Hi,
The CSAM scandal the other day got me thinking about the (often lacking) capability of the Threadiverse to deal with quickly with content moderation, and since PieFed has already been a bit experimental in this regard, I figured maybe this is a place where I could ask if an idea is feasible. Sorry if it’s a bad match!
The idea is to identify trusted users, in the same way that PieFed currently identifies potentially problematic users. Long term users with significantly more upvotes than downvotes. These trusted users could get an additional option to report a post, beyond “Report to moderator”: Something like “Mark as abuse”.
The user would be informed that this is meant for content that clearly goes against the rules of the server, that any other type of issue should be reported to moderators, and that abuse of the function leads to revoke of privilege to use it and, if intentional, potentially a ban.
If the user accepts this and marks a post as abuse, every post by the OP of the marked post would be temporarily hidden on the instance and marked for review by a moderator. The moderator can then choose to either 1) ban the user posting abusive material, or 2) make the posts visible again, and remove the “trusted” flag of the reporting user and hence avoiding similar false positives in the future.
A problem I keep seeing on the threadiverse is that bad content tends to remain available too long, as many smaller instances means that the moderating team might simply all be asleep. So this seems like one possible way of mitigating that. Maybe it’s not technically feasible, and maybe it’s just not a particularly good idea; it might also not be a particularly original idea, I don’t know. But I figured it might be worth discussing.
I wonder how this would work across instances, especially as what might be seen as abusive in one instance may not be in another. Also could this be subject to poisoning, ie spinning up an instance to inflate account reputation on another instance or to mass report abuse from users that instance claims “reputable.” Making it something that is configurable with per instance granularity, aside from being tedious, might lead to situations where only the big instance users get a say, smaller ones can become trashed by a user who manages to become the most reputable solely for coming from a big instance, and/or being able to spam up their rep across instances while mods are asleep possibly exploiting time zone differences (ie build fake rep from lemmy.world at night, to spam a European or Asian instance that is in daylight hours).