Slashdot Mirror
SlashNET IRC Chat Tonight w/ CmdrTaco & Hemos
At 9 pm eastern, Hemos & I are gonna be in #forum on irc.slashnet.org
to answer questions about Slashdot. There's a lot of random stuff
that's happened since the last time we did this, so this is a chance to ask questions about Story Selection, moderation,
Slashcode, or whatever else is on
your mind. If anyone wants to take our answers and send in updates and additions to the FAQ afterwards, that would make our lives easier, and our inboxes smaller ;)
But why? What is your argument for going private with karma? I can't imagine any advantages. Did I blink and miss something?
Um...what about the Signal 11 vs. CmdrTaco IRC chat that's floating around. Is that true? I think you should confirm or deny that rumor here on /., because not all of us will be on IRC tonight.
My own opinion about /. is...you don't have a moderation problem, you have a spamming problem. kuro5hin deletes spam posts, and I think most of us here wouldn't mind at all if you just got rid of the garbage posts. IMO, that's the main difference. I'm not saying moderation doesn't need to be improved, but the spam posts are definitely the biggest problem.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
After about a month, stories get archived and can no longer be viewed nested and a lot of posts are missing.
More annoyingly, all my saved URL's to interesting posts get killed!
How about just stopping accepting posts to stories after a while and not archiving at all? Doesn't your database scale up to the task?
I really can't understand why or how the whole Signal 11 vs CmdrTaco thing became so big. To make a long story short it's one guy thinking the /. moderation system is flawed, telling it to the /. head guys who do not agree with his points. Correct me if I'm wrong or if I missed something somewhere but I really can't understand why it had to take such proportion?!? Who slapped who first? Who was the first to take an aggressive tone in their private discussions?!?!
/. AND k5 these days include some comments about how Signal 11 is a Troll or a karma whore and CmdrTaco is a tyranic dickhead.
Please people realise that this whole thing is a non-issue currently turning into an holy war where both sides just hope to make the other guy look ridiculous. I really don't see why this has become such an issue and why every single comment-thread on
Let's all just forget that and let it become nothing more than it should have been and move on with constructive things...
"When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun...
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
First, I'd rather have replies than karma, but YMMV. Also, couldn't you keep up with that by looking at your user info and seeing what comments of yours got modded up? It would be an informal way to keep track of your karma, as would the +1 bonus, etc.
--
-- Geof F. Morris
Umm, it's right there in the post that started this thread. Telling people how the system works, and when the functioning of the system changes.
There is nothing in the FAQ about the karma cap, and it's been months since it was implemented.
--
While doing something completely mindless at work (pecking a software-hardware interactions document to control spaceflight hardware for ISS), I got to thinking:
Here's the thoughts:
Now, to see this post get to (Score: 8, "Insightfully Funny")
--
-- Geof F. Morris
Also, your point of banality and negative, but well-thought out commentary, may be a consequence of the moderation categories. Essentially, by using the term "Informative" you're ruling out a +1 for such a negative comment, it's Flamebait by definition -- from the mod's point of view. Perhaps it is possible to encourage mods to think in terms of how well is a post formulated, does it make sense, is it rational or emotional, by using different terms : "Rational", "Overemotional", or something like that. Not sure if overemotional wouldn't trigger the same kneejerk reaction as Flamebait, though. Another random idea is a -1 option for obvious karmawhoring, there's only Overrated for this now.
PS, hide the karma :)
If you don't think it would benefit others to read, why would you bother posting it in the first place?
I reread my post and can see how I was unclear. DebtAngel got it right... This post (and DebtAngel's) is a perfect example. My reply is in response to your post, and while a couple of people might like to see it, I like to keep posts like this under the +2 boundary so people who don't want to see it don't have to.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
He becomes somewhat responsible for the content of comments.
IANAFL.
Browser? I barely know her!
I believe I can speak for all women and right-minded human beings when I say your use of the word "suck" is highly offensive. It's hypocritical for you on the one hand to demand that your lover (assuming one exists) perform fellatio while simultaneously using that act as a derogatory slur. We don't have to take it, you know. A lot would change over night if we went on strike and men like you never got another blowjob until you met our terms.
-- Anne Marie
Think of the mail Britney Spears gets! "I'd really like to hump your left leg"
streetlawyer, posting anonymously to preserve my precious Karma.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
in many respects, Trolls don't care for the very web page in which they operate(emphasis added)
Some trolls don't care at all. However, most of us feel that we can make a person think twice about what they are saying, or make a moderator think twice about how they are moderating. In that respect, many of us care.
On the other hand, most of us don't care about
1. How much karma we earn.
2. What kind of /. "popularity" we have.
I care about all sorts of things, `tis true, however, that most of those things have nothing to do with /.
What does "pompous"-ness have to do with the ICANN story being important? Paying attention to ICANN is important. They are the U.N. of the internet. If I said, "The U.S. presidential election is important", would that also be "pompous"? Maybe you should also bookmark www.dictionary.com.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Soo, we have a bunch of conformist "individuals" that feel that they should only espouse what other "individuals" feel is the "correct" thing to say. This unnerves me considerably. People should be saying what they THINK, not what will get them the biggest karma.
In all seriousness, I don't see what karma can do, besides lowering consistently bad messages from one individual. And even then, that would be taken care of in a matter of minutes under a karma-less system. All karma does is turn Slashdot into a game for people with no life.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
Not that I'm an expert on this, but I think the problem is that it would be a major headache for them in the *short* term.
A lot of people like to see their karma go up, its kind of like positive reinforcement for doing a good thing. Like when I moderate, a few days later its nice to sometimes see my karma go up a couple points (if the meta-modder liked what I did anyway). Same thing with making posts that get rated up to 4 or 5, its nice to see the karma increase.
Is it necessary? No. But its nice.
Long term, people could probably get used to not seeing it, but short term it would make a lot of people upset by taking away a little thing that they like.
CT&H probably don't want to have to deal with all those upset people, and I can't say I blame them.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Geez guys, how about a little advanced notice? Parties, talks, chats, all announced the day of, sometimes after the fact! If I had been given a little advance notice I could have booked a flight to whereever this "IRC" place is, and participated.
Oh well, I guess I'll just spend tonight figuring out what this "Microsoft Chat" program is. Heheh, it looks pretty familiar!
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
The problem with deleting spam is simply, who gets to delete it?
Is it CT&H? Everybody who can post articles? Moderators with 50 karma? Any moderator?
Besides, at that point instead of obvious spam, we would get questionable borderline spam, and god forbid if that gets deleted, then we'll have entire threads full of "/. is censoring us!"
Its more trouble then its worth.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
SOn-of-a-bitch. WHo the fuck put that goddamned code option there! It came up HTML in preview and then code when I posted. Let me try again:
I pray, beg, and plead with the Slashdot community for something here.
I will not be able to catch the IRC chat tonight, so I hope someone is decent enough to fully log it.
And if Sig11 is still out there, please god, let him show up for this. It would ruin Taco's night, and be great fun for the rest of us.
Wanna know why I ask this? Click here to witness a conversation and a previous IRC log about Taco and trolls and karma whores (OH MY!).
Bite my yammer.
ummm... It's trolls like you who make it suck.
Say what? I thought he had valid and constructive points (and #1 and 2 were questions I was planning to ask tonight). Could it be that the attitude of "We are your gods -- know your place and mindlessly accept what we tell you and we'll permit you to call yourself a Geek and Member Of The Community!" attitude that's come over the Slashdot editors in the last year is what makes it suck?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You know, I personally like seeing my karma. It's my motivation to write well-thought out, informative comments. Without it, I'd probably blow off slashdot and go elsewhere. Since my karma is fairly high, I suspect that people value my comments.
I suspect I'm not the only one like that.
Maybe if "God" let us know when we were doing something positive or negative by simple incrementing or decrementing a counter, and the counter had to be over a certain positive number to get into "Heaven", then more people would do more good things. As it is, even for the religious, the whole Heaven thing is too Ethereal (sorry, couldn't resist.) It's too much effort to be a good person at every single moment, to be filled with humility and goodness during every action you take.
But if people were good enough, the majority of the people in the world would be a whole fuck of a lot better people than they are now. Strive, strive, and strive some more, and all you do is end up dead. So why look out for anyone else?
Post, post, and post some more, and you never know your karma. So why bother to construct an intelligent comment?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
At 9:38pm Eastern, I'll be on my roof watching the shuttle launch. Come on, you're all invited... we'll do some structural tests on my house.
In terms of plain old moderation, I've a few suggestions for improvement. How about revealing to the moderator some historical information about the poster? For example, streetlawyer is an admitted troll, and he has some talent for posting "interesting" points of view that get him some mod points, but he uses those points for evil. Couldn't some rating be added to give a hint that he should be treated with skepticism unless it is clear that his posts are not karma whoring?
Then there's the problem of the increasing number of moderators who think Micros~1 gets treated unfairly. It is a theoretically valid point of view, OK, but I'm completely fed up with the amount of Windows and Microsoft in my life. I know more about the company than 99% of posters here, and it is no longer an open question to me; I'm simply not interested in hearing people defend Microsoft. Others may have similar/opposite feelings about other issues. How about letting each user moderate the moderators. I don't want to see the moderation that comes from certain moderators. Over time I could indicate that by simply clicking "personally overrated" on posts that I see getting too high. Yes, the straightforward implementation would be computationally prohibitive. But, perhaps there are aggregate statistics that would show large clumps of Slashdot users in various "camps" and they could better see what they are interested in.
Finally, in terms of plain old moderation, I don't much enjoy doing it either. There tends to be too much "grade inflation" as hinted previously, so I rarely see something that needs more points, just things that wish for fewer. (Sometimes I see strong evidence there is a hidden moderation system taking place: Slashdot editors with unlimited points hammering things into rough shape on the fly and letting the public system tweak the results.)
Finally (I guess these are just random thoughts), how about an "offtopic" rating that is not negative. Sometimes I want to shut off all the "noise" in a discussion, but sometimes it's funny and adds color. It would be nice if moderators could rate topicality without devaluing.
I'm with ya brother. And I wouldn't say your comment deserved modding down. It should at the least be modded up as funny.
This place is a gigantic joke. I'm glad I got a sense of humor (and a pair of hip waders).
Bite my yammer.
Ah, but you see, that is what pisses some of us off so much. We have to browse at -1 to see all of the interesting comments and have to sort through a lot of garbage. Why? Because there is no real check on the moderation (yes, meta-mod, but that's just as big of a joke as moderation itself).
Just because someone doesn't post a view that you 100% agree with, that is absolutely no reason to mark him down. And it's happening way, way too often. Mark down stupid crap, but if it's a well worded, on-topic, and completely relevant post, don't mark it down just because you can't fucking handle someone having an opinion that differs from your own. That's just wrong! And I understand Siggy's point on that. Although I agree that he did take it a little too personally. I do have a wife and family and quite a bit of a life outside of slashdot. But I suppose some people don't.
Bite my yammer.
whatever, faggot.
First off, I don't do fucking web design on my slashdot comments. I write (type) and post. I don't give a fuck if it's 'designed' asshole! I do plenty of web design outside of my slashdot life and when I'm here I don't want to spend time 'designing' when I have something to say.
And second off, if you really fucking think that Kuro5hin has something to prove by posting that IRC log and falsifying it, then by all means, tell taco to sue their fucking asses off!
I think Siggy had some damn good points in there, the primary one being, Taco doesn't give a damn what people say. No matter what they suggest, if it wasn't Taco's original idea, he's going to say fuck off and tell you it couldn't work. So fuck him.
And in case you couldn't tell, I'm a little fucking testy because of all the bullshit that I've witnessed on slashdot the past few days. And reading usenet has made me even bitchier. Thank god I have a life off-line to keep me attached to reality, or this place would have driven me completely insane by now. But for those that don't, I feel for you. I remember when "heavy metal" took it's great tumble (and that was my entire life), and it was the worst few years of my life. But I lived through it. ANd you'll live through this. Just find something else to do. Which is probabl what I'll be doing again in a couple of weeks. (Waiting for my Karma to sink again. I've posted a few negative comments lately, gonna get burned by the zealotous moderators).
Bite my yammer.
when do i get my BJ?
Which part do you think is immature? Where I defend my (so far) good name? Or where I note that insulting people makes them angry?
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
You raise a lot of good issues, and I agree to a certain point. But /. has joined the big leagues and that means that a certain level of professionalism is expected. It's not just Rob's little pet project anymore. When I see bad grammar, spelling errors (how many times has CT spelled "too" T-O?), repeated or inaccurate stories and the like, frankly I'm a bit embarassed. I think that it's not unreasonable to expect more from one of the (if not *the*) flagship web sites of the open source movement. I don't think it's too much to ask to make the site look sharp and professional or to do a little research before putting up a story.
I sympathize with Rob, I really do. It must be painful to see your creation attacked by trolls and spammers from one direction, and an endless stream of complaints from the other. But some of these complaints are legit. And he has gotten secretive in his changes to the mod system, and defensive about them. A lot of the complaints would be nipped in the bud if he just told us "Hey guys, there have been some changes, here's what they are and here's why I made them." That's more in the open source spirit than secretly making changes to the Slashcode. (Yes, I know I can just go look at it, but for one thing, I'm not a perl poet and secondly, I'm not interested in diffing the code every couple of weeks to see what changes have been made.) In the irc log he talks about how he gets tired of hearing the same suggestions over and over. Then why doesn't he publish the ones that have already suggested and the reason they haven't been implemented? Somebody else said that they never read the faq. Well there's no reason to - it hasn't been updated in over a year. And it *still* says "updated 9.9", that would be 9.9.1999.
Af for the mod system itself, I don't think it's horribly broken. The biggest problem is that moderators aren't doing a good job. That's not a problem that can be fixed within the system. There are some things that might help, but if moderators are modding trolls up, that's a societal problem that is outside the scope of any moderation scheme. Some things that *could* improve the system are:
1) Make karma hidden again. Karma shouldn't be a spectator sport. I know it's a rush to see your karma increase, but it's just a number. If you're getting modded up more than down you know it's increasing - you don't need to see the number in your user page to know that. Posting a thoughtful reply or participating in a lively discussion should be reward enough. Yes there will be significant lashback, but Rob's just gonna have to put on the asbestos suit for a couple of weeks and ride it out. Maybe some people will leave too. That might not be a bad thing. Are the posters that only post to see their karma increase the type we want around here anyway? To me that's the definition of a karma whore.
2) Require a higher karma to get mod points. Maybe the vets are better at recognizing the trolls and karma whores. Maybe not, but it seems like it's worth a shot.
3) Give some feedback from M2 to the moderators. Right now if I mod a post and it gets whacked in M2, I don't know why or even which mod was the one that did it. It would be helpful to know which one of my mods was thought to be unfair and why. Hopefully better moderation would be the result. Perhaps not, maybe all we'd get is things clustered more toward the mean.
4) Force moderators to browse at -1, newest first instead of +1 highest score first. In other words, ignore the settings in comments.pl when you have mod points. Many older posts that should be modded up are simply ignored because the moderators only see the ones that have already been modded up.
Having said all that, for the most part the mod system works. Most of the truly insightful comments end up at the top of the heap and most of the crap gets buried on the bottom where it belongs. It's not perfect, but I'm not sure it can be. That shouldn't stop us (or CT) from improving it if possible, however.
Lastly, I think we're all (especially Rob) taking this thing waaaay too seriously. Let's lighten up and make this place fun again. Ok?
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
No... must not bite... damn.
:)
/. rather than wreck it. Quite how you get a laugh out of that I don't understand. If you don't like /., why do you waste so much of your life posting to it?
:)
OK, I've never looked at trolltalk. Why should I? Are you saying that if I want to discuss something, I should check first to see if the poster means it? For everyone who trolls there's someone else who thinks like it, so it's pointless trying to separate the two.
As for the rest of your trolling
I drink lager, and so does every rugby player I know. Beck's, Stella, Kronenberg & Heineken, just for the record. I own neither a Ben Sherman shirt, Armani jeans, or a beer belly. And I'm 21. And I'm not cynical, I admit; I'd rather have an intelligent discussion on
Me and my like? How many Linux-using rugby players do you know then?
No score+1 bonus because I'm talking bollocks
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Big word egomaniacal. I love how all types of psycho babble are spewed whenever someone just rants and raves like a loon these days. Why not calm down everyone and just realize that until your own sht doesn't stink we don't need to defend or attack everyone else's actions. Let people take the blame or worship that comes with and hold our tongues for once.
aztektum
No sig for you!!
It's all modded by #forum, so yeah, whatever.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
Unfortunately, I won't be able to be there tonight, as I have yet to aquite a computer at my apartment. I'm confined to reading /. at work at the moment.
/. for some months now, and I have yet to moderate. I have been waiting (patiently, IMHO) for such a time to come, but so far it hasn't. I've tried to meta moderate, but it tells me I haven't been here long enough (and yes, I have "willing to moderate" set to the correct setting).
However... I've been reading
Here is an issue I have with the system. I don't have a terrible amount to say. I read here every day, and most articles, but I post only when I find something I'm knowledgable on, or have strong opinions about, and even then, I won't post if someone has already said what I'm going to say. Those are times when what I would like to do is mod that person up, to show my agreement. I think my karma is like two, simply because I don't post that often.
Anyway, I just wanted to throw my two cents into the pool. Have fun tonight, wish I could be there.
Joshua
You know, Michael, if you understood irony, we could all laugh together at that one :)
-- the most controversial site on the Web
You haven't been trolled, just confused by vagueness on my part :-)
I was talking about averaging as practiced on Kuro5hin, where everyone moderates all the time. That has to produce more conformity than a system where the best of all points of view get moderated up. I don't read Kuro5hin enough to really know how well it works, but there's not as much of a "Here's what people like us think" mentality there, so there's less of a party line to converge to.
As far as the mathematical implications of averaging vs. summing comparable moderations: I'm not sure what the likely effect of that would be.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Work for Change & GET PAID!
With the Karma Kap in place it is more useless than if it wasn't displayed.
What good is a counter that only goes down with Troll Metamoderation(tm).
I'm all for hiding it if it's useless
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
1. AFAIK, no cap for some people is just a rumor, unless its a bug. (a bug in slashcode?? never! ;-) )
2. Some people do read the faq (like me, I'm weird that way). One idea I've heard is to create a section for things like Slashdot news and changes that aren't big enough to make the front page. That way, people who are actually interested in changes can read them, and otherwise they don't fill up the main page (or not get posted at all for fear of filling up the main page).
3. I have no idea. Overrated and Underrated are pretty hard to metamod though, because you have to know the original score to know if the overrated is actually fair. Over/Underrated do seem to be a good way for trolls with modpoints to get around the system though, so maybe something could be worked out?
4. In the infamous CT/Sig11 irc log floating around, this actually came up. The problem is that they see suggestions that have already been throught up a few hundred times before, and I guess they just have a hard time replying to them over and over and over again. The suggestions actually have to fall into a pretty narrow set of limits to be even considered too, because of issues like server/database load.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
1) WTF is up with Karma? First, no cap, then a cap. Now I hear rumors of no cap, but only for some people.
You've heard something about a cap? I've heard nothing -- all I know is that my Karma (a large 2-digit number) hasn't been increasing, despite recent moderation to my posts. And personally, I like knowing my karma and seeing it increase -- it motivates me to post better comments, and let the half-assed stuff slide.
2) When you change things, please, for the love of GOD, TELL US
Agreed!
--Jim
If that's Heaven, I don't want to see Hell...
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
All trolls (note, not spammers, not anonymous Emily Dickinson, not Penis Bird Man) have done is played devils advocate and forced people to think about what they are posting. In fact, I am considered a "troll" because I don't believe open source is the way to go. So what? I disagree, big deal. But that makes me a "troll" around here. I gladly accept the title.
Allow me to quote one of the "Troll Manifestos"
But for Trolls, it's more than just parody of the webpage. In fact, in many respects, Trolls don't care for the very web page in which they operate. For Trolls , as well as for many other readers of the page, Slashdot itself has become too self-important and too self-congratulatory. Its hosts take on extremist viewpoints merely to keep pageviews high... from posters who often just parrot whatever CmdrTaco says. Worse yet, Slashdot believes it makes a difference in the issues, when it rarely if ever does. And perhaps worst of all... if it's on the internet, people believe it as an absolute truth, despite the fact that most of what's on Slashdot is simply opinion. What Trolls do on Slashdot manage to demonstrate that rather accurately, each and every day.
This website would be nothing but a bunch of zealots shouting "Me Too" at everything taco posts, were it not for the trolls.
Sorry, but I have been reading /. for about 2 years now, and have watched the quality in comment response drop steadily. The only thing that has improved has been the quality of trolls.
In any physical society, a person can generally get a good feel for his/her reputation simply by watching how people react to him. On huge virtual societies like Slashdot, you can't do this, because you only have one measure of reaction: the written word. There's far more to seeing your reputation than what people say to you, particularly in a community so large that very few people speak on a regular basis within its confines.
Karma can be used, among other things, as a measure of your reputation on Slashdot (a very crude and rough measure, yes, but a measure nonetheless). If you find your Karma going up, it's a pretty safe bet that you're well-liked by the community. If it's going down, then you're not doing so well (unless you're a troll, in which case you're doing quite well). If you're serious about being a good Slashdotter and you see your Karma going down, you know that you need to find out what's going on and take steps to correct it. You can't get this otherwise. Posting histories are unreliable because the score is bounded (I could be modded down 50 times on a single post and lose 50 Karma, but the score on the post would remain at -1). Looking at reactions is also unreliable, because people don't always post their reactions (remember, moderators cannot post reactions in a thread they mod at all, or their moderation is undone).
So it's still necessary to at least give people the option to know what their Karma is.
----------
Deletion wouldn't be necessary. Instead you could just have power moderation for select users (maybe users with 50 karma) that would be allowed to moderate posts to -2. This same group would also be able to moderate up -2 posts, so if someone got overzealous, there is a fix.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
I LOVE YOU
great comedy company.
I wonder what it feels like to work your butt off 10 hours a day and still get dozens of emails a day, every day telling you what a dick you are?
I wouldn't take a job like that. And, as far as I know, there's nothing preventing Rob, Jeff, Michael, and co. from saying, "screw this abuse"
and dumping Slashdot tomorrow. What do you want from these guys?
Just chiming to say "Mee toooo!" and similar AOLisms to this one. I think that a lot of people forget just how much *voluntary* work goes into providing a lot of services which we, as communities, take very much for granted. Well, here be the gen: if *you* don't like it, either don't use it, or build your own that you *do* like. If you must complain, try using some politeness and elementary good manners. If you want to know why something isn't happening the way you think it should, ask why, but don't *demand* the answer.
Now, I'll be honest - I don't read slashdot very often. I just don't have the time, and living at the far end of a fairly slow 'net connection in Australia, web-based stuff gets to be slow and unrewarding after a while. However, I'm not going to try and get the creators and maintainers of slashdot to try and make the site over to suit *my* needs and preferences. I'll just live with the fact that I can't use the site as often as I'd like, and set my comments reading threshold rather high so that it doesn't take all week to download a page.
Remember, folks, the internet *isn't* like television. *You* have the power to do something about things, and if you don't like something, *you* can go out and create your own alternative.
Perkin's Postulate: Online tech support is designed to provide everything short of actual help.
You, sir, are naive.
There is always the possibility that he just doesn't want to feed the rumor mill by commenting.
I do not refute the possibility that the log is genuine, either. I only introduce the possibility that it's possible that it is not.
And yes, I am in fact skeptical of everything. Like the man said, believe nothing you read, and only half of what you see. I'm a little less skeptical than that, and I fully expect that to get me into trouble.
Don't get too pinched. And don't make obviously false logical statments. There is no causal effect between, for example, someone not refuting something and that thing being true.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Right, but what I'm trying to say here is that it doesn't matter WHY someone makes posts which are informative, funny, interesting, or what have you. It doesn't matter why people stay on topic or avoid trolling and/or flaming. What matters is that they DO do the things which, on slashdot, tend to make someone's karma go up.
Now the problem is the moderators; Acting falsely clever will cause a moderator with a lack of clue to moderate you up, thinking you are clever. So again, the broken part of moderation is the moderators, not the moderatees, IMO.
Now, I know that's what metamoderation is for, but of course, the metamoderators are not guaranteed to be intelligent, either.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Which is certainly does not redeem it from the "drink Steinlager" spam (ugh, lager, might as well drink water; give me ALE!!!). Or the MDMA crap.
PBG guy was actually funny, until I noticed he had posted more than one post, which made the joke get old already. That took all of one minute.
Ok, Hi, average slashdot reader here.
/..
You're acting like a complete prick.
Hadn't you noticed that posts critical of slashdot have been getting modded up and (here's the important part) staying up? Your readership, in general, is becoming annoyed with what appears to be a lack of professionalism on the part of
This was ok, and even cool in someways back when it was being run by two guys out of their house.
Now its just annoying. It's like you're all journalists, who know next to nothing about journalism, and aren't very clever either.
You'd think with Andover/Va's money a Fact checker could be hired, or a version of spell(1
) could be downloaded.
Now, here are questons that the general readership of slashdot would like to see answered, and you act liked a petulant 12 year old. "You make it suck!"!! How unbelievably enlightening that post was! I am being pummled senseless by the force of your logic, charm and wit! Not to mention your masterful command of the English language!
At this point I should point out that I like Timothy's work, and that Hemos seems like a nice guy. The rest of you though...
*sigh*. This post has been edited to be less offensive. Really, no shit.
-nme!
Um... I was there (at least from partway through) and it is definitely genuine.
Of course, the commentary running in #slashdot was also pretty funny... pity it didn't make the log.
1. Limit the # of posts per user more than it is now.
2. Eliminate Karma as a cumulative system.
3. Limit the # of posts per story. We shouldn't need a (-1 redundant) tag.
I have more, and I will be there at 9 est. to share them don't you worry.
Thanks for the explanation. Even so,
I still think that using the words "Inherently Noble" was a stupid, stupid move.
Because I like to argue.
No offense intended, of course.
-nme!
First point, and my piece of snobbery for this comment: Saying "Click here" is lame web design. You should say "Follow this link (at the worst)" or you should have made the link "witness this conversation".
Now, on to the meat of my comment. ASCII is not acceptable as evidence in a court of law, and I hope the slashdotters won't accept it either. I could have written that entire log myself. Mind you, I didn't.
I've been on Irc a long time (since 1991. Yes, I know some of you have done it longer) and I've seen a good many falsified logs, people quoted out of context, and straight up lies. So I don't put much weight on irc logs except from the most trusted sources. Now, if Taco had posted that log on /., then I'd pay a little more attention.
So if you have some proof that that's Taco, bring it on. But it had better not just be some supposed irc log.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
1) No, it's trolls like me. OS isn't a troll, AFAIK, and I know most of 'em
2) If it's "making it suck" that we're talking about, I'd appreciate you pointing me to the URL of an instance in which a troll has posted a blatantly inaccurate or self-serving story. I stopped feeling guilty about trolling the day that you guys posted "Hotmail Set to Collapse Under Load" as the title of a story about them moving a few servers to W2K. When you pull shit like that on the main page, you kind of lose your right to complain when other people do the same thing on the threads.
On the other hand, at least we don't have to listen to Emmett Plant's self-absorbed whinings any more, so hurray for that.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Dunno, having read the log before, I think Taco really gets off tormenting sig11 and sig seems to get pretty peevish about it all.
I have to admin, sig's top-page article on k5 the other day was pretty interesting, although I can see where his constant whining and badgering about improving slash to eliminate this 'groupthink' pet peeve of his gets under taco's skin after a while.
I think everyone who is interested should read the log and decide for themselves. It is a facinating insight into sig and taco.
I think sig raises some valid issues but I tend to agree with taco that the system mostly works for the benefit of the of the majority. No one claims it's perfect, not sure it can be or even needs to be. Could it be better? Sure. Is it so broke right now that other things that need to be done everyday to run the site should be stopped. Doesn't seem like it to me.
Just a highlight to entice you to look at the log linked above:
[20:55] <CmdrTaco> You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. ;)
[20:56] <Signal_11> Just leave me alone, Rob... I've had enough for one week.
[20:57] <CmdrTaco> Sig:I've had to deal with your childish crap for 3 years. You can handle 10 sentances of IRC slapping
[20:58] <CmdrTaco> Signal 11 thinks he is the reason for moderation, for mete moderation, and for jesus.
[20:59] <CmdrTaco> I work all day, you just fucking troll websites. That definitely qualifies you as an expert.
[21:01] <CmdrTaco> Oh, shit! Dark Angel!
[21:01] * CmdrTaco is away: dark angel.
[21:02] <Signal_11> He comes in, slams me, then walks out to watch TV. what's WRONG with this picture...
Some of this may be out of context, read the whole thing. (I didn't try to intentionally slant it, but it probably looks that way.) Very interesting.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Post it to somewhere that actually cares, like kuro5hin.
Additionally, keep resubmitting it until either Taco-boy gets the message or your accouint gets puled.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
You can blame trolls all you want to, but that doesn't fix the moderation system. The fact that any troll can get moderated up to 5 in a matter of minutes is proof that it does not work.
The site depends upon user moderation. If the users want to moderate up crap, there is NO moderation system that will stop that.
I lump trolls and spammers together. Most trolls spam. Most spammers troll. They feed off each other. I see little distinction.
Trolls don't care for the very web page in which they operate...
Exactly. They're purposefully destructive. Nothing noble or honorable about that.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
1) I'm not a troll.
2) But getting insulted directly by Slashdot editors is exactly the kind of thing that might turn me into one.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
oops, I previewed and still the html got munched, the link is here.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Holy shit, up to a score:4? Wow, most of the moderators must be very desperate these days. I know I ... uh, never mind. Um. Yeah.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
very good point. I just noticed this too.
--
Personally, I think it would be much better to get rid of the current mod system altogether and implement something akin to the article scoring in some of the newsreaders like strn. Let me choose my own scores, based on the people I know I like to read, and apply those scores automatically when I request an article. Sure, some people will refuse to read anyone who disagrees with them, but that's their problem, not yours, and one you can't solve anyway. At least it isn't a problem for everyone else the way bad moderation is.
Meta-moderation isn't even a partial solution; it's just the first step in an infinite regression. Who moderates the meta-moderators? I meta-moderate every day; if even 5% of the users did similarly, there's no way you could be reviewing them all.It is a performance issue if *everyone* can moderate. That increases the number of moderators tremendously.
If everybody is rating every post, think of the extra server load over a few posts getting modded by a few people.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Well you could start by rereading the post you called a troll. Beyond that:
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
What proof do you have that that's actually CmdrTaco?
Hands in my pocket
Well you could start by rereading the post you called a troll. Beyond that:
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
[CmdrTaco] THe slashdot PT cruiser is fucking lame. ...
[hemos] I fucking hate that thing.
This was worth the entire chat. =)
_________
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
Taco works his butt off to maintain this site, and people do nothing but ream him. I think I'm a pretty average Slashdot reader, and you know what?
Why is everything Rob's problem and responsibility? Why is it entirely his job to get everything just all tidy and perfect for pampered little you? Has someone tied you up and forced you to read Slashdot? And, if so, is she good looking?
How about this bit from the IRC log?
[21:47] [CmdrTaco] Some days I just go home so fucking angry because some dickless wonder with no information and a paranoid fantasty is convinced that I'm the antichrist.,
[21:48] [CmdrTaco] Its great when someone uses a forum that you work so hard to create & maintain to attack you
I wonder what it feels like to work your butt off 10 hours a day and still get dozens of emails a day, every day telling you what a dick you are? I wouldn't take a job like that. And, as far as I know, there's nothing preventing Rob, Jeff, Michael, and co. from saying, "screw this abuse" and dumping Slashdot tomorrow. What do you want from these guys?
I think sig raises some valid issues but I tend to agree with taco that the system mostly works for the benefit of the of the majority.
/. has some weight in the world, and he's somehow connected to it. Deep in his mind, he must equate his worth to the worth of /.. I dunno. I get a kick out of getting a post modded up to +5, but it doesn't rule my life.
/. are indeed like minded, because you don't end up reading /. if you aren't a geek. If you always post what the herd wants to hear, it's going to get modded up. He got exactly what he asked for. Why is he bitching? Ye reap what ye sow. He claims all of his whoring was an experiment. Sometimes the scientist finds what he's looking for, sometimes he gets burned.
/., and wouldn't care if my Karma was -50 or +1000.
Siggy takes the whole thing far too seriously, IMHO. He set out to deliberately test the system to prove that it didn't work. You're right, moderation is not perfect, and will never be. It works for the most part. The good posts tend to come out, and the junk drops to the bottom.
Siggy is just worked up about it. He badgers Taco and wants him to fix it, but won't jump in and fix the code or make good suggestions. He seems really concerned that
/. is doing fine. It could be better (less duplicate stories), but it could be a heck of a lot worse.
Sig also seems to miss the point that most people who run across
I used to value my Karma, but I really don't anymore. It's just a number. I encounter people in meatspace who don't know
It's just a number. Get over it, dude.
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
Well... one issue with that is that the system is currently designed to enable someone to view every post no matter how crappy, if that is what they want to do.
Unless you make -2 a normally browsable level, you take that away. And if you make -2 browsable, you've just defeated the whole purpose, because then it just replaces what -1 is supposed to be, the black hole of posts.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I didn't post that story, and wouldn't have posted it. It's a stupid headline, not even related to the story. But it seems odd for you to justify your actions over the last year or more with a story posted two months ago.
We post a stupid headline. Flame the slashdot author responsible. Flame the submitter. Flame away in the comments for that story. But it doesn't justify posting crap in other comment threads.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Thats what happens when its written by a self-confessed "perl junkie" originally. :-)
/. started in.
I mean really, if I were going to write somethig like this, it'd be written in ASP (vbscript) and talking to MS-SQL through OLEDB and ADO, because thats what I'm most comfortable with. I could do it in other things, but remember the context
It didn't start out with any plan to be as big as it is now, it was a couple of people doing something for fun. Back then, the choice of perl probably made perfect sense, especially since thats what they wanted to use. (just like back then I would have done it in ASP, in that context it makes perfect sense)
They don't seem to want to rewrite the whole thing into another language, but the code is out there for somebody else to do it if they want to.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I, too, rarely make use of IRC and will not be online tonight. . . .
5) During the infamous CT/S11 IRC discussion, the topic of scoring behavior was brought up. Specifically, the difference between Slashdot (which sums ratings to compute a comment's score) and Kuro5hin (which averages ratings to compute a comment's score) was pointed out.
In my opinion, this is a very crucial difference between the two systems. I also believe that the Kuro5hin system is much more accurate at capturing readers' ratings of a comment.
Both CommanderTaco and Hemos emphasized strongly that the load of computing averages would break their server. I am confused at this; there is a simple way of updating averages. The current scheme looks like this:
In order to update an average, it can be computed at the time of the moderation action using the following logic:
(Note that "score" must be stored in floating-point, though it may certainly be rounded for display.) The math at the time of moderation will indeed require a few extra instructions, but this is insignificant; the concern of overhead is at comment display time, which this scheme entirely avoids. Yes, there will be slight rounding error, which should nevertheless not prove significant in the context of moderation.
My question for CT and Hemos is this: Why (in light of this proposed code) not compute scores using averaging? I see no compelling reason that summation should be used. My personal opinion is that this change (along with hiding karma ;-) would improve comment quality a great deal.
erudite!
In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic.
-nme!
Your comments ARE crap. I don't want to hear them, and the vast majority of the /. readership doesn't want to either. If you want to troll, fuck off and find a forum where it'll be tolerated/appreciated.
Any chance of a poll to *prove* no one likes all the trolling? It's annoying and pointless, and almost never funny.
---
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
There is nothing destructive in posting a thought that disagrees with yours.
However, picking through a long post and quoting one or 2 lines out of it, is the easy way out.
But then again, what should I expect? You don't care about the quality of this site. You are just here to increase page views.
Right?
Popularity is obviously involved; the site has probably thousands of regular posters out of its 200k+ accounts; a new story can get 100 comments in less than half an hour. It's impossible for anyone to keep up with it all, and even if the moderation system was basically sensible (which it never has been), it still wouldn't be enough. As it is, the totally broken moderation system does little but encourage conformity and amuse the trolls.
Management: Two factors here. One, wretched journalism standards, e.g. Taco's report yesterday that Red Hat claimed to have invented Open Source, or the Hotmail debacle that streetlawyer mentioned; two, the moderation system; three, the refusal of management/admins to do anything about it other than whine that it's the fault of the trolls.
I've been spending a lot of time at Kuro5hin lately. Admittedly, as a less-popular site, it doesn't have Slashdot's popularity problem, by a long shot, but I think as it grows it will do better than Slashdot at retaining the things that make it good. The way that users vote on topics works really well, and the thresholds can be raised as the site becomes more popular, so I think it can scale up fairly gracefully. I'm less enthusiastic about Kuro5hin's comment moderation, but it's no worse than Slashdot's, and arguably better.
Slashdot's editorial system makes the quality of the site highly dependent on you editors. Of the lot of you, only timothy can be relied on at all to post quality articles. That has more to do with why Slashdot sucks (if it does; hey, I still read it, so obviously I haven't completely given up hope) than any number of trolls.
I think it's more along the lines of :
Readers: "/. sucks."
Editors: "It's not our fault. Blame that other editor over there for posting that. Wait - you're a troll because you complain. It's *your* fault
Since we've now become a Corporate Republic, I've pretty much come to the conclustion that the guideline for treating people is roughly something like : "The majority of people are apathetic and don't care about anything but getting what they want. If you complain, and show you want things to be better, you aren't apathetic. Therefore, if you complain and try and improve the world, you are in the minority, and your patronage doesn't matter when compared to the revenue generated by the majority. Therefore you are ignored."
Seems to be what's happening to
--
Actually, Michael was involved with YRO stuff (whether it was called that or not) before he started writing for / posting on Slashdot. To say he doesn't care about the quality of the site just isn't fair, not to mention isn't accurate!
There's a big diff. between "posting a thought that disagrees with yours" (which is fine) and letting people intentionally detract from others' happiness. It's grafitti vs. earpoking. The fact that the people who wrote the code for the site and risked the uncertainty of making it work full time are still around and in fact care *deeply* about the site is pretty impressive to me. Not all of them want to have the floor constanly peed on.
An easy-sounding fix for anyone who reading troll posts would be an option that says "view trolls" and an option for posters to honestly label their posts "This is a troll."
Or at least that's how I see it.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Right, but what I'm trying to say here is that it doesn't matter WHY someone makes posts which are informative, funny, interesting, or what have you. It doesn't matter why people stay on topic or avoid trolling and/or flaming. What matters is that they DO do the things which, on slashdot, tend to make someone's karma go up.
Right, I agree that if that happens, that's a good thing, but I'm not sure that's what will always happen. I don't think it necessarily encourages posts which are funny, interesting, or informative but instead posts which will get moderated up. In the best case these are the same thing, but I think most people would agree that they aren't always.
Now the problem is the moderators; Acting falsely clever will cause a moderator with a lack of clue to moderate you up, thinking you are clever. So again, the broken part of moderation is the moderators, not the moderatees, IMO.
Well, I agree for the most part. I think we can blame people who try to abuse the system, too.
right here
Heheh word to that. And why are we called Trolls anyway... we should be called Angels. I hereby declare us Angels. =))
Come to think of it, this applies to a lot of open-source projects, doesn't it
I think thats kind of the point of open source though. (Well, one of them)
I see your point, but there is not the complete equivalency that you are suggesting. Someone being inane/redundant/thoughtless is irritating, and someone who is not but is wrong is irritating. Someone who is inane/redundant/thoughtless and wrong is doubly irritating. Slashdot is an "open source/open standards" and "unix" site, to sum it up in a nutshell. Microsoft is the opposite. It is worth having some Microsofties come around and repitch the arguments periodically to tighten up our own arguments, but to suggest that Slashdot is a tabula rasa with complete equivalency between the two camps is not accurate, nor would such a situation be desirable. That's for the ZDNets of the world.
Fact is that newbies read slashdot and post here and I was wondering what this whole karma whore stuff was all about (didn't try to find out by searching the site, I admit. Sounded so stupid to me that I didn't bother.)
I have read the logs and what the CmdrTaco and Hemos were saying. I just wanted to let you know, that, now, after I understand what this whole karma point system is all about, it makes me a bit angry or sad if you will.
I think the guys who complain a lot about moderation and stuff, are pretty much "off-balance".
The fact that someone like me can post here, without being harrassed, moderated up or down (I really wouldn't care anyhow and luckily I didn't understand your weird point system etc), is proof enough that slashdot moderators are open minded enough to handle other views. Caps on, caps off, if they help to get the worst spammers sent to the bushes, so be it.
I think you do a good job, and I have no problem to say thanks to you guys, and have some kudos for your looooonnnng hours. You are working very hard and you try to stay quite honest and not fake despite the dirt. Stay that way. Good luck.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
For the record, no, the above isn't me. Damn, I don't need to make a Bruce Perens .sig now, do I?
--
There is no K5 cabal.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Thanks, streetlawyer, I was ready to reply with an honest explanation, but I think your comment was not only much more entertaining, but also more insightful than anything I could have posted.
I'm sure there's a point here; too bad all this has to show up in slashdot where no one will notice.
Last I heard, karma was capped at 50.
:-)
Seeing as how I'm not there, this is not first hand information.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
7:00P
7:00P >>> [Gullie (jverelst@somewhere.in.zeist.nl) joins #forum]
7:00P ÚÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ- - - ú
7:00P [] topic Forum logs at ftp://ftp.slashnet.org/pub/slashnet/forums/
7:00P [] author drdink (Sun Sep 24 04:27:16 2000)
7:00P ÀÄÄÄÄÄÄ- - - ->
Okay, that says enough, doesn't it?
--
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
Delete the /. is censoring us threads.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
I do not want to come off as a karma whore, but I will give sexual favors to anyone who mods this up.
Maybe if "God" let us know when we were doing something positive or negative by simple incrementing or decrementing a counter, and the counter had to be over a certain positive number to get into "Heaven", then more people would do more good things.
More likely, people would try to figure the easiest way to increment the counter. That's the problem with feedback mechanisms: you're not necessarily reinforcing the desired behavior (good posting) but rather the measurable surrogate for the desired behavior (getting people to moderate you up). The same thing often happens with tests with lab animals. Positive reinforcement can work if the thing you measure is really well connected to the thing you want to measure, but quite often they're not connected. This leads to "karma whoring", where the goal is to get moderated up, not to necessarily add to the discussion. Removing karma isn't going to make this go away completely, since there's still the kick of having a high per-post score, but it might help.
But it must be the Microsoft/Troll contingence who hang around with mod points and waits for us to troll.
Right?
No, I don't think you want to see the place get better and succeed. You just quoted:
Trolls don't care for the very web page in which they operate...
Pick one or the other. Either you do or you don't. Most trolls don't. I have no idea about you personally.
Most of the trolls are basically in the "class clown" frame of mind. They think they're funny. Most of the other people in the room think they're annoying.
Shift gears. You say you want slashdot to get better? Okay, give me your plan for making it better.
Page views? Don't make me laugh. I get paid the same regardless of page views. This isn't a commission job! My previous employer begged for me to stay and promised that if I ever wanted to return I could. My l337 skillz are in high demand; if VA Linux folds (unlikely) I'll have another job within three days. So I don't give a fuck about page views. What I care about is making a good discussion site. Right now the choice is between censoring the clowns (which k5 does, and which works, but nobody wants censorship) or letting them clown. Everybody who thinks k5 is the greatest thing since sliced bread is saying, "Please censor us!" and that's what slashdot is headed for. It will work to keep up the signal/noise ratio. But it won't be pretty.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
I lump trolls and spammers together. Most trolls spam. Most spammers troll. They feed off each other. I see little distinction. Then you haven't been paying attention. Really, Michael, if you want to come down off of Olympus, you should show demonstrate a little better understanding of how your own system works, and the sub-cultures it has created. Take a little time out of your busy schedule to read the inchfan, or browse at -1 and realize that there are vast differences between the spammers and the trolls.
It's sequences of posts like these that make me want to start fresh sometimes...
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Karma is capped at 50. Currently if your karma is 50 or greater, it cannot increase.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
And my comments aren't crap -- I weight them on purpose to maintain constant Karma, and the ones which bring me down (usually by defending the concept of copyright in terms only slightly more vitriolic than the Slashbots attack it) are always much, much better than the ones which bring me up.
You need me. And people like me. We keep the arguments going which bring in the page views and return visitors which keep your page views up. People will come and post "DMCA SUCKS!" to a copyright story, or "If this was Open Source, it would never have crashed", but they'll only post it once. It takes someone who tells them they're wrong to bring them back.
I've contributed a fair old amount to your site, Mike, all of it under the streetlawyer identity (unlike a few other bigtime trolls, I have no alter ego). I contributed one of your April Fool jokes this year. This morning I submitted a story warning you about how a prominent geek site could be used to bring cross-site scripting vulnerabilities to your bulletin boards. I'm happy to play along with you. But I'm not going to play along with your legion of little me-toos and catamites. I'm not going to agree with your own dangerously naive political views. And, while you provide me with this bulletin board (which is to say; forever; you have no economic alternative), I'm not going to stop saying that you, personally, and your followers, collectively, are frequently full of shit, and doing so in as amusing (to myself) a way as possible.
Oh yeh, and I don't do IRC either.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Show me a constructive suggestion amongst the complaints... then we'd have something to listen to. I honestly don't think any "complaints" from people who flat-out say they're here to destroy the site represent anything that the slashdot crew should pay attention to.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
I'm curious to see an example demonstrating your claim. I can't come up with any situation off the top of my head where summation is provably better at countering groupthink than averaging.
Or, maybe I've just been trolled. :-)
Interesting...
How slash rates your example comment would seem to depend on the order the ratings were given.
If the post started at 0, we can figure it out like this:
- Goes to rating 5 (+5)
- Goes back to 1 (-4)
- Goes back to 5 (+4)
There is still a point left. Now you can mod a score 5 post up, and the poster gains karma, but the post can never go over score 5.
So consider this (same example)
- Start at score 0
- Get modded up 10 straight times (score 5, +10)
- Get modded down 4 times (score 1, -4)
Now the post shows as score 1, but the poster still gains 6 karma (+10 + -4)
This is an extremely unlikely example, but you can see the drastic difference order makes in slash vs in an averaging system (where order is meaningless).
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Post, post, and post some more, and you never know your karma. So why bother to construct an intelligent comment?
oh, i dunno. maybe because you are interested in the topic being discussed, and would like to know what others think of your ideas? maybe because you're actually interested in carrying on a discussion about subjects you enjoy?
even with invisible karma, people who care about the discussion will still do their best to post intelligently, and the trolls will still spew. the spew will still get modded down, and the intelligent comments will still get modded up. if the only reason you're posting is so that your karma can increase, i suspect slashdot wouldn't be particularly hurt by your departure.
-steve
--- "We also were guided by the unlikelihood that anyone would face supernatural evil armed only with technology."
3. Limit the # of posts per story. We shouldn't need a (-1 redundant) tag.
why, so that the only people who can post to a story are the freaks who reload slashdot every three minutes and spout off knee-jerk replies to every story in the hope of getting close to the top? that would make posting a privilege limited to those who can type quickly.
i propose an alternative solution: limit the number of posts per story per person, and make the limit be the same for everyone (except perhaps slashdot staff, so that they can answer posted questions). this would compel people to think carefully about their ideas before posting, as well as limiting the number of stupid-joke posts.
you're worried that you'll think of a really good idea but be unable to post it because of having used up all your posts for that article already? don't flatter yourself; someone else will think of the same great idea soon enough, and will post it. i can't think of anyone on slashdot these days who comes up with thoughts so original that any number of others couldn't duplicate them.
we've already (hopefully) learned to discipline ourselves with the use of a limited number of mod points. why not apply the same discipline to posts?
-steve
--- "We also were guided by the unlikelihood that anyone would face supernatural evil armed only with technology."
So I'm guessing that you aren't expecting many slashdotters to follow the Vice Presidential debates tonight at 9pm EST??? ;-)
This is another view of the world.
Ahhhh. So you're the jerk who skips meta using the overrated tag. A real Klingon would not use such a cowardly moderation tag. There is no honor in it.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Typical... claim the text could have been edited. You sound like the type who is skeptical about everything. How about we use your argument against you: If you have some proof that the log was FALSIFIED, bring it on. Otherwise, don't play reality cop.
If CmdrTaco posted refuting the validity of the log then you have a point. He never has, so you don't.
I've read the log and must say that Signal_11 sounds genuine, while CmdrTaco sounds like a dictator. He even contradicted himself a few times. Not the skills I would expect from someone who claims to be right. The Microsoft metaphor sums it all up.
What's a second? An hour? A day?
It has much more to do with
the Earth's rotation than with cesium.
And I'm not cynical, I admit; I'd rather have an intelligent discussion on /. rather than wreck it.
Let's review the facts. You want to have an intelligent conversation on Slashdot, and Streetlawyer has told you that you've been trolled in the past. Can you see that the two are not mutually exclusive?
If nothing else, engaging one of the 'good' trolls here (the ones who get moderated up and frequently have decent if not flawed arguments) does wonders for your own online conversation. They will force you to back up your statements, face your opinions and basically be absolutely certain you know what you are talking about, or your post will be shredded on the followup. Don't mistake that there often is quite a bit of useful info posted in response to even the most blatant, obvious trolls. It's even quite possible, easy in most cases to win the argument against one, regardless of whether you've lost the game.
All I'm saying is that you should realize that troll postings do have a certain usefulness, regardless of their irritation factor. If they bother you then simply don't respond, and the troll will either go way, or come back with something a bit more useful to the conversation. Think about it.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
arf
If you don't think it would benefit others to read, why would you bother posting it in the first place?
-- I'm not evil, I'm
I pray, beg, and plead with the Slashdot community for something here.<br><br>4 /1852239&threshold=-1&commentsor t=0&mode =nested&cid=12">here</a> to witness a conversation and a previous IRC log about Taco and trolls and karma whores (OH MY!).
I will not be able to catch the IRC chat tonight, so I hope someone is decent enough to fully log it.<br><br>
And if Sig11 is still out there, please god, let him show up for this. It would ruin Taco's night, and be great fun for the rest of us.<br><br>
Wanna know why I ask this? Click <a href="http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/10/0
Bite my yammer.
I hope you were talking about how mature you weren't being in your original reply. This reply isn't very mature, either.
On slashdot, your glass house has long since been destroyed.
If you don't understand it, please don't reply.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'm not terribly familiar with the K5 system, so I'm curious about something...
/. you could quickly run into a problem of trolls simply rating everything in reverse. Then we run into the same problem we have now, needing more good people rating then bad ones (right now we need more good moderators vs bad ones for the system to work).
Can everybody rate posts?
If everybody can rate posts, then here at
If we end up with a lot of troll accounts that simply rate everything badly no matter what, then we would need some kind of way of rating the raters to weed out the bad ones, which is what MetaModeration does right now.
So what would happen is only certain people would be allowed to rate, and we end up with a system very similar to the one we have now, except for some different math.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I haven't been following any of the backchannel troll sites lately- can someone post, or post a link to, (or mail to me) the IRC log that I've seen mentioned here? I'm very interested in moderation (not just /.'s, but other places as well) and I'm curious as to what the two of them had to say.
Thanks...
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
3. I can't actually see the point of underrated/overrated. Doesn't meta-moderation make this redundant?
4. They why aren't they incorporated in the FAQ? (I've read it too.)
---
Well, the initial post by me that you responded to was modded down as a troll.
Why don't you tell me?
Now, on to the meat of my comment. ASCII is not acceptable as evidence in a court of law, and I hope the slashdotters won't accept it either. I could have written that entire log myself. Mind you, I didn't.
Another version is available on kuroshin. Now I have no idea how many people have access to this server, but if I were rusty I wouldn't want to tarnish my domain's reputation by posting a fake.
And according to the log, he was on the channel at that time.
That being said, I praise your skepticism. The conspiracy nuts must be going crazy right now (no wait, they are already)
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
In K5, everyone can indeed rate posts, which, as you point out, could be detrimental to the rating scheme -- especially in a forum as large as Slashdot.
I'm happy keeping Slashdot's moderation/metamoderation scheme as-is (moderators chosen on basis of karma, metamoderation keeping them in check). I'm not suggesting any change along those lines. Averaging comments is a distinct idea, and it turns out to be more significant than just "different math".
Gedanken experiment:
Consider a comment which receives the following ratings:
As I currently understand Slashcode to work (caveat: I have never looked at the code!), Slashdot would rate the comment as +5, which is unrealistic given the negative response the comment elicited. Averaging would rate the comment as +3, which is much more reasonable. Er, given the assumption that all moderations are in good faith (an assumption upon which moderation seems to depend).
Of all the mods I get, "overrated" is nearly half of them. Nobody is keeping moderators who use those options in line.
/. a lot more, and as a result have attained the +1 bonus on my posts. But when I want to post something non-anonymously that I don't think would benefit others to read, I disable the +1 and post at just plain 1.
/. at a +2 threshold and decent into a discussion if I want (unless I'm moderating, when I read at 0, nested). I read at +2 and sort by highest scores first because sometimes I just want to pop in and get a few interesting opinions on a subject. I don't want to see 30 posts at +2 that are just somebody's one-liner comeback buried down in a thread. From what I've read in the /. FAQ and what I believe to be true, this is why "overrated" is in there. I'm not sure about "underrated" though, because if it's underrated then it should be marked as what it is (funny, insightful, informative...).
I moderate as "overrated" a pretty good bit when I have moderator access. In the last month I've been posting to
I usually read
There are plenty of flaws with the moderation system, but it does a decent job of filtering out bad comments. I'll be interested to see this IRC chat session tonight and the effects of it, especially considering the recent Signal 11 brouhaha.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
I think slashdot has bent over backwards not to censor anybody, and your post shows those efforts. I waver back and forth between thinking K5's approach is better vs. thinking slashdot's is better. Both have advantages.
Agree with you that karma is a game. I think slashdot's goal now should be to get rid of that game. It's destructive.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
I was unaware that was the behavior. I guess that means Slashdot moderation is reactionary -- it takes into account both the article and the current score. (Come to think of it, this is how I moderate on Slashdot. :-) If the score is ok, then you don't register agreement with that by modding it some more.
Which is the opposite of how Kuro5hin works; you just vote on each comment what you think it deserves.
The difference being that Slashdot mod points are a precious resource; Kuro5hin mod points are as free as dirt.
Maybe this spells doom for averaging on Slashdot. :-) I'm still curious as to why CT and Hemos are so opposed to it from a performance standpoint, when performance is not really even a consideration.
"Actually there is something inherently noble in pointing out the flaws in the system"
I thought trolls didn't care?
-nme!
Since I'll be on the road to visit my family and haven't gotten the heads-up display/satellite Internet connection in my truck to work yet, let me just ask this:
All the comments I've seen about this include "we'll get 1000's of emails" and "people want to know their karma". I posit that people knowing their karma is a bad thing. It's not like some deity lets us know how many good and bad points we've got in this world.
<><
--
-- Geof F. Morris
i'm going to be in class then.
a question for all of us who won't be home till after 10:00 --
any idea how long it's going to last?
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
You could make -2's readable only to logged in users, or only to users with a karma of a specific value, say at least 0, or at least 25.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
I wasn't able to attend the last IRC-slash Q&A gathering, so I'm not famailir with the format. Is this going to be moderated?
-Turkey
Slashdotting an IRC server is something new =)
This might be Nohican and {}, ready to collect our sacred MAC addresses to keep our passwords company over in the Netherlands (That's where Dutch people live)
So could someone ask these questions:
1) WTF is up with Karma? First, no cap, then a cap. Now I hear rumors of no cap, but only for some people.
2) When you change things, please, for the love of GOD, TELL US. Don't just break it (from our point of view). And forget about that FAQ--no one reads it. Just post a story like you used to.
3) Is Slashdot still depending on metamod? If so, why the heck are "overrated" and "underrated" still allowed without being metamodded? Of all the mods I get, "overrated" is nearly half of them. Nobody is keeping moderators who use those options in line.
4) Is there any point in us suggesting new features (mod-related or not) or is your mind totally closed on the topic? It used to be that you would respond to good ideas with a comment and sometimes even an implementation. Nowadays we keep suggesting but Slashdot keeps sucking.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
I realize that CmdrTaco, Hemos, and co. cannot spend a whole lot of time working on making minute or major changes to slashdot, but there needs to be a way for us to discuss changes. At the current moment, there are only two methods of discussing this: emailing the admins, and posting to other stories. Neither one is desirable. The first method probably doesn't work because of the aforementioned time issue, and isn't great because people cannot discuss the issue. It's merely a one-sided point of view. The second method (posting to stories) is undesirable because technically it is offtopic and posts should focus on the stories.
So I guess what I'm saying is that Slashdot needs an ongoing system of discussing changes. I envision it as almost being a mirror of the front page, where "stories" or topics of discussion are posted and people can discuss. Also, people submit things that they think need to be changed, and they might be accepted for discussion. I guess these stories might be actually permanent rather than temporary, but new things can be added as we go along, just to keep things fresh. Moderation could happen as normal, and I think this would help CmdrTaco filter out what it is that really needs to happen to slashdot. Essentailly it would be a larger scale of this IRC post: a means with which we can discuss the workings of slashdot. Moderation, Karma, Repeated Articles, Article Selection, Spam, anything.
Other than that, I think that a fully updated FAQ needs to be created and maintained. Changes need to be out in the open and accessible to everybody. Also, maybe a newbie faq would be helpful. This could be written by users and would discuss the actual goings on (like the whole thing with Signal 11. I don't understand that at all, and I'm not a newbie.)
Anyway, just my $0.02. =)
Interestingly, elsewhere in this thread, you've said that Slashdot's moderation is a good thing. Now you say that there should be an end to the "karma game". What ideas do you have in mind for this? Allowing moderation, but not accumulating it on a per-user basis as "karma"? Or simply not displaying one's karma score? Do you want to get rid of the +1 bonus too?
Generally, if replying to a post, and the community at large won't benefit from the reply, or you're just cracking a stupid joke, post at 1.
If you think you're furthering a useful discussion, or ranting, and generally want the community at large to read what you have to say, post at 2.
The +1 bonus is there because Slashcode thinks you have something valuable to say most of the time. It's not a right oy passage. So don't abuse it already.
NOTE: And yes, I do have the +1 bonus, and decided not to use it.
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
-- the most controversial site on the Web
i'm going to be running a client in the channel tonight to log the whole thing, and i'll post it for everybody else after it's done. my nick will be gtx (with moo_cow as an alternate nick), so if you notice i'm not doing anything, I'M LOGGING THE CHANNEL FOR THOSE OF US WHO CANT BE THERE. Please don't kick me. email me at loondoogy@hotmail.com if you want a copy, i'l try to post them publicly on the WWW tomorrow. -gtx
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
I hope a pray that Sig11 manages to make it there. For anyone that's interested in improving Slashdot, witness this conversation (with links to the originally discussed IRC log).
Click here.
Signal 11 didn't deserve all of the crap that Taco threw his way, but what do you expect? Egomaniacal garbage seems to be a big turn on for him. Don't believe me? Read the IRC log, he compares Slashdot to Microsoft by saying, "It's like Microsoft. They're popular so everybody dumps on them, ra, ra!" And he doesn't realize that makes him look just as fricken egotistical as Gates.
Bite my yammer.