🎂 One year of user moderation 🎂

Feb 23, 2017

(How the 🦆 does this 💩 actually work?!)

One year ago we started testing a prototype of what would turn out to be one of the best ideas we ever realized together with you: our user moderation. A lot has changed since then but one thing stayed: the myths and misconceptions (occasionally even conspiracy theories) surrounding our system.

Why user moderation?

From the very start we wanted to build Jodel together with our community and make sure that every single one of you is part of this amazing journey. Therefore you should also be the ones to judge on what is allowed in our community and at what point a line is crossed.

By downvoting and reporting the abusive posts and negative vibes, you were already doing a great job in keeping the community clean and fun. It was simply the next logical step for us to enable you to decide upon the reports and guard the peace in the realm of Jodel.

So far you paid us back the trust we put in your hands a thousand times. So this birthday is for all of you: All users that contribute to a positive and friendly community, give us their feedback and help to shape this community that enriches the life of students worldwide. You guys rock!

Nice, so what happens to the posts I report?!

• All reported posts get reviewed by our moderators
  • moderators decide only on the post at hand, not the user
• Moderators decide on them based on our
  • community guidelines
  • moderation rules
• Our moderation algorithm calculates how many moderators are needed to reach a decision
  • highly ranked and experienced moderators = less votes required
  • always a minimum needed, no moderator can decide alone
  • if the reporting user is a moderator, his vote will not be counted
• If a post gets blocked, its creator will lose all karma earned by the post and gets a penalty of -100 karma points

Sounds great! Who are those magnificent moderators?

Our moderators are true and dedicated Jodlers who

• are jodeling for quite some time already
• have gathered a decent amount of karma
• didn’t break our rules or showed abusive behaviour in the past
• helped and encouraged other Jodelers in need
• reported rule violations to keep their community clean and fun

Based on those parameters we appoint moderators to silently watch over the Jodel world and keep the peace. To become a moderator just respect our community guidelines and stay a positive and supportive Jodler. Then soon enough we will welcome you into our ranks and appoint you as a sheriff of the alps.

😱 What if they start to abuse their power??!!

To make sure that doesn’t happen we have a number of security systems in place:

• Our algorithm constantly evaluates the decisions of a moderator
• Good moderators will receive more power
• Decisions of bad moderators will not get counted until
  • their decisions improve again
  • they lose their moderation status
• Abusive users will lose their moderator status

Ok, but what about the users who created the abusive posts?

• all posts blocked by our moderators get forwarded to our admins
• our algorithms identify and sort out the worst users who will get banned on the spot.
• for the rest an admin will look at each case and decide individually

Our Admins

• admins are trusted long-term users, that work with us in our headquarter
• our admins decide whether and for how long a user gets banned
• they decide between three basic options
  1. put on parole (user will get reviewed again after some days)
  2. temporary ban
  3. permanent ban
• decision and duration of ban will depend on
  1. severity of the abuse
  2. amount of rule violations
  3. past offenses

What if there was a mistake?

We are all only human raccoons so mistakes can happen. If you feel like we screwed up in your case, best contact our support so we can investigate what went wrong and make sure this never happens again.

A big thank you again to all our moderators, to all our users keeping up the positive vibe and to everyone out there helping to make this app the awesome, supportive and unique place it is and our lives a little bit exciting every day.

Keep up the good jodling!

P.S. To pass us your feedback on this post or moderation just include #blogmoderation in your Jodel. For everything else just use #feedback. We might not answer but you can be sure we look at every post and are very happy for the feedback you share with us. So tell us, what are your experiences with the moderation on Jodel, where could we improve, are there questions still unanswered? Thanks for sharing!

Niklas, Leo & the Jodel team