How do you moderate a thread?
Users petition the moderator to join? The moderator blacklists an offensive contributor preventing future messages?
That places a lot of power in the hands of the moderator, power that could easily be abused, intentionally or otherwise. Hell, people complain about the occasional moderation done by SI, just on the principal of the matter. Would they accept it from an unknown entity? The complaints would start pouring in, in my opinion.
Could the moderator prescreen each message as is done on the Usenet? That means if the moderator is unavailable, so is new activity on the thread. SI's original intent, for lack of a better word, was to have conversations on threads last over a period of days and weeks. With the massive membership, they last for hours or even minutes. If the inflow is moderated, the real time dynamics that have evolved will be gone.
Hummm. Maybe Brad could flesh out some artificial intelligence monitors to act as monitors, and take the humans out of the loop.....
Anyway, if implemented, I agree with Z that the linked response feature proposed by Brad would be required so as to not eliminate dissenting opinions. Then, the threads are identical to Usenet threads, a branching tree structure. The interface would have to accommodate a view of the tree to help people navigate the morass of sub-threads. |
