Wikis World/Moderation/Trends (Lucas)

(English) This is an essay. It expresses the opinions and ideas of some Wikimedians but may not have wide support. This is not policy on Meta, but it may be a policy or guideline on other Wikimedia projects. Feel free to update this page as needed, or use the discussion page to propose major changes.

This is a personal description of my guidelines for moderating the trends on wikis.world. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of the other moderators, though it might get rewritten into a more generally valid page or section later. —Lucas Werkmeister (talk)

If you don’t know how Mastodon trends work in general: Mastodon automatically picks some posts, hashtags, and links as potential trends, based on how much traction these posts (or posts mentioning these hashtags or links) have on the instance. (Contrary to the popular idea that “favorites don’t do anything”, this algorithm takes favorites into account, at least for posts.) However, these trends will only be shown publicly after they’ve been approved by a moderator – that is, the trends normal users see are a subset of the trends that Mastodon has actually determined, and normal users have no way of knowing how many unapproved trends the software is skipping between the ones they can see. Every so often (about 2-4 times per day for me), the instance sends an email to moderators telling them that there are new trends for review, but moderators can open the review interface at any time, and allow or disallow the trending posts, hashtags and links there; I have a pinned tab there that I regularly refresh. (Side note: As far as I can tell, Mastodon automatically excludes any posts with content warnings from the trends, or at least I’ve never seen them show up there. I don’t really like this, as it feels like an incentive for users to not use CWs when they should.)

Regardless of the kind of trends (posts, hashtags, links):

I generally don’t allow trends related to the gradual decline of Twitter unless it seems especially important.
I’m happier to let positive things trend, and try to not let negative things dominate. That said, pointing out or reporting negative things can still be important and be allowed to trend.
Since the initial selection and order of trends is done by Mastodon, not by me, I don’t usually worry about a “conflict of interest” when approving trends – for example, “I’m one of the people who posted this link” wouldn’t be a reason for me to not allow that link to trend.

For trending posts:

I generally don’t allow posts that have media with missing alt text, for accessibility reasons.
Similarly, I don’t usually allow posts where the language is mis-tagged, because it messes with screen readers.
I don’t allow posts that have gained traction, but don’t make sense on a “trending” page, e.g. for geographical reasons (“looking for a room in $city”)

For trending links:

They’re called “links” in the moderation interface, but “news” in the “explore” interface where users actually see them, so I think they should make sense as “news” in the broadest sense. This can include e.g. blog posts, but excludes, in particular, links to other Mastodon posts (which can appear as trending links if they were linked in another post, e.g. as a form of “quote tooting”).
I also don’t allow links if they don’t make sense out of context, e.g. some signup form (“Apply for photo ID to vote”) that makes more sense in the context of the “call to action”-style Mastodon post that made it trending.
Another reason to not allow news links is if they’re older – they might have gone trending due to a post that put the link’s age in context, but out of context on the trends page it would be more misleading.

With all that said, it’s very rare for me to disallow trends (I usually just keep them unhandled). And in any case, other moderators are technically able to override my decision at any point, and as far as I’m concerned they’re also free to do that socially.