Why pre-moderating user participation sucks
Our ideas of creating architectures of participation for brands often get stuck at the barrier of control. Commercial and non-commercial organisations, as well as governments all have a lot of fear for allowing users to contribute to their website. What if they write bad or inappropriate stuff? So when they want to have their first steps in the collaborative, participatory world, the first thing they want to have is a pre-moderation system: Pre-moderation means that every contribution needs to be approved before it gets published. However, as Jake McKee points out in his blog, there are some important objections to this.
- Realism: Who wants to hang out in a community where someone is looking over your shoulder like a disapproving parent when there are tons of other community sites around?
- Trust: Inherently, pre-moderation says to your community members "we don't trust you". That's not a very good way to build social connection.
- Turnaround time: Will you be staffing the moderation team 24/7? If not, what happens at midnight when users are still uploading content and expecting to see it on the site quickly? Users don't like to wait minutes, much less hours or days.
- Focus: The nature of pre-moderation draws resources and focus away from tasks like encouraging users to participate, creating methods of drawing users into your community, and keeping content on track through participation rather than directive.
- Scalability: If your community becomes successful, despite the issues above, are you going to build a team of people capable of review content additions in a timely fashion? What can your budget withstand... 5 full-timers? 10? 20?
That's why he holds a plead for post-moderation. Beyond a specific use case that requires pre-moderation (e.g. when dealing with a community of kids), post-moderation offers many interesting possibilities:
- Involve your users: Give them tools to easily and quickly notify moderators of problematic content. User flagging can do wonders for keeping the site on par with what your users are comfortable with
- Enlist a volunteer army: In any great community, there are a core group of users who want to make sure the community they love lives on. Ask them to help you with the moderation process. Not only does this help with scalability, it lets them know that the site is as much theirs as yours.
- Spot check: With the right user volunteers and notification methods, you can often rely on spot checking, rather than manually reviewing every piece of content.
- Robust tools: When you are designing your community, don't wait until the last minute to design the moderation tools. Planning methods of dealing with potential problems at the same time you plan the rest of the project ensures that your site is easily able to handle anything users throw at it. For instance, you decide to tie the way content is rated to the way content is flagged for inappropriateness based on the belief that low-rated, flagged content should be seen by a moderator immediately.
In building a community, strategic planning is very important. And this planning encompasses strategies for driving people to the platform as well as strategies for keeping the platform healthy and alive.
Comments