The Conundrum of Moderation

If everyone wrote clearly and respectfully about PG topics,  a moderator might be more of an arbitrator.

If writers considered that maintaining the quality of a site was beneficial to all involved, and avoided writing crap, then there would not be need for moderation.

Many sites which are defunct today had no real moderation.

People wrote, the item was published.   Some sites published crap, some sites published plagiarized material.

Some sites had A.I. as the ‘mod’ so perfectly good articles were bounced because of how defectively the A.I. was tweaked.

Many sites which have collapsed did have moderators.

Some were extremely prejudiced people who would bounce an item they didn’t agree with or those written by person they despised.

Some of the Moderators lazy, so that items would sit and stew for hours/days.

In some cases the Moderator was also a writer so was was moderating his/her competition.

Without moderation a site can become a free for all.   With moderation it might become a bottleneck.

I never minded human moderation when it was done with alacrity and without bias.

This is not often the case.

For example, there was a site, (now defunct) in which I had submitted an article in the morning.  It was still pending in the evening, so I published it elsewhere.

About three days later, (the item still pending) I mentioned this on a Forum. The Owner of the site came on to Attack me.  The Moderator said he rejected it.

The item was published on another site (of a higher quality).

The fact the Owner was dishonest, (the site went down leaving the members unpaid)  and the Mod, (who originally supported the Owner) was kicked to the pavement, was soon revealed.

On another site, which is still up but has ceased paying; the Mods were a mixed bag.

One Mod was twisted he would hand out stars for  rubbish written by a particular scammer who pretended she was dying of a disease.

The second the site stopped paying, the scammer went to another site to post her rubbish.

Another Mod so hated particular writers that regardless of the quality, they would Never get a Star from him.

Writers began to post their work to fall into the eyesight of particular mods; i.e  X2, the ‘Dying Ones’ pet, was in America,  on line at particular hours.   To  avoid being rejected by  other mods she only posted when she ‘knew’ her pet Mod was there.

X1 was in England, expected to be off line at GMT midnight until GMT ten a.m.   Hence posting during that time would avoid his prejudice.

This is the problem with human moderation, which is why some sites went for A.I.   And Artificial Intelligence can not be trusted to moderate human writing.

So it is a conundrum; how to have proper and quick moderation without sacrificing the human element, but avoiding human bias?