PEOPLE tend towards "hooliganism" when they're allowed unmoderated and unfettered access to a publishing system, a senior IT researcher says.

And Australians tend to behave worse than most because we are not used to having so much freedom.

“We live in nanny state where everything is controlled and you can't do anything without getting in trouble,” Dr Christine Satchell, a senior research fellow in computing and information systems at the University of Melbourne, said.

“So it's hard for us as Australians to be in a space with no rules.”

Dr Satchell said users should be encouraged to moderate themselves rather than relying on police and real world laws.

She said a successful example is Slashdot, one of the world’s oldest tech websites, which is almost entirely moderated by its users.

Each is rewarded with privileges depending on how they do it, creating a system that encourages better online behaviour.

“It shows that users are savvy and capable of defining what is acceptable and what is unacceptable,” Dr Satchell said.

“At the end of the day it's about building a culture about what is acceptable and unacceptable. While Twitter is largely unpoliced, it's not as bad as it's made out to be, I'm impressed by how well the unpoliced Twitter world behaves.”

Online aggregator, BuzzFeed has also implemented reward systems where users are given badges, a ranking and “special reactions” like “LOL” and “AWWW” as a prize for contributing to the site.

Karalee Evans, APAC digital media strategist for creative agency, Text 100 told news.com.au that two social media sites with bad reputations have both used this sort of social engineering to clean up their acts.

“We’ve even seen on YouTube, that Google recognised and acknowledged that the state of their comment sections was just disgraceful and implemented a number of technologies to curb trolling and in doing so have made it a more sustainable platform,” Ms Evans said.

YouTube now lets you rate comments up and down by hitting a “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” button which affects its placement on the thread.

It not only means that hostile tweets become less visible, it also makes users competitive to ensure that what they publish on the site is of good quality so they will be rewarded with higher visibility.

Ms Evans said Reddit – one of the most popular aggregators on the internet – used to have “the worst platform online” because users were incredibly hostile to each other.

But through a series of changes to the site, the owners had turned it into “one of the safest platforms out there because the community has established desired behaviours”.

She said education and prevention programs in schools would also help improve online behaviour.

“We are seeing private programs but I think our Government needs to recognise the wider issue of online behaviour and figure out whether people have the right systems to report abuse and that ensure they feel validated,” Ms Evans said.