How do you make news fun? Or, how do you make moderating often fractious comments on news stories fun? You follow FourSquare’s example and introduce badges:
The Moderator badge allows you to more actively participate in this process. If you are a Level 1 Moderator (earned by flagging at least 20 comments that we deleted, with a high ratio of good flags to mistaken ones), your flags now carry five times the weight of a standard flag. Level 2 Moderators (those who have flagged 100 comments that we deleted) are trusted to delete comments directly. We’ve seen how engaged you are in making sure the conversations on HuffPost remain interesting and productive, and are excited to have you become even more involved in helping maintain a non-toxic atmosphere.
The internet’s solution to high-volume problems is crowd-sourcing, but the site’s reported 2.3 million comments a month (just under one comment per second) may stretch even that tactic. Compete ranks the site #78, with about 8 million monthly unique visitors, even a small uptick in participation could offer huge returns.