Luis von Ahn (of CAPTCHA fame) came up with a number of games with a purpose, such as the ESP game. The idea to bet on moderator decisions reminded me of those games.
I recall another one that judged the aesthetic quality of images, but I don’t remember the name. We could use something similar to judge the quality of posts in a way that would be resistant to abuse.
I’m pretty sure that aesthetic game was on the original gwap.com, but unfortunately, the creators seem to have moved on to other projects and the game part of the site doesn’t seem to exist anymore. I’m not sure I remember exactly how it worked. Maybe you could find the rules in Wayback Machine, but it doesn’t seem to be preserved very well. Does anyone remember the name of that game or how it worked?
Von Ahn also invented reCAPTCHA, which gives me another idea. We could perhaps require that a user participate in a judging game on two other posts as a cost to submit a post of their own.
The aim of the judging game is to predict how another other player would judge the post. (for example, upvote, downvote, flag as inappropriate, or some other set of emojis with standard meanings) The post could be chosen randomly from recent posts. The identity of the other player is kept secret by the system. If they agree on an emoji, it gets applied to the post, and the players both earn points in their predictor score. If they disagree, they lose predictor points, and the emoji doesn’t get applied.
New moderators can then be chosen from the highest-scoring predictors.
Games with a purpose seem to work when useful things are also fun or can be made fun; indeed, to the extent that people sometimes do fun useless things, and there are fun useful things, then I certainly agree that we should be moving as much of the fun to “useful stuff” as possible.
Schemes based on markets can work even if they are not fun (e.g. even when participants are algorithms and companies offering professional moderation services).
Luis von Ahn (of CAPTCHA fame) came up with a number of games with a purpose, such as the ESP game. The idea to bet on moderator decisions reminded me of those games.
I recall another one that judged the aesthetic quality of images, but I don’t remember the name. We could use something similar to judge the quality of posts in a way that would be resistant to abuse.
I’m pretty sure that aesthetic game was on the original gwap.com, but unfortunately, the creators seem to have moved on to other projects and the game part of the site doesn’t seem to exist anymore. I’m not sure I remember exactly how it worked. Maybe you could find the rules in Wayback Machine, but it doesn’t seem to be preserved very well. Does anyone remember the name of that game or how it worked?
Von Ahn also invented reCAPTCHA, which gives me another idea. We could perhaps require that a user participate in a judging game on two other posts as a cost to submit a post of their own.
The aim of the judging game is to predict how another other player would judge the post. (for example, upvote, downvote, flag as inappropriate, or some other set of emojis with standard meanings) The post could be chosen randomly from recent posts. The identity of the other player is kept secret by the system. If they agree on an emoji, it gets applied to the post, and the players both earn points in their predictor score. If they disagree, they lose predictor points, and the emoji doesn’t get applied.
New moderators can then be chosen from the highest-scoring predictors.
Games with a purpose seem to work when useful things are also fun or can be made fun; indeed, to the extent that people sometimes do fun useless things, and there are fun useful things, then I certainly agree that we should be moving as much of the fun to “useful stuff” as possible.
Schemes based on markets can work even if they are not fun (e.g. even when participants are algorithms and companies offering professional moderation services).
And Duolingo.