundred dollars, collectively) to help run the server, then offering to run it on their spare computer in their basement
- discovering that due to a relatively unknown feature of PhpBB, we had a whole secondary parasite community that didn't show up in user registrations, and that had a whole private forum set up that nobody else on the board was aware of. It was like opening up a basement closet and discovering that it's a secret night club.
Edit: Actually this link probably makes more sense: https://kotaku.com/the-secret-douglas-adams-rpg-people-have-...
I hate the word "entitlement" because I think it gets used wrong a lot, but oh man folks perspective when it comes to the internet ... a lot of that. Users just feel it should be free and even a minute of downtime and they want answers, about a gaming forum (god help them if they just went to play games for a bit).
As for the prolific troll thing, one site I worked (well volunteered) was a popular commercial gaming site back in the day. Threats, fake accounts claiming to be lawyers, etc. The site made money and all and had some really dedicated trolls. One they actually took legal action against. I assumed it was just some kid with too much time. Turned out to be a dude in his 40s.... in fact many of the most dedicated trolls turned out to be adults. Kinda shocking to me at the time as I was younger then and just assumed they'd be young dumb kids like me...
The handful of actual legal actions never were well known, it was amusing as the dedicated trolls talk big about every perceived injustice or slight or straight up lie they would make. Even posting on other sties about it.
But the only legal actions I was aware of, word never got out. I suspect when it gets real they get quiet fast, or their lawyer tells them to shut up.
This is correct.
As someone who has run forums for a number of years, I can honestly say I've fired 70% of the volunteers for exactly that reason. They wanted to impress their clique and use the power. In reality, it is more about using that power as little as possible except for things that might create a legal issue. (i.e. DMCA)
The other 30% I got rid of were due to activity. (i.e. Would go inactive for 30+ days without notice)
Instead of
"Hunt down bad content and delete it!"
they should use
"Hunt down good content and promote it!"
Why not create a premium version of the product that features only chosen content?
Creators can do what they always did and maybe they're even motivated to become "premium creators".
You're looking for a solution that aligns with your thesis. You're not going to find one.
I mean what should they do?
Write two pages for every article, one where everyone could write and one where moderators accumulate the quality content?
That won't scale.
Maybe they need a VCS based approach, that merges only quality content but keeps all low-quality content in dead-end branches.
I don't know what the solution would be, but the current approach is sub-optimal. Not because it's not nice to delete the work of people, but because they don't motivate people to do a better job.
The people who do them end up being people who volunteer to be "paid" with the opportunity to go on a power trip.
I've not had experience of it myself, but I've heard from some people who have worked at high profile charities that a similar thing happens there.
So, is it kind of like if you desire to be a politician (or any position of power), you are definitely not the kind of person who should be a politician?
There's another even more fundamental problem though which emerges at every stage. The people who want to participate the most at any stage are not the most qualified, and the people who are qualified to answer are busy doing instead of answering. It's not just that inevitably you need to kick out bad content, it's that the people doing the kicking out don't know enough to judge what is good and what is not.
So by the time you get to the recruiting moderator stage most of the people interested in becoming gatekeepers/moderators are not at all the people you actually want to be gatekeepers (those people are generally too busy or not very good at such things), and your moderators are a self-selecting group who are more interested in form and adherence to rules than content.
Not following, SO has always had pretty strict rules on quality from 2009 forward. There's no inflection point here.
When they start, senior players in their field of work laugh at them because they don't have much content. So they try to get as much as possible, trying to get as many new creators on board as they can.
Later, when they have grown enough, the senior players in the field laugh at them because they have mostly garbage content. So they try to increase the quality of their content.
The problem here is, now they accumulated a vast mass of creators who love the site, but only a fraction of them creates quality content.
They unleash a task force of moderators on them that kick out the low-quality creators, which improves quality, but bad for the morale of the whole community.
Wikipedia did this and Stackexchange does this too.
I think, instead of alienating existing creators by deleting their content, they should simply make high quality content more visible.