In this article we are going to learn about chat moderation and why is it important. Let us first learn what really is chat moderation
Definition of Chat Moderation
Chat Moderation refers to the processes and tools that are used to oversee and manage live discussions that are done on web and digital platforms in order to create a safe and inclusive environment for all chat participants.
This includes web messaging and messaging apps, social media channels, live streaming platform, online forums and even gaming communities
Moderation encompasses all user generated content this could include text messages, images, audio messages and even video content that is sent in teh chat.
To quickly repharse for better understanding
Chat Moderation
Chat moderation refers to overseeing real time and near real time conversations that are happing on communities, virtual events and digital platforms or streaming channels to make sure that they adhere to rules and guidelines.
Objective:
To create a respectful and engaging environment by preventing harm, abuse, spam and illegal content and be in line with the community or company guidelines.
Who is a Chat Moderator?
Role and Skill sets:
A chat moderator is reponsable for maintaining healthy interactions in online communities. They need strong communication abilities, empathy technical know how on how to spot community violations and act swiftly
Types of Moderators
- Volunteer Moderators:
Volunteer moderators are passionate community members who help be ause they care about the platform and want to provide a service to the community
- Hired Professionals:
Hired professionals are paid staff with formal training and professional standards
- Community Managers:
Community managers are often responsible for broader engagement strategies in addition to moderation tasks.
What do Chat Moderators do?
- Monitoring Chat Activity:
Chat moderators keep an eye on the discussions that are happining in the chat rooms and they flag and remove harmful content and sometimes ban users that break the rules.
- Resolving Disputes and Enforcing guidelines
Moderators mediate conflicts that can come up between members and make sure that everyone follows community guidelines
- Collecting Feedback:
They gather user input and identify repetitive issues and relay suggestions to improve the moderation processes and policies over time.
Why is Chat Moderation Important
Chat Moderation is not just about stopping bad behaviour. It is an important part of building communities, mitigating risk and enabling long term platform success.
The rapid rise of online chat through gaming, social media, virutal events, communities and corporate messaging, moderation is needed to ensure that conversations remain safe, constructive and aligned with legal and ethical standards
Ensuring User safety and brand safety
Preventing Abuse and Harmful user interactions
- Harassment and bullying:
Without moderation, a small number of distruptive users can dominate the conversations stubbing out everyone else.
These users can harm the sense of security and belonging that everyone in the community feels.
Preserving Brand reputation in Public and Private Chats
- Public Perception:
When negative and offensice content is there on your platform, it can quickly become a public relations nightmare, damaging people trust in your platform.
Private and semi-private communities can also leak harmful content externally if left unmanaged
- Positive community image
Active Moderation signals a brand's commitment to user well being. This commitment fosters goodwill and loyalty amoung users.
These users feel respected and protected and are then highly likely to recommend your community or platform to others
Building Healthy Digital communities and mitigating legal risks
- Community health: By removing toxic content early, moderators can keep the discussions in the chat healthy and make sure that newcomers.
- Legal and Regulatory Compliance: Certain regions have strict rules regarding some content. Platforms that do not comply with these rules could face penalties. Thus to be in line with the legal and regulatory compliance you need chat moderation
Improving user retention and community health
Positive environment encourages user engagement and loyalty
- Creating a welcoming atmosphere:
When users feel confident that they will not be subjected to spam and any sort of harassment, they are more likely to participate in conversations, form friendships and spend more time together
- User Loyalty
Platforms that have safer communites see low churn, Â a well moderated environment fosters long term loyalty, allowing users to build deeper connections and becoming ambassadors of the platform.
Better monetization opportunites and transaction safety
- Safe transactions:
In e-marketplaces and online platforms where there is an element of social buying, chat moderation helps prevent scams, fraud and unscrupulous behaviour.
This build trust and gives the confidance to users to make purchase of good in the e-store.
- Attracting advertisers:
Brands have a willingness to advertise in communities and online websites which best reflect their own values.
A well moderated chat reduces the risk of brand association with harmful content, making your platform more appealing to advertisers and sponsors.
What Content requires Moderation? Â
Modern chat platforms have a variety of types of content, from text to images and video and audio, these all types of content are subject to misuse and harm. A good moderation strategy must take into account the specific challenges of each format and make sure that the chat remains safe respectful and complaint with company or community guidelines.
Text based Messages
- Offensive language:
This includes profanity, slurs and other langugage that users find bad. These messages should be deleted and not be allowed in the chat platform
- Spam and misinformation:
Spamming and advertise other products and services in the chat platform degarde users experience and distract from meaningful discussions
Best practices for real time scanning and filtering
- Using DeadSimpleChat Platform
- Automated filters: In platforms such as DeadSimpleChat you can enbale automatic moderation that does not allow explicit images to be uploaded to the chat room
- Manual filters: In DeadSimpleChat you can also create moderators that can delete chat messages and also ban unruly users from the chat rooms
Images, Gif and Memes
- Removing explicit images: In DeadSimpleChat the A.I based automated moderation tools stops users form uploading explicit images to the chat room
- Using AI tools: DeadSimpleChat has A.I based tools that help with moderation of chat along with moderators.
Common Moderation Techniques
Manual Vs Automated Moderation
Manual Moderation
Advantages
- Human Empathy: Real people can better interpret tone, context and nuances of the language and can offer more compassionate decision making than A.I based algorithm can.
- Nuanced judgement: Certain topics such as satire, humor or coded language require understanding subtle clues making it a more diffcult task for automated A.I moderation tools.
- More context aware: A human moderator can have a broader view of the conversation and user behaviour before taking any action, this reduces the likelihood of inappropriately removing genuine content
Disadvantages
- Resource Intensive: It can be expensive to have human moderators to cover the chat activity.
- Time Consuming: During large event you require a lot of moderators to review and approve or remove the content
- Potential for Human Error: Moderators sometimes could be baised or be in an emotional state or have a misunderstanding this could lead to inconsistent enforcement of guidelines
Automated Moderation
Advantages
- Scalability: Automated moderation with the help of A.I can quickly process large amount of chat messages, this makes them a good choice for chat platforms that have a high user volume data.
- Speed and cost effectiveness: Automated moderation systems that are assisted with A.I can flag inappropriate content fast and in large events with thousands of online users are sending messages in the chat room, it reduces the requirement of human moderation teams.
Period of Moderation
Pre Moderation:
Here all the user generated content like messages etc are held for a moderator review, and once approved only then it is sent in the chat room. This is done when you enable Q&A mode in the DeadSimpleChat
Here moderators can approve or reject the messages based on their company rules.
Ideal Scenarios: This is predominantly used when you have a smaller community, or if you have sensitive topics of discussions and you do not want any bad content to appear in the chat even for a small amount of time.
Pros and Cons: The benefit here is that only approved content appears in the chat room, but on the downside it slows down the flow of conversations and increases moderator workload.
Post Moderation
Here content is immediatly published in the chat room, but moderators review it in real time and if they find any bad content they can quickly remove it from the chat
Ideal Scenario: Â larger event and fast paced communities where lots of messages are comming in the chat in real time.
Pros and Cons: This has more user engagement as there is not a delay between when the message is send and when it appears in the chat room after approval from modferators. But cons here is that some content might escapse the moderators eye and be in the chat room longer than it should be.
Moderation based on Community Guidelines
Reactive Moderation
Moderators respond to reports that are raised by users themselves, this relies on the community itself to raise awareness for the content in question and take action if needed.
Today social media platforms are relying on these methods.
Advantages:
This depends on community involvement, thus reducing the load on moderators and thus requires fewer moderators
Drawbacks:
Content remain visible for a lot more time, that is until and unless specific content is flagged and reported that content remains online. This could impact user experience as well as brand reputation.
Proactive Moderation:
Platforms have moderators with specific training on company guidelines and policies. these moderators constantly review content that is comming up in the community chat and proactively remove bad content
Advantages:
Much quicker than as compared to reactive content mangement. The community feels like a much safer place and bad content is removed fast. This improves brand reputation and user experience.
Disadvantages:
Costly to implement as you need to hire paid moderators or assign community members to be volunteer moderators and provide them training and guidance on company policy
Need Event Chat for your website or app
DeadSimpleChat is an Chat provider
- Add Scalable Chat to your app in minutes
- 10 Million Online Concurrent users
- 99.999% Uptime and 100% guaranteed Uptime durring events
- Moderation features
- 1-1 Chat
- Group Chat
- Polls
- Q&A Sessions
- Fully Customizable
- Chat API and SDK
- Pre-Built Chat