Salt Peanuts, Salt Peanuts

March 13, 2007 6:49 AM

Moderate this! Love food? Love kvetching about how moderators suck? Here's a look inside what it takes to moderate a hugely popular site (Chowhound.com) and to have to explain to people over and over that you are not in fact, evil.
posted by spicynuts (23 comments total)

Posting to this topic has been closed.
posted by mcstayinskool at 6:54 AM on March 13, 2007

What's your point? It's a transcript.
posted by spicynuts at 7:00 AM on March 13, 2007

Chowhound and MetaFilter are the two examples I know of relatively unmoderated internet communities that really, really work. Thanks for this.
posted by escabeche at 7:17 AM on March 13, 2007

I was a moderator and an admin on a nightclub message board that grew from a few hundred users to several thousand users over a period of about 2 years.

This was harder than moderating the average message board for three reasons: One -- Most users were 18-24 years old, and since it was a 'rave' club, they weren't the most emotionally stable bunch of people. Two -- Almost everybody on the message board knew each other personally, and met up in person regularly, or if they didn't they knew how to find each other. Three -- I was basically working unpaid for a business, and the messageboard users were also customers, so we couldn't be as ruthless about banning troublemakers as we liked. Also, some of the worst troublemakers were friends with 'the boss'.

It was almost a 24/7 job and unimaginably stressful, particularly when I was having to deal with drama while I was at my day job at a help desk. Most days I felt like a high-school vice principle. We were moderating relationship issues between members, breaking up flamewars that were always in danger of becoming actual physical fights, and never got any credit from either the users or the messageboard owners for the tight rope we were walking non stop.

Not sure why I'm sharing this exactly, but please-- on any messageboard you're on, give the mods the benefit of the doubt. They're probably working harder than you know.
posted by empath at 7:19 AM on March 13, 2007

I'm going over to chowhound to post about a certain celebrity who may or may not have danced in his underwear to the tune of "Old Time Rock 'n' Roll" and about whom it is speculated that because of a genetic defect, he can only father cyclopean babies. Then we'll see just how unmoderated it is.
posted by Pastabagel at 7:28 AM on March 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

Chowhound and MetaFilter are the two examples I know of relatively unmoderated internet communities that really, really work.

Coincidentally, I just decided to stop visiting chow hound yesterday because of their heavy moderation. Chowhound is as heavily moderated as Ask Metafilter is. Their new stated policy is that they can and will delete any message that is in any way off topic. ""On our regional forums, we take a strict stand against chattiness and flaming."

In other words, unless you stay on subject, chances are, your message will be deleted. As their policy, that's completely up to them, but if you ask me, when you delete lots of messages that people write that some unseen moderator determines as "chatty," then what's the point of people participating?
posted by Dave Faris at 7:35 AM on March 13, 2007

and to have to explain to people over and over that you are not in fact, evil.

Evil is as evil does. If you have to keep explaining that you're not, then maybe it's time to re-evaluate yourself.
posted by Dave Faris at 7:39 AM on March 13, 2007

Double dog dare you Pastabagel.
posted by Mister_A at 7:51 AM on March 13, 2007

when you delete lots of messages that people write that some unseen moderator determines as "chatty," then what's the point of people participating?

The point is that chowhound is the most reliable and useful mechanism I know of for finding out where to eat when I travel. The point of participating is to be useful to other people in the same way that other people's posts were useful to me. That's not weird, is it?
posted by escabeche at 7:57 AM on March 13, 2007

I guess I have two major complaints about Chowhound, and one is derived from the other. First, they moderate any life out of the regional boards. While that might be good for you, as a traveller, to find concise information on where to eat when you come to my neck of the woods, it's a disincentive for me to actually bother to leave the information for you to find. I can make a post about the restaurant, but I can't make a comment about the neighborhood its in, and how it's developing and a place for more up and coming restaurants. (I use that as an example, because I've had messages I've written like that deleted.) As a result, there's really not much of a community-feel on the sub-boards. You lose the personalities. So in the end, you get these random opinions from random people, and you can't really apply much weight to what they have to say. No one can build up any reputation on the site.

The second issue is a result of the first -- the random opinions seem to sway violently from reply to reply. It's not uncommon to see one message that says "I love this restaurant," followed immediately by a reply that says "this restaurant is awful." So, who do you believe?

Maybe other regional sub boards on the site are less volatile. Maybe it's a product of the area that I participated in.
posted by Dave Faris at 8:10 AM on March 13, 2007

I agree with Dave Faris; there has to be room for a little personality and context, or else it's just a meaningless jumble of amateur reviews. Of course people want to know things about the neighborhood and so forth, and about the poster/reviewer—frequent contributor with respected opinions or hit-and-run hatchet man? It does a diner no good to read more-or-less anonymous reviews on a board.

My personal experience with user reviews on the internet is that, unless there is a strong "community" vibe, the reviews are heavily skewed toward the negative because people like to complain, and semi-anonymous complaints without any strings attached are the best kind of complaints.
posted by Mister_A at 8:22 AM on March 13, 2007

It does a diner no good to read more-or-less anonymous reviews on a board.

and

you get these random opinions from random people, and you can't really apply much weight to what they have to say.

See, this hasn't been my experience at all. I feel like I can tell from the review itself how much I trust the reviewer; I find that if I read a certain board a lot I get a good sense of the frequent posters; and I don't feel any disincentive to post about my town, or to report on towns I visit. I don't think the reviews are brutally negative either -- if anything, the "noise" on the board is mostly people offering undetailed and unmerited praise to places near their house.
posted by escabeche at 8:38 AM on March 13, 2007

What Dave Faris said. I haven't visited Chowhound for years, even though there's good info there, because I just don't like the vibe. (Also, Jim Leff knows and loves food but can be a dick personally, and I think that gets reflected in the site.)
posted by languagehat at 8:45 AM on March 13, 2007

It's not uncommon to see one message that says "I love this restaurant," followed immediately by a reply that says "this restaurant is awful." So, who do you believe?

Right because restaurants are a completely objective experience? How does this differ from metafilter where you have Patti Smith is great followed immediately by Patti Smith blows?
posted by spicynuts at 9:01 AM on March 13, 2007

I think that is a stupid opinion ^^
posted by Mister_A at 9:28 AM on March 13, 2007

mostly people offering undetailed and unmerited praise to places near their house.

In my experience, the only voices I recognized on the DC sub board were the voices of the axe-grinders, who would pop up every time a particular place got mentioned, and reiterate their hatred of the place.

Right because restaurants are a completely objective experience?

Actually, that goes to my first point. On amazon, it's easier to read a review from a completely anonymous source. "This electric teapot sucks because it spills water when you try to pour from it." It's different when it comes to restaurants precisely because it is a subjective experience, you can't rely on anonymous, drive-by reviews.
posted by Dave Faris at 11:01 AM on March 13, 2007

Chowhound and MetaFilter are the two examples I know of relatively unmoderated internet communities that really, really work. Thanks for this.

CH and MeFi couldn't be more different in terms of moderation level and style. It's like night and day. MeFi has an open, collegial, fun-loving atmosphere that encourages community participation. Its moderators act like they care about what people think, and try to behave in a fair manner. CH has an opaque moderation system that involves spontaneously deleted posts (for all sorts of reasons, good and bad). CH's moderators are anonymous; the number of moderators is not known; and whether it's the same moderator or a different one who deleted Post X and Post Y is not known. There is no public venue to discuss moderation policy or specific decisions (a la MeTa) and talking back to a moderator via email will get your account banned.

A simple google search will tell you all you need to know about CH's paranoid deletion of any post referring to a restaurant that was ever suspected of being shilled for, thus shutting down all discussion of quite a few popular restaurants. In googling, you'll also find quite a few people who, after having their accounts banned once or twice, left the site entirely. I think a lot of this phenomenon has to do with Jim Leff's huge ego- the whole site reflects this idea that the unique site-created content on CH (the occasional "what Jim Leff is eating these days" type article) has anything to do with the site's popularity. CH is a user-content-driven community, whether Jim Leff likes it or not. We don't see interview after interview with Matt Haughey in the NYTimes talking about how MeFi is so popular because Matt is always surfing the web and finding awesome new pages to blog about.

This all makes it more frustrating when Jim Leff does his pathetic "even my posts have been deleted! moderating is hard! every site needs moderation!" routine. I mean, duh, yes, you need to moderate a big discussion website. But it's possible to do so without being a total douchebag about it.
posted by rxrfrx at 11:31 AM on March 13, 2007

I feel like I should weigh in here.

I'm the head moderator over at UserFriendly.org, with over 85000 users, about 1000 of which are people who post and participate (about 150 are voluminous posters). It's a hell of a job to have, in both a good way and plenty of bad ways. People either treat moderators as gods, as idiots, as a necessary evil, or as an authority to be shit on. Personally, I prefer "necessary evil". I've been doing this for about 6 years now. I have spent up to 30 hours a week being a volunteer moderator, and at best guess I now spend 10 hours per week because we've chosen a handful of volunteers to take up the slack and make it not too onerous for any couple people.

Our forum is pretty reasonable because by and large the participants are reasonable. There are a number of moderators, and none of them get paid, including me. Partly that helps, as some people are more likely to shit on paid workers, IMO.

But what really makes it a reasonable task is the audience, who tend not to be the true smartasses of the internet. I love MF, but I'd have a problem being a moderator here because there are generally more people here who want to be offensive and annoying to other participants than we have an UF.
posted by Kickstart70 at 1:06 PM on March 13, 2007

There's no doubt about it. Moderating a message board can be a thankless job. However, the people at Chowhound appear to be going out of their way to avoid being thanked.
posted by Dave Faris at 2:16 PM on March 13, 2007

I don't normally respond to internet threads about Chowhound, but I've been on MetaFilter as long as I've been on Chowhound and a lot longer than I've worked for Chowhound, so this one's rather close to home in more ways than one.

The philosophies of moderation on Chowhound and Metafilter are very different--though Ask.Me and Chowhound have a lot more in common. I do have a real appreciation for the moderation style that Matt uses here, and I referenced it a lot when I was interviewing with CNET for the position at Chowhound. We cribbed one of our site policies almost entirely from the Ask.Me FAQ, even.

Our volunteer moderators and our minimal paid staff work very hard to try and ensure that Chowhound is focused and unbiased. That requires active moderation, and isn't new. Reserving the right to delete any post isn't a recent change--it's always been policy, we've always moderated, and we can't apologize for it. Not everything we do is perfect, or entirely consistent, but we try to be fair and do what's best for the community.
posted by jacquilynne at 3:15 PM on March 13, 2007

I used to be very active on the Chowhound Boston board. The moderation has always been a bit heavy-handed and capricious, but I had the sense that on balance it made the community a better place.
posted by psmith at 9:01 PM on March 13, 2007

Oy, that transcript is ridiculously overwritten. They seem to have made it as difficult as possible to extract any value out of it.
posted by dbarefoot at 11:41 PM on March 13, 2007

It wasn't scripted and was never really meant to have a transcript--it was meant to be a lighthearted audio interview, and it's much better in the audio version. I literally laughed out loud at the part where Jim gets utterly distracted by passing plates of calamari--it's a very Jim moment. But one of the hounds went to the trouble to transcribe the conversation, so we linked it.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:09 AM on March 14, 2007