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.
Anyway, the mod system described is not the one on K5. It's in Glasscode, which is the system the article is about. Which does not run K5. (Note: I'm not sure if you understood this or not, Sig11, but a lot of other people got it completely wrong, so that's for them).
Lastly, some advice for the kiro5hin maintainers - don't count on obscuring the statistical system to deter your attackers for long.
Which part of the statistical system do we obscure? If you want a full and detailed explanation of how the various K5 systems work, see our relaunch article.
Otherwise, I agree-- the system always has to be evolving. Think about it-- you cannot create an automated system that isn't eventually susceptible to automated attack. It's that simple. You just have to make it hard enough to attack that it's not worth it, and use the lag time to keep ahead of the kiddys. And sooner or later, you lose the race, pick your ass up, and try again (c.f. this summer for K5).
--
There is no K5 cabal.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
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.''