Use sortition for moderation?

Staross
Wed, 27 Jun 2018 07:18:58 +0000

In governance, sortition (also known as allotment or demarchy) is the selection of political officials as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates. The logic behind the sortition process originates from the idea that “power corrupts.” For that reason, when the time came to choose individuals to be assigned to empowering positions, the ancient Athenians resorted to choosing by lot. In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was therefore the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of true democracy.

Today, sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common law-based legal systems and is sometimes used in forming citizen groups with political advisory power (citizens' juries or citizens' assemblies).

The mechanics would be something like this: users report a post/comment, when there's enough reports the systems randomly selects 3/5/7/... currently active users and ask them to determine if the reported post contravene to the rules. The decision is then automatically taken with a majority rule.

Why ?

1. It's the only system that scales (to my knowledge). More users mean more content to moderate, but since the users are also moderators the system works at any scale. Systems that don't scale lead to all kind of problems when the number of users become large.

2. It's very robust to manipulation. As moderators are chosen randomly it's very hard to coordinate or try to influence the decisions.

3. It promotes a participatory attitude and a sense of responsibility in the users. There's no "them against us" (the bad mods against the users).

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~tildes/2tk/use_sortition_for_moderation

Votes: 21

Comments: 21