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Oops, sorry, I didn't mean to duplicate my own comment.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

(3) The author seems completely ignorant of the free information movement and the concept of copyleft. Stephen King's deal was nothing more than an unusual use of shareware sales techniques in the book industry. His book is copyrighted. An guess what? If copyright was abolished tomorrow, there would no longer be any way to enforce the GPL or any other copyleft license. The only reason you're bound by the GPL is that if you don't agree to it, you don't have permission to download the (copyrighted!) information.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

(1) None of the arguments relate to technology at all. Abolishing copyright was tried before the internet existed, during the French revolution. The result was a distaster -- all publishing ceased except for pornography and cheap scandal sheets. To convince me that the results would be different today, I'd have to see an argument that relates to changes in technology.

(2) The abolition of IP is just not going to happen, so why even discuss it? I'd consider it a great triumph if the U.S. government would just stop extending copyright terms the next time the 1923 batch came close to going PD. But even that is extremely unlikely to happen, since, e.g. Disney owns the 1923 Winnie the Pooh copyrights, and their lobbyists managed to get the latest extension passed without even having it debated.

I can think of some realistic political goals in the U.S., but they're a lot more modest. For instance, I'd like to see the federal government force all academic research they fund to be published electronically and copylefted. Arxiv.org has already shown they're capable of replacing traditional scientific journals completely in some scientific subfields, e.g. string theory.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Why don't you make some free information yourself instead of acting like everybody in the world deserves to be your slave and produce what you want for free?

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

• What kind of society will this kind of thinking lead to? I am an amateur musician, and I have made many a transcription (or should I say 'interpretation') of songs I like. I have friends who play as well, and I have no qualms whatsoever in giving them these transcriptions. Am I 'stealing' something now? NO.

Personally, what I think is really immoral about copyright law is the ridiculous lengths of the copyright terms. Unfortunately, Disney et al. have good lobbyists, who are making sure that Disney can retain the Winnie the Pooh copyrights for as long as possible.

• Where do you think music comes from? What do you think it means when some musician tells you she has her 'roots' in this and that artist or such and so style? Do you think she means she signed a contract with those artists, a licensing agreement whereby she gained the right to use parts of their 'intellectual property' in her own works? Is that how you want the music of the 21st century to be?

It also sounds like you think music should be treated differently than other forms of expression like books and paintings. I think that's wrong -- art forms overlap, so it's not even possible to draw strict legal distinctions between them. And I don't see what moral argument would apply to one form and not to others. I think an across-the-board info-anarchist position like Ian Clarke's has more self-consistency than what you're saying.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The Web democratized publishing, and gazillions of people have now published the equivalent of short articles via the internet -- they're called web pages. As for full-length books, there are (see my sig) something like 150 free-as-in-beer or free-as-in speech books that I know of (not counting old public-domain books). Commercial publishers have even started making books free-as-in-beer (example).

What about music? Mutopia is doing a great job with public-domain music (does anyone understand how tedious it is to enter a long piece of complex classical music into LilyPond notation by hand, with no GUI???), but it's amazing what a wasteland the net is for music intentionally made free by living artists. I made an ill-fated attempt to create a site for free-as-in-speech music (focusing more on recent stuff). Now I made a lot of blunders, so really I just have to count this as an learning experience in how not to build an online community. But it's still just a little shocking that there's virtually no free-as-in-speech modern music on the web. (I contributed a few of my own jazz tunes, but I don't claim they're anything earthshattering.)

This is particularly pathetic because there's so much music notation software that's either free (LilyPond) or cheap (Lime).

Maybe it's just that the musicians' culture hasn't gotten hip to free information. I guess musicians are so used to getting ripped off by record companies, etc., that they are in defense mode, and won't even consider setting their music free?

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

As far as support for NIFF, correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK, the only free notation software that supports NIFF is Neume, which isn't complete yet.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

is it still relevant today ?
It would be relevant if you'd stop whining, compose some of your own music, and intentionally make it free.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

If people really believe it's immoral to own information, they should come out and say it, and admit they don't think songwriters deserve their money. They shouldn't try to make bogus claims that what they're doing is legal.

In any case, let's not confuse what OLGA is doing with what Mutopia is doing. Mutopia hosts public-domain stuff, and could also host music that was intentionally made free by living composers. It's not a music warez site like OLGA.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Does anyone know how the effort to make a GUI for LilyPond is going? Until that effort is complete, this kind of activity is unfortunately going to be limited to (a) extreme geeks who want to hand-code LilyPond, or (b) people who don't mind shelling out lots of money for proprietary software.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

At any rate, one of the key problems with cold fusion research is that it seems to turn out that the process of cold fusion (if it even actually happens) only occurs if the palladium rod has a certain kind of composition
Your interpretation is disproven by the fact that Pons and Fleischman are still alive. If cold fusion had actually been happening at any time, they would be dead from the neutrons.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

A repository for free-as-in-speech texts strikes me as a pretty good idea.

As noted by dvdeug, Gutenberg doesn't really want to do recent texts.

On-Line Books Page will do them, but it's not really their specialty; they require the book to have a Library of Congress catalog number, which many free books don't have, and they don't host texts, they just link to them.

Opencontent.org is a general-purpose link site for OPL'd content, but it doesn't host texts.

If GNU is really serious about this project (they don't even seem to have a proposal written yet??), I think they're going to have two big challenges:

1. They may mirror a text which then gets modified. If they don't watch out, they could become a repository for out-of-date versions that just distracts people from finding the latest version.
2. Given the ideological approach shown by their GNUpedia proposal, I assume they're not going to be selective at all. They could easily end up swimming in garbage.

I also hope they'll be broad-minded about what licenses they accept.

Actually the biggest obstacle to permanence for free e-texts is that so many are free as in beer, but not free as in speech. E.g. this catalog contains 151 free books, of which only 23 are free as in speech. (I'm not even talking about old public-domain e-texts, of which there are tens of thousands.) All those free-as-in-beer books could stop being free any time the copyright holder feels like it. This has already happened with a whole bunch of Macmillan computer science titles.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

A repository for free-as-in-speech texts strikes me as a pretty good idea.

As noted by dvdeug, Gutenberg doesn't really want to do recent texts.

On-Line Books Page will do them, but it's not really their specialty; they require the book to have a Library of Congress catalog number, which many free books don't have, and they don't host texts, they just link to them.

Opencontent.org is a general-purpose link site for OPL'd content, but it doesn't host texts.

If GNU is really serious about this project (they don't even seem to have a proposal written yet??), I think they're going to have two big challenges:

1. They may mirror a text which then gets modified. If they don't watch out, they could become a repository for out-of-date versions that just distracts people from finding the latest version.
2. Given the ideological approach shown by their GNUpedia proposal, I assume they're not going to be selective at all. They could easily end up swimming in garbage.

I also hope they'll be broad-minded about what licenses they accept.

Actually the biggest obstacle to permanence for free e-texts is that so many are free as in beer, but not free as in speech. E.g. this catalog contains 151 free books, of which only 23 are free as in speech. (I'm not even talking about old public-domain e-texts, of which there are tens of thousands.) All those free-as-in-beer books could stop being free any time the copyright holder feels like it. This has already happened with a whole bunch of Macmillan computer science titles.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

A repository for free-as-in-speech texts strikes me as a pretty good idea.

As noted by dvdeug, Gutenberg doesn't really want to do recent texts.

On-Line Books Page will do them, but it's not really their specialty; they require the book to have a Library of Congress catalog number, which many free books don't have, and they don't host texts, they just link to them.

Opencontent.org is a general-purpose link site for OPL'd content, but it doesn't host texts.

If GNU is really serious about this project (they don't even seem to have a proposal written yet??), I think they're going to have two big challenges:

1. They may mirror a text which then gets modified. If they don't watch out, they could become a repository for out-of-date versions that just distracts people from finding the latest version.
2. Given the ideological approach shown by their GNUpedia proposal, I assume they're not going to be selective at all. They could easily end up swimming in garbage.

I also hope they'll be broad-minded about what licenses they accept.

Actually the biggest obstacle to permanence for free e-texts is that so many are free as in beer, but not free as in speech. E.g. this catalog contains 151 free books, of which only 23 are free as in speech. (I'm not even talking about old public-domain e-texts, of which there are tens of thousands.) All those free-as-in-beer books could stop being free any time the copyright holder feels like it. This has already happened with a whole bunch of Macmillan computer science titles.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

A repository for free-as-in-speech texts strikes me as a pretty good idea.

As noted by dvdeug, Gutenberg doesn't really want to do recent texts.

On-Line Books Page will do them, but it's not really their specialty; they require the book to have a Library of Congress catalog number, which many free books don't have, and they don't host texts, they just link to them.

Opencontent.org is a general-purpose link site for OPL'd content, but it doesn't host texts.

If GNU is really serious about this project (they don't even seem to have a proposal written yet??), I think they're going to have two big challenges:

1. They may mirror a text which then gets modified. If they don't watch out, they could become a repository for out-of-date versions that just distracts people from finding the latest version.
2. Given the ideological approach shown by their GNUpedia proposal, I assume they're not going to be selective at all. They could easily end up swimming in garbage.

I also hope they'll be broad-minded about what licenses they accept.

Actually the biggest obstacle to permanence for free e-texts is that so many are free as in beer, but not free as in speech. E.g. this catalog contains 151 free books, of which only 23 are free as in speech. (I'm not even talking about old public-domain e-texts, of which there are tens of thousands.) All those free-as-in-beer books could stop being free any time the copyright holder feels like it. This has already happened with a whole bunch of Macmillan computer science titles.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Flamebait? If it's true, is it still flamebait?

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

After all, I learned in my fancy undergraduate education that the speed of light was a constant.
It obviously wasn't fancy enough, because you don't seem to realize it's only a constant in a vacuum, not in a meterial medium.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The problem with your approach, frankly, is demonstrated pretty clearly by reading just about anything in Slashdot's section on science fiction -- er, I mean science.

To make a software analogy, would you want people who didn't know a pointer from a hole in the ground to be able to modify the version of the Linux kernel that Linus Torvalds distributes? Free information means the freedom to do lame things to your own copy of the information, not to do lame things to the copy that someone else distributes and that people count on to be reliable.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

If you think they're not moving along fast enough, why don't you contribute instead of criticizing?

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

As I was washing the dishes just now, it occurred to me that maybe the idea of including a physical threat in the joke was not such a great idea. I mean, I hope it was obvious that the whole thing was a joke, but there are a lot of crazy people out there in the world, and although it may be obvious that I'm not really a klingon, it may not be obvious that I'm more or less sane, and not at all inclined to violence. Sorry, Michael.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Reading and posting on Slashdot am I from Klingon homeworld through wearable universal translator device, operating with optional subspace radio module and speech-too-text and text-too-speech technology. Device excellent is it, but a day very good two die had better it bee for Michael, because has he insulted are honor through him saying that was this device invented by humans.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

As a concrete example of the harm done by voodoo science, all the money being wasted on research into supposed health threats from nonionizing radiation could have saved thousands of lives if it had been used for health care in Africa.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The silliness of Josephson's review is most evident in his discussion of cold fusion:

• Cold fusion -- the suggestion that hydrogen nuclei can be made to fuse together and thereby generate considerable energy at near room temperature, using an electrochemical process instead of the usual very high temperatures -- was a claim that seemed initially very unlikely to be true, though not totally ruled out. After some workers found themselves unable to reproduce the results initially claimed by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989, a high degree of scepticism arose in the scientific community, especially after the publication of an official report declaring the absence of any evidence that fusion had taken place.

  It is interesting to look both at Park's account of the history of cold fusion and at that of the protagonists, presented in a video documentary Cold Fusion: fire from water (available from www.infinite-energy.com). Park impresses on the reader the fact that if the process that generates the heat is really fusion then one would expect to see fusion products. He fails to mention here, as the video does, that the small amount of such products anticipated, given the amount of energy generated, was eventually observed, and in just the right quantity. All mention of positive results, such as the experiment where, by what appears to be a sound method, it was found that the energy generated was considerably in excess of anything that could be explained conventionally, is collapsed into a paragraph where Park notes that many claims are soon withdrawn because of errors being found (as also happens in ordinary science).

  This device legitimises the dismissal of all positive results, and so also the corollary "cold fusion is no closer to being proven than it was the day when it was announced". This is a seriously misleading statement.

• "He fails to mention here, as the video does, that the small amount of such products anticipated, given the amount of energy generated, was eventually observed, and in just the right quantity." I've read Voodoo Science, but it appears that Josephson has not. All of this is discussed in excruciating detail in the book.
• "This device legitimises the dismissal of all positive results, and so also the corollary 'cold fusion is no closer to being proven than it was the day when it was announced'. This is a seriously misleading statement." Actually what's misleading is Josephson's description. It's been, what, 15 years since cold fusion was announced? I'm still waiting for the first demonstration of a working device.
• What Josephson fails to mention is the most damning evidence of all against cold fusion: if the device had really been producing the levels of energy Pons and Fleischman claimed, they would have been killed by neutrons. Subsequent experiments by Gai et al. showed no neutron emission in excess of (very low) background levels.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The silliness of Josephson's review is most evident in his discussion of cold fusion:

• Cold fusion -- the suggestion that hydrogen nuclei can be made to fuse together and thereby generate considerable energy at near room temperature, using an electrochemical process instead of the usual very high temperatures -- was a claim that seemed initially very unlikely to be true, though not totally ruled out. After some workers found themselves unable to reproduce the results initially claimed by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989, a high degree of scepticism arose in the scientific community, especially after the publication of an official report declaring the absence of any evidence that fusion had taken place.

  It is interesting to look both at Park's account of the history of cold fusion and at that of the protagonists, presented in a video documentary Cold Fusion: fire from water (available from www.infinite-energy.com). Park impresses on the reader the fact that if the process that generates the heat is really fusion then one would expect to see fusion products. He fails to mention here, as the video does, that the small amount of such products anticipated, given the amount of energy generated, was eventually observed, and in just the right quantity. All mention of positive results, such as the experiment where, by what appears to be a sound method, it was found that the energy generated was considerably in excess of anything that could be explained conventionally, is collapsed into a paragraph where Park notes that many claims are soon withdrawn because of errors being found (as also happens in ordinary science).

  This device legitimises the dismissal of all positive results, and so also the corollary "cold fusion is no closer to being proven than it was the day when it was announced". This is a seriously misleading statement.

• "He fails to mention here, as the video does, that the small amount of such products anticipated, given the amount of energy generated, was eventually observed, and in just the right quantity." I've read Voodoo Science, but it appears that Josephson has not. All of this is discussed in excruciating detail in the book.
• "This device legitimises the dismissal of all positive results, and so also the corollary 'cold fusion is no closer to being proven than it was the day when it was announced'. This is a seriously misleading statement." Actually what's misleading is Josephson's description. It's been, what, 15 years since cold fusion was announced? I'm still waiting for the first demonstration of a working device.
• What Josephson fails to mention is the most damning evidence of all against cold fusion: if the device had really been producing the levels of energy Pons and Fleischman claimed, they would have been killed by neutrons. Subsequent experiments by Gai et al. showed no neutron emission in excess of (very low) background levels.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The GPL is not like a virus.
I don't claim it's an exact metaphor, and I certainly don't claim to have invented it. Here (1,2) are a couple of discussions of the topic; you can find plenty more by searching in Google for "gpl virus."

Often times, people pin RMS as a "lone" worker, who somehow makes terrible things happen.
My beef is with his very unethical behavior toward the Nupedia folks. I couldn't care less whether he's a loner, or whether he's popular or unpopular. Unethical behavior is unethical behavior.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

I haven't got the least idea why he is doing this to us.
You mean, there was an exchange of e-mails, then he did this, and you haven't even heard from him why? That's insane. Did you know his announcement was coming?

This is beyond the pale. How much antisocial behavior can the free information movement put up with from Stallman just because of his past accomplishments?

I hope nobody with any self-respect goes anywhere near GNUpedia.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

1. Unlike GNUpedia, the Nupedia people care about accuracy and good writing. So GNUpedia would be getting a big boost out of Nupedia's hard and unglamorous editing work, without giving anything in return.
2. You could search in Google, find a GNUpedia article, and never know it came from Nupedia. "Wow," you'd think, "GNUpedia's way of working is really successful."
3. It would be a one-way street. Because Nupedia has editorial standards, it wouldn't be possible just to cut and paste articles indiscriminately from GNUpedia into Nupedia.

Allowing links to non-GPL'd sites would not dilute the freedom of the encyclopedia. Look, everybody knows that when they surf someone's web site, there may be outgoing links. I'm sure that I can start on my local PTA's web site and, within six clicks, wind up on a page about goat sex. Does that mean the PTA shouldn't have had outward links? Of course not. People can normally tell when they've left one site and entered another. As long as every page on GNUpedia had some kind of consistent logo or banner, this wouldn't be an issue. The only reason for trying to pretend it's an issue is because RMS thinks it's his destiny to make everybody else do what he wants.

This policy has all the same ridiculous problems as the DeCSS ruling -- prohibiting people from linking is just plain stupid, and they'll just work around it. The announcement says:

• If a page on the web covers subject matter that ought to be in the encyclopedia or the course library, but its license is too restricted to qualify, we must not make links to it from encyclopedia articles or from courses.

BTW, who's going to enforce this rule, and who's going to decide what sites are not free enough to link to ("too restricted to qualify"), or what sites "ought to be in the encyclopedia"? I suppose RMS will make pronouncements, and then there will be endless arguing with people who disagree with him, since there is supposed to be no central control.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

what happens if some pages are erroneous, or even deceptive?
What happens if the title of the encyclopedia is deceptive? -- Nupedia, GNUpedia
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Keep in mind that, as a teenager, Einstein intentionally renounced his German citizenship and became a stateless person. If he himself didn't want to be identified as a German, it makes sense not to refer to him as a German.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

I would like to believe it was #2 (didn't do homework) or #3 (insensitivity), but I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. He couldn't possibly have gotten to the stage of proposing this whole project without already knowing about Nupedia.

What's really odious about his behavior is that he doesn't even acknowledge that Nupedia already exists.

If he has a gripe against Nupedia's license, he should say so. If he has a gripe against Nupedia's structure (and the fact that Nupedia has editorial control), he should say so.

The only reason I can think of for using a nearly identical name, and never referring to Nupedia at all in his proposal, is that he is trying to be deceptive and sneaky. Just how stupid does he think people are?

I guess it's the destiny of every zealot to end up being his cause's own worst enemy.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Is there any point? Don't be silly. Discovering intelligent life elsewhere in the universe would be the most important intellectual event of the last thousand years.

maybe we should work on traveling these kinds of distances in space first.
What's your logic? Radio is fairly easy. Physical travel across interstellar distances is ridiculously hard. The energy required to accelerate a 100-ton space ship to 10% of the speed of light would be about 10^20 joules, which is hundreds of times greater than the entire world's annual energy budget. Sending people to Mars isn't even likely to happen within the next 100 years.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

(1) Since the author retains the rights and only pays $100, it sounds like we're talking about print-on-demand??? From what I've seen, POD technology isn't really ready for prime time, but maybe that's just because the POD publishers are still doing the authors' layout and design for them, which eats up a lot of money. For geek publishing, it might make sense just to require them to submit PDF or LaTeX and do all the layout and design themselves.

(2) Marketing is very important. Most authors' biggest complain about POD -- and vanity POD even more so -- is that the publisher doesn't lift a finger to promote the book. Do you intend to do any marketing, or is it up to the authors? (But see my sig for one way to get free promotion of a book.)

(3) Are the books going to be available as free downloads? I've actually been reasonably successful at selling print copies of my own books, even though they're available as free downloads (and one is open-source). But I'm not convinced my situation is analogous to what you're talking about. First off, my books are textbooks, and students are going to read them cover to cover (well, at least they're supposed to do that :-). Nobody reads a book cover-to-cover from a CRT, so their choice is either to download and print it (expensive, and you end up with a thick stack of single-sided output), or buy a nice bound, printed copy from me. But when it comes to technical books, most people are using them for reference. If you offer it in electronic form, they're likely to download it, put it on their hard disk, and refer to it as necessary. Here's a sobering fact for you: I get maybe 500 downloads/week of my book, but retail sales are about 1/week. Virtually all my sales are wholesale. If I had to depend on retail sales, I would have given up a long time ago.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

When he says authors will retain all rights, it also sounds like he has in mind proprietary content.

Maybe he could clarify for us.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

1. Most papers have multiple authors. Once the work is ready to be written up, one author writes the actual text, and then iterates with the coauthors for a while.
2. They start giving talks about their work, and getting more feedback that way.
3. They post the paper to a preprint server such as arxiv.org.
4. They submit it to a journal.
5. The journal solicits anonymous peer reviews from people it knows are active in the field.
6. The peer reviewers typically ask for some (major or minor) changes, and then recommend publication (unless the whole thing was a botch).

The reason #4-6 used to be required, not optional, is that there was no such thing as zero-cost electronic distribution.

BTW, cold fusion was messed up because Pons and Fleischman never even made the relevant info public. They bypassed the whole publication process and just gave press releases. Other scientists who wanted to try to reproduce their results were reduced to stuff like looking at photos and trying to estimate the size of an electrode by comparing it with the diameter of Pons' wrist!

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

I guess it's bad form to reply to myself, but some of the stuff in Park's book also got me thinking about how this is obviously complete garbage. The original "propellantless" drive idea was based on a discredited antigravity device, and that approach, as Park points out, is voodoo science because it violates conservation of energy. The new version would seem to sidestep the energy-conservation issue, since presumably you're leaving the vacuum in a lower-energy state after you're done (no evidence such a state exists, of course), but it has a problem with conservation of momentum. The antigrav version would presumably have involved a momentum exchange with the Earth, but this one is supposed to work in a vacuum. So it violates conservation of momentum unless you believe the sub-normal-energy vacuum state also has nonzero momentum!
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

I'm almost done reading Park's excellent new book Voodoo Science. I've learned a lot from it about the psychology of pseudoscience, and I've also learned that no branch of the U.S. federal government is really free of it. I'd assumed NASA was run by people with good scientific training, so if they were studying a certain topic, it must not be 100% nonsense. Not true, as it turns out. In the book, Park documents how NASA panders to the politicians by betraying science. (It's also nice to see a cogent and knowledgeable presentation of the case against human space flight and the ISS.)

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Liberty and Freedom doesn't mean that you have the right to force the rest of us to pay for your habits.
I have this silly habit of going to the public library and checking out books to read. I know, it's really offensive of me to ask to have this habit subsdized by the taxpayers.

But seriously, I feel sorry for any librarian who is forced to choose between quitting her/his job and becoming a censor. It's a sad thing when you can no longer trust the librarian to help you find information because she's been turned into an organ of government censorship.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

• Case #1: High ratio of clueful to clueless. Misinformation gets corrected quickly. People can learn a lot by reading the discussion. Example: discussions of Linux on Slashdot.
• Case #2: Moderate clueful/clueless ratio: You get lots of back-and-forth arguments over facts. "Proposition X is true!" "No, X is false!" "True" "True" "No way, you guys, false!" This is kind of a waste of time, but eventually it gets resolved by someone knowledgeable who says something like, "Well, X is a common misconception among my students at Harvard" or "Here's a link to the relevant DMOZ category -- all the sites there agree that X is true."
• Case #3: Low clueful/clueless: The people who have a clue get tired of correcting all the people who are misinformed. This is how I feel when I visit the Slashdot science section. It's just too much like work -- I teach science for a living. The people who post intelligent stuff get shouted down by a bunch of loudmouths who don't know anything.

So here's why it could be really good to moderate people instead of comments. When moderators mod comments, they end up mainly just looking at whether it's a troll, and whether it's logically self-consistent and interesting, and stuff like that. But that doesn't tell you anything about the story's relationship to the universe outside of Slashdot -- you know, that thing called reality. It would be great if there was a way to tell whether the person posting was a veritable fountain of misinformation, or was a world-wide authority on the subject. It also might be good to make the rating topic-specific. E.g., the same guy who posts in Science saying "First you send out 100 space probes in every direction..." might actually be very knowledgeable about Linux.

BTW, I think Epinions does something like this, although in general I think Epinions is so badly maintained that it's not a model that should be emulated.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The problem ... is that it tends to promote posts that agree with general consensus, and stifle any other opinion
Honestly, on the occasions when I'm browsing at -1, I never see anything that's been moderated down except for goat sex and first posts. Maybe unpopular ideas don't get promoted by moderation, but I don't think they get stifled.

If anything, I think moderation tends to work better than posting. Posting a response to a troll just encourages the troll, and likewise for people who use insults and cuss and swear. I'd much rather get moderated down than flamed, since getting flamed is more upsetting, even to someone with a thick skin like me. And moderating up is a nice way to say "thank you," whereas posting "yes, I agree completely" just uses up bandwidth.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

My experience with Slashdot moderation has been grrrreat! No, I don't think I've ever been moderated down unfairly. I got hooked on the whole game of being a karma whore, and once I understood a little about how the site's culture worked, I found it was really easy to rack up karma. F'rinstance, I realized that a really good way to get some karma was to look up links with more detailed information on some of the science articles being discussed, which were often short fluff pieces from Wired, etc. Oops! You know what? It may have been karma-whoring, but it was also kind of, er, informative...

My only criticism of the moderation system is that now that I've maxed out at 50 karma, it's kind of boring. Makes me want to goat-sex myself back down to zero and start over.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews