Has that ever worked? Rating schemes turn into approval scales for whatever people want them to, not what they're called.

The Slashdot moderation system might work up to a point. In the end, subscribing to moderators you trust (instead of subscribing to killfiles like Mastodon and Twitter groups use) may be the only way to evaluate comments.

> Has that ever worked?

From section "Priming accuracy improves sharing":

"[...] sharing discernment (the difference in sharing intentions for true versus false headlines) was 2.0 times larger in the treatment relative to the control group in study 3, and 2.4 times larger in study 4. Furthermore, there was no evidence of a backfire effect, as the treatment effect was actually significantly larger for politically concordant headlines than for politically discordant headlines"

In other words, people who were primed to pay attention to accuracy were significantly less likely to share misinformation. Seems to me like an example of it working quite well.

Yes, I don't take the studies seriously because I've worked on Mechanical Turk. The people primed to pay attention are maximizing their workflow, because taskmasters set unreasonable time limits, incomprehensible instructions, and every action is necessarily out of context. Attention there is totally divorced from anyone browsing a news feed.

Did you see when they tested it on Twitter users?

Yes. The last study looks even worse.

Not a rating scheme, the value would the thrown away and never shown to anyone. The point isn't to collect information, only to force the sharer to think.

And the sharer is just going to trust you to throw away that information? I don't think so.

Most people aren't careful about what information is collected on them in the first place. Are people going to stop sharing things on Twitter because they're afraid of giving up one more tidbit of information to big data? I don't think so.

It's besides the point anyway. Any mechanism that primes or prompts the sharer to be mindful of accuracy before sharing could help reduce sharing of misinformation, according to the results from the article.

Really surprised that no social media with nano-payment-funded distributed and syndicated moderation exists. Centralization of moderation is taken as de facto, but I'm skeptical that it has to be this way.

Who moderates the moderators in such a system? Would it be structured like the Wikipedia editor hierarchy?

The customers ultimately. Moderators should produce moderations which result in something people think is worth paying for. I'm thinking of a multi-rooted aggregation system. Wikipedia is an example of a single-rooted system.

What qualities do you think that would incentivize in a moderation system? I'm not feeling that tendency to share less misinformation is one of them, and I'd fear that richer people would have more power to control the narrative in such a system by effectively bribing moderators.

Apologies if there is something about "nano-payment-funded distributed and syndicated moderation" that I'm not getting.

Commodifying and creating a market for accuracy-driven moderation among other types of moderation shifts the conversation toward the question "Is misinformation a market failure?" If that's the case then we have a much more interesting discussion on our hands.

But much like ratings systems are actually used as approval/disapproval systems, such a system would instead come to represent ‘what is the most profitable moderation’. Such a market would optimise towards profit, not quality.

That's a critique of all markets. I'm down.

100%. The insight there I guess being a need to choose carefully which areas you allow market dynamics to be introduced, or at least make sure you know what the medium of exchange really is because that's what the market players will optimize towards.

What are "Twitter groups"?

Seems to me that the results of the article suggest that such a slider would help. But I wonder if it wouldn't lose its effect after a while as people get exposed to it and begin filtering it out, a la cigarette warning labels and cookie consent banners? Regardless, it seems like there's a lot of potential here for social media sites to make a significant and positive change without turning to stricter moderation which can in itself be problematic.

: Does anyone know if that's actually the case?

It would become a meme to share obviously fake stuff with the slider maxed out, and we're right back in Poe's law.

Why? No one would see the slider maxed out, so there's no point in playing the fool. The study makes an interesting point, that putting a slider there would force the person to make decision. Either they're sharing something they think is nonsense, so they think twice — or they have reason to believe stuff is accurate, which the study is saying people are actually pretty good judges of.

No one want to say something is accurate and be thought of a fool later. Making this choice forces you to be a scientist, in that you're now making a statement that's falsifiable. Even better when it's probabilistic.

Or they'd just ignore it. It's like upvotes/downvotes, I'd guess most people never use them. I rarely upvote or downvote anything here, compare to how many posts I read.

The existence of a slider won't force anyone to do anything. People will ignore your slider. Some people will only use it in one direction, and others will use it only in the other direction.

You aren't accounting for human nature. People aren't robots.

Seems to me that the mere existence of the slider would force people to share less misinformation, regardless of whether they seriously consider the rating they give or just ignore the slider altogether the second time they see it. In the language of the article, it would work by priming people to be more aware of accuracy.

You're making the assumption that people would care about a slider and that it would be part of a behavior loop.

People might very well laugh at the slider and not be intimidated into respecting its power of graduated informational judgement. As of now, after two hours, the only two replies to the GP are saying they would ignore the slider.

Why do you believe a slider would force people not to share misinformation? There must be some basis for that opinion.

> Why do you believe a slider would force people not to share misinformation? There must be some basis for that opinion.

"Force" is a strawman, but there is a clear basis for thinking that an accuracy slider could cause people to be more thoughtful about sharing: the results of this study, which found that "subtly inducing people to think about accuracy" resulted in "participants in the treatment group were significantly less likely to consider sharing false headlines compared to those in the control group, but equally likely to consider sharing true headlines". The effect found was quite significant.

> "Force" is a strawman

No. It was the literal word that was used not a strawman, which is an intentionally misrepresented proposition meant to be debunked.

"Seems to me that the mere existence of the slider would _force_ people to share less misinformation"

Oh, you are correct. It seems that mcBesse chose their wording extremely poorly there, as "force" is indeed indefensible. I apologize for misreading that.

Truth isn't a popularity contest.