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Positives, Negatives and Improvements for the Jury System

MindsJun 5, 2019, 10:50:18 PM

Good news. The jury system is working!

Over the last few weeks, we have seen decentralized governance in action with the jury both accepting and rejecting appeals from the Minds community on whether content is not safe for work (NSFW). We are making improvements and want to address some of the feedback that has arisen from the updates to provide more clarity. 

1 - NSFW does not get you banned

First and foremost, a strike for NSFW content does NOT mean the content is removed, or that the channel is at any risk of being banned. If you receive three strikes in the same NSFW category, the consequence is solely that your full channel will receive this tag. No NSFW content is being removed and no channels are being banned for posting it. These labels are simply to ensure that NSFW content is only viewable by users who have subscribed or opted-in to see that specific category of content in their Discovery feed settings. We still allow all legal speech to remain on our platform, and all of the information on what constitutes a strike or a ban can be found here: https://minds.com/content-policy

2 - If you disagree with a decision, appeal!

Over the past few days, there has been some miscommunication amongst our admin team on our new moderation technology and it unfortunately resulted in strikes for some users. We implemented the jury system specifically to give our community a way to review and overturn our decisions in an event such as this, and it has proven to be effective. Many of the appeals have been accepted and the tags have been removed due to review from a jury. We encourage users to take full advantage of the appeal process if they believe their post was not tagged correctly. Our team is not perfect and mistakes will happen, but we now have a much better process to rectify them and give you a voice.

3 - More clarity and education

The results of the recent juries have taught us that more clarity is needed for certain NSFW categories, particularly race/religion/gender and profanity. The appeals have almost exclusively been over these tags, and the majority of them have been overturned (which removes the strike and the NSFW tag from the post). We also learned that we need to improve on educating our community and jury members on what they are voting on and what the impact will be. The jury isn’t about banning or removing content, it is about building a democratic tagging system so that we can allow all users to opt-in specifically to the types of content they are comfortable with.

We are going to do our best to improve on our consistency and provide more clarity as to where the line is drawn for NSFW, but we are glad to see the jury system working as intended to push back on our team and highlight areas that need improvement. The entire point of the jury system is to ensure that our team does not hold too much control over these decisions, and it is already accomplishing just that.

With your help, our goal over time is to continue to improve the system so that it can be leveraged for more decisions across the network, including decisions on the initial report, and serve as the framework for expanded, decentralized governance through voting and consensus. You can view the changes we plan to make in the short term and add any comments or suggestions here.