Slashdot Mirror
LA Times Pulls Wikitorial, Blames Slashdot
ubermiester writes "The LA Times pulled down it's "beta" wikitorial after people began inserting obscene content faster than the editors could remove it. Though there is nothing on the LA Times editorial page or in the general coverage, the NY Times notes (free reg req) the fact that the bulk of the vandalism occurred after a posting about the wikitorial appeared on Slashdot and goes on to quote a member of the LA Times editorial staff as saying, "Slashdot has a tech-savvy audience that, to be kind, is mischievous and to be not so kind, is malicious". " Apparently Michael Newman thinks that all half a million daily Slashdot readers are malicious, although I personally would guess more like a 60:40 split myself *grin*.
I bet the entire article was changed to "frist post".
Those mean old Slashdot readers, pointing out the obvious all teh time!
It would have happened sooner or later, they should thank us for finding the bugs right away.
Raydude
I am proud of Slashdot
(wipes tear from eye)..
I just knew someday, you'd make something of yourself...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I've collected much more information and some critique of the LA Times' experiment here: Wikitorial Post Mortem
After the novelty wears off, the juveniles move on to the next place. Here in CA, school just got out for the summer. Coincidence?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Lets face it, slashdot breeds trolls. I see two reasons for it:
1.) The using a shotgun to kill mice method for banning users. To paraphrase: Banning entire subnets to catch a single troll, and, therefore, banning tons of innocents in the process. They use vinegar to lure bees instead of honey. Lets face it, the moderation system isn't good, and its just forcing more and more malcontent and loss of posting.
2.) AC's. Really, that's what kills slashdot. If AC posting was removed, there would be a lot less crap. Making an ID is free, easy, and doesn't require you to give out any personal information. Why not tie stuff to an ID so its easier to get rid of the crap? Instead of IP bans, you can setup an IP 'greylist' that means if you create an account from the greylist, they can't post much or have to wait a couple days after registration to post.
Instead of trying to suspend everyones posting to stop trolls, how about we use a little insight and postive effects to combat trolling and crapflooding?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Wiki's have their purpose. Collaborative story writing? Sure. Editorials and news stories? Maybe not - after all, an editorial is suppose to be a group of people's opinion, so in that case you want a "read-only" wiki with "write" ability to a very small subset.
What the major newspapers should do however is allow comments (a la slashdot style - include user moderation and some basic spam/troll protection). This would let them to two things:
1. Make more money off of ads (Google or otherwise) as people come back to see who's commented on their comments.
2. Readers can point out errors or omissions - yes, this can have an echo chamber effect such as when a group of liberals and conservatives fight it out about who's got the bigger penis and/or breasts, but overall it might be useful if a anonymous commentator could point a reporter towards another source or more information, or bring another opinion in.
Again, wiki's can be a great thing, but perhaps the format they chose was not the best one. And to blame Slashdot readers is a little silly - I'm sure there were many, many other people who wanted to just grief the article to death. Slashdot just helped people know about it.
Of course, this is just my opinion - I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
It's funny, because /. itself went through much the same thing. But by careful filtering and moderation, it's been kept reasonably useful. You still have all kinds of morons posting here, but you don't ever have to see them if you don't want to. And we don't even have editors, really.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Just think, we gave you over a year's worth of experience in about 24 hours. We're not malicious, we're efficient!
Sure, it may have been a useful service if it was well implimented. It wasn't well implimented. You make a place for the public to post anything they want on tEh Intarweb, and you will get crap. Period. Email/Usenet has SPAM, Slashdot has trolls. Email servers can see when the same message is sent to many users. Slashdot has moderators.
The only protection they had in place for dealing with the masses of the Internet was, "gee, I hope we don't get popular." Slashdot has a readership of about a half million. What if they were featured prominently in the NY Times, and on CNN, and a few million people realised that they could say "Bob wuz here." Slashdot wasn't the problem. You don't have to be tech savvy to edit a wiki.
They could have made a system of moderation like slashdot has. They could have allowed a trusted community of editors. They could have done something more than expect that a few official editors could keep track of a public space in the Internet, and keep it clean. Bad web developers, no twinkie. Imagine if Commander taco had to remove every troll post from slashdot by himself!
Now the problem in replying to this article is that if I troll in my reply am I trolling or being insightful? Or, if I try to be insightful about trolls, am I trolling?
...err.. no... ...PROFIT!!!! err...
Damn you Taco! How does one reply to a post about slashdot trolling properly?
In soviet russ...
goatse.. no..
***USER BRAIN OVERLOAD. CORE DUMPED***
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
From the BBC article ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/2/hi/technology/411 4312.stm ):
The online version of the paper started its "wikitorial" experiment last week. It was meant to give readers a "voice".
It was suspended after it was bombarded with inappropriate material.
The grad student who taught a tech for pre-service teachers class the semester before I took over was researching the use of wikis for his thesis. He kept preaching about how wikis give everyone a voice.
It was finally one of my history teaching majors who pointed out, "Wikis only give a voice to the last person who spoke."
Yes, you can look in the document history and all that, but who does? If the last person to speak was a liar, or wanted to put up some p0rn, or even wanted to spam the page with viagra adverts, that's what you get.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Not foreseeing that this would happen proves that the LA Times knows nothing about the internet. The opportunity to post pornography on the website of one of the biggest newspapers in the country would certainly never be overlooked by the Beavis and Buttheads of the world.
Blaming Slashdotters for it is even stupider.
Talk about a failure to accept responsibility!
Even if they used slash code, the same exact problem would have manefestied itself.
/. mod system only works as well as it does because /. is, as you say, a community and the "sane" outnumber the "jerks" by probably 100:1
The
Just throwing up a wiki does not immediately create a community. It could takes weeks, months or years befoire the sane community outnumbered the jerks.
The stated problem was that vandalism was ocurring at a rate that was faster than the sane people could prevent it. Until there was a sufficient number of people that cared enough about the site to actually perform the required level of moderation, the vandal problem would be the same.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
There really are a lot of assholes online. People say and do things they never would in person. Some delight in trying to be as big a jerk as they can and causing as much trouble as they can. If you aren't used to that environment, it can really shock you. The RvB PSA on teh topic is particularly appropriate, but I can't find a link to it right now.
At any rate, while they shouldn't be scapegoating Slashdot, I don't blame them for being supprised and angry. It is amazing the amount of crap some people online will spew and how far they'll go to wreck things for everyone else.
I see the internet as chaos flying on electrons.
It has to be this way because its free. Or at least as free as anything can be. Its almost as free as in air, even if its just free as in beer.
The innocence and idealism which created the internet to be open and available to anyone with access to a modem or university network in that late sixties and early seventies has been pushed aside by a harsh reality. People behave in evil ways when there are no constraints. They do so until they choose to stop.
That is the cost and the benefit of freedom.
In the long run its worth it, but right now, because there are so many who strike out looking for attention and who love creating disturbances, the internet is a bit like the old west: untamed and just a bit out of control.
What happened with the LA Times is they simply didn't think it through. If they had asked any guy on the street what would happen if they let anyone edit an article on the internet, his quick and non-surprising answer would be, "Oh someone will put up porn!"
Well Duh! Everytime someone invents a new medium, what's the first content?
Porn. Its always porn.
If someone invents a holodeck kind of thing, you can bet the first thing he makes with it will be a walk through porn movie.
LA Times should have thought it through. I think the idea can still work, they just need to put in more safeguards...
Raydude
I believe this is the one you where thinking of.
And why start out with a controversial topic like the Iraq War?? It was Father's Day, they should have started out with a 'Thank You to Dads' or some other softball to see if the wiki-concept could handle that.
Personally, I can't see a wiki working for an editorial. A wiki could work for movie reviews or restaurant reviews maybe... but what's the value of using it for an editorial?? What they should do is model evil old slashdot and its moderation system... heck maybe even use the slashcode itself... or better yet hire Taco as a consultant. They could post their staff editorials with slashdot style discussion. Maybe even experiment by modifying the moderation to mark a comment red or blue.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
just what they are doing. Those who have build successful online communitiy discussion sites (and yes I consider Slash to be very successful) have invested a lot of time and energy getting it right.
One would think a high profile exercise like this would be worth a few bucks getting some real talent in on the ground floor to insure success.
They saw some buzzwords and jumped in and got wet.
Blogging because I can...
Nevermind that it was badly done, the message is it can't work. People often blind themselves.
In that case, the king is the man sitting on the porcelain throne. He's also the only one who gives a shit.
He who has no
Mental pain is as real as physical pain. People lose their jobs, drink, do drugs, even kill themselves over mental anguish.
Now you are correct in that what effect words have on someone is in part dependent on that person. There are people who just let insults wash over them, there are those that find a way to take even the nicest compliment as a rebuke. However it's not all internal. Words have meaning, and the speaker has a communicative intent behind them. intent behind them. If you are trying to make your words caustic and hurtful, they are very likely to be so.
This line of reasoning that "words don't hurt" is just used by bullies and social misfits as an excuse to be assholes when someone calls them to account for it. Words can and do hurt, and while people need to work on developing skills to ingore and cope with it, that does not give you the right to be an asshole all the time, nor absolve you of responsibility if your words cause pain.
In nature, animals without assholes simply regurgitate waste orally. Hence a world without assholes would be full of people talking shit. Therefore, I can conclude that there are no assholes on Slashdot and the LA Times is incorrect in implying otherwise :-)