There should be a sacred element to the individual decision whether to click the recommend button. If community moderation is to be sacred, so to speak, it necessarily must rest on respect for the individual voter. A recommend is the end of a decision process. An exception is made for providing information or pointing out what seems an obvious mistake, as I have seen before. After imparting this information, the integrity of the other person would be assumed, and any responses from the recommender would be accepted.
It is my sense that at one point a campaign was mounted to pressure people concerning their recommends--demanding explanations, drawing far-fetched conclusions, and making critical remarks. I believe this tactic can be effective at isolating kossacks because bystanders feel that just by clicking the recommend button they have cast a vote in a global war.
This also converts the recommend decision from a private internal process to an other-directed process, while introducing fear of public disapproval, thus making the decision-making process less rational. Opinion-makers need outer-directed types for their manipulations, advertisers target outer-directed types because their behavior is subject to manipulation.
The outer-directed kossack is mentally rehearsing the reactions of others when making the decision whether to recommend, and fear can make the process irrational without the user even being aware of it. Perhaps some groups are even consciously aware of having this effect and conspire to blast criticisms or coddle with persuasive techniques, sometimes even toward agreed-upon individuals just to influence their recommend decisions wrt specific kossacks whom they wish to build up or tear down.
Whether or not the corruption runs that deep, the independence of the decision-maker is corrupted just by the process of making the decision subject to ridicule or praise. The decision whether to recommend can become internalized as a public decision. Sacred, in this case, means the decision whether to recommend is a private, personal one--both an earned right and an obligation. Sacred means that even insane people who manage to become trusted users get their one vote. Their right to that vote, and the way they use it, is not questioned other than through the procedures in place for doing so.
If a person is a trusted user, his integrity is assumed. There are procedures in place for challenging whether a person should be a trusted user. They should be followed. I won't mention hides, because apparently they are going away, but the same thing holds. Damn, but I did mention them.
I think it should be forbidden to discuss the recommend decisions people make. A recommend is like a vote, it is a part of the democratic aspect of community moderation. We do not have a curtained voting booth, but we can forbid a pressure group from standing around outside the booth heckling. Decisions whether to recommend (or hide) should be matters of personal integrity much as a vote in a meeting room would be. After discussion, people vote. Arguments do not break out during the voting. People are not taken to task for the decision they made, unless you happen to be in a dysfunctional organization in which people lack basic respect for one another.
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