How Topics Get Recognized

Hello.

Today I want to talk about the schemes by which the selection of the best topics on news sites and thematic blogs. These schemes are not so many and they all boil down to two - a democratic scheme and moderation or pre-moderation. As you understand, there are no ideal schemes, in both of which there are unconditional advantages and disadvantages. I want to consider them a little closer and, on the basis of the conclusions, propose my own, not ideal, but improved scheme.

Democracy
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Democracy is the sweet word for the modern user. Now a rare web surfer goes online without a favorite plus. In the era of the web with deuces and zero, everyone can easily feel involved in creating content, even if he does not have the writing talent, just voting for topics and commenting at will.


In addition to freedom, the democratic scheme is protected from stagnation. The constant influx and inevitable outflow of users, the “change of blood,” favorably affect the number of innovative ideas and interesting and unusual topics.

But is this scheme so sweet for the community as a whole? No one has repealed the "herd instinct." The crowd, unfortunately, has no mind and obeys its own laws of physics, any arbitrarily chosen motion vector only increases with time. Therefore, it is a big stretch to talk about the objectivity of the crowd, I would even say that the crowd is more subjective than any of its participants. Which, of course, negatively affects the quality of approved content.

pros

• The community gets what it wants, not what they give;
• New fresh ideas get support.

Minuses

• The presence of "herd" instinct;
• A lot of garbage, including in user-friendly topics.

Moderation and pre-moderation

It would seem that moderation and pre-moderation is a panacea! Dial smart and adequate people, and it is better that they were with different views on the topics of your blog, and you have provided high-quality content. For greater secrecy, make it so that they are not so much in the face, nobody knows by their nicknames, and you will get 99% confidence that no one will affect their decision.

But there are many pitfalls. Well, if your blog is small and new topics do not appear so often (although, of course, there is nothing good about it :)), then your moderators will be able to communicate and decide on each topic, for example, by voting, to live or die.

And what will happen when your blog becomes popular and more than a dozen new topics will appear in it per day?

There will be the most ordinary traffic jam in moderator. People will wait days for decisions on their topic. And some information may simply become outdated even in a day.

Of course, you can hire more moderators. But this will not solve the problem. You still have to decide on each topic together. Or allocate for each category topics of their moderators. But in this case, you risk getting too narrowly focused topics at the output. The lack of a bright head can ruin innovative or unusual, but curious and high-quality work. Whatever moderators are not professionals, there is a process of saturation and after a while decisions will be made on the machine.

pros

• Lack of "herd" instinct;
• Full control over the content.

Minuses

• It is difficult to optimize the work of moderators;
• There is danger of saturation of the topic.

People's choices

Perhaps I will propose a not very new and original idea, but, in my opinion, it suggests itself. It is logical that the moderators are appointed by the resource administrators and their number is certainly not enough. Why the right to choose and dismiss moderators not to give users, expand the number of moderators and allow them to choose the best topics on a democratic basis. Thus, we will kill two birds with one stone - we will allow users to participate in the selection of content and get rid of the minuses of the democratic model.

If you have any other suggestions for improvement, it's time to tell about them in the comments to my blog .