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Ask HN: Best practices for a scalable community moderation system?

4 points by randofab ↗ HN
I am building a TikTok like video sharing site and am looking for technical guidelines and best practices for building a community moderation system to serve the first 0 to 100k users. Without admins or trusted moderators.

E.g. when a video is flagged x times within y views, automatically provide it to select users for review. If z% of those confirm the flag, automatically delete the video and punish the uploader. Etc.

Any tips or resources detailing how to build out such a system?

10 comments

[ 44.7 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] thread
edoceo
One "trick" is to delay comments. To suppress flamewar. Increase delay with frequency.

You have to reputation count the moderator group who gets the Burn option

kleer001
This is a non-trivial problem.

> Without admins or trusted moderators.

There is a reason those eventually get folded in.

My arm chair take would be to be open to a solution and try lots of things, let the best bubble up to the top.

randofab
I think I'll just start building some rules as I described and see how far those take me. Just wish there would be some literature outlining this, like - "shoot for >86.5% consensus of moderators, because math" - "hide videos where unique views * times reported * sum of user trust scores > X" etc.
kleer001
That sounds like secret sauce that nascent social networks would keep close to their chest... if it worked.
thedevindevops
> Without admins or trusted moderators.

> provide it to select users for review

I don't understand, do you have moderators or not?

randofab
I meant that I as the entity running the site do not employ moderators. But a possibility would be to promote users who have a high 'trust score' (determined by factors like activity) to moderators and present these with the flagged videos. Also there are payments on the platform, so it's possible to give a small financial incentive for reviewing videos.
dyeje
I would do the simplest thing possible. Which would probably be a report button that sends me an email and then I review it manually.

With something social you need to be focusing your efforts on things that drive growth. If you spend a bunch of time building a robust moderation system, but nobody is using your app then it's wasted effort.

[dead] siddharth-hacks
Having proper code of conduct and awaring community members for the same helps. Also having moderators can be an option after that.
kleer001
What do you think about sharing your process or your results in searching for this solution?