DU Community Help

"Would it be possible to add an explanation feature to the self-delete feature?"

This is not necessary because in any case where someone has mistakenly posted incorrect information, they can simply edit their post instead of self-deleting it. Self-deletion completely wipes all record of a post from the forum -- even the Admins can't retrieve it. But if you're just correcting misinformation, there's nothing wrong with simply editing your post, and then you can add any additional context you like.

With regard to a system of expert moderators being faster and more efficient than the Jury system, I can assure you that that's not the case. We ran a traditional moderating system with trained moderators for a decade on DU, so I have a great deal of experience with that system. You're right that it is extremely time consuming and laborious. The people who volunteered were great, and were game for the work, but even so, over time, institutional bias creeps in, "rule creep" occurs, and because discussion forum communities tend to naturally divide themselves into groups, accusations of moderator bias and attempts to "work the refs" become frequent. You can imagine, for example, how much pressure moderators would be under during Democratic presidential primaries.

With a traditional moderator system, you need a private space for moderator communications, which can become scandalous if (or rather when) those discussions become public, because people don't like to be talked about behind their backs. Ultimately the community ends up spending an awful lot of time talking about how it moderates itself, rather than getting on with discussions that the forum is supposed to be about.

The Jury system was specifically designed to resolve the problems that we encountered over ten years of working with a moderator system. It is exponentially faster -- for example, a spambot post can be posted, alerted on, and removed within minutes, even in the middle of the night -- and it produces outcomes that are just as good, if not better, than a traditional moderator system. There are significantly fewer alerts and removed posts under the current Jury system than there ever were under the old moderator system, yet the community as a whole is relatively civil.