Google Moderator

» see moderator.appspot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The thing Moderator was built for did not exist where I live. Not the software, which anybody could open from anywhere. The ritual around it: a government putting up a page, letting the public write the questions and rank them, then answering whichever ones came out on top. I have never voted on a question for a Turkish minister to answer on camera. There was no page to vote on. Moderator was a general-purpose tool that became famous doing one very American thing, and that thing is the part I was reading about from the outside.

It launched on 25 September 2008, written by three Google engineers under a project manager named Katie Jacobs Stanton. The mechanic was a single idea. You opened a series, which was a question box with a subject attached to it. People wrote their own questions into the box and voted on everybody else's. What came out was a ranked list, and the ranking was the whole product.

That is a small thing to build and a strange thing to own. Anyone running a session in front of a crowd could point at the top of the list and say this is what people actually asked, which is a different sentence from what the person holding the microphone decided to ask. For a few years Google ran the standard instrument for doing that, and then it stopped touching the instrument.

~ the record ~

~ what a series was ~

A series had an owner and an open submission box under a topic. Voting was the interesting half. Instead of a thread where the earliest comment collects the most replies, you got a list that reordered itself as more people arrived, and a question posted late could still climb to the top if enough people agreed it was the one worth asking. That is the whole argument for the format: it separates what a crowd wants asked from who got there first.

Google shipped that in 2008 and then essentially walked away. The copyright notice at the bottom of the page said 2011 for the rest of the product's life. Every redesign Google rolled out across its other properties passed Moderator by, so a page opened in 2015 looked exactly like a page opened in 2009, down to the blue links and the boxy gray headers. It was maintained the way a stairwell is maintained.

~ open for questions ~

In December 2008 the Obama transition team put Moderator behind a public series called Open for Questions. The first round ran for under 48 hours and pulled a million votes from 20,000 people across 10,000 questions. The second ran a little over a week and took 4.7 million votes from 100,000 people on 76,000 questions. Whatever you think of what came of it, those numbers describe a working instrument. A hundred thousand people ranking a pile of questions for an incoming administration was not a thing that had a mechanism before.

Katie Jacobs Stanton, who had run the project at Google, went to the White House in January 2009 as Director of Citizen Participation. The tool got used again in the years after, most visibly around the 2012 election. That was the ceiling. A voting widget with real civic weight in one country and almost no ordinary use anywhere else is a difficult thing for Google to justify keeping, and it did not keep it.

~ the fifteenth of august ~

The announcement came in the spring of 2015 and had a staggered shape. From 30 March you could pull your own Moderator data out through Takeout, and Google promised that export would stay available for at least two years. On 15 July the site stopped accepting anything new. No more series and no more votes. It sat read-only through the rest of that month.

On 15 August 2015 it went off for good, and Google was blunt about the wording: the site would no longer be available in any form. Half the places that recorded the death got the date wrong, including Wikipedia, which still says the end of June. Google's own notice is one paragraph and it says August. For a product whose entire function was letting a crowd correct the record, that is an unkind way to be remembered.

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