How Listly can possibly auto cleanup bad lists to improve content quality

Any lists with 0-x items should attract a delete notification to the owner. x=4 is good in my opinion. The owner should have y days of time of improve the quality of the list. After this time period the said list can be quarantined to a private space. The user can bring the list back to public existence after honoring the predefined value of x.

To gamify things, quarantine of a list can attract negative points and rank degradation for the owner.

In my opinion, such a criteria for quality improvements is a must. We only communicate something like 7% of the intended content+emotion via plain text. Folks who cannot communicate well using plain text have no reason to communicate at all.
Lists in dire straits of writing style-related updates, can be candidates to quarantine and notify their owners. Delete after no improvements.

A few lists that unfortunately receive negligible hits, views, time spent on list, etc. can be candidates for cleanup. Send the owner an email(?) notification to bring up the engagement within x number of days. After that quarantine the list. Delete the list after y days.

The criteria for quarantine could be some of these proposals.
If a list is tagged with hashtag, then the list should receive 0.x% of the hits received on all the lists with that hashtag.
If the list caters to a particular topic, it should get 0.y% of views on that topic. A list should have, at least, z seconds of time spent on it by the visitors.

I don't like to see, say 3 lists with 40% overlapping content. In an ideal world, users should know better and provide a one-stop shop--a well tagged, uber list--than make multiple lists with redundancy.

This won't happen often in real world. So some lists are left behind with low engagement, low quality content, distasteful tagging, etc. How about merging overly similar lists to provide consolidated view to users?

It is easier said than done. It is more of a soft issue than a technical one. Hence the '?' in the item name.

It'll be a sensitive thing to request, say three users to delete or merge their lists, while losing moderation control. Can Listly come up with some algorithm to merge similar lists OR better still not let users create extremely similar lists in the first place?

Possibilities:
1. While creating a new list, redirect me to an existing lists, if one exists, based on my new list's title, tags, a few items added.
2. If one of the overlapping lists has markedly low engagement w.r.t. to the other, then merge them in favor of the latter.

If multiple people tag an item as "trash" or as a duplicate it can get sent to the "Trash". The owner can come along and clear up later

We have ReList - perhaps we need a "DeList"

Let people suggest tags, or images for items or for the list itself.

Let people drag items on to tags or suggest new tag.

Let the owner limit which tags can be used/shown

It's all about density of use - to aid findability

Hate-inducing content, racial content, pornographic content, etc. should not be welcome on List.ly. It can also be genuine content about or useful backlinks to sensitive topics or items. Then how to decide what to retain and what to remove? Crowd-sourcing based moderation is one way for the community to flag such content. Automatic flagging by an algorithm is another method to bring to attention potential candidates for flagging.

Also, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IknowitwhenIseeit.