The standard moderation model on most social platforms is: you flag a piece of content, a moderator reads it, the moderator makes a call. That works for Twitter and Discord because the content is text or images that sit on the platform’s servers. It doesn’t work for XES, because the audio isn’t on our servers.
So we use a different shape.
After every call, both sides get a rate prompt. Thumbs up, thumbs down, block, or skip. Each input does something specific. Thumbs up adds a small positive to the other person’s trust score. Thumbs down adds a small negative, scaled by the rater’s own trust (so a downvote from a brand-new user counts for less than one from someone who’s been around for a while). Block does the negative plus a one-way block; the matchmaker won’t pair you again. Skip writes nothing. Most rates are skips, and that’s by design.
Trust scores feed back into the queue. Higher-trust users get matched faster and with each other. Users below a certain threshold sit in a cooldown for a while before they can re-queue. Below a lower threshold, the cooldown is 24 hours; above it but still low, it’s an hour. None of this requires anyone listening to a call.
The mod team is for the cases where rating isn’t enough. If a thumbs-down or block is filed with a reason — harassment, racism, sexual content, under-18 suspicion — or with free text, it lands as a report in the moderator queue. There are three of us reading those, and we act on them in roughly a day. Cooldowns up to permanent bans. Trust deductions if appropriate. Reports are aggregated; one report from one user usually isn’t enough on its own, but a cluster of reports across multiple users on the same person is.
The thing this system doesn’t do is moderate the content of any single call. We can’t. There’s no audio for us to listen to even if we wanted to. What it does do is push the platform toward better calls over time, by making bad behaviour expensive. A user who arrives, harasses everyone they match with, and gets blocked five times in an hour ends up locked out of matchmaking for the day. That’s without any of us reading any of the reports yet.
This isn’t perfect. It’s slower than “moderator watches the live feed,” which is what some sites do and which has its own much larger downsides. It’s the version that’s consistent with not being able to listen to the call, which was the constraint we started from.
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