Crowd moderation v0.0.1

[colinmegill]

Crowd moderation in pol.is will be implemented as additional buttons that replace the primary agree disagree or pass buttons after they are clicked, without replacing the comment text. The tentative proposal for those options are as follows:

• Agree
  • This is important
  • This is a fact
  • I feel this way
• Disagree
  • Not my feeling
  • Not fact
  • Abusive
• Pass
  • Unsure
  • Spam
  • Abusive

With the option to skip. Uncertain at this point whether we allow multiselect. An initial UI sketch:

Crowd moderation will not always appear. Here are some thing that could affect when it is shown.

First, there could be a minimum threshold of comments for crowd moderation to be shown at all. There could also be a switch to turn it on and off in configuration. If, for instance, there are only seed comments, we shouldn't be asking whether they are abusive. It might be useful to ask whether or not they are unclear.

It is also the case that even when crowd moderation is 'on', it will not be shown after every comment. It will be shown more if people interact with it, and less if they choose to skip it before making a selection. Thus people self select / opt into more work.

[patcon]

If, for instance, there are only seed comments, we shouldn't be asking whether they are abusive.

Why not? I think to add a special edge-case for seed comments is to hold your conversation admins in too high regard. They're not all going to be consultation professionals ;)

[patcon]

Yay! You guys pushed this, huh? I ran into it the first time when I was demo'ing with that Toronto city staff person last night, and got excited and a little flustered as I figured out how to best demo it on-the-fly ;)

[colinmegill]

@patcon were you demo-ing on preprod?

cc @mbjorkegren

[mbjorkegren]

@patcon We did push it briefly, but we hit a QA issue and had to revert it. It'll be live again soon.

[patcon]

Just to follow-up: is this official retired as a planned feature? If so, is there any context you could offer as to why, in case anyone running their own instance is tempted to re-enable the codepath that I think is still functional here:

https://github.com/pol-is/polisServer/blob/806e77e508cd8c27a8c372502c111359fdd8b28e/server.js#L9072

Uncommenting this line makes it so that every vote is followed by a crowd moderation prompt like so:

[patcon]

Hm. Seems to not be populating database table crowd_mod -- not sure why:

polis-dev=# SELECT * FROM crowd_mod;
 zid | pid | tid |    created    | as_important | as_factual | as_feeling | as_notmyfeeling | as_notgoodidea | as_notfact | as_unsure | as_spam | as_abusive | as_offtopic
-----+-----+-----+---------------+--------------+------------+------------+-----------------+----------------+------------+-----------+---------+------------+-------------
   1 |   2 |   2 | 1588106782742 |              |            |            |                 |                |            |           |         |            |
   1 |   2 |   0 | 1588108892289 |              |            |            |                 |                |            |           |         |            |
(2 rows)

polis-dev=#

[colinmegill]

Abandoned in favor of comment routing. There's no way to implement crowd moderation without the potential for participants to overload it to punish the ideas they disagree with algorithmically.

[colinmegill]

Perhaps no way to do it goes too far — but the role of a central moderator, assumed to be an ethical / trusted counterparty to the participants, continues to be a core assumption of the system.

In the cases where no central moderator is available or desired, comment routing is enough to make good use of participants' time even if there's some garbage in the system.

[colinmegill]

It can be noted that pol-is/polis-issues#123 avoids some of these problems by asking the user when a comment is significant to them, without asking them to 'downvote' others.

[patcon]

Ok, thanks! So should we leave the code in there for a future context/reckoning, or strip it out?

[colinmegill]

At the _moment_ the system is in too much flux to remove code. Feel free to flag it for removal. Once we're on a steady pace of deployment and integration tests we can begin pruning bit by bit.

…

On Sat, May 9, 2020 at 9:55 AM Patrick Connolly ***@***.***> wrote: Ok, thanks! So should we leave the code in there for a future context/reckoning, or strip it out? — You are receiving this because you modified the open/close state. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <https://github.com/pol-is/polis-issues/issues/26#issuecomment-626179917>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AANQGGOBDHUYWCPNSOR4PXLRQVOF5ANCNFSM4CZG5WMA> .

[crkrenn]

+1 on this! My only suggestion might be to combine abusive/spam, and to add something like “confusing”. I would like to understand and highlight clear and concise statements. This ties to a suggestion I made about recording response time with the vote. People will respond to a good statement quickly, but not every one will agree or disagree with it. I was inspired by Weyl and posters commercial implementation of quadratic voting. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uj186urDU8c

…

--- Sent from Workspace ONE Boxer<https://whatisworkspaceone.com/boxer> On May 9, 2020 at 7:26:50 PM PDT, Colin Megill <notifications@github.com> wrote: Crowd moderation in pol.is will be implemented as additional buttons that replace the primary agree disagree or pass buttons after they are clicked, without replacing the comment text. The tentative proposal for those options are as follows: * Agree * This is important * This is a fact * I feel this way * Disagree * Not my feeling * Not fact * Abusive * Pass * Unsure * Spam * Abusive With the option to skip. Uncertain at this point whether we allow multiselect. An initial UI sketch: [crowdmod]<https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1770265/21075498/8f38f3ca-bec8-11e6-80fb-b0d6f42c54e9.png> Crowd moderation will not always appear. Here are some thing that could affect when it is shown. First, there could be a minimum threshold of comments for crowd moderation to be shown at all. There could also be a switch to turn it on and off in configuration. If, for instance, there are only seed comments, we shouldn't be asking whether they are abusive. It might be useful to ask whether or not they are unclear. It is also the case that even when crowd moderation is 'on', it will not be shown after every comment. It will be shown more if people interact with it, and less if they choose to skip it before making a selection. Thus people self select / opt into more work. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#120>, or unsubscribe<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABOJ5V2HJU6R456XNG5CZHDRQYGF3ANCNFSM4M5BRVWA>.

[patcon]

In future, I could almost imagine a pluggable system for this kinda comment weighting, for ppl who want to experiment on this side of things and not fork... (Not to fall too far into the "everything should be configurable!" trap that much of FOSS falls into :) )