Community Moderators: All account holders who are Members or Contributors have the ability to shape the conversation happening on Hedgehog through Community Moderation. Account holders with this ability can raise posts that may be against Community Standards or otherwise objectionable, allowing other community members to either agree or disagree with their assessment. Community moderation is an essential feature of our platform, and we rely on Hedgehog members to use it respectfully. Abusing moderation privileges or a low community standing could result in loss of such privileges. Learn more about community moderation here.

Community Moderation Guidelines

What is Community Moderation?

Community moderation is the ability for Hedgehog members to designate content on the platform for possible downranking or removal. While Hedgehog maintains comprehensive enforcement of our Terms of Service (TOS) and Community Standards, we believe that the Hedgehog community should be able to decide independently via a democratic process if they feel certain content is objectionable or unacceptable for the platform. Sometimes certain content is not a clear policy violation, or it takes direct insight or knowledge about the nuances surrounding a topic to be able to make a proper judgment on content. By giving the Hedgehog community the power to shape conversation, everyone can have a say in determining whether or not something is a TOS violation or simply does not belong on the platform. This will allow Hedgehog to scale for larger audiences across a wider range of topics, while also creating a much higher standard of conversation. By empowering all people to become community moderators, we hope to create a process that is quicker to react, more transparent, and more objective when it comes to drawing the line of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable on the platform.

How does community moderation work?

When a Hedgehog account holder sees a post they think is inappropriate for the Hedgehog platform, the first step is to flag the post via Hedgehog’s reporting tool. This tool can be used for content that violates Hedgehog’s TOS or Community Standards, or content that the community may simply find irrelevant or unproductive to the conversation at hand. The reporting tool is designed to take the reporter through a few simple questions about why they are flagging the content, and depending on the responses, the content will be investigated by Hedgehog’s third party human moderation team to make a determination about a TOS violation, put forward for a community moderation vote, or both.

When a report is put forward for a community moderation vote, the community will have approximately 20-30 minutes to vote to confirm or deny the decision to remove this content. The final moderation determination will take into account the majority opinion of the voters, as well the community standing of those who participated in the moderation. Depending on the results, the content will be removed, downranked, or, in the case that the community does not agree with the requestor’s suggestion, no action will be taken and feedback will be given to the reporter on how to more effectively raise content in the future.

Who can be a community moderator?

On Hedgehog, all Members and Contributors are automatically given the ability to community moderate. Viewers have the ability to flag potential TOS or Community Standards violations and certain other issues, such as DMCA requests, through a separate tool.

What content is subject to community moderation?

Chat rooms: When a Hedgehog member creates a chat room, they automatically have the ability to moderate the conversation in that room. The chat room creator can also designate other members in the chat as moderators for that space.
Comments: Members and Contributors can moderate comments. Members and Contributors have the ability to moderate comments on their own posts, and can suggest comments on others’ posts for a community decision.

What are Content Owners, Trusted Moderation Partners and Instant Moderation?

Content Owners are the people who created a specific piece of content on Hedgehog. This may be a post, a topic of conversation, a comment, chat room, etc. Every Member and Contributor on Hedgehog is automatically the Content Owner of all content they create.

Trusted Moderation Partners are people that can be selected by Content Owners to moderate their content on their behalf. Every Member and Contributor will have the ability to select other Members and Contributors to become their Trusted Moderation Partners. These might be friends, family, or trusted Hedgehog members who they think are worthy of helping keep an eye on their content.

Instant Moderation happens when a Trusted Moderation Partner moderates content for someone else. This can happen in any chat rooms or posts created by the Content Owner, and includes the ability to delete comments and remove people out of live chat conversations.

How does Hedgehog ensure community moderation is fair and accurate?

In order to mitigate account holders gaming or abusing the community moderation system, community moderation decisions are not solely based on a majority number of votes. Instead, community moderation determinations are based on a parliamentary-style system where both the majority vote and the relative weight of each vote is taken into consideration. The weight of each vote includes a variety of factors including the community standing of the requestor and the original poster, as well as the community standing of each voter. Community standing scores are also impacted by past community moderation outcomes. Account holders who consistently report content in bad faith or report content which the community feels is not a violation will receive a lower community standing over time, thereby holding less weight in community moderation in the future.

Our system is designed to provide enough time for content to receive a critical mass of votes from community members, while still taking action on content quickly in the interest of quality and safety. If a community moderation decision is subject to too few votes, no action will be taken. If a community moderation decision is subject to an unusually high number of votes, it may be subject to further review by Hedgehog staff to ensure there was no manipulation in voting.

Additionally, Hedgehog staff periodically review all community moderation decisions to ensure they are reasonable and not being abused. We want to assure that all content and people receive equitable consideration and treatment. potential TOS violations that are flagged will be sent to hedgehog/hive and community at the same time (some language to denote community opinion helps inform/train moderation etc). 20-30 minutes for community decision.

Even if a post doesn’t directly violate community policies, we recognize and respect the community's decision. They may have other valid reasons to remove the content. Content that is irrelevant to the conversation at hand, unproductive, or objectionable can still cause a low quality experience and should be removed. This is why we provide people on Hedgehog the ability to moderate conversations and content by suggesting content for a community decision. When content is suggested for community moderation, the requestor must indicate why they suggested it, and the community will be asked to vote on whether or not they agree.

Once a threshold of reports on certain content is met, This review process lasts approximately 20-30 minutes and will leverage a parliamentary style voting system which takes into account every voter’s community contributions and combines this with a simple numerical majority to make a final determination.