Mastodon#Mastodon 3.5 is out! 🐘 🎉
joene 🏴@Mastodon @Gargron I'm a bit confused about the explore tab. For trends it's possible to auto-approve them, so you don't need to manually do this. Because that costs a lot of time. It would be great if users can report trends, so moderators can act on that.
But posts (and news I presume, but I don't see any news posts yet) you need to manually approve. This can be very labour intensive. I don't think you can expect from moderators (mostly volunteers) to check every few hours if there are new posts. I think an auto-approve setting is very needed here. If the posts are problematic, users can report them. Right now it's to time consuming for us moderators. Actually I just approve them all, cause I don't have the time to individually check them.
The alternative would be to disable the explore tab all together using css.
Eugen Rochko@joenepraat @Mastodon As you can approve authors/publishers instead of individual posts/links, and there is a limited number of actually regularly popular authors/publishers, the workload is reduced after an initial burst
@Gargron @Mastodon It's still a hell of a job to find out if a user is legit. A lot of servers doesn't have this capacity. I really think it would be good to have an an auto-approve options for the posts. On smaller good moderated servers those posts are already usable. Also an option to report trends is a good idea in my opinion. Another idea is to let users vote posts and trends down (with a threshold to remove them completely). This will make it even more a community process.
Bob Mottram :debian:@joenepraat @Gargron @Mastodon As soon as you get into stuff like users voting on trends, then things could get quite unpleasant with brigading, pump-and-dump, and such. Personally, I think voting up and down in a social media context is a failed paradigm, because it's always gamed. As you say it's hard to validate users, but even if all users are valid, legit users can still be paid for influence.
@bob Yes you are right. That is not a good idea. Just making users able to report trend would be the best option, so mods can decide. Damn, even Twitter has that option.