CSflim

Take a look at pretty much any unmoderated forum on the net. Any one that is remotely big is unreadable garbage.

For instance, the imdb forums could be fantastic - a fan of a movie? Want to discuss it in depth with other fans? Sounds great. In reality each board is just thread after thread of immature pointless flaming. Even when someone tries to start a genuinely interesting thread, it degerates into banal crap after about half a dozen posts.


So unmoderated forums don't really work so well in my opinion. Not all are as bad as imdb, but on pretty much all unmoderated boards I've seen the "signal to noise ratio" is pretty poor.

Your "Anarchy" model is not quite the same as unmoderated. It is similar, but it goes much further. I imagine that it wouldn't be long before some jackass decides to delete all posts he/she disagrees with, or bans everyone he/she dislikes. Then there would be retaliation. Soon all posts would be deleted, and every account banned. Not so much fun.

But perhaps there is a middle ground between standard "moderated" and "unmoderated"/"anarchic" forums? For instance digg.com is pretty much self moderated. Like a thread? "Digg it" to increase it's visibility. If a threads gets enough diggs, it gets moved to a more prominent section of the site. This way, the majority of the users don't have to deal with spam, reposts, and all the other crap. Find someone trolling? Vote his post "thumbs down". If a user gets a net vote of minus five, the post is hidden from the thread unless it is explicity viewed.

This has some nice features. No spam, no trolling, but without explicit moderators. But it has problems too. Mainly that it punishes the posting of unpopular opinions. The "thumbs up/down" feature is often used to vote down, not just spam/trolling, but also just things that people disagree with. Go ahead and try to suggest that maybe, just maybe rapant music and film piracy isn't necessarily the most wonderful thing in the world. Your post will disappear. Try to suggest the sometimes commerical software might have an occasional slight advantage over open source software...bye bye post.

I suspect that a model such as this can be improved with further modifications.


Ok, I'll just wrap it up by saying that, no I don't think the anarachy model would work out so well. But I do think that there is plenty of room for innovation in this area, and that there are plenty of possibilites out there, including models which dispense with the idea of appointed moderators. But I suspect the really good ones would resemble democracy more than anarchy.

__________________