A set up of a reputation building model on YouTube would look like this:
1. 0 – 150 points newbie
2. 150 – 500 points resident
3. >500 points citizen
4. >1000 points honored citizen
A newbie can only connect to other users, post videos, video responses and leave comments. Allowing him/her to position him-\herself in the community and get acquainted with the system. A newbie is not able to vote to discourage the practice of flagging campaigns by sockpuppets and vote botting.
A resident does not differ from any YouTube user in the system as it is now. He/ she has access to all existing options, including voting.
A citizen is registered for meta-moderation, a new feature in this model, which allows the user to remove or confirm one flag per video.
An honored citizen is able to lock a certain video, similar controversial articles on Wikipedia, from users flagging it.
Scenario #01
A video gets flagged by five different users, the video gets hidden and checked by five different citizens or one honored citizen. For every flag one citizen is needed.
If it is decided that the video is indeed not in accordance with the TOS the video stays hidden and the account has to hand in 5 points from their account and the flaggers receive 15 points on their account. If however, the video is wrongfully flagged, it would stay up and all the flaggers have to hand in points and the accused account receives points. In order to discourage the overall practice of false flagging, positive rating is always adding more points than negative rating is taking away. This means that the intention to falsely flag a video could turn out to be beneficiary to the attacked account, which contradicts the initial intention.
Scenario #02
A video reaches an average positive rating of higher than four stars after 1000 users have rated it. The video receives immunity, after it is checked by (honored) citizens. The user that posted the video will receive 15 points on his/ her account, while the people who rated it do not receive points. This is to avoid users from rating all the videos five stars.
Very important in such a system is that all the benefits are non-monetary. It would generate a feedback loop between participation and community recognition, similar to Slashdot’s system of meta-moderation. “The system [of Slashdot] rewards both participation on the site and community judgment of that participation” .