I’ve heard it said human powered content moderation is a commodity, and it can be argued that it is, but not by me. When I first heard this I didn’t immediately have a response, I said something along the lines of, “some might say that it is,” and then trailed off lost in thought. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it I will say confidently human moderation of content is not a commodity.

There are a few definitions of commodity, the most relevant one being “a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors other than price.”

And the argument for human powered moderation being a commodity is humans are widely available and largely capable of the this task therefore making the service a commodity.

This comparison reminds of a conversation I was involved in with the foreman of a coal mine in Alberta. I was very green and I’d made the drive out to the mine with a well known, much older, and much more experienced welder. He obviously knew the foreman quite well and began to joke with him right away. In the joking it came up that the job should be done twice as fast because there were two welders on site.

The more experienced welder explained I was new, I’d just moved out from Manitoba, I had just recently received my certification and he would be showing me around and helping me out - in other words, don’t expect the job to take half the time.

The foreman poked back with a smile, “why, aren’t all Journeyman welders created equal?” I was just about to say yes when my partner, the more experience welder said, “hell no.” And they both laughed and I was confused.

Looking back on it I fully understand what the conversation was about. Of course the experienced welder had far more skill then I did and of course he didn’t want to be considered equal to me or the many other young welders flooding the area. This was a time when, although there was a lot of work in the area, welders were largely considered a commodity because there were so many in the region. If one left or quit it was easy to find another. But were they equal in capabilities, would they want to be considered equal?

Back to moderation and moderators, are all moderators created equal? I say no and I would think any professional moderator would dislike being compared to someone who doesn’t moderate - or does not do it professionally - just as much as that welder did not like being compared to me.

The following are a few things to consider when hiring someone for moderation or when looking to outsource moderation, this should help you separate the moderation professional from the human commodity:

How much life experience does this person have (this doesn’t mean old), are they mature?

• Life experience generally breeds patients, understanding and makes someone less likely to jump to conclusions or make rash decisions.

How much education does this person have?

• I don’t care how they came by this knowledge but are they familiar with the many world events that might be referred to in the content?

How many languages does this person speak?

• What languages will be used in your community? An understanding of English, French and Spanish or immediate access to resources to understand the nuances and colloquialisms of each language is becoming more and more important for content moderation in North America.

Have they been vetted with a criminal background check?

• It is important you know who is working on your projects, especially if they will have access to minors online. 

Are they going to have the drive to do this everyday/weekends/holidays?

• It’s a solitary job and being a self starter is a must.

How many words per minute can they read?

• Speed is crucial with high content volumes. What is their comprehension level? It’s not uncommon for professional moderators to read above 500 words per minute (wpm) with full comprehension, 300 wpm would be absolute minimum for moderators. 

This list is a good start to help you find the right in-house moderator. If the content is simple - two submissions per day and it’s pictures of kittens - some of these skills are not necessarily required. None the less, don’t be afraid to ask these questions when looking to hire someone to work as a moderator inside your community.

Also, don’t hesitate to ask these questions when interviewing a potential moderation service partner. Ensure the staff they have live up to these expectations, if not, ask what makes their employees discernibly different from your nephew and his buddies. If they don’t have an answer, at least you have yours.

The cutest Frappuccino

There are many places an agency can bring in partner solutions to increase margins yet outsourced UGC moderation is still a relatively new and unknown option. Agencies, like every other company, are constantly looking to be more profitable, or simply stay profitable, and a content moderation partner can open the door to new revenue (or increased productivity, and this should mean more revenue).

By outsourcing content moderation agencies can not only free up creative staff to do what they were hired to do but now an agency can offer a service that requires a lot of manpower without having to worry about the HR issues.

Content moderation is a tedious task if done by an experienced moderator can be done a lot quicker and with less error than by someone who has 30 tasks to complete and moderation is just one of them. By focusing on one task moderation companies can generally go through content a lot quicker than agencies are able to do in house. This translates into less hours and less money.

Another benefit of the outsourced solution is the cost per hour. Content moderation services from Winnipeg to London to New York are all in and around the same rate. Depending out what they’re doing and how many hours a day they are putting in you can expect to pay no more than $50 per hour - drastically lower than agency fees.

These savings can either be passed straight through to the end client or treated as a white label solution and billed as agency hours. Suddenly the outsourced content moderation solution starts to make a lot more sense.

What’s important to keep in mind here is the volume and the time it’s taking to moderate the content. If it’s a situation where the client is happy if the content is moderated once per day and in house staff can do that in a few minutes - and they don’t mind moderating on the weekends and holidays, than an agency will likely not benefit from working with a moderation partner.

But if you have content that needs to be moderated on a strict schedule with a quicker turnaround, or there is just enough content to be burdensome, agencies may want to look into what options are out there. It’s possible this obstacle has just become an opportunity.

Years ago working at my dad’s welding shop I had an experience that taught me the importance of consistency, what I learned that day is just as relevant to custom metal fabrication as it is to UGC moderation.

A customer had come to us with an order to build multiple identical parts. Because of the quantity of parts, I had to plan how I was going to build them as efficiently as possible. I marked out and cut all my pieces first, laid them out on a clean work surface then paused and thought about how I was going to proceed.

I decided to build a jig. A jig is something you build to lay out all your pieces in so all you have to do is weld and you don’t have to measure every piece every time. Building a good jig takes time to ensure it’s accurate but always pays off in the end if you’re dealing with a high volume of parts. (Another benefit of the jig is that it holds the pieces of steel in place once you finish welding. When you weld steel it pulls as it cools. If your pieces are not held down, or your welding technique is flawed, your pieces will move and the final product will not be what you want.)

I built the parts and the farmer returned later that week to pick them up. I showed him the pile of finished parts and we began loading them into his half-ton. After loading a few he stopped and looked at one. He said, “hand me your tape measure.” I handed it over and after a quick measurement he said, “dammit.”

As it turns out all the pieces had the same flaw - I screwed up building the jig and a measurement was out. They were identical and square but they were no good - they wouldn’t fit. I was constantly fighting the young punk stereotype and I felt this had really set me back.

I looked at him and I said, “I guess you’ll want Ken (the shop foreman and very experienced welder) to fix these.” And what this man said next is the crux of the story.

He said, “You can fix it. You only screwed up one measurement. It would be worse if you screwed up this measurement on only one or two parts - I’d wonder about you then. Nothing is worse than inconsistency.”

Moving forward in my life I’ve remembered these words when I know I’m letting something slide, I’m getting sloppy or I see a lack of effort somewhere is leading to inconsistencies.

Now take this same thought, “nothing is worse than inconsistency” and apply it to the moderation of your online communities. And ask yourself these questions:

Is moderation happening on a consistent schedule?

If more than one person is moderating is the understanding of what is and isn’t allowed consistent?

Is disallowed content being pulled down at a consistent rate?

If responses are being given are they in a consistent tone?

Is the type of content being rejected consistent?

Is the time it take to formulate and post a response consistent?

Consistency says the same thing whether it’s to a customer at a welding shop or to your community members. It says, “I care about this and I put time in before I started to ensure I had a process to make things consistent. I care about what people think, I care about their experience and I care about the end product.”

Inconsistency in a online community says the opposite. It says, “this project was not important enough to dedicate the time, money or training to mange this community properly. No one is listening, no one cares about this community, there is no value here”

Consistency always takes more time no matter what you’re doing. But it’s one of the single most obvious characteristics of something that’s been done with care.

“Nothing is worse than inconsistency”

                                                - some Farmer

Beautiful day to be in the nose bleeds at the Blue Jays game

Take that Winnipeg - I have great weather and Will Cooke!

If you’re planning on using human powered moderation in your community, either in house or with a professional moderation service, make everyone’s life easier and keep in mind your human moderator has a mind too.

A human moderator can reason, they can judge, they understand innuendo, they can understand sarcasm and they can certainly recognize clever misspellings of “bad” words users are able to slip past your word filter. Your human moderators are not software so there’s no need to write moderation guidelines as if they are robots.

I’ve heard horror stories of poor interns tasked with the job of writing all the words and phrases that will not be allowed in commenting. If you don’t understand what’s so daunting about this task - try it. Start with the most fowl word you can think of and start typing slight variations of that word that when seen still effectively convey the meaning of the word.

I’m assuming most readers will not have time for this exercise so I’ve prepared a quick demonstration below. For this demonstration I’m going to use my own name “Dustin” rather than using a real “bad” word. Now, imagine that “Dustin” is the most awful of awful words. It makes you sick just looking at it. It’s the kind of word that if you were caught saying it when you were a kid you would have gotten a mouth full of Tabasco sauce (maybe that was just me). It’s so bad you must make sure you’ve thought of everything - no room for error. The list would start like this:

Dustin - hmm, is there another way?

Du$tin - that’s about it I think…

Dus+in - oh yeah, and like that.

Du$+in - there we go, the list is done - or is it?

Dusstin

Dustinn

Dust!n

Dust1n

Dust1!n

Du$+!|\|

D:ustin

D*ustin

D*stin - oh no…

Don’t Underestimate Some Types Imaginative Notes - and this one here is really tricky

As you can see, it doesn’t take long for this to get completely out of hand and soon the poor intern’s placement is up and they’re back to school and you still don’t have a complete list of acceptable and unacceptable words.

This is where the money you’re spending on intelligent moderation is going to start paying dividends. Now those same guidelines - instead of being sheet after sheet of Excel documents - can look like this:

Words not allowed:

“Dustin” - and any variation

Next word - and any variation

and so on.

And you’re done.

I’m not saying word filters are never the write choice, they are great for weeding out the obvious offensive content. But human powered moderation is fast becoming a popular choice because humans do have the ability to apply intelligence to every decision and therefore can moderate content with a much higher degree of accuracy - and without the endless notes on what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

If you’re using a human powered solution to moderate your community write your moderation guidelines as you would like to understand them. Pass them around the office to make sure it’s easy to understand and you haven’t missed anything but don’t underestimate the intelligence of your moderation team, that’s why you hired them.

A conversation I had today got me thinking about what online community managers need to keep in mind when developing community guidelines. There’s the obvious stuff - what is allowed and what isn’t - but there are some other aspects of the community guidelines document outside of the actual rules that must be considered.

Some problems could be avoided if developers and community managers looked at the community guidelines less legalistically and more from the point of view of the user or the moderator. These simple rules might be considered no brainers but none the less are overlooked far too often.

Here are three tips to help make your community grow organically around it’s guidelines.

1. The community guidelines must be easily understood.

A simple, clear, and easy to understand set of community guidelines is a must for all communities no matter the size. Make it simple - dead simple. Take what your lawyers wrote - if you have lawyers - and rewrite it so a 10 year old can understand it. Often legal speak is used to avoid any grey area but I’ve found it often leads to more uncertainty.

2. Community guidelines must aid in moderation.

When writing community guidelines keep in mind not only the user but the person or persons who will be doing the moderation of the community. Write the community guidelines in a way that will allow the moderators to reference them easily if a dispute arises over content that’s been removed or not removed. If a moderator or community manager can quickly point to a set of easy to understand guidelines disputes have the potential to be settled much quicker.

3. Make community guidelines VERY easy to access.

I mean really easy, that 10 year old has to be able find them within seconds. If you want to make your moderators and your community member’s lives easier do not hide this document. A lot of off-side content is posted because members are not aware of guidelines or do not understand them not because they want to start trouble. 

I’m interested in hearing what you have to say, or other suggestions you might have for people who are developing or who are in desperate need of developing community guidelines for their online properties.

The greatest of Canadian tourist traps - downtown Niagara Falls

Turns out everyone does love Marine Land!

You ever wonder where picnic tables go to die?

Dave Carroll of “United Breaks Guitar” fame is truly an incredible musician.

This CD just came in the mail - if you know what it is you will smile.

Stopped for lunch at Gardin Nelson at the Old Port

At the Deux Pierottes in