6 Types of Content Moderation – Moderation is generally defined as staying within reasonable limits that aren’t not excessive or extreme and avoiding. In the context of community participants content moderation, it described as the practise of keeping track of entries applying a set of rules which define what is acceptable and what is not and getting rid of undesirable contents.
There are 6 Types of Content Moderation which, as a community Supervisor or Moderator, you need to consider when choosing how to maintain some sense of order within your community.
Here are the 6 Types of Content Moderation You Need To Know About
- Pre-moderation
When somebody sends content to your website you have it positioned in line to be examined by a moderator prior to publishing it to the public, you are pre-moderating. Pre-moderation has the advantage of making certain (in the hands of a great moderator) that content you consider to be unfavourable, especially false material, is kept off the view-able sections of your website. It is likewise a popular moderation choice for online communities targeted at kids, as a method to detect intimidation or sex-related pet grooming practices.
While pre-moderation gives high control of what the community content end up being presented on your website, it has lots of drawbacks, generally believed to cause the death of online communities, it causes lack of instant gratification on the part of the participant, that is left awaiting their entry to be cleared by a moderator. Consequently, content that is conversational ended up being stilted and judder to a stop if the time delay between submission and display is too long. Various other disincentive to use pre-moderation is the high cost involved if and when your community grows and submissions across a limit of user-generated content uncontrollable by your maximum group of moderators.
2. Post-moderation
In an atmosphere where active moderation have to occur, post-moderation is a much better alternative to pre-moderation from a user experience perspective, as all content is presented on the website immediately after submission, but replicated in a queue for a moderator to pass or get rid of afterwards.
The primary advantage of this kind of moderation is that discussions do occur in real time, which makes for a quicker paced community. Individuals anticipate a degree of immediacy when interacting online, and post moderation permits this whilst permitting moderators to ensure security, behavioural and legal troubles can be identified and also acted upon in a timely manner.
As the community expands, cost can become prohibitive. As this, as each piece of content is examined and accepted or denied, the website operators legally becomes the publisher of the content, which can prove to be too much of a risk for certain communities such as gossip ones which attract salacious and potentially defamatory submissions. Given that the number of times content is viewed will directly impact on the size of damages awarded should a court case result from publication of a submission, a short time frame for the review of content is advisable.
3. Reactive moderation
Reactive moderation is defined by relying on your community members to flag up content that is either in breach of your House Rules, or that the members deem to be undesirable. It can be utilised alongside pre- and post- moderation, as a ‘safety net’ in case anything gets through the moderators, or more commonly as the sole moderation method.
The members themselves essentially become responsible for reporting content that they feel are inappropriate as they encounter this content on the site or community platform. The process is usually to include a reporting button on each piece of user-generated content, that if clicked, will file an alert with the administrators or moderator team for that content to be looked at, and if in breach of the site’s rules of use, to remove.
The main advantage of this method of moderation is that it can scale with your community growth without putting extra strain on your moderation resource or cost, as well as theoretically avoiding responsibility for defamatory or illegal content uploaded by the users of your website, as long as your process for removing content upon notification within an acceptable timeframe is in place.
However, if your company is particularly concerned about how their brand is viewed, you might not be willing to take the risk that some undesirable content will be visible on your site for any period of time, as you are relying on your members to see and bother reporting this content. In addition to this, a recent court case in Italy involving Google suggests that reactive moderation provides legal protection.
4. Distributed moderation
Distributed moderation is still a somewhat rare type of user generated content moderation method. It usually relies on a rating system which members of the community use to vote on whether submissions are either in line with community expectations or within the rules of use. It allows control of comments, or forums posts to mostly reside within the community, usually with guidance from experienced senior moderators.
Expecting the community to self-moderate is very rarely a direction companies are willing to take, for legal and branding reasons.For this reason, a distributed moderation system can also be applied within an organisation, using several members of staff to process contributions and aggregating an average score to determine whether content should be allowed to stay public or be reviewed. A popular example of such a member-controlled system in place is Slashdot. There are also companies such as SocialMod who leverage the Amazon service Mechanical Turk to offer a moderation service relying on thousands of workers to process content.
5. Automated moderation
In addition to all of the above human-powered moderation systems, automated moderation is a valuable weapon in the moderator’s arsenal. It consists of deploying various technical tools to process UGC and apply defined rules to reject or approve submissions.
The most typical tool used is the word filter, in which a list of banned words is entered and the tool either stars the word out or otherwise replaces it with a defined alternative, or blocks or rejects the message altogether. A similar tool is the IP ban list. There are also a number of more recent and sophisticated tools being developed, such as those supplied by Crisp Thinking. These include engines that allow for automated conversational pattern analytics, and relationship analytics.
6. No moderation
As an ex-fulltime moderator, I can’t in good conscience ever suggest not moderating your community at all. As a Community Manager, even less! But there are all sorts of reasons why you might choose not to regulate in any way the content submitted by your members.
Maybe you simply don’t have the resource or finance, or you don’t believe in any form of molding or control on content. From a legal standpoint, you might feel that your community is small enough to fly under the radar. Be that as it may, there are big benefits to using one of the moderation types covered above.
Without some form of moderation, your community will quickly descend into anarchy, and the atmosphere will probably become so unpleasant it will turn off potential new members. You could point to communities such as somethingawful.com forums as examples that anarchy and unpleasantness is not a bad thing, but dig a bit deeper and you’ll see they employ a moderation system (as ambiguous and random it may be).
Basically, without moderation you are not in any control of your community, which leaves you wide open to all sorts of abuse, both anti-social as well as illegal. I don’t recommend it.
Use the comment box below to let us know which moderation system you use for your community?
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Content Moderation – 6 Types of Content Moderation You Need To Know About