Slashdot Mirror
Interesting Moderation Proposal
Kuro5hin is running a story with some interesting ideas for "the perfect moderation system". I'm not sure I care for the overall system but the idea behind it (of 'balancing' out parts of the site with strategic bonuses/penalties) is intriguing.
"Unfixed bug" entails that it's supposed to be fixed. Since it is absolutely clear that Rob&Co know about the hidden sids and tolerate them, I'd call this a feature.
--em
good idea...
let's call it "metamoderation"
A good filter would "supress" (without eliminating) the obvious noise and allow low rated quasi-noise. We then decide what ratio of signal to noise we desire or can tolerate.
The threshold at the top of the page pretty much allows that. You can even change your default by selecting the "save" button. What you describe is pretty much what we already gots. As for filtering out just troll or offtopic moderations that would keep out a lot of legitimate posts that the morons with points mismark, and that does happen a lot.
The fact that you post with a 2 and can't follow a couple links to the kuro5hin FAQ is the best evidence I've seen that Slashdot's moderation system has utterly and completely failed.
Or atleast a good slashdot poll question: guess his TOTAL karma today.
And it does sound (read:appear) like the guy sucks at searching. If he/she doesn't know how to search for socks, without searching for protocols ("socks -protocol -socket -proxy") - then yes, it does sound like they suck at searching.
Someone moderate this guy up as funny...
Then tell my mom that if she wants to search for socks she has to be aware of the fact that the term is also used in geek-speak, and should therefore use boolean search terms to filter out some likely keywords... After all, we wouldn't want non-geeks using search engines effectively.
and people wonder why most of the original /.'ers have left.
Something in this system needs to change. I don't like the fact that I get moderated down as a troll whenever I take a position that is contrary to the positions of either the editors or readers of this page, regardless of the validity of my position; or if I take umbrage with the wording or position of a story posted here. (That was a long sentence, wasn't it?).
SlashDot used to be a forum where people could discuss the issues raised here, but I see the moderation system used quite often to silence desenting voices.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Thanks, Joe; that's also what I've heard from other people. I've lost about 37 points so far; good thing high karma doesn't matter...
:)
I never did code that depth-first approach. I guess I'll see how it's *really* done soon enough, though?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
"Throw out the first implementation" is not from Stroustroup, it's from Mythical Man-Month. I've read my one about a week ago last time, so I remember :)
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Imagine the karma whoring that would erupt if there was a top ten list! Thousands of trollish creatures posting poetry, inane commentary and links in the hopes of the fleeting glory of their nick in a slashbox.
Bleh!
"Trust the wisdom of Strousoup(sp?) on this one - design the first implimentation to throw it away, you're going to do it atleast once anyway."
It was Fred Brooks who said that, in his book "The Mythical Man Month."
Tis a good read.
Ven. Jhanrato
I haven't looked at the moderation system suggested yet, but I've been developing a similar concept of my own for WorldForge (the MMORPG project... you know you want it).
:-)
Basically the idea is to grant privilages according to one's reputation in the world. For instance, programmatically it is very simple to have a spell that raises a mountain out of the ocean. However, given into the wrong hands, all our oceans would be dripping from mountain tops.
We really only want very wise players/characters to have the use of such spells. The idea is that the gaming community could decide who is wise, through a similar process of moderation. Meta moderation is quite a good idea. In another example, someone who comes into an Oriental style game ranting about Australian Rules Football might have the privilage to speak in the world revoked but a mage of great (moderation) power. The player would have to conduct an act that would bring him back into good repute, perhaps by performing a task for the mage. (details details...)
Anyway, there is no reason to make this system for WorldForge only, I think the principle can be applied to any number of environments... perhaps a mailing list community might grant the privilage for someone to post an attatchment to the mailing list. Again, a person with such a reputation probably wouldn't use it very often, just as a wise mage may be wise enough never to raise a mountain from the ocean.
Message boards are annother obvious application. What about Gnutella? The network is falling appart because people aren't sharing thier files. Why not moderate music sharers? I may choose only to share files with people who only share legal MP3s. Slowly people will start to be rewarded for doing the right thing.
IRC, CVS... the possibilities are intriguing. I've started a sourceforge project to develop a generic library for moderation. Anyone who would like to come help is welcome to:
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/democracy/
(There's no mailing list there... but check back in a few hours when the sourceforge cron kicks in.)
Ven. Jhanrato
Not only is it conceited it is dangerous. I dont need your mathematical bullshit to determine what is a proper thought to express. How about instead of Censoring (dont say its not because its pretty blantent, moderation's very essence is about controlling the manner in which other people perceive your comments) we have an alternate forum where computer geeks can talk about whatever they want to. spew garbage or whatever
Dont piss down my back and tell me its raining....any way you cut it people will still get screwed over. For every ten trolls that get moderated down there is one person thats get pushed aside...a voice silenced
How about this instead: No fucking moderation. How about we say and think whatever we want? Slashdot is a cool place except when you want to be heard. why are all the message boards transient? whay are there no permenent boards with differnet topics and such? Maybe because slashdot doesnt give a fuck? How about it Cmndr Taco? show some balls and put up a message boards so all the trolls and all the people who come here day after day can focus their energy into some real conversations. How about have seperate fields for people to comment into. they have them in usenet. I think its time for an "unmoderated" comment section.
How about letting Nerds discuss news that matters to themselves?????We should make this a REAL community...news of, for, and by nerds regardless of what you thinkof it. I would rather see an article about portman or hot grits or anyhing thats REALLY geeky then that whiney piece of shit on kur0fag about moderation.
Oops better moderate this down, its noise or garbage or some shit. Dont pay any attention to me Im just talking
Maybe a separate forum, like "read more unmoderated". Its seems to me that simply cutting off others toughts and ideas and not giving them an alternate forum to express them is stupid. See evan here I am starting to ramble, But I like to Ramble, I like to say the word fuck, I like to express myself.
People will probably say what the hell is he talking about? I guess I am trying to say that forums like this are more like a bathroom stall covered in grafiti then they are hallow and sacred.
I know people have concerns about ideas drowning in a sea of noise. hey thats fine then they should stick to the moderated slashdot forum. People who dont give a shit should be able to use an unmoderated forum.
People might say well adjust your +- filter thingie. I have a theory that those people are patronizing fucks. "hey open up the sewers and take a look, if you dare". Maybe I am a little vehement in my opinions but I would like not to have to deal with a rarified anal "comment aristocracy" that dictates anything to me.
Instead of seperate and unequal as it is now, I would like to see seperate and equal.
sig as follows:from now on its "Anonymous Heros"
According to an email I got from CowboyNeal, it's actually 50. I asked after my karma dropped by 2 after having two articles modded up to +3 and +5, and another couple modded down. The net should've been positive, but it was negative due to the cap.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
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Whups, first mistake. :)
What do you do for a living?
Between slashdot posts? Web design, tech support, sysadminning. Alittle programming. Sometime in the near future I'll probably be helping out a friend with a contract position or two to do ethernet wiring for small businesses. Oh, and I'm trying to take over the world.
I don't suppose you are looking for a new job..
If you're serious, hit my e-mail address (above) and we can talk outside of slashdot.
--
... Atleast it happened quickly. They did their work and were then quickly buried in the GND. Probably for the best... the impedance would have gotten to them eventually anyway. It's a pity though.. they had so much potential....
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*cough* Yeah.
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--
That does ring a bell. Keep in mind it's 11:47 local time here.. I should have been in bed hours ago...
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Why do you stay? Why do you still post so much here? What's the point?
--
There is no K5 cabal.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Be sure to use it excessively.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I think the system should give moderators a textbox to explain the reason for their moderations. This text wouldn't show up on the comments, but would be seen during metamoderation.
The reason is, sometimes the reason for a moderation can be obscure. For instance, a perfectly reasonable looking post may actually be a crypto-Troll, with an informative-looking link going to a picture of you-know-what orifice, and sometimes trolls can be quite crafty. It would also be useful when dealing with Redundant posts, or explaining Funny messages when the humor is just a little too subtle for most of us.
I thoroughly agree with this moderator. Recently while reading http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2000/ 10/5/8417/29981 on kuro5hin, it dawned on me how true it is that we can only moderate based on personal experience.I read some of the replies posted to this article and I was shocked how people think. Some people thought this person was lying, while others shared true and sincere sorrow for this person. Myself having known this person for a number of years knowing the post is true, can take an honest look into human flaws simply by reading the replies posted by other readers who don't know the writer of the article.
There is an "easy solution". Just require that for anyone to gain moderator access they have to be knowen via web of trust al la the PGP protocall. Abuss via multipl accounts is then seen but data mining where a persons moderation is coming from in the web. You could create mutliply keys, but the only way to get them in is to have yourself or a small group sign them, the creation of multiple keys, will still have the moderation abuse tracked back to you for group retrubion as appropreate. So easy to see, yes. Easy to implement not really. Easy on the CPU cycles no.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
No matter what you do, you're always going to have stupid immature people trying to ruin it for everyone else. I say give it up while you're ahead.
Sure, as long as a state congress passes the law saying so... heck, you could even define Pi as 3 if you wanted...
Didn't the State of Illinois do exactly that once? It's been overturned, of course, but the fact that they did it in the first place is scary.
I agree with you though that if enough people decide something is true, then it is. Most everybody got together and decided that this year was the turn of the century instead of next year, so it therefore it is. There is Platonic Truth and then there is reality....and I'm not sure one has much to do with the other.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Some good suggestions, here are a couple of my additions...
Close the loop on M2. By this I mean that as things are now, if you mod a post up and then get meta-modded as unfair, you will lose a karma point. This is good, but you don't know why you lost it. Let the moderator know which mod was the one that cost him the karma point. Also, if a post was modded up but the moderator got whacked in M2, the original poster should lose the karma point. The reverse is also true.
Make karma *mean* something. Right now, the only good it does is for the +1 bonus. After that it doesn't matter if you're at 50 or 500 karma, unless you are planning to go on a trolling spree. Maybe the higher your karma, the more mod points you get, or you get mod access more often.
Also using the +1 bonus should cost you a point of karma. Lately I've seen a bunch of pretty clueless posts that started at +2.
I fear though, that no matter what system you come up with, the trolls will find a way to disassemble it. I hope this isn't the case, but they are more determined than we are and they seem to have a lot more time on their hands.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Here's the patented (as if) G-funk moderation system. I don't think every idea is for everybody, but perhaps it could start some sort of discussion...
/., but if he wasn't so frigging funny most of the time his karma wouldn't be so high.
:-)
1. set everybody's karma levels to 0, except the people running the site, people who can be trusted at first.
2. No limit on karma for people. Yes this means signal11 will end up running
3. everybody can moderate, but your opinions' weight is proportional to your karma
4. two scores, one based on community moderation as above, and one based on "trusted" user moderation.
5. users with any karma can become "trusted" users, but only after some sort of peer review process, based on their moderation, not their posts.
6. randomness.... every now and then, throw something where it shouldn't be, so people get a chance to look at it. also moderators should see newer posts first, regardless of score- as long as they're not -1 or less.
few.... of course due to the moderation system as it is now, only 4 people are gonna read this
any comments people?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
It'll need to be tweaked, updated, maybe even entirely thrown out for a new system. Trust the wisdom of Strousoup(sp?) on this one - design the first implimentation to throw it away, you're going to do it atleast once anyway.
Actually, that's a quote from The Mythical Man Month, by, um, Burns, isn't it?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
No, it is NOT!!!!
You miss the point. In MetaModeration (which I do daily) all I do is say if I like/dislike a moderation, along with a few other thousand people. Here's the problem - it MAKES NO DIFFERENCE. People can still set up multiple accounts to mod whatever annoying stuff up they wish, and more importantly (as the article spoke of), mod intelligent users down just to attack them.
Under the system I'm thinking of, you become a very powerful MetaModerator for your own account. That means attacks on users are instantly nullifed. No long wait while a troll account artifically inflated with karma is slowly ground down in meta-moderation over weeks. Instantly anyone who modded a good post down goes into my moderator "killfile" so I wan't have to worry about stupid moderation from them ever again.
Sure they can always set up new accounts, but like I said I can mark a moderated post as badly hit faster than they can create accounts. Not that they would do that very quickly, because they would have no way to know if anyone had turned off thier moderating and so probably wouldn't bother.
I imagine it runing on top of the exisitng system (which acts as a baseline for those too lazy to manage thier account meta-moderation), not as a replacement. You would still have MetaModeration and Karma like you do now. You just would have more direct control over what was moderated for yourself.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hmm, I just read all the comments at 1 or above, and I don't see anyone - none - stating that the system described is the system used on kuro5hin. (Except possibly Sig11, but he's a special case - where are the "lot of other people" who got it "completely wrong"?) They'd have to be pretty dense, since the first few lines of the linked article make it clear who the originator of the system is and where it is used. It is a stated assumption of slashdot that people will read the linked article(s) before replying, which isn't always true of course, but in the event that comment #2 (or whatever) is totally ignorant and off-topic, it doesn't matter at all what the writeup was or what the linked article said, you've simply got a case of stupid-poster-itis, totally uncurable.
So I'd have to rate your post as -2, doesn't know what he's talking about. I know it's fashionable to criticize slashdot (always good for an upward moderation), but why not base it on something real, eh?
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
You're confusing "caring enough to criticize" with "criticizes on some rational basis". I scorn posts that fail to do the latter one. Let's recap:
You posted a turdy little comment about people misunderstanding due to the "useless" writeup.
I said the writeup has nothing to do with their understanding or lack of it.
You agreed with me, and acted like a turd once again. (And you're probably misreading my comment, to boot; specifically I would guess that you've misread the last sentence of the first paragraph.)
So we're in agreement: you had no basis for criticism.
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
I would like to be able to subscribe to posters. The few folks that I always want to see what they have to say would have a 5 from my account. It would also be nice to kill file posters. If I could do this from my account it would make moderation work that much better for me.
If you displayed this information as some kind of aggregate, the number of people subscribed to an account and the subscribers total karma... it would make for an interesting stat.
Sure signal 11 is a karma whore, but how many cool people like is posts anyway?
Cheers Andrew
OK -- here's my thoughts on moderation (please hear this out)
... (I'd guess slashdot did initially, and I think Technocrat did until recently.) Let's call this "cathedral" style moderation.
/kinda/ works. However, many potentially good "AC" posts may be overlooked, and many posts later saying the same thing (or saying it less well) from higher karma ppl may "float up".
Traditional media's handling of feedback (such as a newspaper's "Letters" page) has been "moderated" by the editors. People reading the publication have provided some level of trust to the publisher. I'd assume most small weblogs run like this
A key problem with this is accusations of bias on the part of the moderator. (E.g.: Rob Malda moderating down or deleting a post that says "Rob/Slashdot/Andover/VA sucks" because he has Evil Self-Interest at heart and silences the anonymous whistleblower's voice.)
To escape from accusations of bias, we create a new moderation system -- randomly give moderation power out to the readers! This relieves the burden from the operator's shoulders of being called 'evil censors'. Call this "Bazaar style" moderation.
But the tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. So -- we have a system, "bazaar-style", that
Proposed solution: Reader-chosen trusted editors. Give the readers choice by leveraging the database-nature of the discussion sites. Keep a policy like slashdot -- no censorship, no matter what. But give me 3 (or 4?) choices when reading the comments on a story instead of 2. Currently I get to choose 1) read the comments that are at or above my chosen 'score'. 2) Read them all at -1. Add a 3rd choice -- read the comments scored up by editors I trust. (In slashdot's case, have some ppl on staff at VA/Andover/Slashdot, with good knowledge of journalism ethics, whose jobs it is to read and score EVERY comment.) Give me the choice to place my trust in those editors, so I can see the good AC-posted followups, without the fifty trolls.
The bazaar-style moderation may save the operators from censorship accusations, but the random public are not necessarily the most qualified moderators.
-jon "karma whore in training"
o/~ Join us now and share the software
I'd much prefer it if I were to elect or join a group of moderators. This way, the trolls could read about Natalie Portman, Linux zealots wouldn't ever see anything remotely positive about Microsoft, etc.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
This is a story where discussion about moderation is on topic! An all new Slashdot first!
I like your idea, and I've told at least one /. editor that moderation points are a currency. Considering my job, you'll hopefully pardon me if that's how my brain works naturally.
I think it might help to make mod points more persistent (or perhaps just make the gold variety behave that way) and in that way encourage later moderation of interesting comments. I know that CmdrTaco has argued that they should be even more fleeting, but maybe it could be tried both ways? I think that if the points were more-persistent, a market in them might develop, with interesting results...("Half a gram of e-gold if you mod this comment up, anyone?")
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
>If everyone else thinks 2 + 2 = 5, is it indeed 5?
Sure, as long as a state congress passes the law saying so... heck, you could even define Pi as 3 if you wanted... not that anyone would, but I bet it's the same people who first got a hold of that Neiman Marcus cookie recipe...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
>-- "The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
No, no.... dig up! Homer Simpson said so...
(and as for the comment)
>In other words, once one gets the gift, use the points quickly since then someone else will get some points and the richer the moderator base, the richer the "dialogue" that takes place.
That wasn't my impression on how the points are dealt out - for every x posts, another person who is eligible is granted mod points. The fact that you still have your points is irrelevant, only that there were x more posts since the last granting (I could be wrong - I'd have to check the code - but that's how it is described).
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
After the karma cap was put into effect, I had an article posted... at which point my karma dropped all the way to 50 from the happy three digit number it had been at previously. It doesn't matter, especially since I'm the only one who know my karma, but it was a nice litle self scorecard.
I've had the same experience with some posts... I'll get a +3 (no effect), then a -1 at the end of it, which then drops my score. Kind of silly.
My thought has been that you should only be able to gain or lose one point per post... if the post has +3 -2, you still have a net +, so you could gain one point for that, the same way a +4 would. Likewise, a -3 would only lose you one point. I also think that over/underrated should be removed, or included in M2 (with the score at the time is was modded for o/u).
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I came up with the idea the other day that people who have a +2 bonus should loose a point or two every time they use the bonus.. Either that or +2 posts that get moderated down cause 5 to 10 points of karma loss.
I would be happy with a button on my user profile to nullify the affects of that +2 bonus. I only want to read comments that have been moderated up not large amounts of crap posted by people with higher default posting levels.
Hellooooo crackhead moderators!
Did anybody actually *read* this before they moderated it up (+1, Interesting)?
If you had, you might have noticed that it's pure crap!
Sometimes I think that I could score karma just by using HTML in my posts!
Hey, if I use links, bold, italics, *and* unordered lists, I could be the next Signal 11!
~ Give me 101 plastic soldiers, and I will conquer the world.
I think its true that there exists a less than perfect system here, yet I'm impressed with the overall moderation I've seen. I assume that there is a +/- 1 error built into the system. Its rare to read a 3,4,5 that isn't above average. Likewise, browsing at -1 is for the most part painful. Sure some -1 deserve to be 0, some 3 should be a 2...the question thus becomes 1)what signal/noise ratio can you tollerate, 2)whats the probability of finding an undervalued "nugget", 3)whats the average value of said nugget, 4) assign your filter level accordingly.
Obviously I come back because I like it here...the thing is it seems much more fairly rated to me than perhaps it does to others.
Perhaps a weighted average of Kuro5hin's new plan and our current system would improve our error to +/- 1/2...
(ahh but how to weight that average?)
moderated by performance of your economic weath and incorporation
Just don't expect us graduate assistants to participate. We have no economic wealth. I hear some postdocs make decent money...so I guess it would be a filter.
The fact is, nobody's willing to do the work to make sure that the best comments get seen by everyone, every time. It's an impossible task. So instead, moderation makes sure the best people get seen and hope they keep the level of discussion up. It's not the ideal, but it's a compromise, and it usually works.
(Think of the Street Performer Protocol: you're not paying for the product, you're paying for the producer, and the products are a byproduct. Same with moderation; good comments are a byproduct of smart people.)
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
it's not a dumber idea than letting advertisers influence hits on search engines, and there are already clueless investors funding that
I find goto.com very useful when I am searching for a vendor. If I am looking for someone who sells crawfish, goto.com is much more useful than a search engine which makes me weed out the crawfish recipe pages, and if I'm looking to buy socks, I don't want to go through a bunch of SOCKS protocol hits.
I think 10 karma to mod 1 point is too expensive, esp with the karma cap. Other than that, I like your ideas.
Spyky
Why not adjust the rankings I see on my page based on how others moderated them - but only if their past moderations were similar to my own?
So if people are modding up things I would mod down (or vice versa) their moderation has less effect on the scores of the posts when I view the page. You'd get more relavent posts fit better to your own personality because they are ranked by like-minded individuals.
Here is my Moderation HOW-TO:
Nevermind, I am reading the next post.
Have you Meta Moderated Today?
It's at the top of the page. Use it.
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
> It's at the top of the page. Use it.
I metamoderate occasionally, and I moderate occasionally, and I try to exercise due diligence in doing both. However, my original point still stands. Both moderation and meta-moderation serve to uphold the ideological status quo, for better or worse.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
> Articles that follow the groupthink of the cult get good moderation.
/. at least, you can, as I do, always browse at -1 if you want to hear the minority's voice as well.
This is going to be true in any self-moderating community, regardless of the actual mechanism of the moderation... it's something akin to the social contract, karma eventually gravitates and stays near the denser ideological center of the group, and away from the fringe. Thank goodness that, on
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Indeed. I think the system that's in place now is probably going to be the one that ends up sucking the least when it's all said and done... as long as it isn't adulterated with things like the infamous bitchslap, that is. But, I still think it's important to take the ratings with a grain of salt, and browse at -1 whenever possible.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Good luck.
Sanity is statistical. If everyone thinks that a comment is good, then isn't it good? If everyone else thinks 2 + 2 = 5, is it indeed 5?
Of course not =). I agree that the moderation is very bad. If you ever have tried meda-moderating, you know that moderators usually breifly look at the comment, and moderate it, rather than actually reading it and analyzing what it says.
I'm not sure this type of proposed system would work though... a bunch of people with moderation points.... or a lot more people with moderation points, might not make a difference.. because not everyone is reading the articles for content; perhaps that would be a good poll.
Reguardless, I agree, something needs to be done.
Does anyone remember firefly.com? They licensed technology that let web sites implement collaborative filtering. Filmfinder.com used it for movies, and barnsandnoble.com used it for books. They seem to be out of business now, but this is the basic idea:
You rate things (books, movies, posts, posters, stories) that you like, and your ratings are compared to other people who rated those same items similarly to you. You are then presented with new items that you theoretically might be interested in based on what other people who rated in a similar manner to you liked.
This becomes a continual feedback system, as you can rate these new items as well. Eventually, you should see things that interest you and people who have views that are "compatible" with yours.
Would this work as a moderation system?
It has a couple of things going for it. You could tie it to posts OR to users. Personally, I prefer users, as "first posts" and all such nonsense seem to come from the same people. It is an "opt in" system. Don't want to play? Don't rate anything and you see the same stuff that veryone else who doesn't rate anything sees (everything).
Personally, I would find it helpful to be able tosay (on SlashDot) that I liked a particular poster, and would like all of their posts "moderated" up when I read posts. That's a much simpler approach than a complete collaborative filtering system, but would be useful.
At any rate, does anyone know if anyone is using this type of system anymore? Specifically for discussions, but any example would be useful.
Can I be a Karma whore too??? PPPPPPlease????
Francis Hwang
Do domain names matter?
At the very least, Slashdot needs a way to kill offtopic AC posts (first post, Natalie Portman, goatse.cx, etc.).
I would suggest that any AC post whose first moderation is a -1 is automatically deleted. If it gets moderated up once, and then down twice, it stays.
I'd also suggest that Slashdot limit the number of AC posts per IP address, per thread, per hour. For example, address 208.36.42.111 can post two AC posts in this thread this hour, and two more in the next hour, and so on.
This isn't the most aggressive stance possible, but I do think it would cut back on the signal to noise ratio significantly.
Why do you need to keep count? I've been maxed out on karma for awhile now, but that doesn't stop me from posting my thoughts, or enjoying it when I get modded up. It's just harder to brag about when you don't have an actual number. :)
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How 'bout a +1 WTF?
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
Half-empty has some nifty ideas that I like and a flexible design I adore (is it viewable in lynx too?), and I'm sure the site will have great contents, at least until it really catches on. It also has a nice moderating interface. However, there are issues to be addressed for mass-consumption:
1) When people earn karma by moderating. What is to prevent them to automating this? What quality assurance do you get? None. What you need is a system where people may lose karma by moderating badly too. For example by letting you earn karma when people agree with your moderation (moderate posts/ideas with the same bias). In effect, a meta-moderation system where people can meta-moderate each other automagically. The first to moderate a post, would also be the one to take the biggest risk - getting the most potential gain or loss. Since all the others moderating after that user would in effect meta-moderate all the previous moderators. This would have the effect of new posts getting moderated at once.
However, this would also have a side-effect of putting a cap on how many times a idea/post would be moderated. Since there will be little to gain to moderate an already fully moderated post (one people agree with) - unless someone moderate it unfairly after a while. However, that's one of the benefits of relative moderation (see further down).
This system is also vulnerable to automation, but a robot would have to evaluate a post/idea, something that is much harder to do.
An alternative would be to put a cap on when you get karma for moderation (or use ln). If you already got gazillion karma points, you don't really need karma from moderation. This way, earning karma from moderation would be a poor-mans way out of the gutter, BUT it won't help the quality of moderation one bit without meta-moderation.
2) In Half-empty you must moderate something up, down or stay neutral (relative moderation). This is nice, except you can't see what the current score is. How can you have ANY hope of moderating relatively, when you don't know the base you're moderating from? This design is inherently flawed (but the core idea is just simply great!).
Instead, show the score and if people disagree with it let them moderate. (1) insures that they get meta-moderated.
3) Base everything on a mathematical and statistical model. Figure out all the rules and what side-effects you want and don't want. Create equations that'll solve it _statistically_. Don't rely on hard rules like maximum caps or any hard numbers.
4) Let users be able to group themselves, ie, you may join one or more group. The moderation you see is from the group you're viewing/filtering through. This way Windowz users and Machophiles may group themselves, have their own pages etc. A possible complex solution would be to view things through many group-filters (so a group may meta-moderate what they believe is right or wrong is certain circumstances).
Good luck!
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I think that people should moderate on the basis of their own values. If I moderate up what I tickles my fancy (or what angers me) and so do the other N moderators then what gets moderated representes the views of the moderating readership. There is really only one proviso and that is that there should be enough moderators to ensure that the distribution of views that are "promoted" by moderation are representative (rightly or wrongly) of the slashdot readership [or perhaps the non AC readership]
I think that the moderator guide to "moderate up" much more than "moderate down" is valuable. Further I think that one should moderate quickly. In other words, once one gets the gift, use the points quickly since then someone else will get some points and the richer the moderator base, the richer the "dialogue" that takes place.
If one is a +(>1) threaded reader, it is probably just to filter out the guff, so that one may make reading the views feasible. Remember it isn't an exam, there is no "correct" moderation. nor is it a reference site, its primarily a bit of entertainment that from time to time is enlightening. So take it for what it's worth
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
I agree that spendable karma is a good idea, however I believe that the ability to "transfer karma" will be abused.
If someone feels so impelled by the moment that something needs to be moderated, then they should do so at a (minor) loss. The purpose of moderation is to
1) Prevent Abuse
2) Make posts which _should_ be seen more prominant.
In moderating up (or down) a post without giving (or taking) karma from the poster. This would do that job effectively, by preventing even the chance of karma transfer abuse but but allowing that flexibility in moderation.
Countless innocent bits have been mercilessly slaughtered in these flamewars and it must end.
Would those be carefully handcrafted bits or would those be just run-of-the-mill assembly line bits?
-
Where, exactly, is the "metamoderation" button or link located? I've never seen it -- all I can see at the top is the Slashdot/News For Nerds logo and the story icons. Your link to metamod.pl was the first and only time I've seen the metamod feature in action.
:( I'm sure I'm just overlooking it somehow.
Mark this "Score -1, Stupid Question" if you like but this has been bugging me for awhile.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
I haven't had my coffee yet, so I may not be processing this as clearly as I should, but as I see it, there are two main problems with this method. First, every Joe Schmoe can vote for/moderate a message. This will give every message a much more neutral rating, because you will have a large number of beginners who don't understand the system and will vote the same way for every message. For example, if you have a truly insightful message that has earned 100 legitimate "+" votes, using this system it would have a score of 1 (100 "+" votes / 100 total votes). Now assume that you have an additional 400 people, half of whom think that every message is great and deserves a "+" vote and half of whom think that every message sucks and deserves a "-" vote. Now you have a message with 300 "+" votes out of 500 total for a score of .6. You will end up seeing most messages in the .4 to .6 range.
The second problem I see is a more abstract one, and that is that the system is too complex for the average person. If people can't understand the system quickly, they won't connect with it. And the way I see it, having a moderation system like this serves two purposes: to control the flow of messages and to entice people to use the system. This system will definitely attract D&D players, with it's somewhat complex number system, but the average person staring at this setup will have their eyes glaze over and will quickly click elsewhere.
I believe that the two elements that are key to a successful mod system are ease of use, and requirement that a person be familiar with the system before he or she uses it. Slashdot does this, as does my site EventNation.com. People respond to it well.
Scott
1) Average moderation
Any (non-AC) reader may moderate any article to anywhere between -1 and +5. The article gets a basic rating as the average of the moderations. A poster gets his karma as the average of his postings. To avoid giving unnecessary high importance to the first few moderators, a post starts with 10 moderation votes at the karma level of the poster.
2) individual reading
Any reader may choose how his articles are to be filtered:
* By the average moderation done to them (default), or
* By the karma of the poster, or
* By a weighed average of the moderations, where the weights are calculated from how well the tastes of each moderator match the tastes of the reader, as expressed in their earlier moderation histories.
I know the last proposal sounds heavy to implement, but I believe there exist various statistical shortcuts for this sort of grouping and cross-correlation
In Murphy We Turst
After going to metamod.pl for the first time ever, the link will appear at the top whenever you login. So please, no more asking where M2 is!
MashPotato - Mobile Array of Support Helpers for Potato
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
The problem is all the moderators who hasn't read the moderation guidelines...
./ should make you take a moderation quiz before you get your points?
Maybe
But then we still have the problem with those anarchists who read the guidlines, but won't follow them... Hmmm... We need moderation moderators!
;-)
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Why, so Bill Gates can mod down the anti-ms posts and mod up that guy who keeps posting the windows logo ASCII? No thank you.
A closed (to the poor) moderation system defeats the purpose of a pro-OSS site. Not to mention that the trolls obviously have more money than anyone else here. Why else would they be home all day long to claim "f1rst p0st fuxxxxerz!!!JH(*)&# eye 0wn jew" and talk about naked and petrified actresses?
El Nastardo
Meta-Moderation (to me) is a joke. I only metamoderate so that I can claim 'unfair' on any downward moderation, and 'fair' for any upward moderation.
I like to think of it as my way of protesting downward moderation.
^-anyone else see these as smiley faces, or am I on crack?
I know this is WAY OT, but I have to know.
Then I can create 10 different accounts and mod myself up... enough said.
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
What they need is a "Top Ten Karma Whores" slashbox...
I have another idea that would help with the moderation problem - simply, for each post moderated there would be some way to say "I like this moderation" or "I think this moderation is wrong".
It's called MetaModeration.
-- Fester
-- Fester
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
The faq tells you its at the top of the screen. Its not. It doesnt appear anywhere on my screen.
It`d be good if we could have a `junkbuster` style list of words or expressions that we could apply to posts, so ones containing the usual stuff i cant see cos i surf at threshold=1 would be marked as -1. Make it easy to grab other users `junkbuster` lists too so we can share the good ones (like www.waldherr.org has a good sblock.ini file for junkbusters)
~~~
Sigmenation fault.
I think the real problem comes in this new system is the automatic silencing of users. Nothing will annoy a person more than being silenced before they even have a chance to speak, just because what they wrote before was considered off-topic, incorrect, etc. This could, quite honestly, be a system that gets people to leave a site, due to their lack of ability to express their honest opinion while others can express theirs.
- Rei
You look beautiful! Incidentally, my favorite artist is Picasso.
-Elendale (the name's not Japanese, anyone want to take a guess?)
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
This also reduces the effect of 'muliple account moderation' that is done. Lets say i have five accounts, at any given time 2 of them will have moderator privileges (not accurate, i know, but stick with me). When i comment, i log in with the two accounts and +1 it for a total of +2. If i already do this enough, i will post with a +1 basic and the grand total will be a +4 for an average comment. Again, with averages instead of flat bonuses a couple people can remove this advantage i have.
This isn't the extent of it, but its a good start. I may be writing something on K5 in the near future about this.-Elendale (see the .sig)
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
Check it out and see what you think. (You should try registering to see what info we use in our collaborate filtering and then try "encouraging" or "discouraging" articles.
Hey democracy lovers, add Quorum as a c
There are "articles" and comments. There is no article queue, as every article is rated at least 10 times by random visitors. Based on their rating, it gains prominence on the site. Votes are decayed exponentially over time to ensure that the articles are timely and relevant. The idea is to have "equal opportunity to participate," at every level.
It's been up for about 7 weeks.
Hey democracy lovers, add Quorum as a c
my karma whoring ways?
Good idea but it sounds like too much logistical work in the long run to be self-sufficient being completely charity based.
Perhaps a hybrid banner/pay-to-play sort of arrangement? Any suggestions?
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
I think a plug for the site isn't really that much of an exchange that would benefit VA.. I mean, they really donated the hardware for good PR
Faith in humanity is just like being a node on a network, once everyone is online it functions for everyone.
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
the problem is in moderating down. I have to browse at zero because a lot of good post get moderated down because of someone's personal views conflicted with those of the poster. SO... only let people moderate up. /. have sat at 0. Besides, isn't the number one complaint that the moderators are modding down good posts.
all the AC post that are lame dont get moderated up or down and stay at zero.
most of the ac post that are worth a damned get moderated up to a one.
Now we can browse at +1 or even +2 and trust that we're reading the best posts. I mean some of the most interesting post i've read here on
"I mean, All you can definately say about a fellow who thinks he's a poached egg, is; He's in the minority." James Burke
First, people start attaching way too much significance to the ratings. Something in human nature, I guess, that gets gratified by watching one's statistics grow. (Anyone who's played Diablo or any of the better rogue-like games knows all about this.) Then, people start figuring out ways they can increase their rating that don't involve increasing ones skill at the game. On Slashdot, this analogizes to people ignoring the goal of posting informative and interesting stuff, and instead carefully choosing their posts to increase their karma.
Lastly, veteran players split into two types of people. The first type are the insecures who continue to play the game of gaining rating instead of playing the game that the ratings were instituted to rate. If enough people in a particular locale do this, then it significantly downgrades the level of sportsmanship and the quality of the games.
The second type of person realizes that she cares more about the game than about the rating, and goes back to playing as if there were no rating system, which in my humble opinion is the way things should be.
Unfortunately, only people who play the game for a while seem to be able to do this. Something about being a newbie makes one focus on the rating. Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking down to newbies here, I remember quite well how thrilling it's been to gain rating points in various games, karma-hoarding included.
So how does this relate to Slashdot? The moderation system perhaps does create a game out of aquiring karma, but in my opinion this has not degraded Slashdot much. If you take a more relaxed attitude towards it, it's actually a nice way of trimming down the comments so that you don't spend all day reading one page. All the people who like to complain extensively about Slashdot policy need to take a break and go play some other online game until they realize that playing the game for fun is much better than playing it for ratings.
--
share and enjoy
Give the system discussed a try here
Dragon, as an early poster on a newsy subject at Kuro5hin, did you think to shoot a note to someone at /. ?
They can't keep it hot if they don't get the fuel.
This scheme can be exploited too easily.
Let's assume a cooperating group of trolls somehow manages to get karma points (remember, not every troll is necessarily stupid all the time, they might just pretend to be to get their deranged kicks out of the trolling experience). Now they can cooperatively troll happily at Score 5 by shoving these karma points back and forth between each other.
In other words, the main reason that makes the current moderation system relatively abuse-proof is the fact that you get to moderate quite infrequently.
Most importantly, I think we need a "-1 Obviously didn't read the article". This is so common it causes me pain. Now, you don't necessarily have to read the article to make an interesting, insightful, or funny comment, but when you say something stupid that could have been avoided by just doing a few seconds' worth of skimming, you deserve to lose karma.
I also don't think you should be able to use -1 Redundant without providing the number of the article that you think is redundant. This number should be provided with the article when it goes to metamoderation so that people can tell if it really was redundant, or not. Obviously, if the article number you put in is higher than the article that you're moderating as redundant, you should just automatically lose a karma point.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not worth moderating down a "me too!" post unless it's been moderated up.
If it was said in the article, sure, moderate them down, though probably not below Score:1. It's generally not worth it. Most of us won't see Score:1 comments anyway, at least once the story hits the threshold.
But if someone said them in another discussion, well, that may be a discussion that people don't read. So it's not redundant right then. Even if they're related, if I said something once, then someone posted a story that didn't really need to be posted because it was news a month ago (which happens all the time on our beloved /.) and I said the same thing again, but I was the first to say it in a new discussion, then it's relevant that people see it again. So is that really redundant?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Huh? This parent got modded down? It was a first post (a real first post) essentially making a comment about the current system and whether it needs to be changed, attached to a story about an alternative system, and it gets tagged Off-topic?
Maybe I really don't understand the current moderation system....
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Well, comments aren't only redundant because they've already been said in another comment. They could also have been said in another discussion, or the article, or just be a 'me too!' post.
For instance, one time when I got moderator access and was in a foul mood, I went to a discussion and moderated 5 slashbots as redundant. There was probably some whining about 'moderators on crack', and some of them probably got their +5 anyway, but hearing the same tired 'linux is good', 'windows is good', 'napster is good' without saying anything is getting really old. They deserved a karma hit.
(as a disclaimer: I'm usually pretty nice, and actually almost always use my mod points to bump posts up, not down.)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Well, I don't really mean that, if you say something that was mentioned in another discussion, that it's redundant. However, if it's something that's already been beaten to death so many times that any slashdotter can recite it in their sleep, it's redundant.
In my opinion, trolls should be dropped to -1, very offtopic and redundant posts to 0, and anything else I won't bother to mod down.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I like the idea of being given a certain number of points to mod, etc., etc., but the problem, I belive, is that I will mod to my mentality.
/. that I've read something given a +5 funny, and I thought it was quite lame. Or times something would be given a +2 interesting, and I honestly belived it should have gotten a >+2 informative/funny/whatever.
/.er's will be much happier to read comments that apply to them and the topic.
There's been more than one occation of
Therefore, I belive that the best moderating system is something realtivly AI based. Maybe a form of radio buttons that give a general idea of what I think is funny, interesting, informative, offtopic, troll, etc. I understand that personalized server generated moderating won't come out the best (or will take much work to implement), but
----------
----------
"Rock over London... Rock on Chicago..." -Wesley Willis
interesting topic ... i don't know how you get around flaws in any moderation "system" ... my idea of the best system would be one like here at /. but instead of random modebators, that once you get enough karma or accumulated credits of whatever sort, then you can burn some of them to rate other comments - you get +1 for non-anon comment and can go up or down by -1/+1 and they lose a point and comment author also gains/loses points - a higher tier of MM can then moderate the moderators with bigger values deducted/accumulated (though at less frequency ...) ...
I read the article/post link but I think I am so tired - none of it made any sense to me ...
AZspot
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
JohnCGlass.com Going IPO - get yours now!
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
sorry, I didn't realise your site was to do with amateur science fiction. I'm afraid that I will be unable to visit it again, as that stuff brings me out in hives. Nothing personal.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Sure, I send /. many articles... I get early press releases for some animation and sci-fi releases and distributions, as well keep up with some of the YRO stuff. But every single thing I've submitted is rejected. As well, others I know who post to /. also get rejected.
/. recent theme of Big Business is bad, Patents suck, Microsoft is crap, RIAA/MPAA are evil vicious people and Politicians and Media mark us all as bad people . . .
It's not that the articles are bad, it's just that they don't fit the
Again, this is all just grouping a lot of things together, but at least at K5 people choose what they want to see, and if they've seen it before they can kill it. Here, we're at the whim of the very few with those agendas, and often without looking to see the timeliness of the articles, nor whether it's been posted already.
Dragon Magic
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
Well, I know this will probably hurt my karma, but it needs to be said. Not only has Slashdot been rejecting many stories by different people that is News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. (sm), but they are also reposting stories and posting news articles that are old.
/.'s front board?
/. keeps this up, will people continue to read it in the numbers they do? And will it hurt the advertising revenue Andover expects to keep /. moving?
/., but just hope that they become more impartial, check for multiple posts or at least check when the news is from, and making sure the news is definitely news, and not something that's been elsewhere for weeks. For the sake of everyone, just please?
/., merely being up front about /. improving its news...)
Kuro5hin had this up last week at the least, when I posted like #128 in response to their request. Why is it now reaching
Unfortunately, if
I'm definitely not trying to put down
(again, not hoping to bash
Dragon Magic
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
from the kuro5hin faq:
:-)).
:-) (or "Demon fetus" :))
What's up with the name? What is a "kuro5hin"? Is that 'l337 Sp33k?
No, it is most decidedly not 'l337. It's a pun on my name. Kuro5hin == corrosion == rust == Rusty. The gratuitous '5' in the middle in an homage to the character "Da5id" in Neal Stephenson's excellent Snow Crash. It started out as just an amusing thought that popped into my head, and became an online alias. It stuck around as an online alias since it wasn't ever registered or used anywhere, being a word that I made up AFAIK. And it became my domain name cause all the other short snappy names were taken (well, "kuroshin.org" is not taken, but hey -- it's too late to change now
Update: John Prevost informs me that while "kuroshin" doesn't appear to be a valid Japanese compound, the roots "kuro" and "shin", smushed together, could be interpeted roughly as "dark devotion" or "black heart," among other variants of that basic (gothicly depressing) theme. I thought that was pretty cool. For the record, I don't know any Japanese, and the name wasn't supposed to be Japanese anyway. At least it didn't turn out to mean "lustful ferret" or something.
>so CmdrTaco and his very diligent team will know which articles we want to see redundantly.
>
>Slashdot - News for Attention Deficit Disorder. Stuff you saw yesterday.
Yes, we've all (I like generalising) this happening now and then (and understating). Why not introduce a section for FollowUps? Then people could have a little slashbox(TM || Patent Pending) sitting on the side of their screen rather than possibly redundant stories filling up the middle of the page.
Actually, it may become too empty. Scrap this idea.
The location of metamod.pl isn't IN the faq page! You have to either be told about it or make a lucky guess.
Does that mean what I think it means?
michael, you dirty little devil...
Taco, do what you will to change the moderation on /. but don't even think about removing -1, Troll.
I've spent so much time with her I cannot deny she is my soulmate, and to remove her would be the final blow against my wretched trolling life.
With love,
,
faeryman
Yes, that's right. No longer will you have to walk into the small computer shop and wonder whether they are reliable. Whether the clerk is an idiot or a liar. No longer will you run into that person in the bar and wonder "is this person a wierdo, or should I keep talking". The fools, idiots, liars, and cheats of the world would quickly be recognized, and the rest of us would bask in our magnificance.
Yes, I'm talking about implementing a Karma system in Real Life.
Ok, ok, here's my real suggestion: I'd like to see a person's Karma stats subdivided by 'type'. How funny are they. How insightful are they. How often are they off-topic.
Hey, we'll need this for our RL Karma System ( RLKS(tm)* ), so might as well get the bugs worked out of it now.
(*) Hmm, looks like we're going to have to fight a squatter for our domain name.
Definitely, and the price would have to continue to increase as time went on, seeing as more and more people would have karma due to the 'injection' of karma into the system from it's current source.
I mean, undermoderation is really bad, but overmoderation would also be bad.
It would also help to stifle abuses. If the price of moderator points to karma is not 1-1, then nobody can set up a 'karma circle', which would be a very bad thing indeed.
The problem with elaborate moderation schemes is that the more complex the system becomes, the less people will understand it correctly, and as a result it will be misused and abused. We're not playing D&D here with zillions of rules and dice rolls, we're just voicing opinions and silencing pranksters.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I have no intention of offering forth yet another possible solution to the moderation problem. What I want to suggest is that we need to ask the right questions before we decide what the answers are. Allow me to submit that the very nature of discussion boards such as those on Slashdot is not entirely clear. For example...
- What is the purpose of a discussion board?
- For whom does a discussion board exist?
- What function(s) does moderation serve on a discussion board?
- What are possibly valid reasons for moderating something up? (Declared assumption: the concept of moderation "up" or "down")
- What are possibly valid reasons for moderating something down? (Note: *not* simply the converse of the above question)
- What are desirable qualities in a moderator?
I would submit that none of these are easy or straightforward questions - nor is this a definitve list. They are implicitly answered in every moderation system, but this doesn't mean that explicitly declaring them (both for Slashdot and in general) can't hurt - and it could quite possibly help.Unfortunately, it would seem that restricting the right to post might be going a bit far. In fact, I would call this censorship. While someone may have unpopular viewpoints, they may actually contribute to other discussions better than the one they are losing points over. Systems such as this would quiet those that cry "Wolf!" when there was none, but it would also quiet them when there really was one.
On one hand, this might eliminate trolls who can not bulk generate email accounts, on the other hand, this is censorship. I do not know which is the lesser of the two evils. If one managed to get in the thick of a discussion and moderated down, yet contributed well to a discussion but too late for moderators to pay much attention, do they stand the risk of losing their right to post?
<Example> :)
We all flame those who say DeCSS is bad. One has to look at the logic behind someones view before wildly handing out moderation. Such logic might be hard to deterimine from a single post. Jumpy logic like this makes poor posts, but fun examples. I would be never published this like. Do not moderate up this, it would be too kind if you did.
</Example>
In honor of this guy and those like him, I propose a new category (Humor-Impared or Didn't-Get-The-Joke). Rate +- as you like. This would have saved the Seinfeld flamewar on Friday from happening. Countless innocent bits have been mercilessly slaughtered in these flamewars and it must end.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
OK, Mr. 11, the question most of us (ok, me) want to know is: why have you acted in the way you have (enoch root, etc.)? Is it to show flaws in the slashdot system as you point out in your arguement? Were you abused as a child? Just because you can? I know I'm just a lowly >200,000'er, but since this discussion isn't totally offtopic for once, fill us in. Oh, and I believe the "Design the first system to be thrown away" is from "Mythical Man Month."
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
they had so much potential.
Not once I got a hold of them. They would spend their days (miliseconds?) in a Java semi-brute force RSA key cracking program. That's probably in violation of the Electronic Geneva convention or something. Oh, and in case anyone cares, it works like a champ for any values that can be calculated natively (>64 bits), but will hit a huge wall when using the BigInteger class, as would be expected.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
if slashdot were to implement something complicated like this, it crash within a week trying to compute signal 11's karma.
with apologies
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
that's a pretty good idea too!
doesn't quite have the staying power though. i want something i can watch day in, day out. maybe if it was a seperate poll, or even a karma pool, where you bet karma on a daily basis on who's closest to his actual karma at the end of the day. the winner(s) split up the karma pool.
anyone think this is feasible?
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
I wouldnt mind a +1, KarmaWhore...
;-)
I mean, at least then things will be honest, rather than moderateing people +1, Insightful up for:
"Ace's Hardware has been covering AMD's advances fairly well - they have an SMP Capable chipset (the 760MP) in the works, which should be out by december."
True.
Often articles that don't follow the groupthink are often flamebait, and deserve the moderation they get.
But what troubles me is that I've seen articles sometimes that clearly aren't in sync with groupthink, and make a really good point, clear, logical, etc.; but they get a bad moderation because the cabal is offended.
I've never personally felt to be a victim of this. I've just seen it done.
I've also seen articles moderated up that clearly shouldn't have been. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
One thing that is wrong with the present system is that all of the moderation ends up resulting in a single filter.
You can select to browse at -1 or 0, basically unfiltered. Or at a higher level -- thus limiting yourself to the influence of whatever the moderators were smoking (today).
What if different moderator's contributed to different filters?
What if I could say I want to brose at 3, but using a filter made from only the "smart" moderators, as opposed to the "smartass" ones?
Others with different tastes could browse at, say 6, using a filter which only allows them to see articles about goat sex.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
This wouldn't solve the problem of highly opinionated mis-moderation.
I love KDE, and I hate GNOME (or vice versa, or with distributions, etc.). So I'm going to be sure to join the pro-KDE moderation group.
Now I can go on my personal rampage through a story's replies, marking down all pro-GNOME articles that piss me off and marking up all anti-GNOME (or pro-KDE?) articles. Some people are exactly this mature. And some of them even read Slashdot.
I even suppose that anyone can mis-moderate. Sometimes caffene deprivation sets in. It's late. (Or early.) Or you're in a bad mood. PHB, or In a hurry, etc. I don't know, I've never tried moderating.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Makes a smile come to my face that a story like this makes it to the front page. :-)
Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?
Do you have a citation for this .sig? I love it.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
ACK... should have proofread that one. :)
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
> posts like this make you look cool? How
> old are you? Yes, because that's what i'm trying to do. Look cool. Oh yeah.
Grow up.
The only reason I respond is to display my benevolence over you commoners, and to say when I think people are dumb, or when people are smart.
My goal has never been to look cool. And for you to even consider that.. well, how old are you?
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Ba-dom-bom-cha!
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
I'm sorry if this is interpretted as a troll, but it's also true.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
A king might have use for you, boy.
*wink* *wink*
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
If you search for something like knitting and find lots of results about SEX and ANAL then you put -SEX and -ANAL in your search (depending on the engine, of course) to filter them out.
For someone searching the blanket terms "SOCKS" there's no way anyone can know if you are wanting any of the many definate terms.
Look at the results of the first one. Try to spot the trend, it's not that fucking hard.
Kinda like your dick.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
I've been here for years and have watched the decline.
Instead of this "and people wonder why" I have instead found greener pastures. Slashdot isn't what it once was. As you can see it's impossible to control/censor trolls under the current system (not that I can think of a better way - slashdot's is quite good).
So i've come to look on slashdot as occasional news, a bit of fun, trolling grounds (although even I pass for a troll - when really i'm just a tetchy dickhead who insults people a lot).
The original /.'ers left in the same way they left whatever they left to come to slashdot. It's not sad. Things change. The system falls apart.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Goto is just another tool? What about when Synapse - that failed music store - put it's money into Goto ranking (among other advertising)?
The company fell over and Goto kept pointing at them (odds are they were contracturally obliged to).
Goto is an awful search engine; justifying it as part of your repoitre is a tad thin; and there are much better tools about.
Just another tool? what does one need to qualify as just another tool?
And it does sound (read:appear) like the guy sucks at searching. If he/she doesn't know how to search for socks, without searching for protocols ("socks -protocol -socket -proxy") - then yes, it does sound like they suck at searching.
And i'm not about to learn some tact when I already felt pity and apologised to the laddy for the obvious truth.
He's probably got downs or something.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Um, like the other guy, I find goto.com useful. It's great for finding stuff when you're looking to buy. Anyone who doesn't "suck at searching for stuff" will know several tools; goto is just another tool.
If it works, use it.
p.s. grow some tact
I say we need karma that can be traded for frequent-flier miles :)
And I thought the IRS tax code was complicated!
- The proposed moderation system encourages short Ideas which can be read quickly, ergo moderated quickly.
- It doesn't take into account the potency of three dollar crack although it works better assuming a low saturation levels.
- Trolls will still be trolls, but metatrolling is discouraged.
- Transition appears to be a matter of simple substitution.
- The Karma system clearly has its flaws but it does represent a accurate cross section reflecting the quality (or lack thereof) of the typical poster/troll/moderator.
Don't know what I'm talking about? Go Here.Ignorence is blis.
One thing I would like to see is some form of self-moderation. Why? If I post something as a joke I just wanted someone (perhaps the author of the parent) to get a laugh out of it. But other times I write something that I think has good technical merit and wish it would float a little above the default of 1.
I wish I could think of a way to prevent troll abuse. Perhaps allow users to have a +0.5 and a +1 depending upon karma and make it optional (if the author wants to use it, so be it, if not, don't use it). Or perhaps make it a point pool that depletes (like mod points).
As a reader I would like to see what the author thought of his/her own post. It would be amusing to have pointless (pun intended) message attributes (+0 funny, +0 troll, and -0 just wanted to make the mathematicians whine).
You know, its this exact attitude that makes slashdot so shit to read at times, its an unwritten rule to ridicule everyone who dosne't seem as 1337 as you are...
I lost me sig.
IMHO, some topics are very opinionated, and aren't always modded properly. Perhaps there should be a system where to moderate up/down it requires more than one moderator to mod up/down, to reduce bias. For example, A particular user makes a comment, moderator wants to up it a few points, but must be seconded by another moderator. Kind of like a voting system. Another way to do it would be the higher you want to mod it up, the more "votes" it must accumulate, +1 requires one other moderator to vote for it, +2 requires two other moderator votes, and so on. This might become a cumbersome and slow system, but it will help to ensure that moderating is fair.
/. "members" who keep posting garbage and flame/troll, there should be something done to that user, i'm thinking something like the oposite of having an automatic +1 for posts. For example if a particular user is modded down a great deal (accumulate -1 points), when the user reached a predetermined minus score, all posts recieve -1 to filter the crap out. I do realise that they can just create another account, but I really can't see any solution to stop trolls from doing that. Perhaps a small membership fee would be in order, members get bonus points etc.
Also, for
I lost me sig.
The solutions here is pretty easy. Leave a karma cap for internal use, but allow the actual karma to be unlimited. For example, you might have a +23233342 karma rating, but if the internal cap is set to 50, it uses 50 for its calculations. This way, you get the best of both worlds.
But what troubles me is that I've seen articles sometimes that clearly aren't in sync with groupthink, and make a really good point, clear, logical, etc.; but they get a bad moderation because the cabal is offended.
You say that like it's a bad thing. I think it's DOUBLEPLUSGOOD! Don't taunt the Cabal!
-1, Vapid .sig
+1, Funny .sig
-1, Funny .sig, Spewed Pepsi on the Cat, Bleeding
1. Let everybody moderate any post.
2. There's no karma, or any other kind of score. The system keeps the complete moderation history of every user instead.
3. A given comment may have different scores for different users.
4. When somebody moderates a comment, it has more effect on the comment score you see if his taste is closer to yours.
5. This "taste closeness" (or call it agreement) between two users can also be calculated using their moderation histories.
But how does the software calculate the scores? Probably by calculating an average value of all its (moderations adjusted by moderators' agreement). And the taste agreement between two users could be calculated in a symmetrical way: as an average value, or sum, of all differences in their moderations.
So, when you make your first moderation, everybody who did the same moderation gets "closer" to you. Everybody who disagreed goes away. Click the reload button and you'll instantly get a filtered view.
Actually this "closeness" is a proper terminology if you think about it in terms of topology. Imagine a metric space of "tastes". Individual users and individual comments get represented as points in this space. Whenever you moderate a comment positively your point and the comment's point move closer. When you moderate negatively the points move away. And everybody else in your proximity will get closer or further to the comment, but people who disagree with you won't.
Did anybody understand what I'm trying to describe? Please?
Based on this system, when Linus Torvalds decides he wants to make a relevent post to the super popular Linux related thread, he cannot because he is new and his points fall below the normal curve. There's got to be something better
OK thats ☺. Its unicode, and, basically any body with a sufficently modern browser, and a reasonable unicode font will see them as smilie faces.
...you may also be on crack though. ;o) for the rest of you)
(in IE its one of those install on demand components. In X, well ive got my unicode font installed, if only i could get a browser to use it)
☺ (thats a
Don't we all thrive on the fact that wherever there is any complication, there are people who we can mystify with our knowledge(=power)?
Then again, make it too involved (by adding gambling and percentages) and you take the fun out of it all.
I wouldn't reply to any comments until I'd run all the figures and percentages through a spreadsheet to see where I was going to be after the dice had stopped.
Slashdot Moderation doesn't work. I should know, just look at my posting history!
I've been bitchslapped, modded up and down, and most recently had someone with an obvious vendetta against me massively mod down my posts, including a bunch of old ones!
Therefore, I'll be amazed if anyone ever reads this.
However, I probably hold the record for the biggest mod war on slashdot, when in fact my post should have been something like (+5, Funny; +2, Offtopic), where the user can choose how anal and humorless they are.
Anything that is done to slashdot moderation now will be an ugly hack; the whole thing should be scrapped and redesigned, and that probably won't happen, period.
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
Quite right, no perfect system, so adopt a simple one and live with its foibles. I suggest that each account be allowed to cast one vote per post--'signal'(+1) or 'noise'(-1)--and readers be asked to ONLY vote on those posts they feel are worth spending a mouse click on. The system could use these votes, combined with data on the total number of eyeballs that have viewed the post, plus the same information on replies to that post, to come up with a variety of statistics. It would be possible to allow filters based on things like 'interest' (total votes/total views), and/or 'quality' (rating > X) and/or 'controversy' (high 'interest' with cumulative rating close to 0, indicating voters contradicting each other), etc. for either individual posts or entire threads. This would allow readers to decide if they're interested in only 'quality' posts or only 'stimulating' posts (i.e. posts that draw a lot of votes one way or the other), or only posts that are, say, both highly rated and receive many 'stimulating' replies, and so on. You get the idea.
I like the fact that everything can be posted, but no one has to read post from people with low points. Plus, the risk goes up depending on where you post, and how many points you have. It gets the job done though, comments from people with lots of points get read, and they get more points. Trolls either don't get seen or lose points, and alot from the sound of it.
Shit adds up at the bottom...
FWIW, it was Fred Brooks in the Mythical Man Month who said "plan to throw one away - you will anyway".
I think you can build a relatively abuse-resistant system. First, ensure that some *human* effort is needed to submit an article to the website. This means you have to perform some sort of simple on-line Turing test - one example I've seen is "click on the word 'foobar' in this image", but others are possible.
Second, give voting power only to those who've already gained karma/mojo. Giving any power to an account that has not already gained reputation allows you to acquire power by acquiring accounts.
Thoughts?
--
Xenu loves you!
What, is the new limit 64? I only lose points because my karma is well over the new karma cap that was enstated. I asked Rob about it, and he told me that it doesn't matter because high karma doesn't matter. Well, he's right, but it would have been nice to mention that on the site.
.sig; maybe you'll get it on slashdot as a story. You can only expect so much from CmdrTaco and company, and most of the time it doesn't happen. That's why sites like kuro5hin and half-empty exist, because obviously slashdot wasn't enough for some people.
The proper place to go to bitch about moderation is here; that's one thing slashdot *did* get right.
Hey, write a better FAQ, and link to it in your
Personally, I'm still drooling over the skinning support on half-empty. On slashdot, I'd be happy if I could just get a consistent *color scheme*; if Rob implemented a skinning system, I'd probably have a heart attack!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, I don't like the karma cap, but all that means is that you have to keep score yourself. Also, I think that displaying/not displaying karma on your page to other people should be a user-configurable option, because my Karma is definitely part of my user info.
I think that your other idea is basically sound, but needs some work. Realize that Signal 11, as well as most users that post a lot, get moderated down a fair bit, and not always for valid reasons. Therefore, this shouldn't be a number of downward moderations, but rather a percentage.
I know (because of the karma cap) that I've gotten 37 downward moderations since it was enstated, but since that only counts downward moderations, that includes a (-1, Overrated) moderation on a (+5, Insightful) post. That is, what would normally be at least a +3 gain in karma ends up being a -1 loss. Under your system, I might be posting at 0 for posting insightful comments; that's why a flat number won't work for everybody.
Similar proposals have existed in the past, including "aging" of karma. Personally, I would like a simple all-time chart, though, just to keep score. I still think that a really fair way to do moderation probably looks a lot more like kuro5hin, though, and they don't have karma, hence, no need to want to "keep score". That's probably a good thing.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
but with the repeated articles and heavy emphasis on certain topics at certain times, and with the size of /. readership, such as system begs to be put in place. IMO, there's a good way to do this now, similar to kuro5hin, but accounting for the size of /..
There would be two levels of story moderators: two or three people like Rob, Katz, and Hemos, that can pull a story from the story queue and post it immediately, say on things of dire attention. Then there would be 20 to 30 secondary story moderators, which includes those that already on the list, and others selected from /. readership that are willing to help but understand the /. vision. For any given story in the queue, it needs 1/3 to 1/2 the number of moderators (say 10) "go" votes before it's posted, or the same number of "nay" votes before it's pulled. Thus, not every one of these moderators would see every story, as by the time they got to check on it, it might be toast. Special consideration can be done for duplicated stories in the queue (given the average of 300-400 stories everytime I submit, I'm sure about 25% of those are duplicated), so that by the time the duplicates are weeded out, 30 or so moderators are looking at about 200 posts that might go on /. that day.
Having a larger number of people would help avoid duplicated stories, excessive focus on a topic, and possibly show a better reflection of the /. userbase as a whole. But again, this is Rob's site, and he's got his right to run it anyway he wants.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
According to the FAQ on that site, it is pronounced "corrosion" - so chosen because the site owner/editor is "rusty". Kinda inventive, actually.
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We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
What is a karma freeze?
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__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
That said, the kuri5hin recommendations is better than the moderation here.
Question: Why doesn't /. return to the days of the ultimate moderators? What was/were the factors that eliminate this? IIRC, it was because this power was being abused.
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Why is this necessarily a problem? Use it to an advantage.. have people sign up to be part of moderator groups. Each group has a specific focus - pro-linux, pro-*BSD, that kind of thing. Be a member of more than one group if you want. The people in charge of that group are in charge of moderation for that group.. if they want everyone moderating, they can do it. If they only want a small group of like-minded people moderating, they can do that too. Form moderator "communities" and let them decide what's good and what's not.
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I don't criticize slashdot to be fashionable, I do it when I think slashdot could improve. It's been a while since there's been any improvement here, mainly because of that kind of attitude toward criticism. Dude, think about it, if people care enough to criticise, why are you flaming them?
No, I don't care at all about upward moderation. I don't moderate here, I hardly ever post here (my user page has one comment showing right now-- well, two by the time you read this), so what does upward moderation get me?
And, I'd find you comments that misunderstood, but I'm on a modem, and I can't get the story to load before the server times me out, so no dice there. FWIW, the ones that misunderstood were indeed of the dumb, "didn't read the article" variety. No argument there.
Anyway, I'd have to rate your comment -1, Flamebait. Chill, out, man.
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There is no K5 cabal.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Try this:
In statistics, it is a common practice to throw out the high and low values, counting them as anomalies.
If an article gets 3 moderations or more, and at least one of those moderations is different than the others, then pick a +1 moderation to ignore, and also pick a -1 moderation to ignore. Use the remaining moderations to score the article.
Example:
Article moderated as follows:
-1 Flamebait
+1 Insightful
+1 Interesting
This shows an indication that someone was personally offended and mismoderated. Throw out the high and low, leaving a remaining +1 moderation intact. The article gets scored at +1, which is what it would have scored at anyway.
We want to encourage marking comments UP, so we don't penalize the person who made the +1 score that was thrown out. We WILL penalize the karma of the person who likely made the bad -1Flamebait moderation.
Furthermore, we need to get rid of the overrated and underrated markers, because they don't stand in meta. I have frequently seen them abused by people who mark comments out of spite in order to dodge the retribution from meta.
And another thing: Make the +1 score bonus OPTIONAL. Right now if you don't click that little button, the +1 is the default, which seems wrong to me.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The posts don't get deleted. If you lose posting privileges you can dig yourself out of a hole by doing some moderation.
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You are slashdotting my poor linux box! YOU BASTARDS!
I hope I don't lose my cable service!
Dammit! I can't take the slashdot effect!
-The admin of half-empty.org
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This is a common complaint about the system I've set up.
:)
The point of the whole thing is that the points will not BLOCK people from posting. There will not be people dominating the site. If there are, there are variables I can tweak.
The point system is designed for two things
1) Keep out spam
2) Provide quirks for users who post consistent, popular posts.
These quirks include posting in the busiest categories of the day (these change constantly, there are more than 100 categories) and appearing on a top ten list.
It's an experiment. If it turns out to rely too much on moderation and people are dominating the site, well then I will lighten it up a bit.
With such an open site, it becomes necessary to implement a system such that spamming can get destroyed easily without my intervention. To do this I have to find a balance.
Wish me luck
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Note that the moderation system (despite this thread) isn't the purpose of the site. It's also a really neat place and you can post content rich stuff with images and files.
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I think however you are mistaken with the average/majority rules. For instance, certain people have certain tastes - and because of that you can never have an ideal moderation where you rely on the objective evaluation of people.
That is the reason with my current project, nerdfarm [currently down, blame network solutions], I decided to throw out moderation on the message boards. Instead of moderation and a rating system - I approach it as, what do most people find interesting/not interesting/annoying, etc. And then try to profile. It's really not that difficult, there are a few categories of rating and then you can just do some simple math off of those.
This gets rid of trolls because troll posts wont ever be seen unless a certain person pays attention to them.. granted, 5 people may have to look at them before they start being sifted down.
Also, Karma Whores aren't around -- because the only way for you to score the rough equivalent of karma points is to post what people find interesting and provokes discussion and interaction (the system tracks what users interact with each post)
Well, in a nut shell that's what I think the perfect moderation system is. However it's just my opinion. If anyone is interested I'll post more details..
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
The way to fix this is to have the reader decide who's moderation to use. Let moderation be a subjective thing, because the value of a post is subjective. What is +4 to you might be +1 to me. This can be done many ways. A couple of really simple ones would be:
- Anyone can moderate as many posts as they want, whenever they want to.
Readers explicitly choose which moderator(s)'s scores to use. If I like
how Dickbreat moderates things, maybe I'll choose him and let him decide
what I see and how I see it. If I don't like how he moderates, I scratch
him off my list and choose someone else to moderate for me.
- Anyone can moderate as many posts as they want, whenever they want to.
When the system tries to figure out what score to show me for a post
that I haven't moderated yet, it looks at other people who have a history
of moderating similarly to me (using the old 'computer dating' method,
for example) and sees what score they gave it. If Dickbreath has a history
of scoring articles similar to how I score them, and he marks a post as
being +5 insightful, then the system shows that post to me as +5. If I
then mark it as -1 troll, then Dickbreath and I start to drift apart and
perhaps it don't weight his opinion as heavily, the next time it generates
a page for me.
There are also many variations on this theme. The point is that scores, reputations, and so on, should not be global, but rather, they should be vary by reader.BTW, this type of thing works for both posts and articles.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Granted, I'm posting this after there are already 300+ posts, so I doubt anyone will ever see this, but I'll mention it anyways.
There's a very simple and easy way to have the natural effect of the karma cap w/o actually having one. Once your karma reaches a certain number (say 25, because that's where the +1 kicks in), make it so that things that would give you a +1 karma only have a percentage chance of giving you that +1, and the percentage drops as your karma goes up. Alternatively if you didn't want randomness but didn't mind fractional karma, just award a fractional amount of karma, with that fraction tending to 0 as karma -> infinity.
What would this do? Suppose we have a poster that tends to average 2 +1s for every -1. Under the uncapped system that poster's karma would go to infinity. Under the cap they'd slam into the cap. Under this proposal, their karma would rise slower and slower until they reach around where they're getting 0.5 for every +1, and would stabilize there. Whatever this number would be, it'd be a lower fixed number than the person who averages 10 +1s for every -1 -- a feature that neither unlimited or capped karma has.
This does nothing to eliminate karma whoring, but it does make it less and less worthwhile over time. The only way to do anything like that is to change the +1/-1 system itself, and I don't have an answer for that one.
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At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
It's probably too late to post anything here, but let's have a go.
I'd like to see a web-of-trust/firefly sort of site. Everyone can rate everything, and the similarity of a given user's ratings to your own determines how much impact their other ratings have.
Everyone would have their own front page, which would be personalized to their taste, based on how stories were rated by people with similar taste.
Trolls and fanatics would never have much impact, becase multiple accounts would do more harm than good. None of their 20 accounts would be trusted by many people.
I have another idea that would help with the moderation problem - simply, for each post moderated there would be some way to say "I like this moderation" or "I think this moderation is wrong".
If you marked a moderation as being wrong, then after that point the articles YOU read (no one else) would never be moderated up or down by that person again.
Thus, you have the same set of responses, but a different moderated view for each user. It wouldn't matter how much karma whoring someone did, because you could mark moderators that fell for such tactics as useless. Multiple accounts to moderate from? I can mark moderators as fools faster than they can create accounts and moderate...
Note that you would never have to know who the moderator was you were disagreeing with, you would simply say that for any post you didn't like the moderation done and to ignore all the moderators of that post from that point forward.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have to agree that part of the S/N problem is pretty inevitable on a system of any size.
;) Anyway. I'd be extremely unlikely to ever get modded up for my posts, but that doesn't imply that I wouldn't be a fantastic moderator.
We can improve on moderation though - make Karma relative to posting volume. I'm currently somewhere near the karma cap (was on it, until an IE bug moderated the wrong commented and I rightly slapped down in M2...) but I don't get modded up that often. I'm there as I've been here a long time. And, let's be honest, it's not too difficult to get 50 positive moderations in a year or two.
Let's say we make karma degrade. Say 1 point lost per month, one lost per 10 posts (or whatever). I need to remain a good poster to keep high karma. Yes, I can see that that _could_ encourage more karma whoring as to keep a +1 you'd need to do so continually, but I genuinely don't think it's as much of a problem as some people make out.
The other thing to look at is whether it's sensible for posting and moderation karma to remain unified. I'd argue not.
By keeping them together, we unnecessarily reduce the quality of both.
Hypothetical situation. Let's say I'm a troll. Does that mean I'd be a bad moderator? No, not necessarily. There's a strong case to be put for not giving trolls mod points as to withold them may deter trolling on some level, but that's about it.
Now, let's imagine I can't spell and am hopelessly inarticulate. Some might say that was the case now
Ultimately, I'd go for a fundamental overhaul of these things. Rate posts in percentage terms, make sure almost anyone can mod pretty much constantly. Posts then get modded with much more precision - so we don't have the current problem that the first post to hit +5 gets a huge boost over the second, thus encouraging whoring as opposed to well thought-through comments. M2 wouldn't really work so if we want the current style, you do effective M2 by comparing ratings given to posts. Peaks on the chart count as a fair, blips as unfair.
None of this addresses the fundamental problem with moderation as a concept, though - tyranny of the majority. The comment which works for most will almost certainly win. It may be wrong on careful analysis, but the gut call is that it's correct. Whereas the more thoughtful post with more actual understanding may lose out as less can understand it. Also, what do you do if the trolls win? If the system is entirely automated, it's possible that the trolls could get in on the ground floor and, thanks to all systems being fundamentally based on the approval of peer groups, take over. If they mod each other up and good comments down, you're stuffed...
If you really want to maintain perceived quality, restrict moderation to a central clique of the great and the good. It's the only way of ensuring that it's good - but it does make the assumption that whoever does the choosing is right, and impose their viewpoint(s) on the group. It takes a very strong individual to be fair and even-handed with that level of power...
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Everyone here has been brainwashed by the idea of censorship. Moderation schemes are exactly backward, effectively letting others (the moderators) select who and what I read.
Let me be the only one who filters what I read. Let there be personal, dynamic, intelligent filtering instead of mob-based moderation.
That is, let my account record moderation that I and only I do to articles. Then, articles are rated (from my perspective only) based on how I've moderated similar aticles in the past. This can be done based on author, keyword matching, whatever -- and should be options in moderation: "I (dont) like this author", "I (dont) like this content", etc.
Done. The beauty? No text gets explicitly censored -- you read the content that you like, not some function of what the group likes. Of course, you should be able to threshold depending on your mood -- where articles are rated, say, 5=must-read to 0=unclassified to -5=dont-read.
It's more complicated to code and takes more server CPU, but all side-effects of the current point moderation systems (that everyone is trying to hack and patch around) are gone.
I had an email conversation about this exact problem with one of the editors last year sometime. The way I see it, many moderators don't have time to browse at -1 when there are 400 post. So they head to the story that was just submitted and only has 10 post.
My suggestion was to give the option to have Slashdot serve up a random subset of the stories when I have moderator points. I would then choose to de/promote the ones I was presented with.
The editors rejected the ideas, saying that it would break up the flow of the conversation, and that the current system works good enough.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The problem I've noticed with moderation is that it tends to snuff out alternative ideas, and the people who post them.
I agree. Furthermore, with metamoderation being able to nuke people's karma scores moderators have little incentive to try to stimulate discussion by promoting interesting, if unconventional or unpopular, ideas. Nearly every time I've done this I've lost karma in m2--people who oppose viscerally a viewpoint apparently have a difficult time swallowing the "interesting" tag I tack onto a post.
In short, I don't like karma at all. I think it's completely wrong. Each post should be unemcumbered by the quality of previous posts; judged on its own merit.
If I had more time to read posts I'd probably agree with you more. Karma/moderation helps boost the signal-to-noise to the point that it is sometimes worthwhile reading comments.
That being said, the moderation process often leaves a very bland set of posts at high moderation levels. As a proposed change, I'd like to see something where I could specify the percentage of posts at a given level that I want to read. E.g., "100% +3 to +5, 50% +2, 20% +1, 10% +0, 0% -1 to -3". That way I can still stumble across interesting "+0" ACs on occasion without having to wade through 100 unfiltered grits posts. Also, it would be nice to be able to "killfile" certain UIDs so when someone is an obvious kwhore (Sig11?) I could choose not to view any of his/her posts anymore.
I basically agree that the karma cap serves no useful purpose. Many is the time when I've posted something negative about a story that a popular author posted (e.g. Jon Katz) and burned through 10 karma, just because I dared to speak the truth about the emperor's new clothes. If I didn't tend to have 70-90 points of karma, I wouldn't dare do this. Most of these instances have been where I refuted major points in the story, based on directly observed facts (e.g. that Jon misstated certain author's opinions, when I happen to have talked with a few such people many times and knew this not to be the case).
That said, there should be no post bonus beyond the basic +1 (and +2 for slashdot superlogins).
I also agree with the comment that we should be able to rate stories, either +1 point, +0 points (no opinion, for silly people), or -1 point. However, ACs should never be able to rate stories.
But, I don't think our rating of stories should affect how they show up on slashdot, just provide a table which we can look at (10 most popular, 10 worst stories) and which might give some feedback to those who run slashdot.
Will in Seattle
the idea that some people's posting should be limited seems wrong ... at least here, part of Slashdot's charm is that anyone can post whatever they want, and
moderation only helps people filter the list.
I think I agree. Free speech means that you can speak and whether anybody wants to listen depends on (hopefully the quality of) what you say. A good filter would "supress" (without eliminating) the obvious noise and allow low rated quasi-noise. We then decide what ratio of signal to noise we desire or can tolerate.
Perhaps I'm concerned I'd be left out...but I'd also miss some of the interesting tangents I read.
Querry: are we demographicly capable of such "pure" democracy? What is our "troll/hacker" ratio? Regardless it sounds like a truely grand experiment.
The problem I see with how many moderators use their points is that they score it according to their opinion rather than the quality of the post. I honestly don't think you can stop this completely but it can be improved.
My suggestion is to provide two seperate schemes of moderation for each post. Firstly, the moderators score according to the quality of the post (just like it is now) but there is also a separate scale with something like Scores of A to E inclusive which mean A=Agree strongly to E=disagree strongly.
This could be used to generate a "popularity score" which would complement the existing "quality score" for the benefit of those who want to see it.
The major benefit of this IMO though is that is encourages the moderator to seperate their feelings about a post from their view of it's quality.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Why is Slashdot a circus of karma whores and trolls at the moment? Slashdot moderation is failing because of exactly the Delphi effect that Signal 11 tries to promote: the more you spread the ability to vote, the more rating the comment becomes a popularity contest.
Trolls know this well, and so do karma whores, to an extent: it's a simple matter of politics. Democracy was cracked by power-hungry lobbyists pretty much the same way Slashdot was cracked by the trolls. If you want enlightened comments and worthwhile discussions, then placing the debate in the hands of the silent majority is just going to create a mess.
Take Big Brother as an example: are you surprised the pretty face with the missing leg won? This shows you how pathetic it was to let the whole Internet vote. If you compare with Survivor, where the people involved in the action did the voting, there's a modicum of sense that arises. The winner was not the prettiest or the most popular, but the one who worked the hardest and made the most sense.
In Slashdot terms, the problem comes from the fact that those who moderate are necessarely uninvolved in the debate at hand. This allows trolls and karma whores to manipulate the popular opinion, while ACs sink karma faster than an omniscient Battleship player.
What you want is closer to peer review that you find in scientific papers. You want moderators who know what the hell is going on, and have proved they are unbiased.
Democracy works when everyone votes. But it doesn't work insofar as empowering everyone with the ability to run the show. Slashdot needs to realize that if they ever hope to run a decent discussion site.
I'd like to see either Signal 11 or myself get moderated up in a story we don't know shit about, when the moderators are authorities on the subject.
Case it point, if I had some moderator points, I'd mod this up. This is a really good idea.
However, it does have a lot of potential for abuse. Transferring karma across accounts *will* be a problem. Some can mod up their troll comment, and transfer karma from an account that has high karma to one with low karma, essentially avoiding the karma cap.
Even with its faults its definitely something to consider.
Maybe these sacrificed karma points wouldn't give a karma bonus to the poster of the comment that is modded, thus avoiding potential abuses. However, it doesn't seem entirely fair to the legitimate comment posters, since he won't benefit from all the karma he might normally have recieved.
I really like the idea of karma having more of a use than just a +1 bonus.
Spyky
>when I have moderator points.
The problem with that idea is the same problem *I* have with meta-moderation.
When you get a set of posts at random like that you are deneied context. Sure, sometimes a post will quote the parent, but usually they do what I just did: quote only the specific part it's replying to. Rare (and rightfully so) is the post that'll quote the ENTIRE parent before a response.
Many are the posts that might seem trollish or flameish BY THEMSELVES, that, when you see the parent they are responding to, reveal themselves to actually be sarcastic replies, that, IN CONTEXT, deserve an insightful or intresting.
Likewise with offtopic. Sometimes a conversation veers off on a tangent that will be quite intresting, but if the post came up out of the contxt of the thread, it'll definately get zapped offtopic.
This critical problem is why I never meta-moderate. And it's why those asswipes with sigs that say, "moderators: you should be reading at -1, newest posts first", irritate me so.
I ALWAYS read at -1, modding or no. But mod w/ newist posts first? Fsck no!!! I will bloody well keep reading in nested mode so I can see WHAT a given post is a responce to!
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
A large user base will increase the noise. There is almost nothing you can do about that. Slashdot's moderation system does a good job of filtering the signal from the noise though. When I browse with a threshold of 3, I rarely see any noise. The noise I see being the karma whores.
These two modifications prevent (in large part) the creation of "mule" accounts to alter moderation. Ideally, Rob would also reset everybody's karma to 0 at this point, to prevent the currently existing mules from being able to corrupt the system. (and before you bitch, I'm setting at 125 right now, so I do have a fair amount to lose.)
This prevents the common occurrence of a comment being moderated to +5 because several people tried to moderated it from 2 to 3 (for example). I know that several minutes can elapse from the time I get a page to the time I submit the moderation, during which others may have moderated the comment as well.
Again, this is to prevent mule accounts from corrupting M2.
This way, Rob&Co cannot be blamed for the bitchslapping: the community did it. This quickly removes the trolls.
Now the fuse is lit.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Groupthink is exactly the problem. The solution? Disable the ability to take moderation points away from a post. Only allow users to push them up, the trolling/spamming nonsense can be taken care of by a small group of volunteers who will only take down "first post" and "penis bird" posts. Heck, you could write code for that.
Troll moderation should be eliminated as its been proven many times before that slashdotters can't tell the difference between a true troll and a dissenting opinion.
If your comment sucks, we eat you and the poor children of Ireland.
"On problem, as with any universal rating scheme is that it would be easy to, say, create 20 accounts and consistantly mark-down a certain author, something you cant do on /. because you would have work the accounts up to moderator status first."
If you're talking about the system used on Kuro5hin, you should be aware that the number of comments needed to turf or post a story is a percentage. As you create more accounts to affect the vote, more accounts are required to affect the vote. You end up chasing your own tail if you attempt to abuse it that way.
--
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
- Scaling issues, because the number of possible correlations between users increases as O(n^2).
- Privacy issues, because the system has to keep track of how thousands of users rate things. (This would be a bonanza for market-research people, and perhaps political operatives.)
If you use a "representative" system and try to group people by a general agreement of taste, the scaling problem is vastly reduced (to O(n*R), where the number of representative profiles R << n). The problem there is that people's tastes drift and differentiate over time, and it might be very difficult to create new representative profiles once the individual ranking information has been obliterated. There is the additional problem of the system being more vulnerable to skewing by proxy mis-moderation, because a representative profile representing a smaller number of viewers is easier to throw off-kilter than one which includes the entire user population.I like the idea of trying to restrict moderation to verifiable people as opposed to robots, but I don't see any way to make this feasible that does not involve collecting a lot of information that a discussion site has no business asking for.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Everyone has a point of view that correlates more or less with some others. Let people just moderate things however they wish, and then cluster them according to some reasonable statistical technique.
Seastead this.
There are my few cents (more than two...)
./ authors: maybe make a "suggestions" section where people can post about the moderation & meta-moderation system. It may be awhile before there is a system that scales... I don't think the kuroshin idea does... but if we put our heads together, we might find something. Hey, if suggestions are good enough for Denny's, they are good enough for ./
./ can track you either way, if they wanted. They just decrease the noise. -OR- alternatively, make it harder to get a normal account (some variant of #1 above) - at least it will keep the stupid posts at 0.
:)
./ greivances, then I thought to myself... "boy, get a life". I'm thinking that again...
1. Advogato's trust metric was mentioned once in the Kuroshin article... it deserves some more looking into.
2. I like the idea of moderating stories. So do a lot of other people.
3. What separates a good moderator from a bad one? A clear head and a good background in the subject of discussion. So, maybe I haven't read the moderator guidelines close enough, so I don't know if it's there, but moderators should be encouraged to only use their points on areas where they consider themselves experts. Maybe this can be enforced by some kind of category management (of course, you could get a thesis in information extraction if you actually pulled this off...) Some similarities here to the kuroshin idea...
4. No more AC's. Really... what purpose do these serve? Anonymity? Nope, you can just as easily make a bogus account...
5. Meta-meta-moderation. Meta-meta-meta-moderation. (meta)^k-moderation. Ok, not really.
6. Take into account quality in addition to quantity of Karma. If I post 192 times and 2/3 don't get modded and 1/3 get +1 points, and someone else posts 5 times and each gets +4 mod points, who deserves a higher karma? Read my lips: no more whoring
Hmm... I once starting writing a long list of
Got Rhinos?
Give posts -1 for any of the following:
Got Rhinos?
I suggested something a while back called the flag system. Beside the reply, etc. buttons at the bottom of every article are two other buttons called "Flag Up" and "Flag Down." Flagged posts would draw moderator attention. Some sort of volume system could be used to see what the most active articles are and so maintain the flags meaning (keeping every post from being flagged the equivalent of "urgent"). A sort by flag would be nice I suppose.
One problem with slashdots moderation system is that it bows to a mob mentality. Napster=Good. MPAA=bad. Please, a monkey could do that. I'm not sure if flagging could help this.
The other problem is that it is hard to tell what needs to be moderated when there are 300 articles in the comments, you just can't read everything in a reasonable amount of time. Flagging would work towards solving this problem.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
Hi! We have partially implemented this on a site called Prosebush (http://www.prosebush.com). Feel free to make an account (or not) and try to get you post boosted up to the top story. We are presently evaluating the system and would like to have some good data. We haven't implemented the entire algorithm yet for various reasons (I don't think the cheap server we are on would be a good place to do real-time clustering and the C++ compiler is really old). But what we have there is a start. Please try to break it (in the context of the moderation algorithm!), I have no doubt we at Prosebush will learn a lot from it. Thanks for you interest!
--8<--
--8<--
I'm going to disagree... It is possible to do algorithmic moderation based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and an analysis of who read what. I have been yammering about this in several discussions on Kuro5hin but no-one seems to reply so I won't bother reiterating here... but basically you do similarity analysis between what the person has read in the past and the current articles, this lets you know if they will be likely to want to read the current stuff. Further the number of other people who read that article (and it's children) will weight the choice (so a disagreeable, but controversial or important argument, still gets modded up).
The advantages of such "no hands" moderation include not requiring users to work in order to mod up posts (they just browse), the ability to turn off the rating or weight it in favor of some metric (browse at -1, or just read the Sports news), and articles that show up in a discussion long after the human moderators would have stopped paying attention would still have a good chance of being modded up automatically (for those who come to the dicsussion late but still have good ideas).
Disadvantages include the fact that it requires a helluva chunk of computer power to do this. We have implemented a more simplistic version of this system over at Prosebush and use it to rank story contributions, stories, and genres. So far it seems to work. Please check it and let me know if you think the system is failing to work...
--8<--
--8<--
Thanks for the links. I'll check it out!
And to quote Bart Simpson: "I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda" (or in this case Bayes!) :) LOL
Yeah, to have open source stuff for this is ideal... I think there is quite a lot of open source NLP and Neural Net stuff out there but it's probably very academic in nature... I think if you look around University web pages where people do this you might find some packages. I would personally like to see it built into Emacs though! :) M-x moderate-based-on-personal-preferences
THAT would be sweet! :)
Thanks again.
--8<--
--8<--
This is easily fixable. Prevent accounts from transferring more than 2 karma points per day back and forth (or prevent it all together). So you may respond that all it will take is a three (or four) account circle to bypass this. These are quite easily tracked too with a decent algorithym...abusers get kicked out for a month.
This idea can work. Lets start to build it and lobby Cmdr_Taco for his thoughts on it. It's a much better scheme than the complicated ordeal in the parent story.
no sig.
Do you have a citation for this
It's the entire narration for an anti-commercial produced by the Media Foundation, which can be found here.
There's also a link there for a list that keeps track of the UserIDs belonging to the REAL personalities who post on Slashdot. (Perfect for determining who's a Bruce Perens imposter!)
MashPotato - Mobile Array of Support Helpers for Potato
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
I wonder how I can get rid of the metamod link.
/metamod.pl but now every now and then I get asked for that page. I'd like to see an option in the preferences "Not interested in metamoderation".
I once followed a link that brought me to
I am interested in moderation tho.
M2 just isn't interesting, in the last couple of months I've only "Unfair"-d *one* moderation...
(yes I do metamoderate, only to get rid of that stupid line on top of the mainpage)
Ivo
<grub> Reading
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
The problem I've noticed with moderation is that it tends to snuff out alternative ideas, and the people who post them.
This leads to a "lowest common denominator" effect on the site in question; a milque toast effect; a trend towards genericity.
In short, I don't like karma at all. I think it's completely wrong. Each post should be unemcumbered by the quality of previous posts; judged on its own merit.
Obviously, every site has the right to do whatever they please...
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I think the need for MM could be reduced if moderators were given real time feedback of the results of other moderators reading concurrently.
I don't know how many times I've seen a comment that I feel should be rated a 3, mark it up, and by the time I finish reading the other 100+ comments for an article and click the Moderate button, it's now a +5 comment.
Most likely it's not worthy of a +5 but other moderators working concurrently had also decided to +1 it. I know MM is there to take care of this but I think many of us agree that's not very efficient.
PROPOSED SOLUTION:
A Java "real time" moderation interface. It should allow moderators to see "instantly" the results of other moderators.
Configurable options could include:
1) The ability to send on your moderation as soon as you make a selection from the pop-up menu as opposed to waiting for a click on the "moderate" button (which would as now send all your mod at once).
2) If you prefer to wait to the end of your read through of the available comments before submiting your mods, there can be additional feedback in a status bar if a comment you have slated for a mod up (or down) has changed while you were reading other comments.
While I normally prefer that web sites avoid the use of "heavy" things like Java when ever possible, I think we have a worthwhile use for it here. Of course the conventional method could remain an option too.
What do others think?
--Aaron Greenberg
Here's an idea for moderation; pay-to-play. Sell moderation points at a dollar a piece, which will cut down on mismoderation. Then, give all the money you make to a good charity. Everyone wins.
How about it, Taco?
--
Once, I asked you-know-who why my karma was stuck at 48. This is a pretty dumb question when you know about karma freezes, which I didn't. He told me to read the source.
Now, that's all well and good, but it would have taken him less time to tell me what was going on than to tell me to RTFM, or at least the same amount of time. If he had said "karma freeze" I could have drawn my own conclusions and it would have been more helpful than "go try to read someone else's perl code to find out what the system is doing."
I personally interpreted that answer as "fuck you", and moved on with my life. Not everyone has time to read slashcode, we're too busy posting intelligent, insightful, or funny messages as we karma whore. I'd rather help make slashdot an interesting and successful place than understand how it works.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
However, I think the real world is this way... moderated by performance of your economic weath and incorporation. Perhaps that is obvious, but I think this article outlines the process of how a voice is heard in the real world. The only thing it doesn't account for neccesarily is the "who-you-know" factor, which could perhaps lie with emailing, and outside-moderation contact.
Currently I think Slashdot (as far as modeled after the capitalistic process) is much like the current economy. Business are socialized (tax breaks, federal bank loans, etc -- compared to Slashdot's story posters), and the profit is capitalized (companies earn profits the normal capitalistic way, as does slashdot by the traffic of it's posters).
On the other hand, I think you all might agree that this idea could be insanely great, or just plain suck. Slashdot's strength I feel is it's stability amongst anarchy.
----
Remember the words of the Troll Anthem
You can't beat the trolls
You can't beat the trolls
Ee aye addio
You can't beat the trolls
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Now, here's something to think about. The number one security issue is not attacks, trolls and grits lovers. The number one security issue are human mistakes. Most of our security policy revolves around soft security, as it is better to leave community concerns to the community and not to a powerful few. And over time we will only improve the community with simple systems like KeptPages.
Unfortunately, an online community is about communication. It's easier to communicate with 100 people than the 200 000. In fact, you compsci folk already understand the connected graph squaring problem. Sucks, eh?
But, I think, I think that the way out is to use the graph density against itself. If you give people the freedom to manage the system, I think a good community structure will emerge. Moderation systems imposed by the site seem disjunctive, not driving the members to solve problems collectively. This is bad. The community must build itself.
Anyway, as always this is a technology solution vs. community solution dilemma. And I'll bet that you're wrong, Signal11. I'll bet that if you let the whole community help itself, there are a lot more people interested in making it work than don't.
Not entirely offtopic: what does "Kuro5hin" mean? Is it a hacker version of "Kuroshin" (which also doesn't make much sense)...
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
The Early Days (tm) of the web come to mind, where the community culture was set one way, and then all these new folks (outsiders, etc) got into the act. Not bad really, but you see what happened to usenet. The signal to noise ratio has deteriorated badly into tidal pools of spam, etc. It would be very easy for a message board base on this to go the same route. This seems to be the primary flaw.
- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
``Transferring karma across accounts *will* be a problem.''
Perhaps it should be "spend 2 karma points to give 1." I've been thinking about it a bit and something this would definitely prevent extensive abuse while remaining "affordable."
I also like the idea another poster ; mentioned about the donor needing to be a good player with karma of at least +20.
``We are the people our parents warned us about.''
this is not a proof that limiting by IP does not work. I think limiting by IP would work fine. If one guy in a company is ruining it for everyone in that company, let those local users solve the problem. If one guy at AOL ruins it for everyone at AOL, who cares? If there are 1000 trolls who've chracked 10 machines each, that's 10,000 IP addresss read-only, with 100s of millions more posting good stuff.
sounds like a plan, to me.
Where I more cynical I might suggest that this was done so that newbies can't metamod, but I think they've taken away the ability of accounts < 6 months old to M2 recently anyway, so I really don't understand why it's hidden.
Metamoderation has it's own criteria about who gets to do it, much like moderation. I think they throw out the last 25% of newly created accounts and also take karma into consideration.
Normally it appears about once every 24 hours on the main page. If you've never seen it that may be due to a bug in the old slashcode which kept certain people from ever seeing it, you had to discover and go there yourself. The bug also prevented people from being able to meta if they hadn't before a certain point (when they changed to the bug-code? THis is pretty much all fixed now from all reports.) However if you have positive karma and visit metamod.pl, you should be able to metamoderate now. It resets at 7 pm EST so if you just did it, you'll see it come up at the top of your page sometime between then and 8(depending on when apache delivers you the updated content.)
But the short answer to your question, is that you should see it at the top of your page whenever you are deemed worthy by the little pearl scripts that run this site. If it still doesn't come up I'd email Rob and or Cowboyneal and ask them about it, as I'm able to , so by your usernumber so should you be.
One word of warning, the present system allows you to make changes to the moderators karma for bad moderation, but there is an unusual check in place. If you disagree too often on moderations it will cause you to lose karma. For this reason I reccomend not disagreeing too often no matter what the comments say if your karma concerns you. Two or three bad moderations are about the most you'll be able to deal with per session, so go with ones that irk you the most, and leave any other bad moderations unchecked so the next meta-guy will get them, but for Gad's sake don't approve anything you aren't comfortable with! For other questions about metamoderation try the the semiofficial sid.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
Here's something for both of you to consider, slashcode already provides the same easy, point and click style moderation for authors as the moderators get, only the authors have no reign on how they are allowed to moderate. I trust *most* of the authors in here to be good folks and only use their downward powers to balance out bad commetns that get modded up, or only moderate down those that truly need it.
So the question is, why are users allowed to moderate down at all? Sinply take your 5 points and look for funny/insightful stuff. I think OSDN should just go and hire about 5 people to manage all the sites they have that use a moderation system and let them go through and look for true flamebait and abuse. Just a thought.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
Current Moderation is way to complicated, what do others think, less complicated moderation needed?
as long as singal 11, and his impressive karma, keep coming up in conversation, i would like to suggest that taco makes an option to have "signal 11's karma" be one of the slash-boxes that you can choose to have on the side of the main page. i think signal 11's karma whoring would make an excellent online spectator sport.
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
I think there are definite flaws in the current moderation system on /.
One glaring one I see is that you have to wait forever to be able to meta moderate. This account is at least 4-5 months old and I still can't metamoderate. I even have the +1 bonus available now, and yet cannot metamod, and probably am ineligible to moderate too (I never have gotten any points on this account). While a do agree with not letting new accounts moderate, I think especially think that metamoderation should be available sooner to people with karma.
-
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Seriously, there's trolls getting moderated up, and legitimate arguments against Linux getting moderated down, just because the posters are GNU gnay-sayers. (there, that oughta make those bible-thumping moderators happy.) How many times does Bob Abooey have to post "Bababooey to you all !" before he is booted off of Slashdot?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I propose the "Akzar model", where we accumalate Karma by fighting for it. For more information see here
.02
Also, there would be a way to "take out" certain users, meaning if they lose enough Karma their posts would be invisible to all. Then they would have to behave for a while in order to re-accumalate Karma.
That way we could 'punish' lamers and trollers. Good posters could be awarded with cash and/or prizes.
Just my
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
This is primea facea an amazing idea, one thing that occurs to me is that, while it initially seems that the karma in the system remains fixed, if lots of positive moderation is being done this way, modererators are going to do more marking down (if only because all the good comments have been moderated up). This could lead to a 'karma depression', with certain accounts (~11) hoarding karma for the long winters of low karma discontent
people browsing on +3 will believe that slashdot is broken, as no comments will ever reach such lofty heights. People will start exchanging money for karma, perhaps even karma whoreing in the literal sense.
Taco might have to start dumping karma on the market, trying to inroduce bouyency, the possibilities are endless.
Letting people pay to mark down comments would have an even stronger effect, as 2 points would be lost from the system, if this happens, what price a +5 post?
Am i joking or being serious? I'd like to think both, but i reckon +0, Ridiculous, but cute; would be the perfect moderation.
☺
Different people have different tastes in article zposts. Some people like funny posts others like informative. I believe collaborative filtering would work better than a set points system. Everyone votes on the quality of posts and your sorting depends on how closely you mimic others who vote like you.
CF can be integrated in various ways, but the method I'm thinking of would work similar to this:
1. Everyone votes on various posts at will. There is no limit to the number of posts you can vote on.
2. Your votes are compared against other users votes to find the difference in "taste" between you and every other user.
3. Posts are weighted based on the distance between you and other users. Users who vote like you and vote on posts are weighted higher than users who don't vote like you and vote on posts.
The underlying math to implement this is rather simple (with the exception of some of the baysian network models) and widely known, but as far as I know, there are only a few very limited open source implementations in existance.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
(FWIW I'm currently moving away from collectives such as /. and towards weblog-type things. My favourite source for the unusual and nerd-esq is Penny Arcade. Sure, it's mostly centered around a comic strip, but the journal entry / news that is attached to each strip is a very good read (even though it's a bit computer game centric). Otherwise I'm returning to traditional news vendors -- I have BBC, Fox, ABC (Oz), Salon & Wired all syncing to my TRGpro.)
The people who took down the slashdot moderation system did so in an organized and systematic fashion.
And if you want to see an example of Slashdot just before wide scale moderation and karma went in, check out: Slashdot Moderation Phase 1.1 . Even the Anonymous Cowards generally had good comments.
S/N ratio was pretty high in those days, much like kuro5hin now, but from the look of it, community moderation and a 'reputation system' has failed in it's goal to keep ratio up. Instead we've gotten a Karma Whore 'n' Troll circus with lots of anonymous flamebait on the side, which is entertaining and might generate more pageviews, but is probably not good keeping readership up in the long run. Which is what you'd expect when you let a site 'run itself'.
Unfortunately, it's probably only a matter of time before kuro5hin is 'hacked' and it's system has been rendered as useless as Slashdot's for encouraging valuable posts. You are damned if you do (let the readership moderate itself) and damned if you don't (admins end up censoring content, people rebel against 'elite' moderators.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
You might want to start looking up some stuff about Autonomy. This is possibly the fastest growing tech company in the UK. They have a product that uses NLP to help with search solutions, agents, and knowledge management (to use the new-media-hype terms).
I have seen their products in action and they are *extremely* impressive. What might be of most interest to you is the way their algorithms work. Now I'm sure they won't release that info, but you may be able to glean enough info from their material to get on the right track. (Start here perhaps). Basically their technology is based on Bayesian algorithms (Bayes was an 18th century English cleric who came up with some cool ideas about NLP that couldn't be proven until recently when the computing power and information volume to make them work became available - how's *that* for far-sighted!) combined with Shannon's Information Theory. It is WAY powerful in practise!
I agree that it would be really cool to see some kind of automated moderation system based on this type of principle. I'd also *love* to see some Open Bayesian NLP work.
Good luck with the experiment.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
How can there be a perfect system for moderation? Moderation is just that - a moderation of thoughts and desires, really nothing more than a system to balance the will of the masses against the will of the few. That is, letting people read what they want and ignore what they don't vs. being forced to read what they don't want and listen to what they don't like. Too little moderation and the little voices are drowned out by the big guys, too much and the same thing happens. So in that sense, it's really just a great big continuum.
I think that in the end, moderation is really just a personal preference issue and not worth that much effort. None is boring, some helps, but too much is worse. Though I must applaud the efforts going into this, and I do enjoy the debates the issue provokes, maybe instead of looking at it like and trying to build the "perfect" system, we might be content to just call it exploring options or do something more interested. But trying to "perfect" moderation seems silly.
It would be a good idea to allow someone to buy moderation, where:
1. the donor has more than 20 karma (e.g. is a good player);
2. the donor can push up a post only to a total max per post that levels it out at 2 points (e.g. nasty people mod down a good post to -5, nice donors can only spend it up to +2, cost of +7);
3. extra karma spent to buy moderation costs 10 karma for every karma given (e.g. +7 would cost +70 karma);
4. each donor could only spend 10 karma per story (e.g. you'd need to find 7 people to back you up in my example, and they would not be able to donate to any other post in that story);
5. a donor can only donate up to 10 karma once per day (to keep karma whores from abusing it).
Concept?
Will in Seattle
How About this:
...Then again, that'd probably be illegal in most areas of the world.
1) If you think you were unfairly moderated, challenge your moderator to a duel (Say... High noon in front of the Geek compound)
2) You beat each other until somepody passes out.
3) The loser has his picture taken in all his bloodied glory, and posted in a new 'moderation' photo gallery for all to see.
Maybe that will get the moderators to be a little less biased, having to worry about their own butt.
jdb
In all of the moderation systems I have seen proposed, there's something missing that keeps all moderation systems ridiculously stupid. It's called negative feedback.
/.'s "napster, mp3.com, linux" current portfolio. This kind of site would be a great place to get a fresh look on things.
All of the systems I have seen either totally lack feedback at all (for instance, Slashdot's miserable attempt called MM) or have some type of positive feedback - this proposal included. I may be wrong, but it seems that a "poster" with an "idea" can grow to wield power. Someone accumulates enough points, he or she can consistently post to the most active categories and be seen. What would this lead to? A few people who are very active and dominate the board.
I don't know what to propose as a negative feedback system for this type of situation. All I know is that I see a desperate need for someone to design a system in which all users share power equally, however cheesy that may sound. I would love to see a proposal that intends to keep power out of a select few individuals so we rarely see the same name twice. Everyone could have the power to moderate every story they see. The bad stories will quickly drop off the front page, and the good ones will stay. The site won't have the highest-quality news, but you simply can't have both.
What you will get from a site like this is a myriad of opinions and views from all sorts of places. It won't be CNN, and it won't be nearly as homogenized as
This is just an idea, but such a site would cater to the crowd that kiro5hin has attracted. Hence, I think it would provide a nice counterpoint to Slashdot, where one can get a more mainstream, less off-the-wall and imaginitive, quality news source.
Again, admittedly, I didn't inspect the original story too closely..I read the first half and skimmed the second. Just felt like giving something to think about though.
Every time this subject comes up, I see a lot of people arguing about variations on a global moderation system - I keep wondering why nobody brings up the possibility of collaborative filtering.
Basic idea: allow everyone to mark whether or not they like particular articles and/or authors, then use that profile for each user to find the articles and/or authors that user is probably more interested in.
This is even more useful when you compare user's profiles against each other so that if two users have been marking messages/authors in such a way that their profiles are very similar, then when one of the users marks a message/author favorably, it automatically gets a higher rating for the other user (or down, if marked unfavorably).
In effect, each user will statistically get messages rated through a moderation scheme based on their own past history, and the history of other users who happen to agree with them.
So, how come this kind of filtering/moderation system is never discussed? Is it too computationally difficult to implement on a large scale?
Cheers to this idea!
Even if it is just an added option to the current system. To make this transparent the spender/s should be identified!?!!!! That would be really interesting and would prevent siggy from dominating moderation for the first couple of weeks.
Just think...do I spend on this comment and lose my +1 for the good of humanity? If it was done transparently this would be even more interesting as your moderations would tell as much about a person as their posts.
I say lets do it.
no sig.
The problem is not moderation in any shape or form but instead human nature. It doesn't matter if there are a few moderators a la slashdot or a lot a la kuro5hin, people will generally appreciate an opinion that reflects theirs and be hostile to an opinion that is in conflict with theirs. If there was an open way of holding people accountable for their moderations, just as we can read vote histories in article submissions on kuro5hin, then maybe people would be more careful with their moderations (or it could become like slashdot where the many tyrannize the few via meta-moderation).
In my opinion all moderation is flawed because it relies on human nature which is inherrently flawed. I personally suggest reading without scores, after all USENET has no scores and this did not alter the quality of the discussions in several groups.
Second Law of Blissful Ignorance
If you don't like a post, just click "-1, don't like it" and be done with it. Don't like a story, moderate the story as "-1, post-IPO-esque" and you're through.
Strong opinion about a particular user? Moderate every he has posted and ever will post. Just think, with out combined might we can hand out a bitchslap even the Taco would envy.
Heck, you even moderate moderation. If you disagree, there's "-1, wrong". If you like it, it's "+0, right" (because if its right, it doesn't need to be moderated). Hell, you can moderate the whole moderation system; if it gets low enough, it will be defuncted and Anarchy shall reign.
Moderate Slashdot as a whole...negative moderation will bring more stories confiscated from Kuro5hin, positive yields more Jon Katz stuff.
It's extends to the micro-level as well. Moderate the topic list, color scheme, each others' passwords...
Moderation at the bit-level may be difficult, until we get quantum computers and get moderate an individual bit as "+5, very" rather that just "0, false" or "+1, true".
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Something needs to be done.
The moderation on a lot of articles is just plain wrong. Or opinionated. Some moderators rate articles not on the merits of the content, but on how much it angers them or tickles their fancy. Articles that follow the groupthink of the cult get good moderation.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
On problem, as with any universal rating scheme is that it would be easy to, say, create 20 accounts and consistantly mark-down a certain author, something you cant do on /. because you would have work the accounts up to moderator status first.
/., and the system allows for a finer grading of articles, but i cant really see it being better in the end.
/.s moderation scheme my two-pennies worth is that you could combine this scheme with /.s in a 3 tier manner. Any reader can vote a story up or down, however no effect registers until a moderator (generted in the /. manner) comes online. They are then presented with the top x movers, and check to see if the public vote is accetable. They can then ratify or veto the decision. It could even take 2, or 3 agreeing modrators before the story was moved up or down. Metamoderation would then take place in a similiar way to at present.
On my reading of the summary the system doesnt seem to have a way to deal with this. Indeed it doesnt really seem to be adaptable to deal with this.
On a positive note offensive comments should go down quicker than they do on
Since this is going to lead to an inevitable discusion about
However i dont really think that the system would be an improvement on the present one, which, given the circumstances, works rather well (though i might only be saying that because i got +4 karma today ☺).
My gut feeling - it won't work. I think the ideal moderation system would be based on what is called the Delphi Effect, if I understand it correctly. Basically the more people you have moderating, the closer to the "true" rating it will be. ie: if 80% of people believe a post is +3, but 20% believe it is -1, it is +3. No averages. A sort of majority rules. It depends, however, on alot of people moderating.. to the point that there are more moderations than there are posts. But, my ideas aside...
The problem with this proposal is two-fold: One, it has no way to detect 1 person using 10, or a hundred, or a hundred thousand, accounts and thus biasing the voting system. It's a problem prevalent here on slashdot where the trolls have created throwaway accounts. Limiting on IP address doesn't work, because many are behind firewalls and hence multiple users can legitimately be on one IP. one account per e-mail address doesn't work either - e-mail addresses are easy to get.. often for free. The net result is a small group of determined attackers can destroy the system (sound familiar?).
The second problem is related to the first. Their idea of having the users rate themselves initially is a very good idea (rob, you paying attention?) but it suffers from the fact that someone can simply moderate their own posts, and gain a point advantage.. and we're right back where we started.
The key to moderation lies in accountability. You can create the best system in the world - but unless you can enforce some kind of "one person, one vote" standard, it will always be open to abuse.
Lastly, some advice for the kiro5hin maintainers - don't count on obscuring the statistical system to deter your attackers for long. The people who took down the slashdot moderation system did so in an organized and systematic fashion. These people are bored and have nothing else to do - but you DO and hence are at a disadvantage. Once the system is in place, PLEASE ADAPT IT - don't just deploy it and forget about it. It'll need to be tweaked, updated, maybe even entirely thrown out for a new system. Trust the wisdom of Strousoup(sp?) on this one - design the first implimentation to throw it away, you're going to do it atleast once anyway.
Cheers,
Signal 11
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Some of you may feel that without such a cap, it becomes a game (as in "karma whoring" AKA "Signal 11's life"), but I think that's irrelevent. The only "downside" to this "game" are more interesting, informative, and funny posts -- not much of a downside, eh? Some call it "karma whoring", but I think that it's simply the knowledge of how to be a good Slashdot citizen.
Yes, I check my karma totals, but not because I feel it's a game. I use it to gauge the overall effect my contributions to the site by observing the rate of karma growth. And if my karma drops suddenly one week, I know it's time to cut back on the flames and trolls. ;-)
And yes, it's also fun. I'll admit that.
I understand that one of the major reasons for having such a cap is to avoid abuses like this: let's say Signal 11 post interesting, insightful, and funny things for a year. From my experience, an active, consistently good poster can, on average, easily get 100-200 in a year. This means that Signal 11 could start posting Goatse.cx links, and it'd be weeks before he loses his +1 bonus.
I have a proposal to solve this: if a user is moderated down more than 20 times in one week, he loses his +1 bonus for a week. If he is modded down more than 30 times a week, he posts at 0 for week, then at 1 for a week. If he's modded down more than 40 times a month, he posts at -1 for a week, 0 for a week, and 1 for two weeks. I think this not unreasonable, considering that most users with enough karma to get the +1 bonus won't suddenly become PBG or *syringe. :-)
Who else agrees that the +50 KarmaKap has to go?
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
I don't want to see this article again and again
or
Please post this article again and again and again
so CmdrTaco and his very diligent team will know which articles we want to see redundantly.
Slashdot - News for Attention Deficit Disorder. Stuff you saw yesterday.
On a slightly more serious note - surely Slashdot must be getting very uninteresting for the Slashdot admins if they arent' reading their own site. What does that say about quality control?
Very little of how /.'s moderation and meta-moderation works is documented. How come my karma never goes above 64 even though I get moderated up? Why is it that occasionally it just drops a few points even though I haven't been moderated down? (Does karma age?)
Why can't we talk about moderation somewhere on Slashdot? If it gets brought up in a normal discussion, it's -1, Offtopic. I've never tried to submit a Slashdot article that concerns Slashdot itself, but the people who have say those are rejected.
How about a new category: -1, Herdthink, for those posters who just spew the party line about "and this is why Linux is so much better." At the very least they shouldn't be getting Insightful points for copy'n'pasting stuff from the FSF or OSI's webpage verbatim.
If we had a better FAQ, it would at least contribute to more "Insightful, Interesting, and Informative" discussion about moderation.
Enh, just my two timeslices.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
The first problem I see is that the first posts to an article are the most likely to be modded up. Moderators tend to hang around the couple most recently posted stories.
Not everybody refreshes Slashdot every two hours. The people that do, are the ones that agree most with the stereotypical slashdot agenda.
Insightful posts take time. It could easily take an hour to *read the article*, do some other research, and post some meaningful commentary. Those who post fast seem more likely to spout out their gut feelings.
To sum up: The people who post first are likely to be avid slashdot readers and more zealotous. Posts that are made soon after the article goes up are not as likely to be based on facts.
On hot trigger issues such as this one, I have read comments soon, then comments later and been pleasantly suprised by a couple better posts that get moderated later. Often on looking further, I notice that there are several more that I would have modded higher than the ones that are modded higher.
Let me try to illustrate this with a graph:
PostQualityv sTime:
|high
|
| +---+
| +++--+
|+-+ +---+
|++ +---+
|++ +---------------
|++
|+-+
|++
|++
|
|low
+-----------------------------------------
time-- ->
Sumofmoderationdone ;+-----+
|more +-------------------------
| 
|+--+
|++
|+
|++
|+
|+
|+
|+
||
|
|less
+-----------------------------------------
time--->
As you can see from the graphs, I think there are a lot of good comments posted later that don't get moderated, while a lot of earlier comments that might not be quite so good, do.
I suggest the golden moderation system.
You get 5 moderator points.
2 of the are gold.
2 of them are silver.
1 of them is bronze.
gold points can be used on any post at any time. Silver points can be used on posts attached to articles that are more than 2 hours old. Bronze points can be used on posts attached to stories that are more than 1 day old.
I think this would really do wonders for Slashdo
All too often, there are posts that really need a +1 or -1, but the choices just don't cover it. Therefore, I say we need the following choices added:
/* Really, we need more than just 'Funny' to reward the good ones. */
/* So we don't have to waste multiple moderators' time. */
/* Perhaps split into several categories, such as 'about [copyrights | patents | free speech | privacy | gun control | jon katz]' */
/* I expect these to be used rather heavily */
... Perhaps, instead of the list, we could have a textbox where moderators type the reason for their moderation.
+1, Troll
+1, Whore
+5, Signal 11
+1, Slashdot Already Posted This
+1, Claimed They Were Expecting -1
+1, Redundant
+1, Only Intelligent Post in the Entire Discussion
-1, Stupid
-1, Clueless
-1, Opposing view
-1, goatse.cx
+1, goatse.cx
There could be many more, of course
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
You need to be logged in to moderate
You must have karma to give karma
It would actually give some type of value to karma
;-)
Honestly, the only way I can see to abuse such a system would be transferring karma across account, but why would anyone really need to do that?
``We are the people our parents warned us about.''