The poor quality of discussion on Digg, Reddit and Slashdot demonstrate, I think, that user-moderation is ultimately a bad system that tends toward in-groups and lowest-common-denominator discussion topics. A notable exception is Hacker News, and I think this is mostly to do with the community emphasis on simple rules like “be polite”, and the close link between community and moderators. I remember recently the administrator of HN, Paul Graham, made a thread asking whether links to election stories should be banned from HN. A sensible discussion followed, and the community voted to ban election stories. I think this shows that voting works best on the meta-level, rather than voting on specific comments and articles, it is better to vote on rules about comments and articles, which moderators then enforce. The best example of a self-regulating community is probably Wikipedia.
Further to my point about paying to use a discussion area, an example of a successful forum that actually does this is Something Awful. On Something Awful anyone can view currently active threads, but you have to pay the tenbux if you want to post or view the archives. When you join it is made clear that if you get banned, your money is not refunded. This gives an incentive for good behaviour. The people who run Something Awful also use the forums as source material for articles on the main site. Overcoming Bias could do something similar. If an OB admin sees somthing they like on the forum, they could e-mail the poster and ask them if they would like to write up the forum comment as a blog post. Or alternatively there could be a community-edited, publically-viewable wiki. The possibilities are endless.
Finally as far as forum software goes, I hear Vanilla has excellent moderation tools, which I think is the most important thing.
Some more thoughts:
The poor quality of discussion on Digg, Reddit and Slashdot demonstrate, I think, that user-moderation is ultimately a bad system that tends toward in-groups and lowest-common-denominator discussion topics. A notable exception is Hacker News, and I think this is mostly to do with the community emphasis on simple rules like “be polite”, and the close link between community and moderators. I remember recently the administrator of HN, Paul Graham, made a thread asking whether links to election stories should be banned from HN. A sensible discussion followed, and the community voted to ban election stories. I think this shows that voting works best on the meta-level, rather than voting on specific comments and articles, it is better to vote on rules about comments and articles, which moderators then enforce. The best example of a self-regulating community is probably Wikipedia.
Further to my point about paying to use a discussion area, an example of a successful forum that actually does this is Something Awful. On Something Awful anyone can view currently active threads, but you have to pay the tenbux if you want to post or view the archives. When you join it is made clear that if you get banned, your money is not refunded. This gives an incentive for good behaviour. The people who run Something Awful also use the forums as source material for articles on the main site. Overcoming Bias could do something similar. If an OB admin sees somthing they like on the forum, they could e-mail the poster and ask them if they would like to write up the forum comment as a blog post. Or alternatively there could be a community-edited, publically-viewable wiki. The possibilities are endless.
Finally as far as forum software goes, I hear Vanilla has excellent moderation tools, which I think is the most important thing.