Google Moderator

The bet

Google didn't build Moderator as a civic tool, but for a while it became the default one. Launched in 2008, it did something simple and useful. A crowd submitted questions or ideas and voted each other's up or down, and the most-supported ones floated to the top for a host to answer.

To the extent it had a bet, it was this: the hard part of a mass Q&A is choosing which questions to ask, and a crowd could choose better than a producer. When the Obama transition, and then the White House, needed a way to take questions from the whole country, Moderator was the obvious answer.

Peak

At civic scale, this was new. Obama's "Open for Questions" drew a million votes from twenty thousand people in its first run and 4.7 million votes from a hundred thousand in its second. The March 2009 online town hall recorded more than 3.6 million votes for specific questions. YouTube used Moderator for debates, and TED and universities used it for events. For a few years it was simply how you ran a large crowdsourced Q&A.

A president answering questions ranked by a hundred thousand strangers was, at the time, a democratic novelty.

What worked

Moderator made mass crowdsourced Q&A easy and free. It let institutions as large as the White House open the floor to the whole public, where before they would have had a hand-picked room. At millions of votes, it showed that the appetite to ask directly and be heard is enormous. Agora is built on that appetite, and Moderator proved it exists.

What failed — the mechanism

Two things undid it, one on screen and one behind it.

On screen, a raw up-or-down vote rewards the most organized, not the most representative. When the floor opened, coordinated advocates voted their cause straight to the top (marijuana legalization, most famously) and reshaped the agenda of a national town hall through mobilization alone. The ranking measured coordination and intensity, not the constituency, and everyone could see it.

Behind the screen, Moderator was a free, non-core product of a company that owed it nothing. When its usage fell short of Google's internal expectations, Google retired it in 2015. Every civic actor who had built a process on it lost the tool overnight. It didn't fail on its merits. Google switched it off, and its signal had been gameable all along.

What Agora takes from it

Moderator carries two lessons. The first is that raw crowd-voting can be captured by whoever organizes best. That is why Agora verifies participants and weights signal by constituency, in-district against out, instead of ranking by unfiltered votes.

The second is about ownership. Civic participation built on a corporation's free tool disappears the moment that corporation loses interest, so Agora owns the platform it depends on. This is the warning Causes gave about platform dependency, arriving here from the opposite direction.