Hedgehog Integrity
Our priority is to make the community a safe and honest place for open discourse to happen.
Your Safety on Hedgehog
Hedgehog utilizes a multi-pronged integrity scheme to protect our community and members, and to ensure our platform isn’t being abused.
- Automated detection: We use AI controls to process all image, video and text content on Hedgehog. Content that violates our Community Guidelines is rejected and any borderline content is subject to further review. While we encourage robust discussion and don’t seek to manipulate conversation on the platform, we have an obligation to keep our community safe and limit Hedgehog to its intended purpose. Our automated controls focus on the most harmful content such as hateful rhetoric, threats of physical violence, personal attacks, illegal activity, and inauthentic behavior.
- Member Reporting: We give Hedgehog members the ability to report content and accounts for review. Reported comments, posts, and profiles are only reviewed by Hedgehog moderators for violations of our Terms of Service or Community Guidelines.
- Admin Review: We have a dedicated team of human moderators to supplement automated controls and review content suspected of violating of our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service. Our moderation team also audit reports and community moderation decisions to ensure accuracy and objectivity.
- Community moderation: All account holders who are Members or Contributors have the ability to shape the conversation happening on Hedgehog through Community Moderation. Account holders can flag content they feel does not belong on Hedgehog, allowing other community members to either agree or disagree with their assessment. Community Moderation is an essential feature of our platform, and we rely on Hedgehog members to use it respectfully. Abusing the Community Moderation feature could result in loss of such privileges.
We understand that complex safeguards need to be designed when creating a community moderation toolset to avoid misuse and abuse. Moderation of complex issues can be prone to error, and decision-making can become bogged down when too few or too many people get involved, and as new threats develop. We trust our community and our goal is to empower discussions to stay thoughtful and non-toxic, and to evolve our enforcement scheme against any new issues. We
Hedgehog has additional safeguards protecting the integrity of our community and that set our platform apart.
- Invite only: We believe in order to build an ideal experience, the community should be given the tools to build itself organically. This is why Hedgehog is an exclusive, invite-only platform. Being invited to join Hedgehog is an honor, and we have mechanisms in place to ensure only those trusted by the existing community can join. This helps us limit membership to those who will be productive members, and keep the spammers, scammers, bad guys and bots out.
- Contributor Posts: While all Hedgehog members can create topics of conversation and live chats, only contributors are able to create posts. For now, Contributors are designated by Hedgehog staff and are carefully selected to make sure your feed is engaging, thought-provoking and has diverse perspectives. Eventually, Hedgehog members will have the ability to earn Contributor status through participation and a consistently high community standing.
- Content Ownership: When you create a topic of conversation or a live chat, you have the ability to remove content or people from these spaces without interference from Hedgehog. This ensures the conversation remains thoughtful and on track.
What are Topics of Conversation and Live Chats?
Comments are always done wrong – we want to fix that!
On Hedgehog when you comment on a post it creates a Topic of Conversation. If someone else decides to join in, the Topic of Conversation becomes a Live Chatroom. The Live Chatroom creates an opportunity for people to be interactive, discuss and learn from each other in a small-group environment. The order of Topics of Conversation on a post is mostly determined by community engagement, but is also designed to ensure that chatrooms do not get too full.
How are Live Chats moderated?
Hedgehog ensures the community has control.
A cornerstone of Hedgehog’s mission is to keep conversations productive, civil, and safe. We are keenly aware of how bad actors can abuse lax moderation, but we equally dislike the undue censorship on platforms with a strong central authority. This is why in addition to our automated controls that monitor for content violations, our Contributors and Members are empowered to remove comments from their posts and remove people from Live Chats they create without Hedgehog’s interference.
Introduction
Start a conversation
We encourage discourse. Here are a few different ways to dive into the conversation on Hedgehog.
1. Starting a Live Chat
Hit the join conversation button on comments (Topics of Conversation) then, bam — you’re in. Expect to get different perspectives, as well as discuss and debate your point of view in a productive environment. Trolls be warned: you can be removed at any time by the other members of the chatroom. Remember the good ol’ days on the internet? Vote. Kick. Gone. But be careful with abusing the voting system; if you nominate someone to kick and lose, you get booted instead.
2. Tracking your conversations
Easily track all of these fabulous conversations in one place—each discussion represents a different chatroom you’ve joined. Ever change your mind about something or regret something you said? Don’t worry, chatrooms delete automatically after about 30 days.
3. Reacting
With a wide range of reactions — not just a thumbs up or thumbs down — you can express your opinion with just one click. Reactions let people know you read their comment or post, and everyone should feel comfortable reacting to content without judgement. To make sure no one feels sheepish about leaving an honest reaction, we’ve made reactions anonymous to everyone except the person who posted the article. You shouldn’t have to fear what others might think of your reactions so they will never show on your profile for others to see.
4. Notifications
Notifications help you stay up to date on topics you’re discussing and content you may be moderating. Get notified immediately when someone reacts, comments on, or tags someone in your post.
Tips for engaging on Hedgehog
Mind your manners
With Hedgehog you will find a place where different opinions can be embraced, community can be built, and common issues plaguing online discourse today can be avoided. All community members have a hand in setting norms and boundaries here, and that starts with promoting respectful, civil and thoughtful engagement. Here are a few things we don’t tolerate on Hedgehog:
- Spam or self promotion
- Bullying or threats
- Illicit, explicit or pornographic content
- Posting private information about someone else
- Intentionally misleading information (like posting the wrong day to vote)
For a full list of do’s and don’ts check out our Terms of Service.
Ready to get started?
Get started and signup for Hedgehog as a Viewer! Or, ask around for a friend who is already a Hedgehog Member to invite you!