Lately, there's been growing concern about the site's lack of moderation and about an apparent rise in blatantly HR-able posts receiving recommendations. If there's no site moderation and we're left with a "wild west" atmosphere, is it time for the DKOS user base to step up and provide some deputies?
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to run or manage this idea. So, I thought I'd at least throw it out into the DKOS stream to see if anyone else wants to run with it. I'd certainly contribute as best I could.
The DKOS Equality Watch group would be dedicated to posting a daily (or twice daily, if needed) diary with a title along the lines of "DKOS Equality Watch 4/13/11." In this diary, DK4 users could post links to comments that were bigoted. This would NOT be a place for reporting insults or general trolling. These might still be best handled by the normal flow of recs and HRs. The DKOS Equality Watch group would be dedicated solely to stopping:
- racism
- sexism/gender discrimination
- homophobia
- any other forms of discriminatory speech
Those who feel like keeping DKOS a safe and hate-free space could keep an eye on the daily diary. Any offensive speech reported could then be quickly identified and zapped. The diary would NOT be a place for extended debate about the comments. Rather, it would just point eyes toward discriminatory speech on the site and let those interested in a hate-free site decide whether the comment was HR-worthy.
I could see this becoming controversial, but there's nothing to stop the rest of the community from responding by tracking the diaries as well and uprating any spurious HRs that were given out. Since it takes twice as many HRs as recs to hide a comment, the community as a whole could easily right any wrong. And as I said, the group would only focus on discrimination so as to avoid the drama of policing non-discriminatory name-calling which might best be left to the current haphazard system.
Has the time come to deputize ourselves in this wild west? Thoughts or comments?