I was thinking about moderation in PieFed after reading @[email protected] mention he doesn’t want NSFW content because it creates more work to moderate. But if done right, moderation shouldn’t fall heavily on admins at all.
One of the biggest flaws of Reddit is the imbalance between users and moderators—it leads to endless reliance on automods, AI filters, and the usual complaints about power-mods. Most federated platforms just copy that model instead of proven alternatives like Discourse’s trust level system.
On Discourse, moderation power gets distributed across active, trusted users. You don’t see the same tension between "users vs. mods," and it scales much better without requiring admins to constantly police content. That sort of system feels like a much healthier direction for PieFed.
Implementing this system could involve establishing trust levels based on user engagement within each community. Users could earn these trust levels by spending time reading discussions. This could either be community-specific—allowing users to build trust in different communities—or instance-wide, giving a broader trust recognition based on overall activity across the instance. However, if not executed carefully, this could lead to issues such as overmoderation similar to Stack Overflow, where genuine contributions may be stifled, or it might encourage karma farming akin to Reddit, where users attempt to game the system using bots to repost popular content repeatedly.
Please answer with a single option per comment without duplicating and upvote the topics you've seen active.
I've discovered the keyword filter and I want to know what's out there. Although I doubt the filter will work in topics I at least can try and figure out some keywords usually used in those communities.
The polls don't allow users to add their own options so I had to do it this way.
I'm super impressed by the features I'm discovering using Piefed! I'm going to be experimenting a lot with the keyword filter particularly. Here are some ideas we might add to make Piefed even better. Share you own in the replies.
Some of these options where too long to make it a poll.
As a community grows in popularity, it often shifts from hosting insightful discussions to attracting memes, funny, and low-quality content. This change appeals to a larger audience interested in such content, creating a vicious cycle where valuable discussions are overshadowed and marginalized by the platform's primary demographic.
It's the pendulum swing of pretty much every community on Reddit.
Community starts out with a small group of users dedicated to quality content related to the topic
Community growth reaches a point where the most popular posts begin to trend outside of the community
New users join the community after seeing popular posts show up in their own feeds. Growth accelerates
Community becomes "popular" enough that posts regularly trend outside of the community
New users flood in
Users flood the community with low-effort content to karma farm
Community now sucks.
It happened to basically every big sub on Reddit once reaching a large enough size.
As the platform grows, it becomes increasingly important to have a system that differentiates between different types of content, such as insightful discussions and humorous posts. Without such a system, there is a risk that the platform could become dominated by low-quality content and memes, burying meaningful discussions and discouraging participation from users seeking more substantive interactions.
To address this concern, I propose implementing a nuanced voting system inspired by Slashdot's approach
this was something I loved about slashdot moderation. When voting, people had to specify the reason for the vote. +1 funny, +1 insightful, +1 informative, -1 troll, -1 misleading, etc.
That way you can, for example, set in your user preferences to ignore positive votes for comedy, and put extra value on informative votes.
Then, to keep people from spamming up/down votes and to encourage them to think about their choices, they only gave out a limited number of moderation points to readers. So you’d have to choose which comments to spend your 5 points on.
Then finally, they had ‘meta moderation’ where you’d be shown a comment, and asked “would a vote of insightful be appropriate for this comment” to catch people who down-voted out of disagreement or personal vandetta. Any users who regularly mis-voted would stop receiving the ability to vote.
I don’t think this is directly applicable to a federated system, but I do think it’s one of the best-thought-out voting systems ever created for a discussion board.
edit: a couple other points i liked about it:
Comments were capped at (iirc) +5 and -1. Further votes wouldn’t change the comment’s score.
User karma wasn’t shown. The user page would just say Karma: good. Or Excellent, or poor, or some other vague term.
I'm thinking this seems pretty similar to post tagging. Perhaps both could be implemented with the same feature? Post tagging usually needs to be objective but that's indicated in the guidelines, perhaps there could be some subjective tags users could vote to sort the posts based on those tags.
