On YouTube there is not an official hierarchy amongst user accounts, with the exception of users that are part of the Partnership Program . But this only offers the possibility to monetize videos and does not offer any privileges in the sense of favoriting. In this chapter I will briefly address some existing systems of hierarchical moderation. I will not give an extensive analysis on each of them, because overall they are quite well known. Therefore I will highlight the exemplary aspects that I think are of interest and/ or applicable to YouTube.
7.1 Slashdot (1997): meta-moderation
Slashdot’s system of meta-moderation is a pioneer in its field by using crowdsourcing as a way to detect trolls. An random, automated system selects a few users providing them with the a temporary privilege to annotate comments as being ‘offtopic’ for example. Providing the comments with a score ranging from –1 to 5. Other users can adjust their filter, so they will not see the trolling comments and other spam. The concept of crowd-voting has worked so well that sites as high-traffic as the NYT now use it .