Quora,
- COMMUNICATE!
- Try BNBR towards your own users
The modbots now communicate back to reporters about how many reports they have actioned. That is a start.
Provide rationales for why a moderation action has been taken. The mod hammer is now unpredictable and opaque: people have no idea what they have fallen afoul of. The bots know what rule they have robotically applied, and the outsourced mods know what rule they have robotically applied too. Say it.
This is critical for edit-blocking. It’s even more critical for permabanning.
Give visibility of escalation of appeals to moderation. A visibility other than “your email is important to us, and Rory the Quora intern will walk it straight to /dev/null”. Other companies have solved this: you make the ticket visible to the requester.
You do have a ticketing system, Quora, don’t you?
Apologise for fuck ups, and say what you will do better next time. Demonstrably.
A mumbled couple of phrases on the Closed Facebook Group for Top Writers does NOT count as an apology. We’re not part of the cabal, we’re on Quora. Talk to us ON QUORA.
(I can’t link to the instance I have in mind, because the author has since deleted his Quora answer mentioning it. Can you say chilling effect?)