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Content moderation is all kinds of actions whose goal is to keep the content clean and relevant. Any user should be able to take part in content moderation to some extent, as long as they have a personal interest. Usually, content moderation does not require any special knowledge besides good writing skills and basic common sense.
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Community moderation is about moderating relationships between users. Moderating relationships requires special skills such as empathy, active listening, conflict resolution, etc. Moderating relationships implies the need to make decisions on very subjective topics. This type of moderation should be restricted only to volunteers who have been explicitly elected to serve these needs either by the community itself or assigned by a community manager.
Each of those types of moderation requires a different moderation tool set with very different access levels. When choosing a platform, pay attention to if moderation activities cover both types of moderation, are broken down into the minimum possible actions and there are some settings tuning which you can control access to moderation tools for the users based on some criteria.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.