Moderation poses one of the main Internet challenges. Currently, many Internet platforms and virtual communities deal with it by intensive human labour, some big companies - such as YouTube or Facebook-hire people to do it, others - such as 4chan or fanscup-just ask volunteer users to get in charge of it. But in most cases the policies that they use to decide if some contents should be removed or if a user should be banned are not clear enough to users. And, in any case, typically users are not involved in their definition. Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom concluded that societies -such as institutions that had to share scarce resources-that involve individuals in the definition of their rules performed better -resources lasted more or did not deplete-than those organisations whose norms where imposed externally. Democracy also relies on this same idea of considering peoples' opinions. In this vein, we argue that participants in a virtual community will be more prone to behave correctly -and thus the community itself will be "healthier" - if they take part in the decisions about the norms of coexistence that rule the community. With this aim, we investigate a collective decision framework that: (1) structures (relate) arguments issued by different participants; (2) allows agents to express their opinions about arguments; and (3) aggregates opinions to synthesise a collective decision. More precisely, we investigate two aggregation operators that merge discrete and continuous opinions. Finally, we analyse the social choice properties that our discrete aggregator operator satisfies.
展开▼
