Slashdot Mirror
On the Matter of Slashdot Story Selection
Let's talk about Beatles Beatles. For the uninitiated he's just some dude who submits a lot of stories. He actually happens to get a lot of them accepted. We have a number of users like this. Looking at the hall of fame shows you a number of the most successful ones. Now the motivation for getting a Slashdot story accepted (besides fame, glory and sexy women who start IMing you naked pictures of themselves mere seconds after a story goes live)is a return link to the website of your choosing. Your creds. Your 'Reward' for sharing a cool URL with a half a million Slashdot readers.
It's not hard to figure out what sorts of stories Slashdot likes. We have a format, and a subject matter. A persistent user can simply start spamming the bin with a submission about everything he finds that comes even close. If he does it enough, he'll get a few through. Especially if he manages to get something reasonable in at 11pm when there's little else to choose from.
Now there is no conspiracy. There is some Roland guy who's last name i can't spell who submits stuff all the time and people thought for awhile he was Timothy. Lately there is a Beatles Beatles user who conspiracy theorists now think is Scuttlemonkey. We don't know these people. They are not aliases for us. They aren't paying us. 3 months from now it will be somebody else.
Now these submitters each have their problems. In Roland's case, he likes to link to his personal blog where he writes mediocre summaries of stories that add nothing to the original. In BBs case, he just cuts and pastes paragraphs from linked pages. Both use their return link to link a web page which is, in my opinion, pretty worthless.
Now technically speaking, we could add a nofollow to their URLs. Or strip them entirely. But that puts me into the position of editing not just the submission, but the submittor, and i really don't think that this is "Right".
Part of the Slashdot Editor's job is to make a submission "Presentable". Usually this means moving a few URLs around. I'd guess a good half of story submissions use the word 'here' or 'article' or something equally stupid as their anchor text. I prefer relevant words to be linked. There are other minor things tho, like taking off extra intros like "Hi guys I read Slashdot every day and thought you would like this". We want the Slashdot story to be mostly distilled down to the essentials. Just the key 3-4 sentences.
Should part of this process be checking the URL of the submitter to make sure that it is legitimate? Does that really matter? Should we add a nofollow tag to those URLs?
My opinion is no. Those URLs are what you get for submitting a story to Slashdot. We selected it. The submission braved the Gauntlet. A hundred submissions died, and this one made the cut. I don't think it's fair that we strip creds from someone just because they choose to squander that URL on something stupid. Who am I to judge that after all?
Now the real problem with this is what it does to the discussion. Last night a nice story was posted. It came from one of our "Problem" users. And dozens of comments were posted about this user. The conspiracy theories. The hostility. Now a lot of this is normal Slashdot Forum Faire. Thats fine. But the problem is that often when this occurs, it swamps out the real discussion. The messenger becomes the story.
I think this sucks.
The story is not about Roland or Beatles Beatles or whatever other random user is submitting a lot of stuff this week. I encourage moderators to use their points to mod these discussions down when they see them. As a moderator, your job ought to be to steer the discussion on-topic. The submitter is almost never the topic!
The catch-22 kills me. I might have a URL in the bin worth sharing. Something a half a million of you might enjoy. But because a user with a "Reputation" submitted it, I know that posting it will spawn a giant forum cesspool. I could strip attribution and take away incentive for a user to submit. Or just throw away the article and forget it. Or I could post the story and watch as half of the discussion is simply about the submitter and not the URL that i wanted to share in the first place.
Damned if I do, damned if I don't, right? I'm seriously looking for feedback here. What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?
And moderators, use those offtopic mods to steer the discussion towards the subject of the article, not the flavor of the month conspiracy theory about story selection.
As a side note, I'm really going to try to write more articles addressing Slashdot matters on to Slashdot. But please understand that doing so is tremendously time consuming- this article will generate hundreds of pieces of mail and forum posts that I want to read and reply to. But there are only so many hours in the day. I would like to request that the forum try to stay on-topic here. Let's talk specifically about the issues i addressed above. We can talk about digg or moderation or whatever issues are of most interest next week.
Update a dozen or so users have made the same point: Simply wait for the same story to come from another user. If that was possible, I would do so. I'm really talking here about stories that are submitted just by one person. Part of why these users are successful is that they submit enough stories that they get a handful that only THEY submitted. I can't simply wait for someone else. That will never come!
update Allright it's been about 300 hours. I've read every comment posted so far, and replied to many. Even managed to whore myself a couple dozen upmods ;) I think we will add a nofollow to the submittor link. Several users raised good points and they ultimately convinced me that since the focus of the story is the submission, not the submittor, any link that detracts from the focus is less relevant. This will probably reduce some kinds of abuse in the future, but of course not all.
There's a lot of really good discussion in there. Some really good feedback. I haven't touched my inbox yet, but I see a lot of messages in there as well that I'll try to get to. I'll try to post again in another week or 2 on some other subject matter. If you have ideas on what that should be, you're welcome to email and suggest topics. We'll try to make it, if not regular, a frequent thing on Slashdot.
Toss it. The reason those submitters earn their reputation is because you haven't killed his or her stories before. You need some kind of editorial policy where all your editors share the same basic guidelines for what to approve and what not to, and this should include a corpus of "known troublemakers". It's basic due diligence and should be as natural as looking a wee bit harder for dupes and checking the spelling and grammar one last time before hitting "Publish". And yes, add the "nofollow". It doesn't detract from the story one bit, but it does kill some of the story spammer's motivation.
I'd rather live without a good story completely than having it ruined by a discussion about the submitter.
There are plenty more stories in the sea, but there's just one Slashdot.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Institute a cap on the total number of stories a given submitter can get accepted (per day, week, month...whatever). A cap doesn't hurt legitimate submitters, while limiting the payoff for linkwhores.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
An article about Slashdot on Slashdot... why haven't Slashdot been slashdotted yet? Inquiring minds want to know.
Just pust what's good. Don't let this issue influence your judgement about what to show.
/. personalities - be they you, Katz, Michael, or the plethora of submitters - run in a smooth continuum through moderation system whiners and /.-herd posters all the way down to ordinary FP and OT trolls.
/. personally, rather than simply move on. It can manifest in all kinds of ways, overt or quite subtle, and this is one of them.
As far as I can see, the conspiracy theories about various
Some people are just brats. They said something and it got modded down, or they submitted a story and it got ignored and (gasp) some other submission got in that looked similar, and then they decide to hate
That said, I'm certain that it's possible to trick, scam or abuse slashdot's editors with story submissions. I've certainly seen some questionable writeups go by over the years. It doesn't take anything away from the site, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
For the most part, the system works. Stories come and go, the comments are generally good, and moderation doesn't always do what we wish, but nothing else really compares to the results. If occasionally something looks questionable people will question it, just as always.
It can be alarming how sophisticated some haters can be, but frankly I haven't seen anything here that even deserves your response. It's good to clear the air, but anyway, I wouldn't worry about it.
If you want a project, think about an interesting way to reorganize, prefilter and/or score story submissions...
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
... but it seems to me that people complain far more often about advertisements thinly disguised as stories than they do about lots of submissions coming from the same user(s).
Are you seriously trying to say that Beatles_Beatles was the only guy so submitted all of those stories? I would be VERY surprised if this were the case. If you get one story from 50 submitters, what's the point of going to the same submitter time and time again? Give the rest of us a chance.
Yikes, if this is the quality of an editor submission, no wonder Roland, Scuttlemonkey and Beatles Beatles get their submissions accepted. :/
I think people just want to see some quality out of Slashdot, instead of dumping everything onto the main page. And yes, your job as editor is to edit the submission, not to just accept it as is and fix URLs.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?
Maybe telling them to only submit stuff under a different username for the next 3 months. What we don't know can't hurt you.
Background. I'm a registered user posting (quasi) anonymously. I have been
around Slashdot since "Chips and Dips". I used to be a valinux or some
other variant of the name volunteer developer, which has become OSDN.
Should part of this process be checking the URL of the submitter to make
sure that it is legitimate?
Why not?
Does that really matter?
I'm a sticker for details, and "illegitamate" URLs or 404s bother me.
Should we add a nofollow tag to those URLs?
I don't see why not since you added the nofollow on signatures. I
thought Slashdot did the same with user's posts, but I just checked and
they don't. I guess the next time I want to do a googlebomb without the
constraint of 120 character signatures, I know what to append at the end
of my posts.
I don't know what the queue for stories looks like, but I doubt it would
be too dificult to avoid a * *Beatles Beatles goon with other stories.
Especially when we gripe about it (see below).
Suggestions for Slashdot:
- option to randomize the top of a threads. Now there is by newest and
oldest first, but I believe that if the randomize option were there and
used, it would allow for more deep threads than the 90% of the ones that
jump on early posts to get closer to the top of the charts and the 10%
that get tacked onto those that view by newest first. I also hate when
I write a long, researched, post and it gets too few eyeballs because I
did not opt for the quick fix at the top of the list.
- stop the dupes. I seriously do not believe that copying and pasting
the subject or keywords into google with site:Slashdot.org takes more
than 10 seconds, or at least for me. Over 90% of the time I do it, the
first link is the dupe.
- listen to us more. I hate to say it, but Slashdot is more our site
than "yours". We submit the stories, we have almost every piece of
content on the site. Yes, Slashdot does provide great software to view
the stories and a known hotspot for us geeks. Being that slashcode is
open, in theory a new and better Slashdot could happen at any time with
little difference in the look and feel of the site. The reason this has
not happened yet, because we are reasonably happy with each other here
and the progress of the slashcode to date.
Kudos to Slashdot for:
- friends/foes/fans/freaks. Although I'm slightly dislexic between
friends and fans and foes and freaks, the ability to use these to filter
out at least the free iPod people is invaluable. My signal to noise
ratio is pretty high now. Sometimes I feel like foeing a friend or a
friend of a friend just because they post too much, even though I like
a good amount of what they say, they then to pop out of threads too
much for my tastes, but it would be very complex to fix such a minor
annoyance.
- staying cheap for subscribers, and being one of the top sites on the
internet
It's not hard to figure out what sorts of stories Slashdot likes. We have a format, and a subject matter.
But slashdot also has an agenda, and it's real easy to see. Linus and/or Jobs sneezes and it makes the front page, but interesting tech articles can get rejected because they either go against the slashdot agenda or don't mention it at all.
A guarenteed way to get your story selected by ask slashdot is to append the words "open source" on the end even if open source has nothing whatsoever to do with your submission. I'm not bashing open source, but it's not the end all be all of technology. Not sure how to improve it, but this "news" site is hardly unbiased...
this is the most ridiculously flawed logic i've ever heard. if something is worth defending, it's obviously broken? you're assuming that all criticism is always valid. in my experience good systems are often compromises, and pleasing everyone is impossible.
i could live a little longer in this prison
And I'm sure "TacoCmdr" logged into World of Warcraft all day has nothing to do with it... right...
this story was just an ad for slashdot!
create a /. staging area, where us, the real users, can rate stories, and let us decide what makes it to the front page... The the RPs and BBs of the world will only show up when their linkback page is actually relevent and useful...
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Why not simply link to the original article, instead of these cut-and-paste pages?
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
...that the bigger problem comes from the perception that other people are submitting the same stories without the thin blog-to-attract-ad-hits wrapper, and having it rejected. Certainly people claim this in many of the Beatles-Beatles and Piquepaille threads. This generates the perception that only the "favoured few" submitters can have story submissions accepted, whether this is true or not.
A quick check to see if the link is substantive, or just a wrapper link around someone else's content to get ad money, or if someone submitted a link to the real content before someone with a wrapper page? Maybe that would help...
Game dev and music blog
Why is it that only Timothy posts Roland stories and only Scuttlemonkey posts Beatles stories?
While we're on the topic of Slashdot: I'm pretty sure that's not a bug, but rather a feature. It's always complained about as if it were some sort of error, but I suspect it's part of a system designed to reduce the GNAA-style first posts. Anybody know?
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I have half-heartedly submitted a dozen or so articles to /. - none of which have been accepted. My favorite topic, of course, is the danger of X-rays emitted by spark plugs. (See how I snuck that in) Any chance of there ever being a "Guide to writing acceptable articles for slashdot" that gives detailed advice on DOs and DONTs??? Just thought I'd ask.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
be more transparent. There are alot of things you could to help your cause. Showing rejected story list may be nice. I trully doubt only one user posted that story. If it's true that he was the only one to catch it then if people knew it they might be more ok with it.
That's one way to be more transparent, you may have to be creative to think of others.
One more thing.
Denying that what happened was suspicious is calling your community stupid.
Also try having the editors perticipate in a conversation about them and directly answer some of the comments(not sure if this hasn't happened, but it didn't when I was looking at it.).
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Specifically, what percentage of their submissions get accepted. You might have to add some code to retain submission stats, but it should quiet the conspiracy buffs ... oh, wait, they'll just say you faked the number.
By tossing the contribution from problem users you free up problems as the story will obviously get submitted again by a non problem user.. But I do understand its a hard choice to make and puts you into accepting tasks that you might not be prepared to accept..
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
Don't you guys check your own archives before posting something that you've already posted, and are now "passing it off" as new?
Don't you index your stories?
I'm not trying to be hostile, and I do really appreciate Slashdot. I'm more curious because it seems to generate genuine hostility amongst some of your readers.
Since I'm not willing to grind out quantity, I just stop submitting.
Editorial control is just that. If someone is posting boring material then it shouldn't be posted. Slashdot usually manages to keep things fairly fresh in the face of what could be incredibly boring content considering the wealth of source material on the internet. If someone is getting to the "whiny baby" stage posting to Slashdot perhaps they need to find another outlet ... I hear this "blogging" thing might catch on some day. ;)
The most critical thing I can see is that these type of questions aren't asked that often. I would like to see a once per week, or at a minimum once per month, question from the editors like, "how are we doing, what changes, etc." It doesn't mean you have to implement them, but we'd like to know that you at least halfway care what the readers think. When you take out a story from someone with a rep, that can be considered censorship, so print that pig and watch the fur + mod points fly. That's what the internet is for. However, you can go out of your way to make sure that people starting to earn a bad rep get steered clear of that, by telling them early and often when things are going south. If they continue to be jerks, or post ad after ad, that's when it's time to step in. The New York Times doesn't run ads masquerading as articles. I'm not saying this is the NYT, but you can understand our frustration as readers to click a link and get an online store.
stuff |
Make the link point to the user's slashdot profile page.
Cap the submission number. Or the number of stories accepted. If these guys are submitting 100k stories and 3 or 4 get through evry day, they are basically spamming the system. Should that be rewarded? Alternatively, wait five minutes. Someone else is bound to post the same story.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Seriously, since when have you ever let trolls dictate policy here? I know we give you a lot of shit but this is still one of the most popular and informative tech sites around. It doesn't seem to me that this problem is any more serious than "You bowed to Microsoft/Scientologists" or "OMGSignal11WTF???!?". I mean hell, even if you went all the way and switched to user-chosen stories people would still find a reason to bitch about editors using dupe accounts to influence voting or some shit like that.
Over the years, I've always had my articles rejected. Over time I started to notice days of the week and times of the day that articles were few and far between. I also noticed that each editor had their own likes and dislikes. The last two articles I submitted were the first two I had ever had accepted.
I do believe that guys like Beatles Beatles found a way to try to "beat the system" but I don't think it is a conspiracy. If the editors wanted to abuse slashdot's pagerank, they have dozens of other ways to do it. Slashdot has to be an incredible amount of work for these guys. I post some edgy responses on occasion, and I get a ton of e-mail for it (which I appreciate). I can't imagine how much feedback the editors get and how they get through it on a daily basis. There are days that I feel like hiring someone just to get through e-mail, and I doubt the editors get paid (if they do, it can't be much).
That being said, I think we do need to see some new stats up for submittions. If you submitted 10 in a row with no acceptance, I think it is fine to keep that private. How about printing the acceptance percentage of the currently accepted post, based on how many submittals were not accepted since the last one. If you get an article accepted, and then you get 99 that don't, and finally the 100th gets accepted, you have a 1% acceptance rate for that particular message (and your future acceptance rate would be set back to zero until your next acceptance). That way, guys like Beatles Beatles would likely have really low rates (as he seems to spam the editor at the right time with the right style of story).
Also, how about if slashdot regurgitates some stores (instead of rejected and pending and accepted you can add a fourth one -- hold) that will be held up to 6 hours and resubmitted automatically, if the original editor puts it on hold and the new editor finds no good submissions (11pm).
Thank you. Please do try and address current Slashdot issues. As soon as you started asking for subscriptions, this moved beyond being just your personal weblog of stuff you found interesting. I'm not willing to pay money for CmdrTaco and friend's blog. I need to think there's value in the subscription, and right now, I just don't see it. If you're willing to address problems that people see with the site, then maybe, eventually, I will.
(On the other hand, I'm one of the apparently few Slashdotters who doesn't block ads. I just uses Flashblock, which strips the annoying ones, and see anything else. So far the only ads that have actually been interesting are ThinkGeek ones, but, hey. So I'm not a complete leech. :))
So, thank you for taking the time to address Slashdot. At the very least, I appreciate it.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
What should I do?
You should no-follow the links to submitter's pages, every time. They still get their "creds", in that the slashdot user base still gets a link to their page. They can profit from this link by slashdot users hitting their ads. They also don't get bumps up from pagerank, profiting from a googlebot sending more people their way who didn't find them through slashdot, word of mouth, or an individual linking them. And finally, it's got the added benefit of destroying the temptation to consistently bitch about submission system abuses for the benefit of raising pagerank.
You didn't read his whole post. He wants advice on how best you'd like it fixed.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
Those URLs are what you get for submitting a story to Slashdot. We selected it. The submission braved the Gauntlet. A hundred submissions died, and this one made the cut. I don't think it's fair that we strip creds from someone just because they choose to squander that URL on something stupid. Who am I to judge that after all?
Pffft. Your submission doesn't even have a URL. Jeez, what kind of self respecting geek doesn't have some sort of web site they can link to these days.
Keep doing what you are doing. It will work itself out. Just post the best submissions you get. Good is good, regardless of the source. We the readers are smart enough to figure this stuff out. And the moderators will tire of the OT ramblings and squash them. It's a good system.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
"I could strip attribution and take away incentive for a user to submit. "
If their incentive to submit is attribution, they shouldn't be submitting.
Take Fark.com for example. The submitters get no recognition (on the main part of the site) when an article is greenlit. They may chime in the thread with comments, but other than that, nothing. And they get a counter in their profile on how many articles they've gotten greenlit.
Their incentive for submitting is an interesting story that's funny and may spark discussion.
While the humor angle isn't applicable for the most part here, the discussion part is. Submit something because you think it's interesting, you think your fellow nerds will think it's interesting, and it will generate an interesting discussion.
Submitting just to gain attribution is the wrong reason to do it.
.. there weren't any important stories to file till Jobs' keynote right? And this aint a conspiracy theory..
...is not getting to place a link to the site of your chosing. The reward for having a story accepted is to have a story accepted. If you are submitting stories for any other reason, then your motivation is wrong. Add the no follow tag, and end the debate for good.
Slashads, which seem to be getting through at a more regular rate. Again, I don't want to be advertised to by the story submission (especially when that person is not paying /. for the privilege).
A couple of suggestions: first, every article about a product needs to have at least two links. One to the product and a second to an un-biased review of the product. A link to the product alone is a Slashad for the product and a link to the review alone is a Slashad for the review site. Only once an article has a few links does it get away from the Slashad realm and into the useful realm.
Second, to put it bluntly, the editors need to do their jobs. I would much rather see a few high quality stories than many useless ones. Taco said it himself, if the submission bin is empty, a story has a greater chance of being accepted. No! Good stories should be accepted and bad stories rejected. Period. End of line. It is the editor's job to find the good stories, fix the links, and check the grammar (!).
For the longest time I believed that Anonymous Coward was a real user. And THAT guy used to get under my skin on a regular basis.
Then one day I posted anonmously- for the first time.
DOH!
Cogito Ergo Sum
"There are plenty more stories in the sea, but there's just one Slashdot."
That's what you think.
How many article submitters consider this important? I can imagine the possibility that regular users submit an occasional story just because they think it's interesting and the kind of thing they'd want to read about on this site, without caring about a reward. The people who do care about getting return links are the people who will be "spamming the bin with a submission about everything" - that creates more work for the editors, and it annoys readers (because it's not 'stuff we (the community) think matters', it's 'stuff someone thinks the editors will accept'). I don't think we mind seeing a lot of submissions from one person, as long as they're not trying to unfairly manipulate the system for their own gain.
If that's the case, then adding nofollow to the submitter's link (for all submissions, since nothing else would be fair) will remove the spammers' incentive, while not deterring people who are submitting stories for their interest. (And don't include links in the summary which point to the submitter's personal site if they haven't added any value to the original news source.)
Of course, if most interesting stories are only submitted because of the return links, then that won't work at all. Does anybody know whether this is the case?
In Roland's case, he likes to link to his personal blog where he writes mediocre summaries of stories that add nothing to the original.
/. does and just copy the first paragraph of the article and call it a summary.
What idiot would want to read a blog with mediocre summaries to stories that add nothing to the original? Oh, wait... Maybe he should start doing what
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Does it actually matter what happens in the comments section? I'd be interested in knowing what percentage of regular Slashdot readers actually read the comments, and further, what percentage read the comments at a threshold other than 4 or 5?
I visit Slashdot 2 or 3 times a day, and very rarely do I actually read the comments of a story.
I thought the hue and cry after Roland Piquepaille was unnecessary. So he was trying to drive traffic to his blog and maybe become known as some kind of net pundit. That, it seemed to me, was fair enough. Isn't that essentially what we're all doing, sounding off here on the topic of the day?
But this Beatles guy isn't doing that. He's using his links back from /. to drive up the PageRank of his link farm, with the apparent overall aim of trying to push spam sites up Google, for money. This, as far as I and, it seems, a large number of /.'ers are concerned, is not fair play. It simply isn't cricket, and we don't like to see our community effectively supporting spam.
That's what gets me upset about **Beatles-Beatles, that didn't worry me about Roland. This kind of link farming and search engine spamming spoils the net for all of us, and a major geek centre like this one should be firmly against that.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
It's your site. If you don't like it, change how things are done and change the tone of the site.
You set this up to be this way, and encouraged certain behaviors and such by the content you run. And then you're upset just because YOU then happen to be the target of some of that same paranoid behavior you've encouraged?
Woe is you, you have a popular wesbite you've made lots of money off of, and some people question or don't like you sometimes. Boo-hoo.
YOU of all people have the power to change something with this site if you don't like it. If you don't like how the paranoid-delusional Slashdolts are acting, you can change it. And if you make excuses that you don't want to do this or that because this or that reason, and trying to be a perfect, benevolent ruler, then that's your problem, not anyone else's. Right now , lowest common denom-- intellect rules. That's been encouraged rather than discouraged.
So either shape up your readers and posters, or just deal with the monster you've created.
It might not do any harm to institute a filter which automatically added 'nofollow' to all links in submissions.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
In my /. lifetime, little over a year, I have submitted maybe 3 stories, that I thought were /. worthy, of the 3 one was accepted. Now going by the rationale that certain users get selected more based on "slash-cred" mine would not have been accepted. I think the editors do the best they can with what they have. You guys must see so many submissions daily that the average /.joe/jane would have their head explode.
/. submit something relevant and thougt provoking. Submitting something to ensure a flame war in the forums isn't the way to go.
My opinion, if you want to have a story posted to
I think the editors are doing a hell of a job, even you Zonk.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
The editors are only human. Maybe if you hired more people to screen articles and provide feedback instead or along with the subscribers?
I've never noticed this before.
Sorry. I see lots of stories with oddly linked articles, text ripped from the article, or linking to a meta-article. I'd say this happened between 25% and 50% of the time.
I think that Slashdot needs to aggregate submissions. E.g., if there are 10 submissions regarding the FX60 processor, each with a different link, then make a single story linking to all of the sites, mention all of the people who submitted it (or the first one) and flesh it out a bit.
Make it look like you at least read the links.
And hey, having some more content of your own wouldn't hurt either. Besides the book and game reviews.
Even just attaching a longer opinion piece or editorial piece to a story.
he is trying to fix it, he's asking for feedback
If you think the beef that people bring up in the comments in legitimate, then you need a clear policy prohibiting such abuses from submitters. Hopefully the submitters will change what they do, or this policy can give you abilty to change the submission/links to fit your new guidelines.
If you don't think that the beef people have is legitamate, then you've got a problem. Since this is largely a community run websight (the content is largely the forums, and the moderation is done by the community, too), you can't really force the websight to run at odds with the way such a large part of the community wants it to. You can perhaps nudge it with clear policies, but expect troubles if a lot of people strongly disagree.
Interesting the name Roland should come up. That was the first name I thought of when I saw the headline. Roland Piquepaille should just retire his name and change it to something else like say Serdar Argic. Of course Roland is no Serdar. After all Wikipedia nuked Roland's entry.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I love that whole "if you are trying to defend yourself, you must be guilty" logic. That's just silly.
I agree with the rant. We all realize exactly what Beatles-Beatles is doing. He's sponging off of Slashdot's pagerank by posting stories. Still, I say "So what?" Is he hurting anybody? No. Why do you guys keep freaking out about it?
He's submitting legitimate stories that have perfectly legitimate value. Yes, he has an alterior motive. I guess you're only allowed to do anything if it is purely out of altruism or philanthropy, right? That's stupid and naive.
I have to say that I find it much more annoying to hear all these people on Slashdot bitching and moaning about this guy than the fact that he's posting stories with self-serving links.
I realize I'm probably going to get modded down for having an unpopular opinion here, but I'm just damn sick of hearing about this. Seriously.
If ScuttleMonkey does not know Beatles-Beatles, then why is he almost the only one who has ever posted his stories?
I have seen many, many, many submissions by Beatles-Beatles. I can't remember even one of them being posted by someone other than ScuttleMonkey. If it was simply a matter of Beatles-Beatles submitting a lot of stories, which you seem to infer, then they would be spread out among a number of editors, not all of which would be ScuttleMonkey.
This seems to poke a huge hole in your reply. There is something else going on here.
There are several ways you can combat this. WHy not change it so two edtiors need to approve a story instead of just one? Or, why not only have one external link / day for submitters? Then they wouldn't spam the queue so much.
As for your parent commect - the issue is not soley whether or not the user would enjoy the link. There is an issue of journailistic integrity here. Just because a story is facinating does not always mean a journalist should feel comfortable reporting on it. In the same way, just because a link is good does not mean you should be posting it.
If someone submitted a very interesting story, but their referrer link pointed at a child porn site, would you still post it?
Maybe you should discuss why you publish duplicate articles all of the time.
Why not make the "nofollow" a matter of karma? Those with por karma have a nofollow added to their link, just as their comments are started at score 0 or -1.
You could even get tricky and make a separate karma just for story submission, with some sort of moderation system. This moderation could be done by the editors themselves, or it could be opened up to the readership. I've read dozens of comments over the years where the submitter wished they could moderate the story. Perhaps it's time to add that functionality to slashcode.
I don't even look at who submitted it. Same with Digg -- It's the content, stupid. :-)
That said -- you were slashdot, even CowboyNeal was -- and we all shared your editorial taste. Now you have others making the majority of the choices and, well, their choices aren't always as good. In other words, you sucked less.
EOF
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Just replace the article text. Leave the attribution and attribution link (under the nickname, rarely followed by users) but rewrite the summary and skip the middleman, linking directly to the article. So Roland posts in his blog a piece of some other site and links to it. Write "[Roland] wrote about [this cool site], which is about..." instead of "[Roland] wrote: I've put a short blurb [in my blog] about that cool site..." He gets the nickname attribution link. Not all the slashdot effect hits.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Taco, dude, stop worry about the 'quality' of discussions.
/. think are funny - you know the posts I mean.
It really doesn't matter.
At the end of the day, moderation can't be expected to keep discussions on topic. The best you can expect is that it will filter out the absolute worst of the cesspool - the ones who post the classic posts that are just offensive and only people who are new to
The rest of the crap that gets posted but not moderated off my screen, I ignore. Most of the time. If I ever post on the unrelated crap, it is usually because I am bored and either a) the story that was posted bores me or b) i felt like it.
There is no rhyme or reason. Most of the people who make a big deal out of submitters etc are just bored and have nothing better to do than come up with conspiracy theories.
So. I repeat. Stop worrying about it. It doesn't really matter.
I can't believe you got worked up enough to actually spend time writing a rant about this. Jesus. You should be used to this shit by now and should be able to just tune it out.
Again. Stop worrying about it. It doesn't matter.
Perhaps you should start a feedback score for an article
E.g.
Dupe
Advert
Biased
Boring
People who submit too many times will have a lower score and a past history editors can look up.
First of all, Taco, I am glad you chose to gather feedback on this. I was the right thing(tm) to do, IMHO.
With regards to the linking issue, my take is that giving some guy a forum to plug his own website in return for a good story is perfectly fine. I just wish I could see which sort of link I am getting. Something like "original story" and "submitters take on the story" as mandatory fields.
In terms of incentive you just might want to add a link to the submitters homepage to the story heading, along the line of freshmeat. this would offer the incentive for submitting while making links to my-own-blog(tm) in the story text less attractive than now.
just my two cents
majello
This opinion is mine, you can't have it.
Slashdot's best days are behind it. There are too many other sources of news to wish submissions were better. There's a zillion sites and blogs for gaming news, gadget news, linux news, science news and anything else. It's easy to find. I rarely see it on Slashdot first, and the other sites usually have better visuals.
The only thing Slashdot has going for it over those other sites is the comment system.
You guys should stop worrying about who submits the news and start worrying about how you're going to compete with the bloggers who go out and find their own news.
Let's look at the supply and demand: apparently only 1 in 20 submissions ever makes it. Therefore, there is a massive oversupply, and it's quite clear that people don't need a link back to their website to be encouraged to submit stories to Slashdot.
Editors shouldn't just selectively remove link backs to a submitter's website - they should not put a link to the submitter at all, except maybe to the user's Slashdot user page (not journal). Perhaps I could understand the need to encourage people to submit stores if there were so few that the queue was almost empty, and every submission had to be posted - but this is clearly not the case.
Finally, I don't think people would have noticed * * Beatles-Beatles if his name wasn't so prominent, for example, if his username had been Johndoe or something else inconspicuous. Same goes for Roland Piquepaille who also has a prominent and eyecatching name that you'll remember the second time you see it - so some of the whole * * Beatles-Beatles controversy and Roland Piquepaille controversy is stirred up merely because their names stick in the mind.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
If you feel the need to defend your story submission criteria/methods, then that means you yourself feel that it isn't up to snuff.
No - he specifically said that it was to do with the amount of offtopic comments (that get modded up) that are the problem.
Many people come to slashdot for the comments rather then story (I am one of them).
It's good that Taco is trying to address this.
My pics.
Sometimes I find there are so many links in the summary that I can't find the actual news item amid the many background links shown. Perhaps "article" isn't a bad tag after all. I know the editor is trying to help make the summary flow, but it would be helpful if you could glance at a summary and clearly see the link that prompted the item.
I like good stories. Keep 'em coming.
I've been reading slashdot pretty much since it came about, seen a lot of good stories, lots of bad.
I've also seen some good comments, but lots of bad.
I've gotten to where I very rarely even read the comments, because most of them are *way* off topic, or are just full of crud.
I doubt this helps any with the problems, but I have no real suggestions to a solution either, just putting in my 1.5 cents + tax.
.
You ran a story on the "new" WinZip 10. Funny that there was nothing "new" about the WinZip 10, except its purchase by a VC firm determined to "make sure this great product actually makes money".
I don't like this story. Only if there were a method where everyone could vote on good stories.
No Digg.
I don't care about those who think you guys favor one person over another. Frankly, they're putting WAY too much of their pride into this. I happen to love slashdot the way it is, and don't want anything to change. I read this site daily, and have never had any qualms with stories posted here, other then the one or two that I read a couple days previous.
Keep the faith man. You're doing things right. Remember, this is your site. Readers don't pay to read. Hell they don't even have to register if they don't want to. 90% of slashdot readers could care less who submitted the freaking story. What your readers want is content, not who posted what.
To the readers and submitters who have cried and moaned about not getting your stories posted. Read what should be done when submitting a story, follow those guidelines, and maybe, just maybe, you'll have enough content to be worthy of a story here on this beloved site. Quit yer complaining!
if I were able to see further, it was because I stood on the shoulders of Giants -Newton
Please edit for spelling and grammar. Readable stories are good stories.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
If a story is up to the standards of being picked, then publish it. Simply because some people have problems with the source doesn't mean it's not a good story or not newsworthy.
Imagine if we were to apply the same logic proposed by some here to the network news channels or to newspapers, and just toss stories by people who are known to incite comment and ridicule... Dan Rather would've been out of a job a looooong time ago, The NYTimes would all but shut down, and the Washington Post would be a single sheet of paper with movie listing.
... elipses...
Whichever way it is -- some conspiracy theories do have hints of truth. Sure, the depths that the rumours tend to evolve to are essentially false, but they started somewhere.
About a year ago I submitted a story on "P2P through Firewalls" -- I wrote up the article and explicitly included "(link to Dijjer omitted at author's request)". I found that when it was posted on Slashdot, Michael had changed the article to make the word Dijjer link through to their page. This, despite flashing blinking red text on the Dijjer page that said "DO NOT LINK TO US". Stuff like that breeds conspiracy theories.
I don't think there is any be-all end-all solution to this problem other than dedicated moderators (and meta-moderators.) People need to be modded off topic if they are. Perhaps there could be some sort of penalty for bad moderation? ie. if 4 people mod a comment +1 Insightful, somebody mods it -1 flamebait, and then someone else mods it +1 insightful, the person who modded it 'against the grain' could be punnished by somehow being less likely to get mod points again. Maybe there could be some sort of 'smart' auto meta-moderation. just a few thoughts, too early in the morning bored at work...
Not another fucking CmdrTaco post. That guy sucks. All he ever does is whine and complain.
Am I the only one who never notices the name of the person who submits the story? I'm only interested in the article and the discussion, I could care less who submits it.
If the story is news for nerds then let it in and appeal to the moderators to flag offtopic posts as "off topic".
Or create a "bitchy whiner" mod.
I agree that it sucks when "[t]he messenger becomes the story." But you know, Slashdot is like Usenet used to be (before Slashdot and various other Web forums largely took over Usenet's role, leaving most newsgroups as purely the domain of spammers and trolls, I mean) in that, while there is a hell of a lot of noise, there is also a lot of signal -- and the noise really isn't that hard to skip over. Most users, it seems to me, can train themselves to scan posts quickly, decide if they're germane to the story or just a bunch of conspiracy-theory nonsense, and page down to the comments with some meat.
The moderation system should make this easier. Now, I'm not a big fan of the "Offtopic" mod -- I don't remember the last time I used it -- but what I do when I have mod points is try to mod up only on-topic comments (as well as comments that are good in other ways, of course: interesting, insightful, etc.) so that, hopefully, those comments and the threads they spawn will rise to the top of the page and leave the trolls and conspiracy theorists and **Beatles-Beatles dissas 'n' Piquepaille-hatas, yo, down at the bottom where they belong.
BTW, the reason I don't like "Offtopic" is because I think it's often abused; many mods will mark a post that way when it's a perfectly legitimate reply to another post which is kinda sorta ontopic. For example, in many science stories (regardless of the type of science in question) you'll see people ranting about how dumb and ignorant scientists are, often including links to creationist/ID propaganda or some bullshit look-how-clever-I-am Michael Crichton speech; and they may (or may not) get modded as "Troll" or "Flamebait," but people who respond to them and try to explain to them how science really works get modded "Offtopic" because the explanation isn't directly relevant to the original story. This is a problem, because these ideas need to be addressed whenever they crop up, IMNSGDHO. See also: rational discussion of the advantages of Mac OS X in response to "L0L M4XZ 5UX0RZ PCZ R0X0RZ" posts, usually in any given Apple story. "Offtopic" isn't a bad mod category in itself, but I think it should be much more carefully used.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I think an area of /. devoted to Story Submission statistics would be a fantastic feature. List how many stories a user has submitted on their profile page, list how many were accepted/rejected and/or a %.
List story subject lines of the last 1000 submitted stories, group them by relevance.
Allow searchable submitted stories in the last X number of hours so I don't waste time typing out a beautifully crafted story description and well researched links, only to see all my hard work get rejected when a similar story is accepted and published before mine is ever read.
Create a filter on submission that detects key phrases in my story, and shows me other submitted stories that are pending/denied/approved that may be related, so that I can search through them before submitting mine, or even rate pending or denied stories such that they may become approved by the user base.
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Make the policy simple:
1. The poster's name may link to whatever he or she wishes.
2. All other links must be relevant to the topic.
it will have been submitted by other people.
How many times do you actually only get 1 submition of a really good story that just broke?
Anyone have statistics on the times of day at which R.P. and **BB stories turn up?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
But never got around to it. Why are some stories accepted, but never posted?
For example: "Global Trends in 2020 09:19 AM January 24th, 2005 Accepted"
Accepted, but never posted. Editor just forgot to post it? <TinfoilHat>Killed after $someone complained?</TinfoilHat> OTBE'd? A bug?
Best Slashdot Co
Immoral Microsoft has shut down the Chinese-language weblog of Mr. Zhao Jing.
If you work for Microsoft, you have a moral obligation to quit your job in protest.
The Communist Chinese government murders people, and Microsoft is its helper.
If you own stock in Microsoft Corporation, you are a murderer by proxie.
To Microsoft, money is more important than DEMOCRACY and HUMAN RIGHTS.
Conscientious decision-makers have a fiduciary obligation to abandon Microsoft censorship
and to migrate their information-technology purchases to sources supportive of free speech.
Cryptome CN publishes information, documents and opinions banned by Peking and Microsoft.
Piquepaille, Roland Piquepaille. It's simple.
You just got troll'd!
For the same reason that APES live in a BESTIARY and BEES live in an APIARY: Because there is no SPOON. Next question!
-- thinkyhead software and media
Could that be to do with timezomes.
These submitters and editors are people and sleep occasionally - it might simply be coincidence that they submit with the respective times.
liqbase
samzenpus and cmdrTaco have both posted stories by this Beatles fellow. Though it does appear Scuttlemonkey posts most of them.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
I say 'Reward the guy who manages to get his submission published with the link.'
I've never submitted a story, as I really cannot be arsed, I'm lazy and selfish. These people who do submit them are giving their time in order that we may be entertained/informed.
There is nothing stopping YOU submitting the same quality or quantity or stories as bug-bug does, except for either your low intellectual ability or dare I say laziness.
So to fix this problem the answer is simple - submit better quality stories so that yours get pyublished, not theirs and use your link to point to something like savehtewhale.org
Oh, and need I say 'Don't feed the trolls'
they come here for the atmosphere and the attitude. Seriously, when I started reading slashdot (under a different uid), it was often 3 to 6 months ahead of other news sources. These days, with the blogosphere what it is, slashdot is unfortunately more in-line or even following other sites in terms of speed. What people say again and again is that it is the discussion that keeps them coming back, not just the links. It would follow then, that the thing you should try to protect is the quality of the discussion. Encouraging moderators to keep things on-topic is one way. But it isn't sufficient. I agree with other posters in feeling that it is highly unlikely that "problem submitters" are the only ones aware of and submitting the story, especially when the link appeared first on other tech blogs which I will leave unnamed. Since timeliness has largely been conceded, but quality of community and discussion most certainly has not, it seems that the only conclusion is to reject the "problem submitters," and let the stories come up elsewhere. People wpn't stick around if they feel slashdot has degenerated into a link farm. To our fearless leader: I think this is really an issue about responding to disruptive changes in internet news. It isn't that unlike the changes that conventional, dead tree publications faced a few years ago: they were becoming increasingly less competitive in terms of being first, so the quality of their analysis and insight became their source of competitive advantage. Those that realised that and focused appropriately succeeded, and those that didn't did not. Slashdot can't stay static and survive given the pace of change in the interactive media culture it helped pioneer.
First of all CmdrTaco, huge thanks for Slashdot!
Should part of this process be checking the URL of the submitter to make sure that it is legitimate? Does that really matter? Should we add a nofollow tag to those URLs?
No, this would be too time consuming, but beware of posters that repeatedly post bad submissions and consider banning the ones who don't have anything sincere to contribute or when 'the messenger becomes the story.'
Damned if I do, damned if I don't, right? I'm seriously looking for feedback here. What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?
If the person is a repeat Troll or Flamebaiter just ban them permanently, otherwise let them submit and let the moderations/comments fall where they may. Possibly limit the number of submissions per user if they are submitting too many, or use another person who submitted the same story instead of the repeat submitters.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
If ten people submit the same story then the editors are going to publish the one that requires the least editing. This is the problem because experienced spammers are masters of the format. Solution is to have story moderation and make sure that the editors cosider the reputation of the submitter when picking the stories to publish.
The quality was better five years ago.
So... how about creating a "Rejected" section? Obvious trolls and one/two-line stories can be discarded and removed. The rest, we can see.
At the leats, it'd be interesting to look at.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
We know, we know. The one's you like, you post more than once!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Or maybe not. I dunno.
A-Bomb
Maybe you should have something that keeps track of how many articles someone's submitted then prioritize the queue by that, least submissions first. That way it prevents people complaining about over-accepting submissions from the same person (like here), and it penalises people who try spamming the queue to get accepted.
Also, don't just reject other people's submissions because you've had enough articles for the day. Keep them for posting later, like you say late at night the site tends to get slow.
If you've got a story, but the submittor's url is inflamitory, derogitory, whatever. Why not leave them a message to resubmit with a differrent url.
Or if you suspect that the submittors's name will spawn more discussion then the topic, Ask them to resubmit as anonymous.
Do this with the statement that if someone else submits the same story you can use the new one. If the resubmitted entry is agreeable, then it will be printed.
The big problem I've had in submitting stories (some that where much more interesting then the days fodder at the time) is that I don't know why they were rejected. It's like a neural net that has no feedback. By adding a little feedback, you would get better submissions and thereby better stories. I'm sure that you've got several standard reasons for rejecting, just boilerplate them.
... number of submissions. Shrug, if someone is sending 20 a day they need shot. Limit people to 1 submission a day so they're forced to submit only their best rather than taking the shotgun approach.
Shadus
Same here.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
For what it's worth, here's my suggestion for dealing with some of the problem posts/discussions:
Place a submit button at the end of every post and reply. The button is labeled with instructions to "Click here if this reply is off-topic, an attack on the submitter....[you could add more criteria]"
Clicking the button logs the post/reply ID, possibly the ID of the clicker (e.g. HikingStick for me, Anonymous Coward for many).
When any given thread reaches a threshhold based on average volume, an alert is generated. For the sake of this illustration, lets assume that 20 clicks is enough to generate the alert.
The alert sends an email to a small group of users who would normally be eligible for moderation. This email provides them a link to the flagged material and they are assigned special moderator privileges for that given item regardless of when they last had (or if they currently have) moderator points.
These "incident moderators" can review the post/reply and, if appropriate, take immediate action to drop the rating more than one point (perhaps two points), or can take other administrative action as delegated.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Beatles-Beatles submissions are overwhelmingly approved by a single editor, Scuttlemonkey. Looking at other stories, this isn't the case for other people submitting stories. This looks very much like Scuttlemonkey has a strong motivation to approve Beatles-Beatles stories that the rest of the editors do not have. What is this motivation?
As for the reward, are you aware that Beatles-Beatles is "reselling" your pagerank? To the detriment of search engine results? If your "reward" for submissions was spamming email rather than search engines, would you be equally in favour of keeping things as they are? Why help spammers of one type but condemn others?
Other than that, good idea on posting more about Slashdot itself. But why must you reply to all your email? You have a article posted here with lots of comments and lots of moderation. Why not ignore the email and reply to the highly-moderated comments?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
But if the link is good, why NOT share it with the audience? I believe my first priority is to the readers here. If they would enjoy a link, why should the fact that it came from a user with a negative repution make me not choose the link?
I think a good part of the problem here is the perception (and occasionally documented fact) that other, non-link-whore readers have submitted the same story, sometimes days before, and been rejected. In other cases, the stories the link whores link to are months, maybe years old, or blatantly mis-represented in the summaries.
Thus we aren't really in the situation you describe of getting good, fresh links that we would not otherwise see from these people; when the links are good, there's a fairly good chance that someone else has submitted it too (and that chance would rise if people in general thought their odds of acceptance were better). And when the links aren't that great, the loss isn't either.
I would agree with the GP that there should be some sort of rotating queue or time limit on acceptance. Perhaps putting people who have had a story accepted in the last month at the end of the slush-queue, so that all stories from non-accepted readers get considered first.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Thank you very, very much for this thread. The Beatles Pascal thing isn't a particularly hot issue with me, but I recognize and appreciate the effort that opening a thread like this entails.
I've come to learn, maybe all of you know this already that you as a poster never see the actually modding done to your posts. Yet you are evaluated and possibly suspended or worse based specifically on that which you never see and never know. Take for example a post - it goes in as a 2. Now 8 people read it and 4 of them mod it down and 4 of them mod it up. It winds up with the same score as it started, but somewhere in the bowels of /. you get 4 black marks in your tally for being modded down 4 times. You never see this, never know it. Until of course you cross some magic Jedi threshold whereby /. has determined you have been modded down too many times and are to be suspended. Also your overall karma has zero bearing on this.
Again, maybe I'm the last person here to know this but I just wanted to share.
What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?
My feeling is that you should not know who this user is in the first place.
Why not setting up something that expose stories anonymously and with some randomness in their order to you guys (that would require to group and hold stories for a short while); It would give everyone a fair chance to be selected for a single story that has many submissions.
I really don't think you should bother and know about who send what.
what a load of total shit, please explain
a) why scam monkey is the one that posts his stories, which, always suck and have some beatles related word snuck in.
b) why you can't understand how on earth anyone could, given 5 seconds of scrutiny figure out exactly what is going on.
"What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?"
.
Pay no attention to the submitter of a piece. At all. Maybe have it be invisible to the editors.
Then, we can all assume that there is no favoritism, etc, except in terms of article/subject/writing style preference
And, ideally, this would result in truly the best articles being posted.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I would love to see posts like this once a month or so! How about it?
Post it - focus on story not the submitter!!
Sheesh. Here you dare to submit your own story, which asks legitimate questions, and even asks for feedback. The hubris!
You're lucky that the feedback has (as far as I read) thus far only accused you of
- Cronyism
- Faking user identities
- Taking kickbacks for posting stories
- General stupidity.
OKAY, FOLKS. TIME TO WAKE UP.
Let's take 'em, here:
Cronyism/faking poster names. IF ROB WANTED TO POST FAKE USERNAMES, DON'T YOU THINK HE MIGHT TRY TO COVER HIS TRACKS A LITTLE BETTER? Occam's razor kinda dictates that this Beatles Beatles guy is legit, 'cause Rob could cough up as many accounts as he wanted if here were attempting to run a propaganda site.
Kickbacks for stories. Ummmm... duh. Let's face it: we read Slashdot (or, at least, *I* read Slashdot -- and have for years; check my user number) because we enjoy the stories, and the commentary. If we EVER found ANY conclusive evidence that Rob was taking kickbacks from advertisers, I think it would be safe to say the site would be abandoned wholesale. Instead, just like UFO abduction stories, people love to discuss potential cabals and conspiracies, but offer no proof whatsoever. PUT UP OR SHUT UP.
General stupidity. Okay, maybe this one's valid, maybe it isn't. But, akin to Howard Stern's take on similar situations, IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, STOP READING. I can think of no better vote. No, you DON'T own the site. Rob does. (Or the media conglomarate. Not sure. Doesn't matter.) But we, the users, in a very real sense do dictate the site's future. If we stopped reading, it would go away. So, if you're so pissed, STOP READING. If you think the stories that are posted are stupid, STOP READING. There are plenty of other sites that are spawned in Slashdot's image, that offer different editorial direction and/or mechanisms. Feel free to avail yourselves of them. And, while we're at it, if it's not to the point where you want to wholesale abandon the site, you can -- gasp -- get mod points to change the feel of a story's discussion. Use 'em.
In the meantime, I think Rob and the crew -- with the odd exception (see: magnetic longevity rings) -- try hard, and succeed most of the time. Certainly enough that Slasdhot's one of the sites I refresh the most. I, personally, will continue reading, as long as CmdrTaco and Hemos are associated with the site. They ain't perfect, but they do a damn good job, and have done it long enough and well enough to show it ain't a fluke.
Party on Way^H^H^H^H Rob.
Party on Hemos.
Strip out the fans, add 8 gallons of cooking oil Monday January 09, @01:16PM Rejected
Microsoft plans to put Xbox in Nissans Monday January 09, @01:03PM Rejected
Digg.com has frontpage link to Slashdot Monday December 12, @09:44AM Rejected
Get RSS Feeds on Your Toilet Paper Thursday December 08, @08:58AM Accepted
Google Releases Transit Trip Planner Thursday December 08, @08:52AM Rejected
Say Hello to .ANYTHING domain names Wednesday November 30, @09:10AM Rejected
Close Call for Stephen Hawking Friday November 18, @04:04PM Rejected
New Linux Shell - vshnu Friday November 18, @03:53PM Rejected
Organic Polymer Tunnel Diodes Friday November 18, @11:17AM Rejected
Sony DRM unistaller worse than rootkit Friday November 18, @11:10AM Rejected
iTunes Security Flaw Discovered Friday November 18, @11:05AM Rejected
Google Corrects Gmail Security Flaw Friday November 18, @10:05AM Accepted
US lead in science and tech may end soon Friday November 18, @10:00AM Rejected
The Physics and Math of Cow Tipping Friday November 18, @09:17AM Rejected
Google Purchases Riya for $40 Mil Friday November 18, @09:11AM Rejected
Counterfeiters caught in a jam Thursday November 17, @04:05PM Rejected
Digg might bury Slashdot Thursday November 17, @08:32AM Rejected
No direct link between P2P and lower music sales Wednesday November 16, @01:30PM Rejected
Only 80 Games A Year Will Succeed Wednesday November 16, @01:23PM Accepted
Gates speaks to SuperComputer Experts Wednesday November 16, @09:48AM Rejected
Flight of the Falcon. Saving the Earth? Wednesday November 16, @09:43AM Rejected
Sober virus outbreak springs 6 variants Wednesday November 16, @09:38AM Rejected
MIT to launch a $100 laptop in November Wednesday November 16, @09:16AM Rejected
How Apple, Microsoft, and Sony cash in on piracy Tuesday November 15, @12:15PM Rejected
Furor Grows over Internet Bugging Thursday October 20, @10:07AM Rejected
A book that googles Google Tuesday September 13, @01:07PM Rejected
What would you do for a $50 iBook? Tuesday August 16, @12:45PM Rejected
Blind teen amazes with video-game skills Friday July 29, @12:02PM Rejected
Woman sues GTAs Rockstar Games Wednesday July 27, @03:14PM Rejected
Illinois bill targets mature video games Wednesday July 27, @03:07PM Rejected
Hackers target flawed backup software Tuesday July 26, @10:17AM Rejected
Programmers: Video games need a woman's touch Tuesday July 26, @10:12AM Rejected
Microsoft expands anti-piracy program Tuesday July 26, @10:06AM Rejected
Astronauts strapped in for launch Tuesday July 26, @08:35AM Rejected
Websites censored by US Governement Friday July 22, @03:53PM Rejected
Foghorn Longhorn Wednesday July 20, @01:55PM Rejected
USC database hacked Wednesday July 20, @01:45PM Rejected
Dork Pride! Suddenly, it's cool to be uncool Tuesday July 19, @09:37AM Rejected
New .mobi Web Suffix for phones Tuesday July 12, @10:17AM Rejected
Steve Jobs calls family of stabbing victim Wednesday July 06, @09:45AM Rejected
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Could someone just clear up the link spamming for me....
I understand that in **Beatles-Beatles' case he usually provides a return link to his website which is full of advert links - so does the fact this link is posted on slashdot create the revenue for him (eg 20,000 users read the slashdot entry and he automatically gets 20,000 click throughs) , or do we still individually have to manually click through to his site?
Damned if I do, damned if I don't, right? I'm seriously looking for feedback here. What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?
/. profile page and hit up their bio and URL from there.
Instead of linking to an user inputed URL on the story, why not just give the option to link to their Slashdot profile.
That way they can't abuse Google page rank, but if anyone is still interested in the submitter they can go to their
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I might be considered a casual Slashdot reader: I check the site frequently, at least daily, and I follow the links in the stories that interest me. Sometimes I read the discussion on /. itself. From my perspective, the current system mostly works: a wide variety of material comes across the front page of /. and keeps my eyes on the bigger pictures.
I do wish some of the discussions were more substantive and on-topic, but I'm not entirely sure how you might go about achieving that. It's something that every association deals with -- hey, if you want to know why I don't consider on-line groups to be communities, then you'll have to check out my website. (But I'm not going to link to it.)
So there.
I've said it before, CmdrTaco, and you've answered me. I think you should spell check your summaries. You replied that it was 'not our character' or something like that. Fair enough.
But now you say your job is to make the submission "presentable".
If you and your editors work on your actual writing skills and presentation, and maybe I'll think about subscribing. I don't now, because of this, and I don't complain, because its free for me. (You can consider this post constructive criticism.) But if you are wondering about subscription rates... for me, that is the reason. Slashdot is not professional. It doesn't deserve money until it chooses to be so.
I am happy to take it as it is, while it is free. Ask for money, and the expectations are quite different.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
/. should provide feedback to story submitters, informing them of why their story was declined.
/. to improve future submissions.
/. reader - I'm a published technology author (magazine articles, blogs, working on a book) - so, to have stories declined by /. from my perspective is very, very odd.
/.'s article selection process for everyone.
This would allow submitters to revise their submission accordingly, or to submit stories of higher quality in the future.
Instead, we're left wondering why nearly every story we submit is declined, and given no information from
Eventually we'll stop submitting stories - at least, I have.
Now, keep in mind, I'm not your average
Work out a better feedback system, and you'll improve
Actually, I take the same position on ads that you do: I flashblock annoying ones but static ads do not bother me, because I know they're how the site pays for itself. (I do have Firefox set to play animated GIFs only once, because they're just as distracting.)
I have been around here for a while and over time I have had to boost the comment threshold quite a bit to drown out the whiners and trolls. However, reading at a high threshold gives a peaceful and interesting view of the comments. So much so, I was *unaware* of this "problem".
The moderation system is doing the job it was meant to do: whiners and trolls get left at the bottom and content actually rises to the higher levels where I see it. Some days I feel like I'm sponging off those who have mod points, but I mysteriously lost my mod abilities years ago, so there isn't much I can do about that.
I *literally* don't see the problem. Those who read at lower levels may, but I thought that was the point behind making that choice. I don't want to see whiners and trolls, they do. While you might think that meta stories are going to help get recommendations, the reality is you will get nothing but the same whines and trolls you were trying to avoid... promoted to "5". Oh, yay.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Perhaps only accept submissions from someone who has written at least n comments to stories at /. (n being whatever you choose > 0). Also, their Karma must be above a certain point.
/. that seems to be getting lost. Members who participate in the site--leave comments, etc.--are the ones who direct the ship.
This will give a true community feel to
Anyone else submitting stories probably has their own agenda. While their stories might be cool, they're truly not part of the community.
Active/semi-active participants are the folk who generate your ad revenue, not others.
Make it clear in the story submission area that linking to your own blog which gives a summary of a story and a link to the story is not desired. Heck, even be a bastard and say you reserve the right to edit the submission to give the actual link. I hate to bring in this site, but Digg has that problem (people linking to their own blogs) and they constantly rake people over the coals over it. Use your superior position as editor to stop that crap.
Regarding someone who posts really good stories over and over, let them. Use your ability to talk about Slashdot (as you have done) to disclaim that you are those people if you think it is a problem. (Again, hate to say, but Digg has this same problem with AlbertPachino and a few others.)
You encouraged us to talk about this subject and not talk so much about Digg, but I think that is entirely the point. You are acting in Digg mode and taking what you got. A lot of crap bleeds through on Digg because the editors (read: users) aren't bright and they don't have an editorial backbone. You are an editor, and we come to you for the edited stories. EDIT! Add a disclaimer if you have to.
PS: Now for my small side indulgence. I wish you would increase the story rotation or have a section of the website with a higher story rotation. Something to compete with Digg, but without the infestation of 13 year olds.
Some stories stick out as paid for advertisements. Maybe these are really unbiased postings, but often they seem to obvious to users (including me) that they are there because someone paid money to get them there. Does /. take money for reviews? If so can we users at least get a warning like "Advert" in the heading?
Part of the Slashdot Editor's job is to make a submission "Presentable".
Oh, I know, you must mean correcting obvious spelling and grammar mistakes, right?
Usually this means moving a few URLs around.
Oh, OK. But I guess it would also mean checking to see if the article summary is an accurate summary of the linked article.
I'd guess a good half of story submissions use the word 'here' or 'article' or something equally stupid as their anchor text. I prefer relevant words to be linked.
Well, yes. That would be nice. But about those spelling and grammar problems...
There are other minor things tho, like taking off extra intros like "Hi guys I read Slashdot every day and thought you would like this".
Uh, hello? Accuracy? Spelling and grammar? Anyone?
Speaking of Roland Piquepaille, he's not a part of ZDNet. Here's the story, with a creepy-ass picture where he looks like a cracked-out muppet.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I feel you might be handling this the wrong way, the problem is that right now the only incentive to submit stories is to get a link, if you add incentive (ad free for a week or something) you will get more and better submisions, reducing the people who just want a link. Also maybe add no follow tags if a submitter has submitted more then 4 in a week or something? Also you could limit submissions per account, which would decrease the spaming of articles (maybe a system where accepted articles allow more submissions while rejected for cause (i.e. not those who submitted an article that wasn't published yet, but weren't first) reducing the number of submissions. You need to increase the value of an accepted submission while simulatenously increasing the cost of submission.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
It seems a simple idea. You show which stories were rejected on some page in tha back of the site. It allows the people to view for themselves the story whores and it lets people starved of news to see some 'weaker' stories.
The only problem I see is people writing nonsense storys/flames just to get the visibility but that has always existed in the comment system anyway.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
This is clearly a shameless slashvertisement for /.
Next!
There will always be dissenters and people who argue either side til their throats bleed. Facts of life are Slashdot has its user base because its methodology works. Those people who swing left and right are the people that define and effect the middle and hence their opinions are important. I say though, even though I am disgruntled when my stories don't get through, I can often see why. So keep up the good work. The review process is good and based in sound philosophy (I read it somewhere on the site).
Really, I don't care who the submitter is, I don't care where his links goes. I never follow the submitter's link, or even notice his name. They should just pick the best quality submission for each story, I fail to see why the submitter should be important to anyone at all.
Just my two copper pieces.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
It's like you want to fill space and thus present some of the most drab stories out there.
the beatles guy-scuttlemonkey "coincidence". if beatles really submitted that many stories, how come scuttlemonkey is the only editor that accepts his submissions?
Namely why is valid BSD news getting rejected time and time again. Example DragonFlyBSD release 1.4 happened several days ago and all submissions to /. have been rejected. I'm not asking for front page, how about just BSD section thats valid and to some pretty big news.
I realize that I'm walking a fine line with this question, but seriously... If the readers of /. decide that they want to fill a message thread with conspiracy theories, or diatribe about the poster, what's the problem here? They've read the article (in some cases), they've came to the site, they're interested in it enough to leave feedback, you've got your readers, etc.
/. readers want to discuss. Simple as that. It might not be the intellectually fulfilling discussion that you (meaning the editor who approved the story)envisioned, but that's not the role a good editor should take IMHO. An editor is there to make sure that a story is legible, easily read (well.. It's slashdot after all, so this is sometimes questionable), and fosters discussion among its readers. That's exactly what the articles you're ranting about are doing. The difference is that the discussion isn't what you wanted to see, and so you feel it's a waste of everyones time simply because it's a waste of your time, based on your interests.
/. felt the same way, then this off-topic discussion wouldn't take place. But they don't... People have their own opinions, and they should be able to discuss what they want in an open forum. Anything less is censorship.
/. editors focusing on a way to avoid duplicate articles, rather than working towards eliminating the opinions of those they disagree with.
I'm sure that you didn't intend it this way, but your "rant" seems to indicate that in your opinion, the message threads become a waste of time for anyone who wants to discuss the merits of the article if it degenerates into a slamfest about the poster, or his/her reason for providing the post. I disagree!
If the message feedback becomes centered around the poster, and their ethics, than that's what the
If everyone reading
And as far as the moderators go, there is an "off-topic" category, and any non-article specific talk (such as discussing the merits of the submitter) can, and often are labeled as off-topic. In an ideal world, I'd think that a lot of what's bothering yo should have been labeled as off-topic, and still rated based on content. So you might have an off-topic rated thread, but this thread could (or at least should)still be able to be rated up to a 5, or down to a negative based on its content.
I guess my point is this: The old "You build it, and they'll come" saying has worked for Slashdot. You built this site, promoted it, whatever... And we came. You however seem to have a problem with what we want to discuss now that we're here.
If moderators used the system as it's implied, and rated these off-topic threads accurately, you could just choose to filter out off-topic threads and you'd never be bothered by such things. However moderators here seem WAY too focused on modding down content and posters they disagree with, rather than promoting and categorizing the messages in a more neutral manner.
Personally, I'd rather see the
I'm finding digg.com is more relevant to me anyway. Slashdot is old and tired, I've been here since Chips & Dips and I'm just not excited about Slashdot anymore. Too bad selling userids is frowned on.
The more you know, the less you understand.
Before this story was posted, I didn't care less who submitted a story. Seriously. Why care about it, its about the content. If I am interested I read it, whoever submitted it, if not, I don't. End of discussion.
I wouldn't give anything about who submitted a story. It looks interesting and fits into a slashdot topic post it, if not, then not. If its too crap written so you would need too much time posting it, drop it. Sad but true. Perhaps anotherone will repost it in a more useful way.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
A-HA! They got to you, didn't they!
Best Slashdot Co
I definitely appreciate what you're saying about the discussion getting off-track and becoming a flame-fest about the submitter rather than the story, but in those cases, it could just be that the story wasn't as interesting as it seemed. I know in a lot of BB cases, I just find the "he is an alias for [slashdot editor du jour]" thread and ignore it entirely. The people who want to go over the same conspiracy fluff again can do it, and the people that don't can hopefully parse through it. I know you feel like you have to focus the attention, but I don't think there's a reasonable way to do it. It's all about precedent, and you can't revise content without getting burned.
:)
In a "normal" media world we'd know these super-submitters inside out by now. We'd have pictures of them at the corner store, walking the dog, who they're dating (ha!) and what they ate for breakfast. Transparency helps cut down heroes and villains, I think. But I don't see that kinda thing happening with overly-successful Slashdot posters
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Allow modding of both stories and submitters, not just content. Between the rotating mod points and meta-modding, most of these problems will quickly resolve themselves, including people bitching that it is the staff's fault. So, if a story is out for ten minutes and is quickly modded "-2 Slashverdisement" or "-5 Dupe," people who don't want to see that crap, well, won't. Most people who have made this suggestion have done so half-jokingly, but really, why the hell not?
I don't think you should allow anything but the actual story dictate how you post. It shouldn't matter at all who submitted and what URL they leave. If you like the story, post it. If people can't handle that, well, they've got some growing up todo. There are lots of bright, young people on /., but there are certain things that you only acquire with age. I would let moderators mod-down any OT discussions, especially if they get out of hand. I think the bottom line with /. is that the people decide what to talk about. I can scan through a couple hundred posts in no time... anyway.
I agree that the system mostly works. Most of the conspiracy theories are just unreasonable, and the complaints are often unwarrented. If you really wanted to quiet complaints for good, I think the only system that would really please people uniformly would be some sort of story moderation or metamoderation system. One suggestion has been to allow subscribers to moderate stories to see if they ever see the light of day for non-subscribers. I have to say that I believe this probably would improve the quality of stories (and take some burden of the editors), but I'm not sure if it is feasable in the near term.
Every once in a while there is a problem with story selection. One which annoyed me was a series of "science" articles from Sterling D Allan with science that was questionable at best, often linking back to the clearly crackpot oriented opensourceenergy.org. Perhaps the most egregeous of these was Wilma the Capacitor and Particle Accelerator. That one certainly shouldn't have gotten through, but more generally I would have liked to have seen the many complaints from users on his stories have some effect on whether the future ones would be accepted.
Maybe a middle ground would just be to allow people to rate stories after they've been posted and then keep a tally for each submitter. Then at least editors can check this rating for the submitter to warn them if there's a person whose submissions they should check over extra carefully. It could be, though, that submitters would just start switching identities to get around this.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Part of the reason that accusations of a Slashdot insider submitting stories is that the going-ons of Slashdot are shrouded in secrecy. What happened to Jon Katz? What is Michael's status? What is Timothy's status? If Rob Malda was a little more up-front with things like this, maybe people wouldn't need to guess or come up with conspiracy theories.
And when I say 'edit' I'm not just talking about spelling. You frequently post stories verbatim even when the original submission doesn't even contain sentences, or stories that make no sense out of context. These are very basic editing skills that you all appear to lack.
-- SIGFPE
Quote:
"Now the real problem with this is what it does to the discussion. Last night a nice story was posted. It came from one of our "Problem" users. And dozens of comments were posted about this user. The conspiracy theories. The hostility. Now a lot of this is normal Slashdot Forum Faire. Thats fine. But the problem is that often when this occurs, it swamps out the real discussion. The messenger becomes the story.
I think this sucks."
I submit a lot of peoples behaviour is dependent on the environment they find themselves in. An otherwise honest person will steal food without a qualm if it means life or death. Slashdot's environment provides a place for bad behaviour to happen without hindrance, and thus encourages it.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Hey its all about the story, someone submits a lotta good ones and has a crappy website linked to their name, owell... my websites crappy, so what?, The answer is not with the Editors its with the Submitters. If you don't like someone submitting stories.. submit better stories before he does, otherwise live with it.. Otherwise if BeatlesBeatles or who ever submits a cool story they should be able to link to whatever dumb website is their preference.
"On a normal ascii line, the only safe condition to detect is a 'BREAK' - everything else having been assigned functions
Let them keep the link but use nofollow. They'll still get the "cred" of it being there, it'll still drive people to visit their site out of interest but the search engines will ignore it and so those who try to post articles to boost their pagerank will be left out.
Everyone is a winner. Except the pagerank scammers, but we don't care about them.
I like this idea of Taco posting stuff about Slashdot every month. Next time I'd like to know how they handle dupes and what they intend on doing/implementing to reduce the number.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Mentifex could never get a story published until Zonk was in charge of Slashdot overnight.
Zonk knows what is worth publishing.There's a couple of problems with what's going on, and they've gotten worse because they've gone on for a period of time. The first is that you feel that the incentive to submit articles is that you send the /. readers to the URL they chose. I would argue that the entire incentive should be that you shared something geeky with fellow geeks, and they enjoyed it. The URL should post to the actual best information, not some rehash on a personal blog. I don't want to waste my mind finding a cool article, and then click on a link that simply takes me to some guy's site, where he might not have even linked where *he* found the article. Then I have to google it. Please don't waste my time.
/. with stories to increase the page views on their personal blog.
But let me argue it another way. Let's say I agreed with you that they should be able to keep that URL. The reality is that we, the readers, are not happy with that, and you're seeing the discussion become about the submitter and not the story. There's a reason for that. We are all smart enough to understand what they're doing - spamming
Either way I see it, it comes to the same thing. And in the end, who are your customers?
No matter what, people are going to insult each other here. I would side to be 'damned if you do', and post the URLs, and let the users have an option to enable or disable the submitter's URL. If the users are complaining about the submitter, they really need to find something a little more productive to do.
Also, another major contributor to this is the fact that the userbase usually does not have an appropriate place (or story, or thread, for that matter) to vent perceived weird stuff in /. That's even discouraged ("Note: grousing about rejected submissions is Offtopic and usually gets moderated that way.")
Yeah, I know this is karma-whoring, but since it is about /. itself, I'd like to have us call it "meta-karma-whoring"!
This is one of my favorite sites and has been for years. I'm here every day. But lately my interest in this site is waning. Here are the recent trends in story selection I find most annoying.
Look at what's on the top of each page. "News that matters". Lately you've been sliding away from that slogan. And that's the real threat to this site.
Post it. If it's good then I want to read it. I almost never take notice of who submitted a story. I just don't give a shit, and neither should anyone else, unless it's obviously spam.
If some people want to bitch and whine about the messenger, that's their problem.the editors can still edit for content. Optionially provide some feedback from the moderators. Then moderate the moderators who do a "proper" job and no screw around.
"I prefer relevant words to be linked." ;)
Then why is "Beatles Beatles" not a link in your rant?
...so everyone gets roasted. If the offtopic posts about an author are getting modded up, and the metamoderators are not nipping that in the bud, then that is how the site works currently. The next step is probably to have periodic meta moderation audits to make sure that the site is going in the direction you want.
As a regular metamoderator I can tell you that I rarely quibble with +1 insightful or +1 interesting. A +1 informative needs to at least have a cross reference or impart real knowledge. But +1 insightful on a post that contains an unemotional plain response always works. The -1 moderations get examined with the hot lights. Half of the -1 trolls usually are not. But the unfortunate part about being a metamoderator is that you are exposed to the more disgusting real trolls (*YUK*). Probably 2/3 of the -1 offtopic posts really are. But, Troll, Offtopic, and redundant are way overused to attempt to shut someone up with a valid contribution that does not agree with the majority. I look at underrated and overrated posts and make a judgement call. It does not seem to be a commonly used mod. +1 Funny, well, if the rumor is true that Funny does not count towards your karma, then it is probably for the best...
So just now
+1 funny - unfair (judgement call, but hey, you would have stared at anyone who said this out loud. Shameful waste of a mod point in my opinion.)
-1 offtopic - unfair (I won't name the subject, but it is one of the hot buttons on the site. It was a topical post within a +5 thread)
+1 insightful - fair
-1 offtopic - fair
+1 funny - fair
-1 redundant - fair (but probably should have been -1 offtopic)
+1 insightful - fair
+1 informative - fair
+1 insightful - fair
+1 insightful - fair
8 fairs to 2 unfairs is a pretty typical session. Also, 7 upmods to 3 downmods is pretty typical.
Have you Meta Moderated t
The simplest way, I think, would be to introduce another moderation selection, "Offtopic - Submission Related" which would indicate to the rest of the Slashdot audience that this type of troff isn't appropriate in the discussion. The topic is indeed the story, not the submitter or anything else.
A bit less negative in nature would be to allow the user indicate whether or not the comment is about the story or the submission. From there, the comments would be separated into two respective bins that a user could select to read from. The types of comments I could see going into the submission comment bin are:
* Misspellings in summary
* Factual problems in the summary
* Dupe complaints
* Out-of-date nature complaints
* Plagarism complaints
* Complaints about the submitter
* etc.
Having all these types of comments segregated from the real meaty comments I feel would really clean up the quality of discussion in general.
The number of times you have run hardware/pc-tech stories where the submitter is the owner of the site linked is what gets me.
Granted some will then submit anonymous but its far better than seeing @nnnnn.net being the same address as the story and then getting bombared with ads.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
CmndrTaco, You're doing a good job. You are approaching the issue circumspectly and openly. You are admitting that there are quirks in the system and that sometimes crap falls through.
Gee, sounds a whole lot like life to me.
My subject, "I actually have a life...". I spend too much time earning a living to go off on someone who posts utter crap. That's what the editors and moderators are for and they are doing a pretty damn fine job. How can I tell? Because I (and many like me) keep coming back. If you weren't doing a good job, I'd go elsewhere for my relevant geek news and never even tell you about it, probably.
I'm involved here. I Meta Moderate semi-frequently. I even used my Moerator points once (it took me an hour to figure out what they were for... it's not obvious to the unitiated).
You can't please all the people all of the time. Hell, you can't please most people some of the time. You gotta please yourself.
I don't submit a lot, and I've had some submissions rejected that were later posted for someone else. I started to get discouraged by that, until I figured out that the style of the submission matters as well as the subject. Editors, whether here or at a newspaper or a magazine, all have a style to which they respond. /. has multiple editors with differing preferences, but there is still a style that works here. K5 has a different style, and writing a letter to the editor of the New York Times takes a different style, if you want to see it published.
You have to think about your audience.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I like how Rob totally omits editing spelling & grammar in the story submissions from the job of "editur".
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If a known nazi (such as Adolf Hitler) would recommend something to you; what happens when you in turn recommend it to others, saying your source is Adolf Hitler?
In a logical world, people would see that YOU recommend it; no matter the source.
In the real world, people would see you condone Adolf Hitler's message - whether it's his core message or just a "cool article".
No, I'm honestly not trying to troll here (even when Godwin-ing this thread); - I just thought it'd be a good way to get the point across.
What you're doing is actually legitimizing Roland's link-whoring, saying everyone should do it if they so please.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think ripping the articles of well-written websites is a nice thing to do?
If you're going to classify someone as a 'troublemaker', and reject a submissions based on that, you really should provide a remediation process, and some kind of definition of what kinds of things get you labeled as trouble, so there's a clear picture of how to avoid landing in the don't-bother-to-contribute bin. Otherwise, the general openness of discussions on /. is taken down a step. BTW, that's not necessarily a bad thing, less openness. Its just your choice, as to whether or not to label someone trouble and reject submissions based on that, and open that can of worms. I guess its the lesser of two evils, really.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
"I'd guess a good half of story submissions use the word 'here' or 'article' or something equally stupid as their anchor text."
The reason people do this is because it's the right thing to do! I'm constantly annoyed that it's not obvious which link in a story goes to the article being discussed. Slashdot's 'pick words at random' attitude to links is the only reason I have Firefox's staus bar turned on all the time.
Take the recent story about the 'Sony Reader': the phrase "electronic book reader" points not as you would expect to Sony's page for the device, but to to the BBC, "E-Ink Technology" links not to E-Ink, but to Slashdot, "isn't their first attempt" links to Wikipedia. Sony's page on the product isn't linked at all!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Like Digg, for example. Digg is cool because stories come from the community but it's crap because their community sucks. If you enable this feature, create a new pseudo-editor called "Community" or somesuch and let people filter it like they can do with any other editor, if they choose. Make all the voted-in stories appear under this editor. If a reader wanted he could remove it entirely or even exclude everything else. Give the Community editor five of the top-voted stories every day so it doesn't swamp the other editors. If it's successful, it would remove a lot of the incentive people have for visiting Digg rather than Slashdot.
1/ Strip attribution. Make all submissions effectively AC. If the story is submitted by a registered user, maybe send them a private message indicating that it was their submission that got the story posted; that way, they get a nice warm feeling. But to the rest of Slashdot, the source of the story is unknown, and is thus not a discussion point.
2/ If a submission points to a blog entry with a couple of paragraphs of waffle accompanying a link to a real news site, Slashdot should link directly to that real news site. That way, we get to read and discuss the real story, not some wannabe pundit's opinions of the story. This doesn't need to be hard and fast, of course; if the pundit's opinions are really insightful and worthy of Slashdot's attention, then maybe the Slashdot summary could link to the blog as well as to the real story.
Just my penny's worth.
-Stephen
Should part of this process be checking the URL of the submitter to make sure that it is legitimate? Does that really matter? Should we add a nofollow tag to those URLs?
My opinion is no ... I don't think it's fair that we strip creds from someone just because they choose to squander that URL on something stupid.
I don't think that you distinguish between legitimate creds and creds that are mangled with dishonesty. If that's your opinion, then I think you are making slashdot an "accomplice to the crime", or to put it in other words, you encourage pragiarism. Yes, yes, I used the word encourage. If slashdot is telling the world "this is the prize for getting your story submitted, and slashdot won't check the integrity of the links", then you are turning a blind eye, and encouraging pragiarism ... and it doesn't matter how cool/interesting/hot-topic the story is.
"what interest the half-a-million readers" shouldn't be the holy-grail that justify low standards on slashdot links. Slashdot can be better than that, and I am sure that the quality of published stories won't go down, because there are so many of them. If anything, the quality of submitted stories will go up.
The only qualification to that basic idea I'd offer would be: What makes it "tricky," again?
We already have the mod system, with categories that are overbroad but that basically work. We have a mechanism for pushing posts up or down the page based on recency, mod scores, or whatever the user's chosen in her prefs. There's a separate pref that lets us choose to see all stories on a topic, none of them, or just the "best," too -- only what counts as the "best" if we're not modding?
We wanna be able to mod "the latest Jon Dovrak troll column" as a troll. Half the posts to any Dvorak story are just going to amount to that anyway.
Similarly, we do have enemies lists that we can cause to mod down by a value we set, yes? Just let me do that to posters, by user name. Problem solved, no editorial intervention required.
(If it was up to me, I'd use some sort of mod system to screen proposed stories and determine which ones were worthy of the home page. That would require some real recasting of the mod system, but I don't see why applying the existing system to stories that are already up would take that much at all...)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Kudos to CmdrTaco for having a meta-discussion! Because of this excellent show of good faith, I am going to remove my new sig which I installed today. Previously, it said:
Turn off ScuttleMonkey's stories.
Now, it is gone entirely.
I actually noticed when I did what I recommended in the sig (and I'm about to undo it) that slashdot basically went away. The fact is that right now, ScuttleMonkey is doing all of the work. Now, when the Beatles-Beatles goofball (may I pause to say that I'm the only person in the world who hates the Beatles? I even had a dream about hating them just two nights ago. That's pathetic) started coming up, SM was posting his stuff all the time. It's clear to me now that we aren't getting BB stories multiple times a day any more. We're just getting a slashdot that's put together mostly by SM, and he's approving BB stories that he thinks are appropriate, and so therefore all BB stories that have been approved (save one, last I checked) have been approved by SM.
Now, CmdrTaco, some responses to your questions and statements:
Or I could post the story and watch as half of the discussion is simply about the submitter and not the URL that i wanted to share in the first place. Damned if I do, damned if I don't, right? I'm seriously looking for feedback here. What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?
Now that I've thought about it awhile, my answer is go ahead and post a story if you think it's good, but don't sweat it if we want to talk about something else. Let the linkscammer get his reward ... but let us despise him all we want. I don't think it should ever be a big deal to the slashdot powers that be if we run a few threads into the ground discussing something besides the subject itself. As you noted, you have a moderation system in place to control these things. Let that system control it, so that we can self-select the level of offtopicness that we want on a particular day in a particular discussion. Allow us to have these off-topic vents, and I think you will find we feel a lot more charitable toward you. (I know that I immediately felt better just seeing that you posted this story.)
As a side note, I'm really going to try to write more articles addressing Slashdot matters on to Slashdot.
This is really cool! I know that for years you've stated that you didn't like meta-discussions, that you didn't like slashdot to talk about slashdot. And people have constantly disagreed with your stance. The really weird thing for me is that, for my part, I did think you were wrong to avoid meta-discussion for a long time, but finally came around to mostly agree with you. And by the time I agreed with you that a site should avoid meta-discussion, I was running my own webforum elsewhere, where I more or less took the same tactic. Now you're shifting back to what people want you to do, so I'm going to be watching closely.
Kudos for being bold and expressing this intent to encourage periodic meta-discussion.
We can talk about digg or moderation or whatever issues are of most interest next week.
Aw, can't I say just a little bit now? Because what I want to say is I hate it when I see people shilling for another site here. Whether it's kuro5hin, Bruce Perens's forum, digg, or whatever, there's always somebody screaming that slashdot's sky is falling, that it's terrible here, that you've repressed and oppressed me, and that I should go to some other site which is allegedly better (but which never seems to have the needed software features to work right). I have no account on any of those other sites. I'm not just a fanboy; slashdot is still the best. Those folks are just annoying me. Thanks for the chance to vent about them.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Sites like Digg and Reddit, are burying Slashdot. Not to mention the cesspool of a forum each article creates (I am aware of the irony - no flames please), which most of the time aren't even on topic - I do my best to moderate - but 5 moderator points is meager. Here's a graph showing the traffic comparison of Digg and Slashdot. Now we have front page stories made of the kind of he-said she-said BS that I expect from a high school newspaper, and I feel things are only going to get worse.
Maybe it's time Slashdot innovated, and came up with a new format. Perhaps something like reddit or digg, but giving priority to 'classic submitters' (the Slashdot staff).
Find Escorts, Strippers, Massage Parlours, Swingers
That might be true, but all too often I read here in /. people complaining their story hasn't been accepted while RP's or someone's else has. That said, I think you're understating your problem. Your real problem is not stop people complaining from "famous" submitters. Your problem is improving the submission/approval system as a whole. This would do away with dupes, links to [self]advertising, shallow articles, and so on. Target the causes and not the effects (this was straight from a PHB manual).
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
It seems to me that the responses inside the story discussion only happen because there's no other place for the disatisfied to direct their concerns.
Slashdot really needs to have a place where the admins can have an ongoing conversation with the users. This is basic Cluetrain stuff, it's somewhat appalling that Slashdot hasn't "gotten" it.
Hell, even if you guys don't even read it, it would at least provide a place for complaints to go instead of swamping story discussions.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
I admit that my discussion with other /.ers at times wavers from the topic at hand. The point of threading and nesting on the comments section is quite simply to allow that kind of banter to occur about a nitpicky point from the main topic, or even to allow entire side discussions to occur. This happens in society all the time as well. When we read the morning paper, my wife and I will begin discussing one topic which leads us down a path of discussion that may have very little or nothing to do with the original topic... but it gets us talking to one another and discussing.
As much as I despise how retarded and offtopic things can get around here at times, there are still those gems of information, little known facts, and useful banter sessions that you can pick up JUST FROM READING THE COMMENTS. All those little bits of goodness is why I keep reading, why I can't stop reading, and why I keep commenting. I'm involved in the discussion, I'm a part of making a concensus on a variety of topics (even if it only lasts for a few days while the discussion rages on), and I get direct feedback on my thoughts from others with varying opinions and points of view. This type of activity engages me far more than just reading my morning paper ever will do. It's talking with others about the topics that makes it worthwhile to read "the news" - IMHO, and I'm sure others will disagree - GREAT!!
Take for example what I copied from your article. When a story submission from Beatles_Beatles or Roland Piquepaille (sp?) is swamped by us users making up conspiracy stories, theories, and conjectures and drowning out whatever BB or RP submitted a story about, obviously we're more interested in these infamous celebrities in our little geek world, just like the majority of the US is more interested in what crazy thing Pat Roberts will proclaim next (and the conspiracy theories around why he does it) than the actual content he presents. He's infamous to the entire US population, just as BB and RP are to our little nerd/geek population on Slashdot. If you really us to only discuss the topic posted, have fun deleting comments left and right every time you post something from these two characters (or the next one that comes along). But obviously you know that won't work because you already instituted a moderation system to allow us to deal directly with that issue - and obviously we LIKE smacking you guys around for posting so much from these two users who apparently have even less important work to do than all the rest of us; given the rate at which they submit stories.
Besides, you just admitted that you edit story submissions, and yet we have dupes and crappy grammar and spelling, and a dozen other problems with how well you guys perform the job of "Editor." So hire some real journalism majors to do a better job, or let us use the comment section to whine and bitch about your lacking facilities (an appropriate grasp of the English language) to our heart's content. Just don't go changing things. K5 and its policies is a wasteland of philosophy turds, IMO.
As you said : "And moderators, use those offtopic mods to steer the discussion towards the subject of the article, not the flavor of the month conspiracy theory about story selection."
The moderators who promote such offtopic comments are the problem here. Some retarded moderator promotes an OT tired against the submitter, and then you get 10s of comment, because its sittting on top of the pile with "+5 interesting", and the story is hijacked.
If the same comment was marked "-1 offtopic", its killed already before it becomes a problem.
Slashdot should do what Groklaw does. The first and second comments on Groklaw are usually "Corrections here, please", and "Offtopic posts here, please". This allows people to discuss random things, while keeping the comments readable.
http://outcampaign.org/
So what if the fellow is building a reputation or trying to build a reputation. What matters is the quality of the story and the quality of the write up that he submitted with it. Nothing past that matters. Your job as editor in chief of this here boat is the weed out the crap that goes on the front page. Not to police the reputation of the writers and users that submit the stories. We will do that ourselves.
If you ask me who submitted the article should be anonymous to the person who approves it. Once that is done the user id of the one who submitted the article can get tacked on. Who cares if someone is trying to build a reputation here? What matters is the quality of the articles on the front page.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
submitters may be less hostile if they knew why their submission was rejected while another accepted, especialy if the one accepted seems poor in comparasion.
:: it is a duplicate or in close proximity to another published story
:: it is a duplicate of a pending story
:: appears not related to slashdot readership
:: has presentation/spelling/linking errors.
This imediately asks for more work from the editors, but anything would be better than nothing, especialy things like;
Your submission was rejected becuase
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
Is it really? Are you saying that if no freebie link is given then submissions will dry up? That's ridiculous. That's as stupid as saying authors and composers will stop creating if their copyright term isn't life plus 70 years! I think you want to encourage submissions from community-minded people rather than dirtbags looking for a free high-visibility reference to their worthless, ad-riddled link farm. You're sticking to your policy without regard for whether that policy is having a positive net result.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
If you really think the garbage BB is pumping out there is quality, then add a moderation system to stories. Let Slashdot readers mod stories that you promote to the front page, and the argument is moot. Until then, it's just your opinion, which is strongly objected to by (at least) the more vocal readers.
To summarize his response, he (and hopefully the other editors) does try to track down the original story, but will leave the meta-link in place if he feels it adds to the story in a significant way.
You may have already seen this, but I figure linking to it directly will cut down on the "OMG he's not actually reading the discussion" posts.
that that is is that that is not is not
If somebody submits a story that generates a lot of personal discussion about the submitter, split the story into "on topic" and "on submitter" sections, and let people post in the appropriate section.
In fact, who cares one way or the other? If I see a story I want to read, and I hit the first page of posts only to find it's all bullshit, I'll either spot-check a couple other pages to see if there's anything else to read, or I'll move on.
I don't spend all day on
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
After all, I read it on Slashdot!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just post it. Let the trolls/whiners kvetch. It's kinda like those people who hate dupes and clog the forum with their bitching. So what? This ain't Newsweek; it's a digest of interesting web content. In the interest of laissez faire, the editors err on a hands-off approach. Just ignore the noise and move on. I could care less about people making money off of their Slashdot submissions. If I follow links and they're lame, I start ignoring the person who posts them. Pretty simple solution to me.
Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
>If you become a popular submitter it is because you submit relevant stories.
I don't even like the idea of a popular submitter. There are enough people here submitting stuff that we don't even need them. Limiting submissions to 1 or 2 a day is probably the best way to go. Why?
1. Now that we know that people can just write scripts and submit unlimited stories thats a -disincentive- to submit. Why should I get off my ass, write a summary, check my links, spelling, etc when Beatles Beatles will just mass post the very same CNET article except with a worse summary.
2. Unlimited submissions in general is just a bad idea. There really should be a limit for the sake of community spirit.
Metafilter had this exact same problem. Users would post to the front page multiple times daily to the point it would just get ridiculous and 3 or 4 voices were dominating the site. Matt changed the site so you could only post once a day to the front page. The quality of the site went up dramatically. Same when he implemented ask.metafilter.com. You could ask a question daily (or more than daily) and the questions became very "chatty" and silly. Then he limited the questions to once a week, so most people think before wasting their once a week question.
Essentially, limiting the submission system will produce a more varied information ecology, encourage nobodies without scripting systems to submit, and get rid of the "search engine optimization" spammers.
Not to mention, I dont think nofollow will even make a difference to these people. Some will do this just for the challenge or just to see page hits on their ad-ridden sites.
With thousands of viewers and with a need to maintain some integrity to the Slashdot name, the solution is very simple: filter your content. Submitters will be harassed and mud-slinging will transcend all that is good in Slashdot. But if you want to make a difference in the quality of Slashdot, internalize the problem -- don't talk about Roland or Beatles. Talk about you, Slashdot, and what you need to do to modify the submission process as to weed out the obvious problem-causers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Specifically, the comment that I posted here.
I just wanted everyone to read the email that I just sent rob:
----begin email----
And that's what I believe - I'm thrilled that this story has been posted - It's exactly the response that I've wanted for a while now. It's not Jamie chiming in with "Nuh-uh!!!1", and it's not a bitchslap of comments off-topic (which does fuel conspiracy theories). It's fantastic.
If rob allows, or if the contents aren't private, I'll post any reply email I get from him; but, I will respect his privacy in communication if he does write me back and asks me to do so.
~Will
sig?
How about stopping the trolltalk crapflood....we need a home again!
Until I read this post, I didn't know that the submitter link was a URL. I just assumed it was eitehr a 'mailto:' or a link to their /. profile.
Roland and BB both have very memorable names, so it makes them all the more obvious when they have multiple stories accepted.
The memorable names of the problem submitters make it equally obvious that they do not participate in the discussions they spawn. Could it be that the topic at hand is of no interest to them (beyond getting the submission approved, of course)?
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
/.'s job is to pick stories that provoke discussion
/. postings, you go for it.
it's raw material is : submissions & comments
if you can find a away to moneterize your
nofollow in comments is fair enough way to reduce spam
I'm sure once your submission queue is a more hassle you'll add nofollow to them too
good luck
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This is story moderation, something people have been clamoring for for years. I think it's a good idea since there are always a ton of things that people spend far too much time complaining about. I don't mind dupes since I often miss stories the first time around. Other people who hover over "F5" all day wouldn't want them.
/. after 7-8 years.
I for one would just love to see front page article descriptions that are all at least in the same area code as good grammar and spelling. But there's nothing going on (including digg.com) that is making me not want to continue using
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I submitted one story back when slashdot was first getting circulated, the story was turned down but then one of the regulars submitted it the next day, no harm no foul as my original intent was simply to get the story out.
How do you feel about people promoting their pet projects in their sig? Honest question. I see lots of people doing it but I'm not sure if I like it or not (me doing so included).
As a side note: I've seen google employees clicking through the submitters URL link, presumably to check it.
Should you post an article you think is worthwhile reguardless of who it is that sent it? Yes
Should you edit it as necessary to remove uneeded "fluff"? Yes
Should you worry about the oncomming forum storm? No
YOU are an editor. You take what is submitted, format it appropriatly in your views and post it for your readers. People who submit stories may or may not be reporters. They ARE NOT STAFF, they are NOT PAYED, therefore they should not expect to have their submission posted word, for word or even to be accepted at all. They are giving you information in return for a mention of who sent it in, the deal ends there. If they don't like how their submission was edited or changed, DON'T SUBMIT. To use an old quote, don't look a gift horse in the mouth. You got an honorable mention, move on.
Slashdot is huge, they don't call it the Slashdot effect for nothing. The amount of submissions sent on a daily basis is probably astronomical and to expect everyone and their brother to get a story posted is unrealistic. Why aren't those same people complaining to their State officials for not winning the lottery do they? After all, they buy tickets just like other people. It's not fair that the people who buy hundreds more tickets have a better chance of winning than someone who only buys one a week. In that same effect someone who sends in one article a day has no ground to stand on for having less of a chance to get a story posted than someone who sends in 30. That's not to say the person who sent one in didn't send a good one or that all 30 are gems but you see where this is going. People, we're not a comunism society, we're capitolism. If you want to get ahead, YOU HAVE TO WORK, no one is going to just hand you everything you want. Just because you scoured the internet and really thought you had a perfect story doesn't mean it will be posted, it means work harder and send in multiple good submissions and your chances of getting one posted are much better. There's only so many submissions that can be read at a time so there are going to be entries that fall through the cracks.
As for the forum flurries, simple logic takes care of that. Did they subscribe to Slashdot Premium? No? Then shut it. You're reading stories and news FOR FREE. You type in slashdot.org, you're agreeing to read what is posted. If you don't like it, GO SOMEWHERE ELSE and leave everyone else alone. If you want to make a suggestion, then do so in the forum or email the editors but don't throw a temper tantrum because your "precious opinions" weren't used. If you don't pay for it, you don't have a right to complain. The only reason I'm even posting is because CmdrTaco requested feedback from all the readers. For all I know this whole post could be deleted and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.
Long post short, CmdrTaco you do what you think is best for Slashdot. Anyone who opens this site and reads its contents has to abide by your rules, it's YOUR SITE. If they don't like it, they are free to make suggestions but if they're causing trouble, there should be no suprise if they're banned. Everyone has the constitutional right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness SO LONG AS those rights DON'T infringe on someone else's. I have the right to read stories on Slashdot every time I open my web browser, have for years, but that right has been infringed upon because CmdrTaco needed to ran and had to take up space where a story would have been due to incessant forum and email whining because someone who puts forth time and effort into getting stories posted got their stories listed.
For what the opinion of an Anonymous Coward is worth, I'd say post the stories anyway. Attacking the messenger isn't relevant and should be discouraged by the community, but this just means the community needs to learn to discourage it. (Not to mention not doing it in the first place; we're all in this together.) The stories and the discussion are both vital parts of what makes this a great site and a great community. Don't sacrifice the stories because the discussion gets broken sometimes, we can fix this if we all pull together.
What about allowing both to exist? Creat a new topic area similiar to the ones you have now (Games, Hardware, etc...) but call it something like "Regular Users" or something. Now, all of the articals by repeat users go into this topic area. On the main slashdot.org page where you show the new articals you supress the 'regular users' topic area so that casual visitors see new, fresh articals by different users. More serious slashdot users can direct themselfs to the 'regular users' area to see more articals. It would keep them seperate but yet allow them to coexist.
I really think that giving credit for submitting a story that someone else wrote is a bit strange. Yeah, you might get some geek 'cool points' but it really has no value to anyone other than that. I believe the simple solution is to stop crediting people for submitting the work of others entirely. The discussion threads are things that are of value (to their submitter and the /. community) and those should be where the geek cool points go, not to the submitter of the story. If you have some relevant, cogent and/or amusing comments about a story then that's where the real meat is. I don't think that finding a story worth posting and talking about is that important, it's what follows that is. IMHO.
and sexy women who start IMing you naked pictures of themselves mere seconds after a story goes live
Is this something new? Last time I got a submission accepted (probably about 5 years ago if not more), this didn't happen.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I read slashdot frequently, but I rarely comment on anything here. It would be interesting to see the queue of submitted stories. Maybe we can do that now, but I don't know it.
Part of the Slashdot Editor's job is to make a submission "Presentable". Usually this means moving a few URLs around. I'd guess a good half of story submissions use the word 'here' or 'article' or something equally stupid as their anchor text. I prefer relevant words to be linked. There are other minor things tho, like taking off extra intros like "Hi guys I read Slashdot every day and thought you would like this". We want the Slashdot story to be mostly distilled down to the essentials. Just the key 3-4 sentences.
I am not sure whether this is written in parody or sincerity. Most of the article text we read here on slashdot has far bigger problems than the hotlink being over a word that Taco doesn't like. For example: incoherence, grammatical errors, misleading summary, editorialization, or of course, duplication.
I guess CmdrTaco deserves respect for admitting what little he feels the need to do, but I would never entitle such a job with the respect of "Editor".
-b
myselfmusic
"Whenever I've gotten mod points, I've modded up comments like that because they need to be seen."
Why? They're not relevant, and you're misusing your mod points. Mod them offtopic or don't mod them.
"NO ONE should be able to profit from submitting and getting a story accepted."
Again, why? You don't get to decide that, and you have yet to make any case other that "because I said so". Frankly, I don't give two craps who submitted a story, and I have yet to hear a decent reason to punish these submitters.
"The only thing you should get in return is the knowledge that you've shared valuable information with your fellow reader."
Why? The only people I see who have a problem with it are people like you, and you have yet to list ONE reason that isn't just plain stupid. Example
"Fame, money, girls, etc... should all be left to REAL work: building or designing stuff, cooking, or cleaning for example."
So, you've set yourself up as the arbiter of what real work is, what submitters should be censored, and what the motivation of submitters should be, but you have yet to answer WHY.
My guess is that you won't be able to, because your jealousy is the real answer and you won't ever own up to that.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
Allow users to use mod points to moderate the stories. Keep a seperate karma system for submissions. Submitters with low/bad submission karma don't start off with a vanity link. The link would also get removed if the story gets modded down sufficiently. This would reward users for good submissions yet still allow these 'problem users' to post stories to Slashdot without their personal link whoring becoming an issue.
1: If we submit a story that's Rejected, we don't want to see the same story Accepted from a later submitter. Posting the time that an article is initially submitted to Slashdot would help us know when we really were beaten by another submitter.
2: In addition to Accepted and Rejected status on submissions, having a Duplicate status would be nice to say, "Hey, it is a great submission, but someone else really did beat you to this one. Better luck next time."
At least this would make me happier. I've had items Rejected, only to appear a day and a half later under someone else's name.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Many people have defected from /. to digg.com - the reason being the stories are more interesting to the readers (since they selected by them through a voting process).
/. editors use to select stories. Whatever it is - is does not work particularly well, as often stories turn out to be hoaxes, dups, spam, or rehashes of the same old things that presumably interest the editors, but often noone else. It would be same no matter who were the editors.
I don't know what criteria the
How about introducing a system where we (or subscribers) can vote for stories? Many eyes are usually better than one or two.
Make it 1/day, 5/week, whatever you think is fair, but after that threshold, they still get the stories posted, but the links get a "nofollow". That way you're still sharing interesting, unique stories with the Slashdot readers, but people have no incentive to submit hordes of stories. Combine this with prefering submissions from infrequent contributors, and the incentive of the Beatles-Beatles-crowd shitfs to trying to find the most unique stories.
It is in everyone's best interest to encourage a wide range of story submitters, and you point out the many problems that come from "celebrity" submitters. This is really no different than blogs screening comments to ensure they aren't spam. Any forum that allows relatively open submissions from the users will need to protect itself from spam. Sure, sometimes the stories are unique and interesting, a spam-y coating but a ham-y center. So block the spam with a "nofollow" after they hit their limit, and we still get to see the story, there's still a reward for good submissions, but there's no incentive to spam.
If SPAM gets read by 1% of the recipients, how about SPAMMING slashdot with stories? Even if only 1% of them will get accepted.
5 4
This is not a newspaper. It's a competition. The first one to get his story accepted wins.
BTW, I made a list of hints to get a story accepted (besides submitting like crazy). http://slashdot.org/~Spy%20der%20Mann/journal/934
CmdrTaco, what do you think of my guidelines?
These people aren't submitting stories because they're good people, they're aiming for profit.
Slashdot has a very high pagerank on google. Google highly values outbound links from a good site. So, if you want to get your site raised in the google rankings, simply get slashdot to link to your site. These submit-whores don't care about slashdot, they don't care about quality stories, they just want that link.
A true slashdot supporter will submit stories regardless of personal profit.
plz stap the crapflood on trolltalk.....
Thanks!
Isn't the prime purpose of slashdot to gather together
interesting stories for its readers
If so i have no problem with roland because he must spend hours finding sites and pages of interest- time the majority of readers don't have. it is a useful service he provides for readers of slashdot.
on the otherhand submitters who primarily post for page rank and to pollute google thats a diservice to everyone.
a database of submitters and successes and fails would probably allow the editors the opportunity to sort positive contributers from negative.
Some posters probably should be blacklisted if they are just manipulating slashdot for pagerank in google.
a user rating for the individual stories could be very useful in that it would actively involve the logged in readership and promote the posting of stories which interest the readers. if this is linked to the author and even editor it would be feedback that could be used to improve slashdot. more relevence more interesting stories and less dupes.
maybe you could use the polling mechanism you already have on individual stories.
finally i would like to compare slashdot and digg the big diffrence between the 2 sites are on slashdot i read the comments on digg i read the stories that take my interest
I hope you find these comments useful
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
It seems to me Slashdot is quite happily using someone with motives that aren't exactly above-board, and participating in a quid-pro-quo with a pagerank/link farming scam, just because said person ferrets out some good links. Tell me, how far are you willing to go with this? Right now, it's in the spotlight. Every two-bit scammer and spammer is now going to know that if you do the dirty work for Slashdot, you're gonna get a pagerank-boosting link of your choice on the main page. Will you start accepting submissions from frontmen of spam companies next, with personal links to spyware sites?
Taco, you're playing a dangerous game with the credibility of your site simply to gain a few submissions per day. It isn't worth it.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Personally I wish more stories would actually have an anchor of Article or whatever, usually I have to try and guess which of the four or five links is actually the article and not some related link or other Slashdot story. If I am going to RTFA, I'd love to see which link is actually the article without guessing!
The cap should be on the submissions sent, instead of a cap on how many are accepted. This will force submitters to 1) not spam the editors, and 2) only send their highest quality submissions.
The story is not about Roland or Beatles Beatles or whatever other random user is submitting a lot of stuff this week.
Shouldn't that read:
"The story is not about Roland or Beatles Beatles or whatever other random user is submitting a lot of stuff this week."?
Ah, slashdot editors...
It will teach the submitter a lesson, and probably take away _his_ incentive, while leaving everybody else happy.
It's just a BloJJ
I know you (or one of the editors) have replaced the URL's in some of my submissions. But I'd really appreciate it if you coralize them in case the original submitted link was coralized, too.
:)
Thanks!
You get a new submission, you read the submission, follow the links, check facts and then start the job of editing.
The first job is perhaps to check if the story is a story. This is subjective but I would suggest that you get it horribly wrong to many times. Still it is your site and all the lame crap is what makes /. /..
Then you could check if the sites being linked can handle it. If not, use caching. Not that hard and would help people to RTFA.
If a story links to 1 page wich in turn links deeper get those links out there and classify the links. Something like this "Reader A discovered this <blog url> blog wich reports on <real story>".
If you read real editted publications you might have seen something like this "the idiot [CmdTaco] complained that people [slashdot readers] expected him to do his job [editing]". An extreme example where a real editor uses his leet editing skills to clarify a text by including stuff the reader might not know in []. The often sued [sic] is there to show the editor knows there is a error but that it is left in on purpose for reasons of humor or accuracy.
For instance you really should have linked to the story that had so much discussion about the submitter and not the story itself. Frankly your own submission sucks as bad as all the submission you do not edit.
As for the messenger not being important or worthy of discussion, grow up and enter the real world. We are all judged on our reputation and your own site uses this. Why else bother with the whole karma idea? People with bad karma get bumped down and will be read less. People with a history of bad story submission will be less trusted. My reputation is used to determine wether my replies gets seen or not why should story submissions be any different?
The messenger determines the trustworthyness of the story. Simply put I am more ready to believe a story linking to a BBC.CO.UK url then a myspace.com url. Call me crazy. If there is one link and it goes to an ad filled page with absolutely no information or worse idiot ramblings with a link to the real story then I got to question why neither the submitter nor the editor just skipped the blog crap.
It happens way to often to just be coincedence. CmdrTaco claims it is not corruption well that leaves only the option of incompetence.
Anyway does anyone really believe that god got worried about the postings here or could it be that ad revenue is down? If there is anything we learned from the internet it is that companies only respond to protests by their users when they are feeling the result in their wallets.
Don't whine that people expect an editor to edit. Change your jobtitle if you don't like it.
You do not have to throw away the submission or remove the submitter, just make it clear. That is the editors job. I really can't understand that we, your readers, have to explain this to you.
Lets edit your own submission shall we? First thing any good editor would have done is explain who the fuck you are. No not everyone here knows. How should they? The submitter doesn't deem it worthy of mention but an editors job is to help his readers understand a story.
Second he would have linked to the storys you mention as examples. Helps us judge what your talking about. For instance I am not quit clear wether this entire argument is about the links in the articles OR the link under the submitters name. Personally I don't give a crap about the link under the submitters name since I never follow it, why should I? I am upset about the crappy links in the articles themselves.
As for making it more presentable. Well it is not an easy
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
people would still bitch about the submitter endlessly.
he just wouldn't get his links.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Isnt this really just an argument about the mission of this web site? Is it to disseminate news to the masses or is it a device to facilitate community communication and to encourage debate? IMHO we have plenty of sites disseminating information, even a moron like me can hit refresh on news.google.com, but what Slashdot adds in value is unparallelled discussion after the topic is introduced. The debate is the real value and if you miss a couple of stories to inspire the debate - i'd say 1) your earning your title as editor and 2) the site will prosper for it.
Now about these posters. I dont know anyone who hasnt been in a college class or a meeting at work or a social event and hasnt met someone who has to dominate the conversation. Someone who just has to control the topic, make every joke, basically be an unsocial asshole. These people exists. As it pertains to this story, the editors need to remember that if they let these people dominate the conversation, some people will not want to participate and others will complain, loudly, as they should in a heathy debate atmosphere. Perhaps the editors should make a Slashdot comment area and then it would be sensible to mod these complaints off-topic but until that area is created - moding them down is censorship IMHO.
But again, if you could just send every decent story through will no bumps why would we need editors? Without some emotional/social aspect to the editing process we might as well start writing the Slashdot editor Perl scripts right now.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
I have been a pretty consistant reader of /. for at least the last year. I had no idea that this was a problem. In fact, I didn't even notice in all that time that the poster got to choose a link for all to see. Although I read some of the discussion, this is my first post to date since most of the discussions have a few too many hundred posts for me to catch up with. I would like my comment to be somewhat relevant, you know?
/. user base pays attention to more than the headlines? How many casual users don't participate in the endless discussion and couldn't care less who is submitting a story? How many of us begin to flame when one user is hogging the spotlight? If this is a problem, then perhaps more needs to be done about the people who use posts to bash other users.
How much of the
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Reputations come from *crappy stories*. R.P. (I'm not as familiar with B.B.) posts stories that are crap. They are often unadulterated bullshit, but more likely just overblown hype. They are chosen to generate lots of heat and get people to click on the website, even if just to flame him mightily. Hey, I guess there's no such thing as bad press, right?
A story moderation scheme would allow you to identify (automatically, if you like) submitters whose submissions were frequently crappy and unnewsworthy and got through anyway. Better still would be a more thorough editorial policy, but that seems unlikely to ever happen.
There's nothing wrong with submitting a lot of *good*, *factual* stories that take place in reality. Let's reward signal, not noise.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Allow the moderators to moderate submissions (as well as reader comments).
Then, come up with some freaky formula to calculate a risk level associated with the submitter based on past postings, karma, typical number of responses, number of stories submitted, etc.
The double benefit would that we could opt to only see stories that are rated > 0 on the front page. No more dupes!
I think he forgot to say that HEXUS was getting a minimum of 3 reviews posted each week on Slashdot because Slashdot love to do free publicity. At least if the reviews weren't made of two picture like the xbox watercooler one and actually had some info's in them (benchmarks, temperatures, reviews).
And here I was thinking this post would be about the large number of stories that are irrelevant, old, duplicated or pure pseudoscience.
pooptruck
You have my permission to say that *I* submitted the story instead of the 'problem user'. I will never contest a submission in my name. Feel free to use my link to point at whatever you want.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
THANK YOU!!!! Guess I should have taken more time to read before posting as you said pretty much what I said.
CmdrTaco's biggest problems with Slashdot, and they are big, are made much worse by Slashdot policies.
The biggest problem for Slashdot, in my opinion, is the fact that moderators cannot post comments to stories. That means moderation only comes from people who are not enough interested in a story to comment. That lack of interest and maybe boredom distorts every story. If the moderator sees an idea that he or she hasn't seen before, he or she is likely to mod it down. Since the moderator has no serious interest in the discussion, comments at the beginning are much more likely to receive moderation, for example. The present moderation system causes many more kinds of distortion, too; the problem is much worse than is immediately obvious.
To function correctly, a moderation system must be very sophisticated. Slashdot's moderation system is too simplistic.
The second biggest problem, in my opinion, is that Slashdot members are composed of two groups that are very different and largely incompatible. The first group is computing professionals who need a place to learn more about the fast-changing field of computing.
I know the following will be difficult to hear for some people, but I think it is a useful understanding that could lead to improvement for both groups. The second group is people who are mostly interested in being spectators: Those who play computer games. They often have little real interest in technical things. Their comments on technical articles are usually non-technical in nature, such as an attempt at joking. Anyone who spends his or her time pretending to kill people probably has a lot of anger. Such a person may be rigid and cynical. The anger, rigidity, and cynicism lowers the quality of every discussion.
The solution would be to separate the two groups. The games stories that involve minimal technical discussion of computer issues could be given their own web site: Gamesdot.
Such a division would bring more advertising for both groups because the quality of the discussion in both groups would be higher and the ads could be more targeted.
What normally happens to comments such as this is that someone who is interested in games and who has little insight into his own behavior will moderate it down. "Troll" originally meant someone in a discussion who is intentionally causing trouble. Now it has come to mean "If you disagree with me, you must be a troublemaker."
I'd just like to thank you, esteemed #1, for finally publicly addressing this issue. It's a step in the right direction because it increases transparency. Conspiracy theories whither only under the application of illumination. More of this sort of discussion can only help, aside from any other concrete modifications taken or eschewed. Come visit us more often, Taco.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
I appreciate the hard work editors do in selecting and cleaning up submissions.
However it seems with large number of repeats that some editors dont closely follow what each other are putting on slashdot.
Make the URL modereated. But don't let moderation's low point trip invisibility of the link. It must always show, to give the poster the creds.
URL moderation categories:
'Low Bandwidth' ie: easily slashdotted out-of-existence
'Google Page Rank Whore'
'Related to Story'
'Obnoxious' ie: g0teSx, GNA
in addition to the usual 'insightful', 'informative', etc.
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
Altruism sounds nice, but is difficult to sustain. We spend those few hours daily (monthly?) away from our computer screens in honest-to-goodness real-life communities.
Do you work entirely for the public good? Or if in the off chance you do collect a salary to pay for little things like rent or a mortgage, do you give all of the remainder back? Few do, but our communities are successfull nevertheless.
A good community is able to provide balanced rewards for productive involvement--and that's what this discussion is about.
Some of us have lurked here for a long time before finally making our accounts so I've seen Slashdot grow. There was once a time when shooting you an email meant getting a response in a pretty short time frame. Although I completely understand that your readership has grown, I think that by posting questions like this you bring a sense of "for the community, by the community" feeling back. So don't worry about not being able to respond to every single one of us as long as you can get a general feeling of where we stand and ask any clarifying questions that help facilitate those conclusions.
Last but not least, I would post the story even if its from an annoying user. I'd also tweak the moderation system such that users with "Excellent" karma always have the option of modding down a discussion thread that is discussion a problem poster. Once the initial thread is flagged, others with this priviledge can verify it. If a user erroneously does this a certain number of times, then they lose the priviledge for good. It's just a thought which I'm sure you'll be able to drive a semi through.
Why don't you just ask your question directly, or say what you really mean? That is, that you think he is lying.
Why couch your statment in weasel words?
More importantly, you were told they were different people, so what kind of proof would you require, and what makes you think you deserve any kind of proof in the first place?
I hate that there are enough people here with their priorities screwed up that they waste time yammering about submitters, and modding people like you up.
YOU and those like you are far more objectionable with your whining about submitters that the submitters will EVER be.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
It does please me to see that he actually does care, at least a little.
The problem is that "Conspiracy Theorist" comes up numerous times in the post. Let me point out that I was one of the first to get angry about last night's story. I do not consider myself a "Conspiracy Theorist", here's why.
By definition, a "CT" takes nothing and makes it something, looking for subtle details and making them the backbone of a theory. The situation here that we're debating about isn't subtle! It's a brick to the side of the face!
Our main moaning points are:
1) BB has an _insane_ amount of submissions approved EXTREMELY disproportionately approved by ScuttleMonkey.
2) BB is obviously abusing Google's page rank system by using Slashdot as a referer.
3) BB has never (to my knowledge) posted in any discussions! His submissions are generic as you've already admitted.
#3 only reinforces #2. And #1 isn't a conspiracy theory made out of some subjective evidence, it's a freaking overwelming fact.
Seriously, I appreciate you trying to explain the situation but I also would love a little common sense. If you're _so_ hands off that you allow people to abuse the system even when we're screaming that they are, then that is just as bad if not worse as "editing submitters". If BB was actually a part of the community instead of a spammer that found a way to do his dirty work through Slashdot, then I may not "want blood". But as it stands, he isn't.
My personal vote is not to accept any BB posts because of glaring point #2 and #3. And I seriously doubt we'd be discussing this at all if it weren't for point #1.
Thanks for your time..
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Taco is also a bad lier .. You can see right through his ignorance.
Isn't it a felony to do that?
rewriting history since 2109
Okay, so I've read most of the comments (at least, at +3 and above), especially the comments about moderating articles. Here's my idea, for what it's worth...
Why not let the general public view the bin? Throw nofollow on EVERY link (that way REAL spammers (ie. just linking to viagra, though I'm not sure how much of that Slashdot gets) don't get free links), and then have that moderatable by people with mod points. I'm sure within 30 minutes of the article going into the bin it'd easily get make it to -1 spam, -1 dupe, or +5 useful. Maybe even modify the system so that there's no limit (though that's probably going too far). Once an article hits -10, it gets automatically deleted. Once an article hits +10, it's added to a "priority" bin for editors to look at first. Editors can, of course, override the moderations at any time and post the submission (ie. it's breaking news, get it out fast, don't wait).
Go one step farther, and only show the bin to people with mod points.
In fact, even better -- let those people with mod points add comments to the articles in the bin. These comments would not be moderated, and would not enter the real comments upon editor approval. That way if I see the article is at +5 but I know it's a dupe, I can post a comment saying "This is duped back to " so that other moderators know not to waste their points, and editors can see the feedback. This would also eliminate the need (well, eliminate a lot of, not eliminate the need) for people e-mailing the editors over dupes etc.. The editors would be required to look at the comments before approving.
Carry on...
Instead of letting the user link to a website of theirs on the front page, just have that link instead go to their user profile on slashdot. From there people can do several things:
-Visit their website listed in their profile
-Read their journal
-Friend or Foe them
-Potentially see all stories they've submitted (if you add that feature)
-Etc
Personally I think this is a better solution because it allows slashdot to push itself and the community aspect of the site and not just some other website the user linked to in the story submission. The original functionality is still there in their profile (a link to the users website), but also a lot more info about the person submitting.
Of course, linking to the users profile should be opt-in. Win-win situation in my book.
Wtf is this all about? I think this Taco guy, he's just trying to steal the thunder of the upcoming Macworld Keynote address by His Steveness Himself.
22 minutes and counting:)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
If he'd gotten into the pits with all the rest of us, been there, been a person, commented "I don't know * * Beatles Beatles, it's just that he's always submitting during my shift" or "He happens to submit stuff that's the kind of thing I care about, stuff that the others don't submit, that's why I'm always approving him" or "* * Beatles Beatles continually hangs on the same IRC channels as me and point out interesting stuff, and I tend to ask him to submit the cool stuff" or whatever is the background, I think the problem would have gone away.
However, being just a name that appears on the stories creates distance, and makes it easy to talk about conspiracies...
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
The way the system works, a good number of people post to the first relevant post like I'm doing now, and all too often that thread becomes the discussion. The moderations are irrelevant(insightful) and inconsequential(informative). Everyone should have mod points, and people should be able to label the posts whatever they like. People should be able to see what labels other people use, and how many people use a given label. In fact scrap mod points altogether and allow the viewer of the label to decide whether they want the label to indicate +1 or -1 or even have a label from one user be a +1 while another person using the same label gets their mods to count 0 and still another using the label to count -1 to the viewer's customized moderations to the posts.
http://okcupid.com/ uses a similar system and it works rather well.
Now for the attributions. If the person has a slashdot account, it should link to that account, if not, then no link. Alternatively an email address can be used. No page URL's!
You mean slashdot actucally has editors?
(or, at least, *I* read Slashdot -- and have for years; check my user number)
:-)
Forget your user number, you are the man for getting that username
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
I think that a lot of this discussion mirrors what happened before their was comment moderation. I remember when that first went into effect, there was a huge hullabaloo about it, but the site got better even as it got bigger. The same can't be said of a lot of newsgroups I used to read.
/. for a while, but I think I've only tried to submit stories five or six times. Personally, I don't have the time to get things right. It's okay though because I don't suggest stories for the NY Times, NPR, or the Wired Magazine. I read them. I don't mind if someone else writes them. With each of those outlets, I read some of the stuff and others get tossed out. That's how I read /. except that I also get to talk back very easily.
/. but I don't give a damn about that. If Beatles-Beatles profits from this, I don't care. If you aren't profiting, I don't care about that either. I want to read, discuss, and read what others have to say. The rest of it be damned.
/.
Here's my thing: I set my comment threshold to what I feel like I want to hear. If the moderators are doing the job (and I include myself in there with them) then all goes well. If, like me, they haven't moderated well lately, things get messy. A note like this from CmdrTaco is useful as a wakeup. And maybe that's all that we need.
I have noticed that Beatles-Beatles keeps coming up on the page. I noticed because that's a weird and memorable name. I hadn't noticed who was posting the stuff from that submitter (is that a word?) because I just don't care. And here's why:
I've been on
I suppose that it's different for those people who are looking to make money by posting to
There will always be those people who go off topic, there will always be the idiots concerned with being the first post, and there will always be flame-bait. Beyond that, there will also be intelligent conversation and debate, funny stuff that makes us laugh, and new things to learn on
I'm going to moderate more carefully for now. I'll need another reminder down the road. I'm still not going to give a damn who posts what. I'll just read whatever strikes my fancy.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Really, I've read several posts by BB (some good, some fairly poor in fact IMHO), never once have I clicked on the "Beatles-Beatles" link to look at the poster information.
I read the articles which capture my attention. I respond to posts on subjects where I feel I have something to contribute. If <insert poster name here> wants to link his ID back to a personal website, that's <insert poster name here>'s business. It's not as though I'm paying for the content I see here, although I'm aware that some of us here do; I'm recieving free information, and I should exercise normal judgement regarding the content of that information accordingly, not expect some "higher authority" to vet and sanitize the information first. If I wanted that, I'd be using AOL.
Isn't this an almost exact dupe of this story?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I don't get the problem. The story is the thing. I couldn't care less if it were Charles Manson submitting in the story is relevant and interesting. Who the submitter is DOES NOT MATTER.
That has to be lamest day of the year for Slashdot. It was funny in 1998. Its 2006, its no longer funny. Really, its no longer funny.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
how the hell do you know what SM is or is not doing. Your first response is denial/attack it should be investigation.
...not that a given someone got a submission put up. You know, that's kind of petty, really- it doesn't (and shouldn't matter WHO submitted it, it's a valid story...). What I have a small beef about on story submission is that with all of your claims of format, etc. I've submitted stories in the past that met your apparent criteria that got rejected, only to have the same story approved for some other submitter a day or so later . Now, to be sure, some of the stories in question that I've submitted over time weren't accepted at all- I've little problem with that because you can't post everything. But, the ones I've submitted and got rejected only to have it show up from someone else days later... You can't tell me that they submitted in the queue before me or that the topic all of a sudden became news- days later's not believeable unless your editorial staff's that far behind in the bin. What gives with that CmdrTaco?
Anyhow...
No, you should post the story and have the editorial staff and the mods forcibly mod down stuff that has nothing to do with the story as offtopic. Yes, it's a cesspool, but only to people that're viewing below 1 or 0. In all honesty, it's all you can do, Rob, in light of all the prior choices. They've all been lesser evil choices, but they've all been good ones over time. This needs to have the same class of treatment. It may not be what you're envisioning, but it's your only option now that you've gone down the road you have.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
That the only people that complain are those who wish to take advantage of posting their own link, too. If they were real /.ers, they'de care more about the stories and comments on the site than who submitted them. Face it, the complainers are just jealous that someone has submitted quite a few stories that got accepted.
/.
But even if it were true, who cares if Beatles Beatles is in bed with Scuttlemonkey?! If you do care, it's only because you wish *you* were the one in bed with him.
I'm still happy about the articles that are posted and I'm still happy about reading comments. I really don't see any reason to be upset and ruining the boards. Afterall, you can vote with your mouse clicks-- meaning that if you don't like it, go somewhere else, or create \. the evil twin of
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Release more stories that are submitted or you will continue to leak users to digg.com . If that's a good thing or a bad thing, decide for yourself.
I got a story accepted and I only got one naked picture. And I think it was CowboyNeal.
A good compromise is one which leaves everyone just a little bit pissed off.
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
I work for a non-profit organization that benefits the city I live in in a pretty generous way. So I feel like I have a pretty good position to think like this. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's what I wanted to do because I believe in helping people who need help just because it's the right thing to do. I could have looked for more money (salary wise) in the private sector, but I'm not interested in that. Yes, I need to pay the bills, but I want to do so with a clean conscience and want to contribute as little as possible to what I perceive to be a problem: profit motive/commerce.
I also realize that even in the non-profit sector we still have to send our money to businesses that exist soley for profit. In many cases, that's OK because those businesses are reasonable. Especially the local ones. But I don't believe in supporting companies like WalMart where they only care about the stock holders. So that's a bit of a pulse on where I'm "coming from".
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Comment removed based on user account deletion
the whole point of something like slashdot is that if you give many people a small incentive to provide others with useful/interesting information, people will get the best content very quickly.
/. for YOU to read. his only reward is a link to his website - at no cost or damage to you whatsoever.
Beatles Beatles is a great example of this. apparently his or her major concern is promoting a fairly pointless website about George Harrison. in order to do this he spends major amounts of time finding interesting news stories and submitting them to
without the submitter link, the balance would tip in favour of those who want to make the front page either because they are spamming the links in the article itself (eg Roland Piquepaille) or to push some agenda.
some big stories appear on a whole bunch of news sites in a short space of time, and presumably get submitted here multiple times. it's the ones which are only submitted once, and don't appear many other places, that are the slashdot gold. and hence the obsessive submitters make a big contribution to the magic. (also, i would guess, ones who obsess a particular topic, and submit quite a few stories about say, heatsinks until once in a while an genuinely interesting heatsink story comes along.)
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Readers don't want the impression that submissions are mostly coming from the same couple of people.
So, why did you modbomb a bunch of people "-1 Offtopic" in the last discussion? Can you really blame us for noticing that ScuttleMonkey always accepts these stories? He can see who the stories are from because he edits the submission to say "Beatles*Beatles writes to tell us..." Can you blame us for saying, wow, this is the twentieth time that has come from ScuttleMonkey? It just defies logic to say every one of those has been a coincidence. If it had been an even distribution of submissions from the various editors accepting his stories, that's one thing. But with the exception of one story, it's always ScuttleMonkey. ALWAYS.
That doesn't, I don't know, make you curious?
"Sufferin' succotash."
it's a bigger change to slashdot per se, but little changes for the user:
- strip the submission of credits and everything pointing to the submitter
- add a link to the original, completely unaltered submission for readers to follow to if they're interested, and make the link name the submitter's name so there's some credit.
that would work for me as a reader, and if i imagine myself in the position of a submitter, i'd be happy as well.
Over on another site where users promote worthy stories to the front page the same conspiracy theorists clog the comments wondering how Albertpachino got another story to the front page. And even though this site lets you see the volume of submissions this guy makes and lets the readers themselves promote stories they still cry foul and come up with the same conspiracy tripe you mentioned. I think what it comes down to is the internet is full of stupid people who like stirring the pudding with conspiracy theories. I think inflamatory comments have hurt Slashdot. I am not sure what happened to Jon Katz but I liked his contributions but people were so rude to him in the comments. One of the things that keeps me coming to slashdot though are the comments. I'd say more often than not, the comments can be more interesting than the story submissions themselves and one can gain alot of knowledge from reading them. But over the last 2-3 years some of the comments have become brutal and in many cases vulgar and not safe for work.
'Same speed C but faster'
"But please understand that doing so is tremendously time consuming- this article will generate hundreds of pieces of mail and forum posts that I want to read and reply to. But there are only so many hours in the day."
Do what the rest of us do, read and post from work.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
If a user submits a lot of stories, but his personal link is 'mediocre', you should cap the number of times he can have that his personal link included in a story. Try once a week to start. Let the story through, just have the slashcode tell the editor how many times he's been on the front page that week, and then the editor can decide if the personal link is worth retaining.
By keeping the decision in the hands of the editor, good story submissions that include quality analysis at the personal link can still be posted, while those who are just in there to get links back to their websites can find somewhere else to spam.
If this is that big a deal, you can add a moderator checkbox for "ad hominem attack versus submitter" and let readers filter those out. Speaking of which, increasing the flexibility of the filters (maybe implementing more user-controlled boolean logic or even tools for naive bayesian filters) would probably help a lot of readers feel they were getting more benefit for the time they spend reading.
Not that I've spent a lot of time reading this site since you started it or anything.
-jpowers
Thanks Taco for talking to us about this. The more you open the door on to how things work, the less the consipiracy nuts will have to go on. Thank you!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
CmdrTaco just admitted that he has a "problem" with actually doing his job of editor to edit stories.
Now that I have expressed my opinion on this, I must also say: Who cares? Its just a website. Its not something you should be so emotionally attached to.
Sure there is unrefutable evidence that Slashdot editors mod bomb threads, accept inordinate numbers of stories from one source, accept ads from Microsoft that slam Linux while pretending to praise Linux themselves personally, and more. But please its just a website. You don't have to use Slashdot. You don't have to pay them either. The only reason why they can get away with what they do here is because largely most people don't care or are too stupid to care.
So I would suggest that you guys take it to a place like Digg, which has plenty of faults of its own, and try to build a better community instead of whining and griping.
If **Beatles Beatles gets more pageviews on his site, no one is going to be hurt I don't think.
An alternative is to do what K5 does. At any time, any user can mod any comment 0 (hide), 1 (discourage), 2 (neutral), or 3 (encourage). After a preset number of mods, the comment's average score is shown along with the comment. Add in a user-configurable kill-threshold, and you're golden.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
You are trying to censor discussion based on what you think the discussion should be about. If the article is the point, then post the article. If you think the discussion is the point and not the article, then throw away the user info. Is Slashdot a LJ or a Newsfeed? Pick one.
/. and Digg have their own unique strengths. Unfortunately for speed of news, I'll check Digg, but more often then not- they let slip a LOT of content that I would not consider "Tech-Worthy" news, so I go to /. for the "meaty tech stuff".
Adding to my comments above:
I know what I'm about to say is very unpopular with Slashdot editors. However, I'm not the only person who thinks this way.
It is amazing, after all these years, how little Slashdot editors have learned about grammar or spelling. No matter how good the writer, stories need the assistance of an editor. However, Slashdot stories often don't receive enough attention.
Often a re-organization of a Slashdot story or a bit of research would vastly increase the quality of the discussion. I definitely know how difficult improvement would be; it would use vast amounts of brainpower.
I'm very appreciative of Slashdot. It helps me educate myself about computing.
DON'T do it. If I'm clicking the link to RTFA, then I want to go to TFA, not some dipshit's summary.
Period. End of discussion.
Taco, your suggestion that we mod offtopic comments down is troubling, in that it runs contrary to what I believe about the way Slashdot works, or should work:
Everything starts at the same level, subject to optional bonuses we can choose, but probably most of of us actually read at 2 or higher these days -- except when modding. I would think the best use of the limited modpoints we have is to mod the ontopic, useful comments up to the point where we all see them, rather than push the lame stuff further into oblivion. There's plenty of time to correct poor judgement calls in voting, once we get to the point of metamoderation. But that's sometimes days or even weeks away, when the discussion in question is cold, and no longer benefits from improperly downvoted posts recovering their standing. I'd rather see a few comments not of interest to me, than few comments of interest to me, which is what happens when we subtract from, rather than add to, the pool of visible comments.
As part of adding, sometimes we'll see points come up that are only mildly related, but worthy of note. But tangents are a major point of the spark of discussion created by the topic even being set before us, aren't they? Tangents are where we leave the space we all know and expect, and start to learn things, perhaps unexpectedly. Mindful of this, people are certainly less afraid to bring tangential information to the table if they think they might be rewarded for it, rather than punished.
I think we have a broader, more comprehensive discussion when interesting points are pulled up, rather than when the crap is pushed further down. As an editor, you have unlimited points to get rid of the worst offenses anyway. Let us concentrate on digging for the gems, please.
Why do we need to know who submitted it?
... posting the number of approved stories on their info page? All of the prestige... without the front page description of which story is theirs. Or, if attribution is necessary, no links for anyone, just a byline. Since most submitters are NOT submitting their own work, and are arguably mostly getting their news from other news aggregation sites, this is not like they are submitting something that needs extensive citation.
If you edit and check it, you stand behind the work submitted and posted, right?
This is not posted as a tongue in cheek jab about editing. I understand that you are serious about the site, and since you are serious about the site, you don't want to have to worry about popularity contests or such nonsense.
Well, there's an easy fix.
Take away the popularity incentive for submitting stories. The only people who need to know are you and the submitter. Award some other incentive, if you need to- submitter points, which can be used for something, i don't know.
What about just
The other result of taking away that link, and possibly the direct byline, is that it would increase the responsibility on the editors, which would lead to less public muttering about irresponsibility (regardles sof whether warranted in that instance or not.) There can't be any question whether the editor read it if the editor's is the name on the piece. It means that they didn't just accept it because of who submitted it- they had to read it, make sure it was informative and editorially sound, and then post it on the site.
Thank you for taking public opinion on this.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
Now the motivation for getting a Slashdot story accepted ... is a return link to the website of your choosing. Your creds. Your 'Reward' for sharing a cool URL with a half a million Slashdot readers.
Here's my take: the 'creds' noted above are probably the motivation for the 'problem' user. One of the comments above mentions that BeatlesBeatles has submitted on average 4.5 stories a day since September. Apparently the return link is important to him/her, sure.
But for your average Slashdot reader who occassionally submits stories, I doubt that link is the real motivation at all. I've had stories accepted over the years, and typically my motivation is wanting to see what other people like me (i.e Slashdot readers) think about it. In other words, my motivation for story submission is the potential for generating an interesting discussion.
So part of my solution would be, yes, get rid of the credentials link. This has its own set of problems, but it would solve the initial one we're discussing. You might then lose some of the volume of links submitted, and get stuck with a bunch of 'virgin' story submitters who just don't know how to submit a good story.
If you're really ambitious, one possible solution to solve the 'virgin submitter' problem might be to provide better submission feedback. "This link is good, but please run a friggin' spellchecker." Or "We're not posting a link directly to your blog; please try again." Possibly putting a submission into a 'Draft' state, then waiting for the user to improve it.
Yeah, this would be potentially a lot more work for the editors, but hey TANSTAAFL. The best way to solve this problem is, in my opinion, to do all that you can to help the casual Slashdot reader to submit a good story.
--Mid
If the problem is that the readers can't grow up and engage in meaningful conversation on an interesting article, then it's their fault. Why bother bickering about how someone gets a lot of articles accepted? The articles were accepted, and thus were deemed interesting.
Karma: Chameleon (Mostly affected by the 1980s)
I think the random thread idea is a very good one for all the reasons you outlined above. I think it would be particularly good for moderators. I hope this gets consideration.
Jack
PSPupdates was a relatively good site; it had current news and was constantly being updated. Sad thing was even if somebody copy/pasted a story from another site or hell just said they made the damn news it really didn't matter to me. If there was a link I would check it out, if it was without source I would go Google it. 9 times outa 10 it was a real story or was relevant to the site.
The downside of pspupdates, and they have fixed most of it but it does still occur, was that most all the comments on a story were about how the submitter sucked, or the program, or that the news was from another site.
For me this is pointless in every way. When news or a breakthrough comes out, I want to be able to read about it, I could care less where it came from originally, I am sure through the readme or other people talking the source would surface.
Instead all you got after somebody submitted a story about the PSP being hacked was shit-head fudge-sticks talking about how they had the first comment or that they didn't support hacking of the psp. Rather than commenting on a good job to the programmers or the story 134 comments would be posted about how the guy that said he was the first post was gay or that everyone would or wouldn't go download ISO's.
Point I am trying to make is, when did you guys become so ignorant in the way of common sense? Why are you worried if some asshole gets 100 stories submitted and you don't get yours? Isn't that why there is IM and e-mail? If the story truly is good enough to get out it will find a way. Hell, i see stuff posted on Slashdot that's a couple months old, although it's still good news.
It is quite sad that a "story" or article like this was released. I do believe that the mods should check into the links of the submitted story, but it should be up to the submitter to honestly judge if pasting in his own blogg is even complimenting the story or is just trying to be an internet whore and get everyone to check out his/her page.
Just give me the damn news and I will do with it as I please. 15 year olds complaining that their story about shaking soda up in a can would be diffused by tapping the side can just get lost somewhere.
The articles on Slashdot have been most always informative to me. I have submitted a few and had them published. I didn't ever link to a personal site or post "how much I visit Slashdot" it's not the point of the article.
In short, let's just think before you post, post about the article, let it be with whomever submitted it. If it gets bad enough just whack whoever submitted it, create a script sending the user an e-mail saying that the article was submitted give it a CASE ID, Slashdot will now read
Article 12348za3 "Idiots claim lives on internet"
That is all.
I rarely submit stories because I get rejected so often. Now I don't feel so bad but I also learned something: /. **
/. new stories are rarely posted. I get bored.
**don't bother submitting stories to
I have a better chance winning the charity lottery for my local hospital than having my story posted here.
PS: 2 years ago I had trouble keeping up with the pace. Not anymore. Because of the picky-ness of
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I think I better understand what you mean about the link farming. The user's PERSONAL url that is associated with their username at the beginning of the story? If you're concerned about that then...
If you are concerned about the 'reward' you are giving having a negative impact (link farming):
Then the 'reward' should be the link only and with a nofollow, by default, for all users. However, a manual override could be in place if the user's actual URL has something to do with the story. Isn't that really what you're concerned about, search engine pollution? If I submit a story about chickens, you're doing a disservice by linking my personal home page URL to that subject matter. (And the indirect reward of a link to my homepage into a search engine's calculations really isn't that much of a reward to an average user. To someone manipulating search engines, it may be.)
If you are not concerned about the 'reward' you are giving being a negative impact (link farming / search engines):
Then really, you don't care if they're link farming or not or you're associating a story about chickens with an unrelated user's web page.
I mean it, everything. Every single link on the site. We don't owe google anything, we don't need to help them to get their results, and they lead to spammers messing up our site. So, not to put too fine a point on it, fuck them.
I am trolling
Think of your self as a magazine with contributing authors. Suppose I had an author that no one liked. That everyone complained about every time I post his story. The general opinion of my magazine will decline. I'm in the magazine industry to make money, not to be fair to the contributors. If the contributors is doing things to make people not like them for whatever reason, then I'm not going to lessen myself by allowing them to contribute.
I don't like the idea of removing credit. They did the work, if no one else posts the story, you can't strip the credit from their work. You have expressed this already, so I don't expect you'd ever do this.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
This is an exellent point. Why is a submission by some random geek better than a submission by someone who is involved? I'm not saying blatant ads on the front page, but if someone releases a product and wants geek exposure, they should be allowed to submit.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Why not just add an option for those users who don't want to feel spammed by the story submitters to not show who submitted it?
"Denying that what happened was suspicious is calling your community stupid."
If you waste time whining about the specifics of submitter/editor relations, you are stupid and you deserve to be called such.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
It seems to me that the problems you mention probably seem large because you are looking at Slashdot from the perspective of being one of its parents and on-going creators and not as one of its average readers. I have never actually noticed the problems you have mentioned. Not once.
Here is the crux. . .
The average reader is entirely capable of doing his/her own skimming and content filtering while reading through any given forum. Every comment on every story, realistically, is not going to get read by the average Slashdot reader. Heck, I only read about 20% of the stories put up on the main page anyway. Readers don't want to waste their own time, and so they automatically learn how to skim. This is probably why everybody clicked so instantly with the term, "Surfing the Web" when it was first invented. You surf, you don't swim, or try to drink the entire ocean.
If people post garbage about the story poster, then I give it the hundredth of a second of my attention it deserves, and move on until I find a post which is interesting, (and like I said, I have yet to notice even a single instance of this kind of response in the five years I've been reading Slashdot. That's pretty good auto-filtering!). The self-moderation of the site also works rather well; the "Off Topic" mod seems to keep the bullshit factor down nicely.
So all in all, it's interesting to hear from your perspective, but realistically, I really don't think that there is ANY problem here at all. My enjoyment and illumination through Slashdot hasn't been impaired in the slightest by the kinds of posts you are talking about.
Thanks again for providing Slashdot. Cheers!
-FL
I never suspected that ScuttleMonkey or anyone else were submitting their own stories (with fake UIDs) or accepting bribes. I was just concerned about the perceived lack of professionalism. When you have three straight stories posted by Beatles-Beatles (December 11th), it is disconcerting. Also, when each story begins with the formulaic "* * Beatles-Beatles tells us . . .", I get confused. When you combine that with the fact that **BB's linked site is, uh, shday, I was discouraged about Slashdot.
I have to admit that for a time I was an instigator of the anger over Beatles Beatles. I am mostly over my paranoia now, but I still have some concerns. Now I need to get back to obsessively following MacWorld.
Hi Taco. Thanks for the commentary from behind the curtain.
/. ID. Whee!) And I've done the same thing most of my friends have as /. has gotten bigger, and as real life and professional concerns creep into our lives. We hit the /. front page, hit all the relevant links that interest us (tabbed browsing works wonders) and read the stories, but ignore the commentary. Occasionally we'll delve into the commentary to see what's being said.
/. users don't post much. Partially because we don't want to deal with the unruly mobs in the discussion area, but also because we don't have the time to delve into a deep conversation.
/. hordes, which is the point of the whole endeavor.
I think it's more important for the story to make it to the site, regardless of the submitter. I've been reading the site for a long time (note my 4 digit
I think this might be an opportunity to see how many people hit the site vs. how many actually comment. I've noticed as time has gone on, a lot of older
If someone is making it to the front page because they're submitting good stories, then more power to them. I have noticed that sometimes it seems there's favoritism, since I've submitted stories, with links, and they'll be rejected, but a few hours later, or a day, someone else will submit the exact same story with the same links, and it'll get accepted. That's annoying. And that's probably a bigger issue to deal with on the operations end. One the other hand, the story still got out there, and into the minds of the
So, I say, don't throttle people's submissions. let them submit away. Post the stories if they're good/unique, etc. If you've got someone who's posting a lot, it might be worth waiting a little while and seeing if another user posts the same story, so that you can bring an end to some of the "Tragedy of the Commons" we're experiencing. If the story still hasn't been posted after a reasonable amount of time, put it on the page. It's more improtant to have the info than it is to censor.
And that's my Karma Bonused 2 cents. Thanks.
Reeses
"If their incentive to submit is attribution, they shouldn't be submitting."
That's your opinion and I disagree. Your opinion obviously doesn't make sense to me, and you've given no reason other than your personal feelings for your opinion.
So my question is why should anyone who doesn't care about the submitter change their mind?
What apart from personal jealousy is the driving force behind your opinion?
"Submitting just to gain attribution is the wrong reason to do it."
No it's not.
See how I made that last argument, or rather, made no argument at all? That's your post, an exposition on what you think should happen with no logic, fact or reason at all.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
by "not", I meant "now". my bad. he's now a part of ZDNet.
and he still looks like a cracked-out muppet.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Brilliant idea!
:-)
I know it was probably unintentionally hilarious, but each one of your proposed moderations was negative.
What about?
Interesting
Helpful
Enlightening
Useful
Warm gooey feelings
At least part of the problem, as I see it, is that the lack of editing on the part of the editors leads to the impression that these "problem" submitters just get their stories posted with little question and that other submissions are getting ignored. I'm not going to name any specific editors but there is a serious problem here. There are spelling and grammar errors in the article summaries that wouldn't pass 5th grade English and these occur with amazing consistency. On top of the lack of basic English, there is the problem that duplicates have become quite commonplace on the site. An editor is supposed to actually do something, not just copy/paste an article from a favored submitter and then add an additional poorly structured statement or question to enhance the posting controversey. These editing problems create the feeling that the actual article review and posting process is performed in a shoddy manner. This leaves a wide open opportunity for people to question the motives behind the posted stories.
Personally, I couldn't care less if Roland or whoever gets an article posted every day, as long as the quality of the site and stories remains high. You've had a great thing going here for several years now, I hope you continue the good work and improve the site where appropriate.
Anyways, that's just my opionion.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Let me propose what I think is an easy solution to this problem.
Instead of allowing the user that submitted the story a link to any URL, only allow them to link to their Slashdot profile.
The user could still put links to an external website in their Journal. They would also still gain some fame and notoriety if their articles are frequently submitted.
I think with the external links being 2 clicks away, and not linked directly from the front page would curb some of the people abusing the system, as well as people complaining about it.
Quoth the Penguin, "pipe grep more!"
I just can't see why people are getting so worked up over this. Obviously they are. I have been reading slashdot for a little while now, and rarely do I notice who submitted a story. I'm sure it's important to some people to be seen.. but come on. This all seems a bit childish doesn't it?
--LR
"Hired Net Grunt"
--Hired Net Grunt
How about providing each /. user with the means to remove submitter information from the head of any subsequent stories from a given submitter. Replace it with Anonymous Coward, or Cowboy Neals Pet Goat, or something ... It might help prevent negative comments about such a submitter reaching the critical mass required to "swamp out the real discussion."
Just look at how many comments have been submitted? The readers of Slashdot would love nothing more than to write endlessly about Slashdot!
...but he is getting a wicked karma boost for all those highly-rated posts!
en tee
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As far as I'm concerned the story is all there is. I don't give a flaming s**t who submitted it. The current policy is fine.
Trouble, a mistake or fun, your choice
Update a dozen or so users have made the same point: Simply wait for the same story to come from another user. If that was possible, I would do so. I'm really talking here about stories that are submitted just by one person. Part of why these users are successful is that they submit enough stories that they get a handful that only THEY submitted. I can't simply wait for someone else. That will never come!
Give me a break. That is such a lame excuse. 9/10 of the "offenders" posts are on every other news site on the net. It's not like slashdot is posting some amazing groundbreaking articles that don't appear anywhere else. If for the sake of argument, the tenth post these spammers submit is something extraordinary that will never come from elsewhere...here's the kicker...maybe you shouldn't have posted the previous nine articles from them that WERE submitted by thirty other people!
This is crap, Taco, and you know it's crap. Something stinks in Slashville, and you are panicked because the people who visit the site every day have noticed. Your "explanation" is equivalent to Bill Clinton's famous "I did not have sexual relations with this woman!" broadcast.
Take some responsibility. Man up. Have some pride.
I'm sure everyone is terribly sorry that doing your job might take up a lot of your time during the day. God, that's just terrible. The pain you must suffer!
How about the mods get flags for submitters who link to the same site too often? That way, someone who's always posting articles linking to their personal blogs gets flagged.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Slashdot is more than a collection of links, it's a community. User participation is what makes slashdot. If you strip the public credit (name, link) people will still submit stories, because the readers of slashdot want the site to continue and be successful. When I've submitted a story, it's because I thought it was interesting and unique, not to garner fame or a link.
If you want to preserve credit, make it part of a user's profile. Just a simple box score without submission titles:
Stories submitted: 100
Stories accepted: 3
That's all there is to it. Trust me, if you remove the credit, people will still submit. Look at Fark. No credit, plenty of material.
Has anyone thought that perhaps the other editors ignore Beatles-Beatles submissions as spam? And only the delightful Scuttlemonkey is brave enough to sort out the bad and the good?
I think this entire rant just extends jealousy and hate from other slashdotters that aren't lucky enough to get their name on the main page next to an article.
I applaud Beatles-Beatles for providing slashdot with lots of articles of interest and just because you have a link to your website doesn't mean I'll consider you evil.
I don't see why anyone has to pay attention to Beatle-Beatles website to read the interesting tidbit he/she* submitted. I find it hardly noticeable.
* Probability dictates that Beatles-Beatles is most likely male, but you never know. Females know better than to mention their gender on the web. =)
Why is that you don't offer subscription access to the entire queue, ala TotalFark?
This has always made me wonder, but now I think we all know the real answer.
Once the threshold is hit, the article's links get stripped of references.
Done and done.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
This is how I understand it;
:)
A *known* user posts a story, with his reciprocal link.
Lot of slashdotters jump on thread and start complaining (OT) about said link and\or submitter.
After enough OT comments on enough submitted stories said known user gets a reputation.
Slashdot admin now can't decide whether to post more stories from the original submitter because they now have a reputation based on OT posts.
The solution seems pretty obvious to me.
Sort the mods out to mod the OT posts asap. That way the original submitter *won't* get a reputation. Plus there will be less cr*p for me to wade through. The reciprocal link should remain, it's a privilege\reward for contributing. Maybe all those who complain need to look at themselves and see how they are actually contributing to Slashdot rather than flood a story with a load of OT crap.
If users complain (via email) then surely a mod or admin can address the email and take any action required?
My tuppence
If the guy is CLEARLY a spammed (Beatles guy for example) and theres an article you're dying to post then slap them as AC. Not only would this discourage abuse of the system but it will also get the news out to people you want.
I think Slashdot could survive without link whores. If you took out the "reward" (which I see no reward in for anyone) then you have just the worth while story spread to others for the knowledge/intrest of the story. If you want people to goto your site then sig it, I've been to quite a few people's sites through sigs where they've caught my attenction, the post got modded up so it was worth while and the users thought so.
So in short Taco : Remove the person behind the story and make them fight for their "15 minutes of fame" in the comment area. It makes it much harder to spam crap and would improve the discussion you so hate (lets all attack beatles dude). Now you could say "but they'll get ignored", when quite often we see the article submitter modded up for a comment on the article submission.
But hey maybe we're all just getting a little older and a little bitter and seeing Zonk rant about games positively over and over, while beatles beatles tries to whore his sites and a few worth while articles pop along once in a while, just isn't cutting it for us any more.
I like muppets.
Again, that works in theory. But not always in reality.
/. editorial staff expanded beyond you and Hemos that /. started to noticeably dive in quality. I don't know what the answer is, I don't know what the relationship between editors is. You might try suggesting they stop going with the easy, safe submissions of known submitters versus others that include better links and equal if not better text.
the spammer is taking the time to submit many many stories to get a couple through. The casual user only submits the stories he thinks are the absolute best. If we pick a dozen stories, they can't all be the very very best. There will be a few stories that are not as great... and a few that simply are of interest to a different subset of readers. A spammer submits 10... if i order them in terms of how widely known they are, #1-5 are submitted 20-30 times... but number 8 and 9 maybe only once or twice.
Okay, so you're saying that when the only person to submit an interesting yet slightly obscure story is a queue spammer, that queue spammer is going to get their submission posted. This makes sense except...
The queue spammers are getting their submissions accepted on stories that are not obscure, when there are 20-30 submissions, and a casual perusal of the comments shows half a dozen irritated submitters who had at least comparable if not plainly superior submissions on the same story which were rejected. Yet the queue spammer not only wins, but wins several times in a row. Clearly there is more going on here, and your explanation sounds more like "theory" than "reality".
I'm not going to claim that the spammers are being deliberately picked or given preference due to some unknown deal. I am going to claim that, consciously or not, certain submitters are being accepted more readily than others irrespective of the relative merits of the submissions, and I don't think this claim lacks ample support. At the very least, the fact that a story that links to a blog is frequently picked over a similarly well-worded submission with links to primary sources shows that the system is not working even for those most popular stories.
I think part of the problem here (meaning this very story) is that the problem is not you, yet you have to come to defend the editorial process as you exercise it. Frankly, it was the moment
The enemies of Democracy are
IMHO, I don't really see the big issue with any of this. I never really look at the people submitting the stories. I look at the contents of the stories and that is about it. If I find the story blurb interesting, I click to follow the article, and maybe the discussion about the article. If a story doesnt catch my interest, I don't read it, and I dont go into the discussion.
In fact, today is the first time I have ever clicked on a submitters link. I did this just to see what all the fuss was about. Personally, I wont click on Beatles Beatles link again, it has nothing there to interest me, and the submitter has nothing to do with the story that is posted besides being the person who posted it.
I think this issue has been overblown, and I dont really see what the problem is. If you don't like the submitter, don't click on his link. If you don't like the story, don't follow the links to the article or the discussion.
Stop Behaving Like Children! No-one is forcing anyone to click on any links here on Slashdot, and I would personally hate the thought that someone is modifying or censoring the posts on this site.
The fact that Slashdot is COMMUNITY DRIVEN, is one of Slashdot's greatest strengths and weaknesses.
I don't mind having links to stupid websites. There is nothing that makes me click a link unless I think that the address of the site is interesting. If I click once on someone's link who submitted a story and find that the site is uninteresting, I don't have to click his link again. He wants hits, /. wants stories, they trade stories for hits. Problem solved. A perfect example of free enterprise. Does anyone have a problem with that?
boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!
I rarely look at the submitter of the article, only the article itself. Please learn not to use ad homen strategies to sooth your own ego. If you don't like the topic, don't blame the submitter or the editorial team (Sorry Rob. I didn't know how else to classify your job). Just because a certain person submitted an article doesn't meant the topic is not relevant to part of the Slashdot population.
Is when a story that I submit gets rejected but the exact same story, submitted by one of these guyes(AFTER I submitted it) gets accepted.
It doesn't bother me at all that certain users get many stories accepted.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Don't use submitted stories at all. Just cease. PROBLEM SOLVED. Slashdot could be a news source of its own. The editors all write, I read their stuff on other sites. Let the editors pick and choose and write their own stories, or write up submissions and summaries and provide the external links. How many editors do they have? If each one did one original article and 4 more summaries and links, per day, that would be a normal day full of stories to comment on. Problem solved. And if the parent corporation wants to subscribe to some news syndicates, then they can do that as well to get stories. You don't actually need submitters outside the company, all you need on a discussion forum is the people who like to type and discuss-or cuss as it where. Hundreds or thousands of magazines/newspapers etc do it just like this now and it seems to work, they have a very tiny "letters to the editor" section, but the bulk of what you read is written by their own reporters or is copy/pasted news syndicate stuff.
Personally I don't have much of a problem with user submitted content, as long as the links are valid and on topic. As to ads,most of the web is ad based,so unless people want to adopt micropayments for each byte of content, we don't have much in the way of alternatives. In other words, who cares? and geez, if you want some tech advice, just turn javascript off. there ya go, yuou have eliminated well over 90% of what is wrong or can go wrong on the net. Clueless webmasters will eventually learn that allowing random websites to run active code is a BAD IDEA. Forcing your visitors to surf like that is very rude and obnoxious, even if you can pull off "new and shiny" effects. . I have way more of a problem with that and Flash based ads than I do if joe random screen name is a story submitter or poster on a discussion forum.
Posting AC because my user info points to a page that has ads on it.
Its rare I read through the slashdot comments anyhow, at least beyond the first few, mostly for the reasons you mention. I come for the stories and my two cents is publish anything you find interesting, paying no attention to the submitter.
You might try getting rid of Anonymous Coward, that will cut down on a large bulk of the comment cruft. Require all comments to be by a logged in account. Then, repeat commentors who go off topic should get modded down and their initial comment level should be reflective of their standing as a commentor. Doesn't stop someone from making multiple Slashdot accounts, but if someone is that determined to post unimportant/off-topic comments, then obviously this is how they get joy into their lives and will find ways to do so anyhow.
Hiya CmdrTaco,
Thank you for hard work on Slashdot. You and your co-editors set the tone of Slashdot, and while it's a mixed bag, myself and many others find it enjoyable and often brilliant. But like many other users, I simply don't read comments. I've tried. When Ricochet's death was announced, I posted technical information on the free origins of its protocol, how to unlock it from the Ricochet (brand) network, and the command set of the device. That factual post was drowned out in a sea of opinions not just in volume but in moderation as well. That's okay. The fatal implication is that other factual replies by other people suffer the same fate. I'm now firmly of the opinion that any factual content worth while makes it as a headline and the comments section is skipped. This reply is an opinion. As such, it's devoid of substance. The short of it -- probably most of your readers are just like me and never noticed that "Beatles Beatles" submits a lot of stuff or has a pointless home page; we enjoy Slashdot even though the comments are run by hoardes of idiots; nits aside, the editors do good work.
Regards,
-scott
If the /. profile is always the link, then I wouldn't enjoy having my submissions posted quite as much. It punishes the non-malicious submitters to do that change.
/. Editors, so make a moderation pool for stories, so moderators can determine if a person can submit stories in the future. If the submitter is modded down, they'll have to rebuild "story karma" first, or post anonymously when they submit a story in the future.
The Edit option is higher stress on the
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Of course is the inability to complain about the lack of options in /. polls.
Let moderators rate the links in the articles, and unlink what is considered "spam" over time.
I don't know if it could work on the timescale of a single article, but a consistently bad rated web site could be unlinked.
Your page is on every post you make, and so is mine. Additionaly for me, my e-mail is in the clear in every post I make, so it's not like the webpage in the article itself is going to drive search engine traffic, follow or nofollow.
I'm a fairly casual slashdot user. I read a couple stories a day that I think look interesting, scan the top comments for interesting banter, and comment once or twice a week if I'm not busy (or sometimes if I am busy and need to procrastinate. I would venture to guess that I am an average slashdot reader.
In light of that, what I wanted to say is that in my casual reading I hadn't even noticed this problem, and I would venture to guess that alot of readers are in the same boat. I also have never clicked a submitter's link, and am unlikely to - realizing that it probably points to their personal webpage and in most cases I have no interest in that.
m0nstr42.blogspot.com
I really don't understand it. What's it all about?
If I see some interesting article, I read it.
If it seems full of crap or irrelevant to what I consider "stuff that matters", I ignore it.
NONE of my stories (I've posted a few) have made the front page. Do I curl up in the corner of my office, screaming: CONSPIRACY!?
No, I don't. Because, let's face it, Slashdot is an immensely popular blog. But it's still a blog. And until Soviet Russia makes neutral story-rating robots, we're gonna have to settle with a "personal touch".
In addition, I often find myself clicking links in people's signatures. They are not always relevant to anything either. Do I care or cuss? No. Welcome to the web.
Man, I must be new here..
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Generally, I try to post material that is as fresh and recent as possible. I put no spin, commentary, or personal opinions on it. Instead, I just make a relevant snippet of the article, and post.
What pisses me off is someone else that submits the same story and does nothing more than copy the article in it's entirety AND put a personal spin on it will get the submission granted, whereas mine gets rejected.
So my question is, do I need to resort to blatant plagarism to just try to get a story out there?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Unlink submitters names. It adds nothing to either the article or the conversation, and solves this problem. People will submit without their "Reward".. and really, why do you want to reward people by using slashdot's google-power to bolster bad webpages? If I submit a good article will you let me hawk herbal viagra on the main page? What does that say about slashdot in return? It doesn't make sense, and it really is a very simple issue. Just remove them.
What's the point of attribution? Recognition. The vast majority of
What do readers get upset about? Scams. If you're feeding referral sites, users get pissed because editors are not excercising due dilligence in EDITING and it's reasonable for readers to expect protection from that. News sites are about content and that's 1/2 the value.
No Follow is the correct answer. There's no moral ground to stand on when an editor is claiming non-interference with link format after practicing editing by selection (throwing out 50 prior submissions to the same content with a different editorial and/or link format). Unfortunately editors often have to do the edit work, there's nothing "wrong" about it.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why not record a user's reputation and display it with the user's post.
Or some other up front warning of the legitimacy of the referenced URLs.
That way if users follow the links they are doing so with full knowledge of what they are doing.
Even if the poster is a problem child of sorts, why focus on this? Enjoy the fact that he picked something worthwhile. It's a matter of keeping /. on track - if the editors start sorting by the personalities of the posters, somethings' gone wrong.
Being a regular moderator myself, I'll from now on help pan down anyone discussing the submitter. That's my contribution to a great web site.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
"Maybe we could moderate entire articles."
/. readers now.
Kuro5hin had this. Rusty set it up, and we got some content going. It worked out very well. We got some great, well written, well thought out stories. We also got some great links.
Then something happened. It became about politics. Because and others like me did not have the personal time to mod down every stupid story that came in (from our point of view), the site gradually became more about obscure US politics than about technology or interesting things that were happening.
I hear there's a new "anti-slashdot" called Digg, and I'm sure that unless they take steps, the same thing will happen. Slashdot has a group of people who are paid to keep a particular "topic" of story flowing, and they have mechanisms to enforce it. This keeps the site, as a whole, focused on a topic to the point where the discussions become valuable and fun. The foot traffic is the other advantage.
Much like on K5, lots of people like to jaw and whine about this and that, but unlike K5, you don't have to worry about the story flavour changing over a few months. There's a state format, clear intent, and enforcement of it. Not that K5 is bad, but it's just not interesting to me and probably most
Story moderation is not a panacea.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
99.9% of the readers neither notice the submitter nor care.
-- My Weblog.
K5 scaled decently for a while, but then got taken off its selected topics by a mass of readers who had nothing in common with the "old guard" K5 folks who wanted something like /., but more egalitarian.
It didn't work. Rusty is a nice guy, but he didn't predict what would happen. It's easy to say something will happen, but you have to prove it before anyone will care.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
...I do believe this is the day that Slashdot has officially jumped the shark. Users of a forum which the majority claim to be "open" to things such as uncensored speech and expression, free software, public global exchange of information and knowledge are now discussing who to censor, who to exclude, who to ban, who is worthy or unworthy of a posting information in the form of an article submission, or how many times one is permitted to express this information. On top of this, CmdrTaco - the provider of this supposed open media - has watched this go on for so long that he feels the need to make a statement in the form of an article...a statement of which will probably do little except feed the flames of some people's rage, causing them to further desire the exclusion or censorship if those they disagree with.
I think it's amazing that some of those (some, not all) who argue so much for freedom of speech and open exchange of information are the same that make so many attempts to silence others. Many of those who say if you don't like what you hear, read, see, etc then change the channel, close the book, change the station. So many posts responding to this article call for the same type of censorship they complain organizations like the FCC try to implement on them. I personally do not use any filters on Slashdot, if you do not like seeing articles from a specific submitter I suggest you filter them if possible. If it is not possible, then maybe the addition of such a feature is necessary. If you are upset about someone else getting credit for articles over you, then it is not the submitter that is the problem, rather it is your own ego.
I personally do not give a rat's if all the accepted articles for a month are submitted solely by Beatles-Beatles, or anyone else including myself. It is the content of the article that matters, not the submitter. Readers still gain the same information from the articles no matter who posted them, do they not? Or is what really matters some pissing contest over who gets more exposure, publicity, recognition, or other gain? Cause I was under the impression that the whole ball of wax was simply about the free exchange of news and ideas among a group of people who share a common interest.
Taco, if you are feeling twice damned in your submission selection you need to make a little script that hides the submitters name/info/etc from the editors while they are making submission choices. Choose submissions based on their quality, not the submitter.
No one can blame you for choosing X submitter if you don't know it was that submitter in the first place. Obviously we have to have trust that you are actually hiding the submitters name, etc during the selection process, which won't stop the conspiracy theorists, but the rest of us will take it on good faith that you are choosing submissions "blind" to the submitter.
Complexity Happens
There's that, but it would also be good to have a general policy of linking to an original source for a story rather than a regurgitation blog. Requires fewer clicks, helps prevent bandwidth issues, prevents linkrot, and removes the distaste some people have for submitters who intentionally profit from the system.
To me, the brightline is this: does the blog just summarize the article or an opinion thereof? If so, there's no reason not to change the link to directly link to the article.
And if a policy of relinking or outright rejecting violators is established, stories won't be missed because sumbitters will stop putting the useless step of linking to their page between slashdot and the story. Everyone wins except the parasites.
From my point of view, it makes no sense to toss out the stories based on who submits them. I never pay any attention to who submits them, and I almost never read the discussions around the stories. I simply use this site as a portal to news that might interest me. If you start tossing out stories because of who submitted them or what sort of discussion they might provoke, you reduce the value this site has to me. I care about keeping up with interesting news, nothing more, nothing less.
Sorry about the hate mail but the conspiracy theories are part of what make slashdot fun. Sometimes the stories are a bit boring and the conspiracy theories are just more intriguing. The Beatles Beatles conspiracy is more fun than most because of the silly name.
-Anonymous Andy
Seriously. This would fix the whole thing.
I'm not a paid subscriber to Slashdot. I've never had a story accepted. I don't use the jiffy 'advanced' features of Slashdot such as journals.
I moderate, and even meta-moderate, but I browse the site primarily from work and don't often have the time or opportunity to do so.
I come here to read news, stories, and articles which relate to things that I'm interested in. I could care less the intentions or motivations of the person submitting that story to Slashdot, as long as the story itself meets my standards. And overwhelmingly they do.
The people who complain that an article is a 'slashad', quite frankly, need to put up or shut up. If they have better news to share, then share it. If they can present an article in a better manner than the people who are currently presenting it, then do it. Otherwise STFU. I'm constantly amazed that anyone from the culture that made Open Source and GPL so popular could honestly sit back on their ass and whine rather than come up with a better, competing solution.
We live in a world of commercialism and that is neither inherently horrible nor evil. If you want to live in a commune, go live in one. If you want to live in this world, then you need to grow a thicker skin and stop being so offended that someone bringing you something for free would ever think to include an ad in the content they provide.
Let the moderators downmod the complaints till they are six feet under and leave it at that. There is no need to setup complicated policies just to please the vocal few, who honestly seem to find fault wherever they are and whatever they are given.
We've been through this before, remove all the negative mods like "offtopic" - there are tons of irrelevant messages here, you can never mod the bad ones down, let people focus on modding the good ones UP. As it is, it seems a lot of moderators are simply using the negative mods to harass people they don't like or disagree with (I should know, apparently I can no longer moderate after a group attack)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Who cares who submitted it, or why? The content is more important. There are some story submissions that just should never get approved:
"Google just released a new product. Let's link to it, because anything Google does is worth reading about."
"I just got fired from my non-interesting job and was wondering what you all think about the coming ice age."
"Unknown Company Inc gets sued by Who Cares LLC for patent infringement over production of metal shavings."
But I'm glad to see a story that finally doesn't have a "topic" per say. A story to discuss problems with story submissions. This is one reason I think Slashdot really needs a general forum for issues, such as trolls, story submissions, sig discussions, and other things that are traditionally off topic that will never be brought up. Although email can be used if there is really a problem, This is slashdot, and email just isn't "the thing".
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Umm... Me too? To be honest, I have never clicked on a Referral link in my life. Didn't care enough to realize they were there. And Viola! so-called problem submitters never caused me the slightest grief.
There's a parable in there somewhere...
"I am become Gerund, Destroyer of Verbs"
Why don't you apply the same process you use for forum posts to the user's link? Users that have junk links will can be moderated down... your score stays with you. In the case of users who are logged in, only users who consistently provide good links will have a good score. In the case of anonomous coward posts, the link for that one article will be moderated. Then, allow each user to supply their own threshold like you do for posts. That way, users who don't want junk links can filter them out.. users that want to see the links can ignore the moderated value. You guys don't have to do any filtering yourself, so you don't have to worry about your personal bias. The moderation mechanism will achieve your desired result: fairness.
Repeating what many other posters on this thread have already said, I haven't noticed a problem so much with who's getting the most stories accepted and rejected, etc. But, and maybe this is where I should have done more filtering work, the comments and moderation of comments seems to have dropped in quality. The signal to noise ratio is horrible IMNSHO. Strangely enough I recently journaled my thoughts on the comments / moderation of Slashdot lately. So, I am glad the editors are active in the community and are looking to make Slashdot a better site. Thanks CmdrTaco!
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
See Subject!
Thanks!
The amount of hatred and paranoia directed at the editors is a reflection of their lack of accountability to the slashdot community, but accountability can be good or bad. The U.S. government is fairly accountable to the voters, and as a result we have pork-barrel politics and budget deficits. Unlike the U.S. government, slashdot has competition. If I like technocrat.net or digg better than slashdot, I can vote with my feet.
It's interesting to look at the story of K5, which lets users decide what to post. Basically, K5 is a dysfunctional family, and has been that way for years. My interpretation is that because users were the editors, it bred resentment and tribalism along with all the positive interpersonal bonds. This culminated in the episode where somebody photoshopped Rusty's wife's head onto a porn photo, after which he stopped accepting new members. From then on, the site was basically dead. I've been back a couple of times, and in general the signal-to-noise ratio is really low, and the civility-to-rudeness ratio is even lower.
Sure, I've submitted stories to slashdot that were rejected, and it didn't make me happy. (See my sig!) But that's life.
IMO the biggest single problem with slashdot is the tendency to post low-quality crank science articles. Frankly, I think this simply indicates that the slashdot editors don't have a strong enough background in the physical sciences. Oh well, not the end of the world.
All this other stuff is minor, and can be handled by moderation. If the story's a dupe, post and say it's a dupe; people will mod you up to 5, and everybody will ignore the story. If the submitter is using slashdot to do disreputable things, post and say so, and if you're right, people will mod you up to 5, and everybody will know not to click on the link. If some people think the biggest problem on slashdot right now is that Beatles Beatles is getting his page rank pumped up --- wow, what a minor problem.
One thing that I think might be helpful would be to allow users to have at least some voice in the early stages of selecting submissions, maybe as a second, alternate route for getting a story accepted. For instance, let user A submit a story to a "slush pile" area. Then all of user A's fans will see that story pop up. If user B is A's fan, and likes the story, he endorses it, and then if C is B's fan, C will see it too. If we go A -> B -> C ... -> Q, and Q happens to be Taco, then Taco might choose to post it. The nice thing about this is that it would get rid of some of the feeling that high-quality submissions aren't being considered seriously enough by the editors. Also, it would allow people with an intense interest in one topic (legos, free books, Natalie Portman jokes,...) to see more stories on that topic.
Find free books.
You know, you're right. But then again so is trolling as an AC, and that hasn't stopped anything around here.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Geeze people could we have some reasonable discussion? I've never clicked on the submitter's link, and half the time I submit a story I don't bother to include a link because there's nothing interesting I want to highlight. But let the good stories be published - I enjoy reading them.
Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
(in fact, I don't have time to submit stories anymore either)
I thought that the more people that "voted", "chimed in" or sounded off" the more realistic the outcome of the discussion would be? Wrong again I guess. What the hell are mod points for anyway?? Is it the "electronic" slap on the ass athletes give each other?? No thanks. Can I get laid with mod points? I didn't think, so I say do away with mod points, (they seem to inflate egos and create "old boy" networks). Let people post real mods, like: "Hey thanks, great info it was totally helpful!" or " What does this have to do with the price of rice in China?" As operators of the site you should be able to say, "Shut up, take your ball and go home if you don't like it" The site belongs to you, you'll do the right thing.
Sig Hansen?
The moderation system has been the tool that has been used here forever to lift up or silence users. Maybe it's time for editors and story submitters to play too? If it's good enough for us, then surely it's good enough for you!
Let the readers directly provide feedback via a rating system like that now imposed on other readers! Then articles could be ranked 0 to 5, Informative, Interesting, Informertial, KarmaWhoring etc...
Scarey thought isn't it? Think you could handle it?
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
CmdrTaco,
If Beatles Beatles were to submit an article titled: "Windows Vista Source Code released, Microsoft to convert all code to GPL", you could hardly expect that any discussion of the submitter would take place. Perhaps, in fact, Beatles Beatles, really does submit marginal articles in an attempt for personal gain. As the editor, you certainly could spread the wealth to one of the other 30-40 submitters. Maybe you just need to save up some of the daily submissions to round out the evening, or have fewer evening stories to accurately reflect the lack of articles.
eltoyoboyo
Have you Meta Moderated t
"And moderators, use those offtopic mods to steer the discussion towards the subject of the article, not the flavor of the month conspiracy theory about story selection."
I think you made a point that may help. Moderation is a privilege granted by Slashdot to responsible users. At least, that's the way I hope moderation is granted. In that regard, moderation is like a driver's license -- it's a privilege that can be revoked for bad behavior.
Slashdot lays down guidelines for moderators, with wide latitude given for personal judgment. In the end, though, Slashdot's administration is the final authority of whether moderators are taking their privilege seriously. If some moderators are doing a particularly bad job (such as modding up the-messenger-is-the-discussion flamebait), then perhaps those accounts shouldn't be given moderator points anymore. Moderator points are given in exchange for the implied promise of assisting Slashdot's administration in enforcing Slashdot's moderation guidelines. They are not given to promote an individual's agenda.
I presume that Slashdot has a mechanism in place to track how moderators applied their points (I haven't reviewed the published Slashcode), so the effort required to see who has been abusing their points for this particular agenda should be outweighed by the end result of improving the signal to noise ratio in those types of discussions.
Don't post BB's stuff until he stops linking stupidly/maliciously
a) If he is doing a service, he'll fix the issue
b) If he is bumping PageRank, he'll stop being a problem
Are the stories really all that necessary? Stop wasting time and do the simple thing - stop accepting BB posts. It means less work and if the stories are really useful, someone else will pick them up. The advantage is you don't annoy people enough to get a lot of +5 scores from "conspiracy theorists" (most of whom are really saying "stop it!") and people learn to be nice to slashdot.
You boys need a clue -- who gives a rat's ass about who submits an article? I don't even look at that 99.9% of the time. Of course, I don't read most of the replies, either, because of what most of you deem "amusing". Thank goodness for reason modifiers and thresholds.
Get over yourselves.
Since you brought him up. Where is he? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HIM YOU BASTARD?!? Just curious.
I don't think anything needs to be done about this. Slashdot has a high concentration of tin-foil-hat types, and it's to be expected.
Mods, mod these guys down. Responders to posts about conspiracy theories, tell the theorists to submit as many stories as the mega-submitters. Too busy with a job? Well, maybe the mega-submitters aren't.
There's so inanely little to gain from what they're doing if you put it in to perspective.
The problem is, I do like the articles. The originals, not the scraped-up-POS that is served up by link-whores. The big issue is that they are taking somebody else's article and posting a link to their own site with a crap overview of it.
Now, if somebody else comes along and posts the same story without the crappy linkarounds in front of it, it will either be rejected or it will be a dupe. It's not a problem with the stories being bad, it's that the summaries are often lame compared to the original article, and/or they take credit away from the original article site as well. How many links/banners/etc are the various science/tech sites losing out that they might otherwise have earned by having a good story posted up on slashdot? How many more good articles could they have posted if they had gotten the possible revenue generated from such traffic instead of having it leeched off by the link-parasites that rip their stories?
In short, no it doesn't work because you'll be possibly nuking good stories along with bad submitters.
Make the user url point to the user's User Page on slashdot. So people can see the user page for Roland all they like, but they have to click through to his blog only if they really want to.
sulli
RTFJ.
I second this idea. Let me build on that- assuming a moderator can assign points to story submissions similarly to how you assign points to comments, the points range for stories could be fairly limited: -1 to +1 (stories start at 0.) As the parent poster suggests, it could take more than 1 mod point to mod a story ... or maybe only subscribers could mod stories, and it takes a full 5 points to do it.
I know this would require big changes in slashcode, but I'd actually buy a subscription to Slashdot if I knew I could browse stories at +1.
Create some user names, and use them to anonymize the submitter name if you think the name will become the issue. Still issue the link to the user (and knowing the crowd, the link will give him away maybe).. it may delay the firestorm of comments enough that the real discussion happens in the first hundred or so posts.
"sometimes that might mean EXACTLY re-writing a submission. "
If you [an editor] rewrite a submission, at what point to you claim the article with link to be your own submission, or does that happen ever?
What's more important, getting the cool link out there, or waiting to reward a better writer with the same link submission?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The conspiracy theorists among the Slashdot community accuse Beatles-Beatles of abusing the Slashdot submission system to increase his page rank with Google. One in particular says, when people google for Beatles, they're going to get his site because he's abusing the Slashdot submission system Bunk. Have you actually tried Googling Beatles recently? I did just a few minutes ago, and stopped scanning there sults after perusing 200 links as didn't see a single reference to Beatles-Beatles' web site. The problem here is not Beatles-Beatles, but the idiots who would rather complain than just read the frigging article. Every time one of BB's submissions is accepted, a flame war begins. Last night was no exception. Frankly, I found the article interesting. Did those of you who complained actually read it, or was your only concern to once again scream and yell about BB. I don't give a damn about the links behind a submitter's name. I don't look at them. I'm only concerned with finding interesting news. Another user said, I'd rather live without a good story than have it ruined by discussion about the submitter. Again, it's not the submitter that's the problem but the ones who continually scream and yell. Frankly, I'm of the opinion that Slashdot should leave BB alone and should instead start sending warnings to those to endlessly scream and yell. If the conspiracy theorists can't stay on topic, dump them, not the submissions of a user with a reputation.
Leave it be. Every discussion goes off on tangents, but there is always useful information to be had. There's a lot of noise on the signal but it's that way everywhere, and slashdot currently has enough tools in place to deal with it.
Personally, I've never adjusted my preferences other than setting my default view to nested. If I'm not interested in something, I simply don't click on it.
What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?
Post it on Fark.Com instead.
--Drew
I'm guessing you meant overestimating? If so, then prove us wrong. How about a counter on the front page showing the size of the submission queue? For those of us who are up late at night, we might see the queue being horribly empty and use that as motivation to send in some cool links we've been sitting on.
/. multiple times a day.
/. because I have years of experience with the site telling me that CmdrTaco, Hemos and some of the other long time editors are trustworthy. However just because I'll take your word for it that the queue is full of crap and devoid of quality doesn't mean that some empirical evidence wouldn't make me much happier believing it.
Part of the reason you get so few "good" submissions is that editorial policy has ended up creating an image of slashdot as the place your link WON'T get posted not the place it might. I don't know that the editors actually understand the sort of awe most readers have of the person who gets a submission accepted, particularly amongst the folks who don't login, don't post, but read
In general, I trust the editors of
CmdrTaco, I totally understand that you guys have to wade through a lot of crap to get to the good stuff. That's part of what makes slashdot valuable: the fact that you guys do that.
BUT.
I think you guys are falling victim to the law of unintended consequences, when it comes to article submission. I've submitted a few high quality stories to slashdot - relevant, well-written, interesting and slightly off the beaten track. Not one has been accepted. How many more stories do you think I'm going to bother making the effort to write up and submit? Probably none.
If you want to boost the quality of your story submissions, you need to reward people for quality, not quantity. You need to give people a realitistic chance of having a story accepted. You've said yourself that people who flood the story queue are the ones who get rewarded. Right now, for the average joe who doesn't crap flood the story queue, the odds of getting a story accepted is vanishingly small. Therefore there is little or no incentive to take the time to bother submitting a well-crafted story.
Here's what I suggest: firstly, take away any PagrRank reward for submitting the story. It should be reward enough for a story submitter to know that they've contributed to their community. A simple no-follow attribute is all it takes to do this - or better yet, just make the submitter's link go to their slashdot user page. Secondly, as others have suggested, place a cap on the number of story submissions (not acceptance - we do want to reward quality) per day. Make it no more than 3 stories per day.
The end result of these measures would be a higher level of quality in story submissions from a widwer variety of people. This means less crap for you guys to wade through, better stories for the rest of is, and real sense of being able to contribute. It's a win for everyone.
In regard to * * Beatles-Beatles, it would seem that there is a certain amount of jealousy that such a highly numbered member could have so many stories accepted. There is so much envy, that his last two comments were nailed with double -1 moderations. The metamoderation system should level it out. It looks like all his stories are valid. Yea, his web page is meaningless to most, but aren't all of them? This is just a minor blip.
Have you Meta Moderated t
question: do the words "hrana" mean anything to you? hahahahaha
Short reply: I agree with your approach.
Longer reply: If the story or link is good, post it, regardless of who submitted it. Editing the submitter is a bad idea -- you enter into the morass of doing value judgements on people, when the only thing that should be judged is the story or link. Don't wait for a "more acceptable" user to submit the same story, either. If it's important enough to post, don't sit on it waiting for someone "more acceptable" to submit the same thing. That just adds to your job and puts a throttle on the news line. Finally, off-topic posts just waste everyone's time. Sometimes, the first post on a story is off-topic!
I have been a reader of slashdot for quite a while, but not an active participant (time. Alas!). Slashdot is to me a conduit into what matters most in computerdom. What matters is the story. Slashdot's tagline "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters" is the key. The Story is King!
--- >
"What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?" I think you should definitely post it if the actual story and its summary is the quality you're looking for. These politics might die on their own, but I don't think it's a submitters fault there are conspiracy theories about him. As soon as you listen to those conspiracies and ignore a submission you otherwise wouldn't have, you are in fact honoring the conspiracy theories.
I never noticed until just now, but CmdrTaco posts with a magic +2 karma bonus...
That just doesn't seem fair.
Nope, I don't post so much nowadays either - mainly because the groupmind here and I have drifted apart over the years. That could be because my interests have changed, or because the groupmind's interests have changed - most likely, both. I've posted many more times than BB over the years, however, and never had a submission accepted - and I gave up trying long ago - I now stick to more genuine community sites/lists/channels/etc. I remember when, for example, any time anyone linked to /. it was a cause for celebration, unless they linked with the dreaded www added on the front of the URL. The style - though not, to a significant extent, the look - of the site has changed a lot since the early days, but I do remember when there were articles here, interviews, Geeks in Space (a podcast!) - and vaguely visible editors who were a part of the community.
I guess things changed.
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
CmdrTaco, thanks for finally getting this issue out in the open.
What I gather are the facts:
1. Slashdot has a high page rank. This is due largely to its popularity, comments, etc.
2. Bad People who run shady websites want to increase their page rank.
3. Slashdot readers do not want Slashdot to be associated with Bad People.
4. Bad People have used Slashdot articles to increase the page rank of their shady websites.
5. Slashdot readers and editors want useful articles to be submitted.
From my perspective, the ideal goal is to prevent the pagerank of Slashdot affecting the pagerank of Bad People, while still providing interesting stories. Therefor I recommend the nofollow solution, as well as a basic check to ensure that the story does not link to the personal website of the user in question. Just do that as part of the link checking that editors already do.
It seems like a fair trade to me that personal websites may appear in comments, on personal pages, journals, etc, but not in story submissions. If the real purpose of the story submission is to provide information and discussion topics to the Slashdot community, then a potential story submitter shouldn't be upset about links to their own website getting a nofollow link.
I've admittedly only been around here a few years, but this problem is definitely getting out of hand.
I am officially gone from
The purpose of positive moderation is to amplify comments which are worthy of attention. Front page stories need no such emphasis. Being able to slap negative mods on stories is a terrific idea.
Advantages:
1. Crap stories can be filtered more easilly.
2. Crap submitters can be identified quickly by editors.
3. Instant feedback of how each editor is doing. (Information which Taco could use as he sees fit.)
Disadvantages:
1. Requires changes to the Slashcode, which nobody seems to want to do.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Why not have a moderation system for article submitters where mods can go to a submitter's profile and mod their score as appropriate? Those with a very low submitter score would get a nofollow or no link at all (or maybe a nofollow at first and no link at all if it gets to an even lower score, or maybe even preventing their submissions' getting posted if it gets low enough)? This would be sorta like moderating articles except that a low-scoring submitter wouldn't have an easy time getting another article posted, thus encouraging them to consistently maintain good manners (no ads/spamming/etc.).
Some thoughts...This would require some changes to slashcode including the creation of the mod stuff on the user's page (when they get their first greenlit submission?). Maybe this could be based on karma? (but then people might downmod a good comment from an article submitter with a 'reputation' just so they couldn't post articles)
PS: Tell me more about those naked women?
PPS: How should I go about writing my script to get the one millionth user ID?
What do Beatles and Roland P think is fair? I haven't seen them chime in here yet.
(Alas, I'm probably far too late in posting for this to ever be read/moderated--as usual.)
Interesting is when somebody makes a decision that I might like this story. Mob rules is when a bunch of loudmouths decide they don't like such-and-such because of whatever.
/., but I liked to put little links back to my blog at the bottom of my post. Obviously, that somehow pissed off the powers that be. It got so when I published a comment I would get a dozen people saying "hell yeah!" and half a dozen saying "it's that asshole again!" This is not moderation. This is mob rules. I don't comment much anymore, and I don't submit. I wasn't using /. for link-whoring, I was using it because I liked being there, contributing to the ongoing story. I put links in because I am proud of my content, my other work, and I expect to be able to show people other things about myself when I contribute. But I the mob ruled otherwise.
Since when is "link whore" the epitome of all evilness? If somebody has something interesting to tell me, let them tell me. Who the frack cares if it has links in it to free I-pods, video games, or do-it-yourself nuclear power? I want to read interesting stuff. The link is what I MIGHT click on if I want to go somewhere else. That's the freaking way HTML is supposed to work. So it increases their rank in search engines. Whoopdee freaking do. We can't have that now, can we? Because we're not interested in maintaining a good, interesting site. Heck no. We want social justice! People obviously can't be posting articles just for links! That goes against the Force, the Constitution, and our way of life!
Get a fucking grip. All of this "no follow" shit is worthless whining. As a reader, I want stuff that informs and entertains me. Not some kind of mob-rules political hack-job. I could care less if the submitter gets link credits, enjoys publicity, is promoting their business, or secretly jerks off to pictures of Benji. It's about content, folks. People will stay if you provide content and leave if you don't.
My IP is banned. Why, I don't know. Nobody bothered to tell me. I have great Karma, and I used to publish comments (and got some stories selected!) in
Now my rant is over.
I haven't looked at slashcode, but I don't think it would take major changes to add the same moderation system that already exist for comments, and apply it, or something similar at the story level. I look at sites like Geek.com, and the comments are pretty bad. English is terrible, and it's filled with fanboys who spout out of lot of opinions but not really any facts to back them up. On slashdot you don't see a lot of this, because either they get modded to 0, or because they know they will get modded to 0, and therefore don't bother posting. In the same way, this could help get rid of a lot of stories we don't want to see. We could start with something simple like -1 dupe. That would get rid of not only having dupes not show up, but also get rid of all those posts of people complaining that a story is a dupe. Many times you miss a story, and the second time around, you catch it. The problem is, is that when you go read the comments, they are filled with dupe messages, instead of messages that are pertinent to the article. It would be nice to just mark a story as a dupe, and then those who hadn't read it before could read it anyway, without wading through the dupe posts.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I think that to a large extent the issue is that people unduly expect journalistic integrity from slashdot (and/or its editors). I don't mean to disparage anyone in particular, but to consider /. "editors" as editors in (the traditional) journalistic sense is pretty far fetched. This is just my opinion of course, but given the level of complaint about the editorial process that exists in the typical slashdot discussion I consider it an opinion that is not without justification.
To be fair though, it's not as though slashdot is unique in this regard. Journalistic integrity in general is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, even among the most respected publishers. Just turn on the news the next time a big story breaks and count the minutes until some guest "live on the scene" cracks wise about Howard Stern's penis. Open your local paper to the editorial and/or letters sections and enjoy the vitriolic party-line rantings of those astroturfing for their cause (I'm supposing that well reasoned arguments no longer sell to the majority of the American public). I used to think that all the talk about bloggers replacing traditional news outlets was unrealistic because I couldn't see a way in which bloggers as a whole could match the journalistic integrity of more organized news outlets. Now however, I've come to believe that it's actually the other way around. Traditional journalism is clawing and digging its way down to the lowest common denonimator as quickly as it can, ostensibly because they'll get higher ratings or syndication numbers.
I read zerocool's posts about BB in the Milky Way thread, and I tend to agree that where there is smoke there is usually fire. That by itself doesn't convince me that anything untoward is occurring. However, neither does Taco's declaration that it's all just a big coincidence -- trust me and move along convince me that there is not something fishy going on. As with everything else, I take everyone's two cents along with a grain of salt and wait patiently for another shoe to drop. Just my two cents.
Don't you have someone you'd die for?
Now the real problem with this is what it does to the discussion. Last night a nice story was posted. It came from one of our "Problem" users. And dozens of comments were posted about this user. The conspiracy theories. The hostility. Now a lot of this is normal Slashdot Forum Faire. Thats fine. But the problem is that often when this occurs, it swamps out the real discussion. The messenger becomes the story.
I think this sucks.
Maybe you can hide the name and link for a period of time - to generate enough discussion on the forum that if or when the hostility comes out it is drowned out at the bottom of the discussion. Do it for all submitters, not just the problem ones. When a certain threshold of posts is reached, reveal the name.
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
I think the problem we've got now is not some guys benefited personally when their stories get accepted by slashdot. In many geek circle, you can gain your fame of they day if your name is on the front page of slashdot. We can consider this as benefit... Perfectly fine for 99% of reader around here.
The problem is some submitters use slashdot as a leverage to, say, improve their own page ranking in google. The reason slashdot has a ranking factor is because of the fair large readership and the site itself, not the submitters' blog. Improving page ranking in this way is a syphon off the slashdot community. The nofollow tag is a pretty good way to separate the different commnunties (and the unauthorised fame grabbing). As long as the fame starts from slashdot and ends here, most will stop complaining about the Beatle or Roland or whoever that submit heaps.
If only you did. Thing is, you don't.
/. waited for 5 hours before posting something inferior.
/. material.
If you were going to, what would be your time limit? 1 hour? 2? 12?
There have been several instances where I have submitted a story (often hours) before B-B or other users, and had mine reject in favour of someone else's. I'm obviously not in with the right crowd.
I was probably the first to submit about the London bombings (I was on the last train to run) Yet, I
Yes, I'm bitter about slighted in favour of B-B and their ilk. yes, that's why this is not going under my real name. And yes, that's why you get these long threads about non
Everyone gets to say his piece, no matter how offtopic. And giving moderator points will lead to people moderating things any way _they_ see fit. So, if you want to kill off-topic discussions you'll have to hand-pick your mods, but live with the fact that users will then complain about that...
:-P ) and live with the fact that if a majority (Otherwise there is no drowning) of commenters like to bash the submitter then that's simply the way it is. Submitters should get their link (The reason I removed my URL from my profile is specifically that I don't want it on the frontpage, just in case I get accepted) and if Slashdot "thinks" the submitter is more interesting than the story, and you thought otherweise, well, you were wrong apparently :-). But in the end, that doesn't matter. Keep up the impartiality, it's one of those things that keeps me coming back (Despite the hideous pop-ups...)
Simply put, Taco, keep it the way it is (well, maybe add a way to moderate stories
I open all 5 in tabs
What are these "tabs" you speak of? They sound convenient. I'm going to try this out with Internet Explorer....
The problem with one person being able to moderate a story up or down is that, by my understanding of the moderation system, the more stories you submit that are accepted, the higher your karma and the more mod points you receive.
Make it possible to moderate stories, but more difficult (in terms of swaying the story's score) than moderating comments. If a story has (5? 10? 20?) more people moderating it up than down, the story reaches +1. Similarly, if the story has that many more people moderating it down than up, the story reaches -1. This means there has to be a consensus that a story is really good or really bad before its score gets affected.
When a story that you submitted reaches a +1 moderation, you receive a bit of positive karma. When a story you submitted reaches a -1 moderation, you receive a larger quantity of negative karma. This rewards people who post stories that most people find useful and interesting and punishes those who post crap.
STRIP the lame blog posts. its really that simple. yes some people need edited.
i shouldnt have to goto abcd's blog to get a link to the REAL article. slashdot editors should click the links they are posting and see if they take you to real information or to some placeholder that links to the true info.
but hey whatever
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
Thanks for acknowledging the issue and taking the time to ask our feedback. This has restored my faith in the system, so to speak.
Well said. I that Slashdotters tend to forget (or probably more accurately: use their anonymnity as an excuse to ignore) that the guys who run Slashdot are not only OG's (original geeks) but they're actual human beings as well. I've been reading Slashdot since day one, and I've seen the site go from the project of a couple of college students to an internationally known hotspot for all things nerdy. "To Slashdot" is as much a verb in nerd circles as "To Google". Usually when success finds people, it changes them and changes their creation. But given the tremendous success of Slashdot, I think it is downright amazing that it hasn't been sold off to (or infiltrated by) some sort of evil media/marketing concern that truly does use it as a pulpit to peddle wares. They could do that. I would be shocked to find out that nobody has approached Rob and Hemos with piles of cash offering to take the reins. Sure, OSDN is Slashdot's parent company, but the OG's are still running the show.
Slashdot is a wonderful, nerdy, frequently childish place (even reading at +5). But it is honest, or at least as honest as you're going to find these days. It pains me to see people leveling anonymous insults and complaints at the guys who are keeping Slashdot in the hands of the geeks. Seriously, if you really have such strong feelings or concerns of conspiracy theories, start your own massively popular news site for nerds. Maybe you could report back on how easy it is to placate a half million active users, once you've got them.
You said it. It is frustrating for an audience comprised largely of computer hardware experts to be patronized by being shown review after review of 'PC Bling'. You know... power supplies with 50 LEDs, mousepads with fans, that sort of thing. They are all gimmicks, and very rarely slashworthy. The only time I don't develop high blood pressure reading a hardware review story on slashdot is when it is about a truly innovative DIY modification or a summary of reviews of a revolutionary new product, (IE nVidia and ATI product launches). It is insulting to see an anonymous submission accepted, when the subject is as mundane as 99% of hardware reviews are. These people are largely kids who get the hardware for free to review, get money from the ads, and in spite of having no expertise or journalistic credibility are encouraged to continue this cycle by hordes of slashdot traffic. I'm sure XYZcomputing, for example, makes hundreds of $$ per month from slashdot.
Perhaps you should stop letting submitters include their own URL but that will probably lead to entire articles being posted on their websites, so no win there either.
Perhaps we should just ignore the crap and carry on regardless. It's your site, I don't have any right telling you how to run it, and the whiners who think they do have such a right need to get a life.
Oh that's right this is /. after all. Never mind, nothing to see here ...
(Perhaps there should be a new moderation option (-1) STFU)
I know in the past you've been hesitant to talk about Slashdot ON Slashdot for whatever reasons, but I think it's a great idea. It's refreshing to read people's comments on certain issues here, as well as their solution to those problems. Thank you for handling it this way.
After reading through all the posts, I really like the idea of story moderation. Once the story hits a certain level of moderation, the submittor's site link is removed. Perhaps you could display this "story submission karma" when approving submissions as well, so you can be more likely to choose a story from someone with high story submission karma (read: links to interesting articles, well-written submissions with few spelling/grammatical errors, etc).
Setting the nofollow attribute is also a good idea, is a simple solution, and should help at least a little bit.
Once again, thanks for this discussion.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
I thought it would be fairly clear to anyone: Beatles-Beatles is not trying to get slashdotters to click on his link. why would anyone? it's clear from the address that's it's not of any particular interest or relevance to the story, and why would anyone anyway. i've never clicked on those links, at least not on purpose, and a few people have pointed out in this thread that they thought those links go to the user's home page on slashdot. nor do i see what benefit he would get from a few random slashdotters clicking his link (either to give him 'props' for a good story, or out of curiosity?)
No, Beatles Beatles is trying to spam Google, and other search engines that work like PageRank. Doesn't his username make this obvious? this is a problem for Google, and one they need to work on. i have never liked their purported solution, the <nofollow> tag, for the following reason; when i post comments on someone's blog, i don't want those links to be disregarded by pagerank. i might be replying to someone's request for help, by linking to relevant information. pagerank's success owes a lot to the fact that everyone can influence search results through pointers in their own content, and <nofollow> seems to destroy this.
as you point out, slashdot's problem is that people talk about this stuff ad nauseam. the only solutions which occur to me are: "don't read it" and "mod it down".
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Maybe it's just me, but I never pay attention to who submits a story. I just read the headline, and if that catches my interest then I'll read the summary and so on. I really could not care less as to who submits a story.
I, personally, don't give a flying frig who submitted the story. I mean, I'm only a front page reader and have bad karms (BTW, please mod me up, I'm begging, I need the karma *wink wink*) so i'm sure the /. community is gonna take anything I say with a grain of salt but, really, if there's a story posted that catches my interest I gould give a large rodent's behind less who posted it.
/., sometimes we reward people for being jackasses just to get FP on a new story; I've seen it, and so have all of you so I see no need to find an example to back that up -- but I will if one is requested.
/. jokes below.
/. every day and finally get one posted ...
/.ed
Actually, another point I'd like to make right now. Karma; WTF does it take to get good karma here anyway? Of the three posts of mine which have actually been moderated, 2 were modded up (1 as +1, insightful and the other +1 with no reason given), 1 was modded down (-1, troll), leaving me an overall score of +1, higher than the 0 (neutral) I started with, yet I have lower karma. Makes no sense; bad karma should be any score LOWER than 0 if 0 is "neutral". (and I implore you all, after reading this post in its entirity, to take a moment to read through everything I've posted, including this there are only 9 posts to peruse, and if you can, moderate them as yo usee fit -- and I know, that's like asking for more -1, troll mods, I'll face that if that's all I get) But, getting back on topic and to the point I was trying to make, now that I've gotten my quasi-trollish rant out of the way, once your karma is marked as "Bad", even if it's because you were modded "-1, troll" for something that was MEANT to be funny (and your insightful rebuttal was ignored by those with modpoints), well, even your most well thought out, relevant, insightful and informative comments fall through the cracks. This is how it should be, perhaps, for users with scores
That said, yes, it is obvious to me why the post in question was modded "troll". I don't need to be told that, you don't need to point it out, I see why, I get it, I would likely have modded it that way as well, nobody needs to explain it in this case, whatever. I certainly should have put more thought and effort into that post. Then again, how many users with otherwise good karms have done similar things and been MODDED UP FOR IT? Because it was a first post and, well, here at
Ok, now that I've gone slightly off-topic, let me summarize. Who gives a flying frig who posted the story, if it's a good story, it's a good story, I'm sure many readers here are in sales and understand "if you through enough of them at the wall..." so get over yourself and quit posting this and that about the poster and keep your comments relating to the story; that's not so hard to do. And someone please tell me WTF is up with karma. Thank you.
And since I can't think of any other way these things will be mentioned in this thread, I'll take a further risk of being modded down for this post and go ahead and run through some of the more popular
In soviet russia, karma whores you!
1. Submit hundreds of stories to
2. Watch as the only comments made about it relate to you and not the actual story
3.
4. Profit!
Yes, but does the OP run linux? (ok, that one's a stretch, I admit it)
Hope the server this story if posted on doesn't get
Ok, no more, I've gone too far. Whatever. Anyway, if you can't find anything insightful, informative, or at least funny to mod this up based on, go ahead and burn some mod points for the sections of this post which are off-topic; but please, give others a chance to read it and mod it up first.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=conspirac y
c y%20theory
I'm leaning on (4) here... and:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=theory
AND!:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=conspira
Take your pick...
The point: Conspiracy Theory doesn't imply making shit up to explain something (see: roman religions), but more to the effect, a theory of which, based on some sort of evidence or clues, that would implicate a group of people (2 or more) that have plotted to some degree to do something that is generally considered sinister (too strong, but close).
To be a conspiracy theorist, you're stating that from information that you've gathered based on events, haven't taken the common, well driven path, and have tried to find information that may better explain a situation. There are the whack jobs that would give such a title a bad name, and people through it around like they through around "conservative" or "liberal."
It's not a bad name (or title if you prefer). It's merely someone who tries to think beyond the box, and apply a reasoning to something based on a set of evidence where others would only just take the cover story and call it fact.
- Some Conspiracy Theorist Guy -
"And moderators, use those offtopic mods to steer the discussion towards the subject of the article, not the flavor of the month conspiracy theory about story selection."
Perhaps making the OT points seperate from the the total point pool? 5 Points, including OT, plus two OT freebies?
- Financial Gain: When the submitter posts a review of the book, and the link to the book is one where they make money selling it. Slashdot is a news site, not your personal bookstore.
- Incorrect Information: Often the summary INCORRECTLY summarizes the article, fabricating facts that only leads up to even more people saying "RTFA". What is the point of the summary if not to summarize the article?
- No Information: When somebody just posts a link to their personal webpage where they wrote about something happening. I don't want to read your blog, I want the ARTICLE!
- Grammar and Spelling: How hard is it to spell-check the summary? Some of the articles I've seen are just embarassing.
</rant>There should be a general place for any sort of moderated discussion about slashdot itself to happen on a daily basis and in its own space. It could be in a dedicated section linked from the side-menu on the frontpage, containing a special daily "article" called something like "Topical Slashdot Issues/Feedback" (whose content would be regularly deleted, perhaps at the end of every day) where users can discuss current issues and problems relating specifically to slashdot, thus removing the tendency for such discussions to creep into frontpage articles where they are off-topic. Providing a regular place would be useful whether or not you or any other slashdot editor spends time taking part in it because it encourages users to discuss their concerns about slashdot there, rather than as off-topic discussion in the main frontpage articles. This sort of idea has been suggested before:
Scroogle
Adding nofollow to all user homepage links is not "editing the user". It's recognizing slashdot is a news site, not an SEO tool and doing something to correct the problem of people (ab)using slashdot's high pagerank for their personal benefit.
Also, you should recognize that the submitter and his reputation *is* part of the story, and discussion about it is relevant. Slashdot stories are not just single links to other sources, the submitter gets to add her own commentary, and can use the summary and choice of links to influence the "spin" on an article. Knowing who published a story and what they might have to gain from it is an important part of being able to evaluate the worth of the story. Using site admin powers to moderate those discussions into the abyss helps nobody except the spammers, scammers, and political cranks who try to manipulate slashdot for their own ends.
0 1 - just my two bits
See you in metamod, beotches ;)
When people have discussed Beatles-Beatles's spam, I've found the discussions interesting, and it's not like there is any other way to discuss and criticize Slashdot itself than in normal stories...
Heck, the fact that people keep modding up these criticims in the first place might be the only reason why the Slashdot dictators notice that something is going on!
For example, apparently stripping users of mod rights for no apparent reason and with no explanation.
Yeah, I'm bitter ;)
Clever signature text goes here.
OS HIT
Slashdot is primarily about the stories, not the forum. If a good story should be published, publish it. Who cares if the forum becomes a cesspool?
I do have to say I've been unimpressed by the level of science and newsworthiness lately. At least when SCO was around the stories we got seemed relevant. Not just crappy slashvertisements for Xbox 360 liquid coolers or something.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If people want to spend their time and bandwidth arguing about the reputation of the person who submitted the story, so be it. I view this website as a portal that will lead me to various interesting places on the internet that can provide stimuli for my intellect. I enjoy posting on the discussion boards, but the truth of the matter is I only post while at work attempting to make the day go by faster. If I'm at home and I decide to peruse slashdot I will rarely spend any time on the message boards. I may not be the norm in this respect but because of how I use this website I could careless about the junk discussions.
;)
People are going to get pissed and get in to internet arguments because it's something to do; if it's not this it'll be that so it is a pointless battle to fight. Besides, I just skip over trashy disucssions, or get pulled in and in to a shit throwing contest but hey it's all entertainment
In other words, don't change a damn thing. A good story is a good story is a good story. Some stories may not be good stories but that'll happen; not like there are monthly subscription fees to use slashdot [I realize some members do have a subscription but that's for a premium service...]. If people think it's bias or want to talk about conspiracy theories they can either do it here and live with it or go elsewhere but I personally think that your time is spent better doing what you already do well and not wasted on pissing contests [which is what this amounts to].
Just my two cents...
You sell early access to stories as a premium service. You need the money. I can afford the stamp when I mail a letter. I would be willing to purchase as a premium, the privelege of telling slashdot that I do not grant permission to alter my credits along with my submission of the storey. The guys who saturate you with submissions will either wise up or buy you a sweet new server and a condo on the riviera. I have 60 or so submissions and my batting average is around 200...I can afford that much vanity.
/., broker [for a fee if you wish] the contact. This latter method will put off many who follow links impulsively and haven't got the capacity for delayed gratification that a call-back protocol entails.
Alternatively, cache the credits and when a reader WANTS to know more about who submitted, ping the submitter who then is given a choice whether or not to let you,
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
I like the moderation capability of Slashdot. It would be interesting if story submissions themselves could be moderated. I.e., just as I can browse comments at +4, I would also be able to browse stories.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The editors do a pretty decent job of finding stories we like. Every once and a while, a dupe or ad slips through in addition to submitters with "reputations" so let the people fine-filter these. The editors don't have to worry about dupes or ads or bad submitters, they just focus on topics of interest. Semi-random users - those with particularly good (or excellent) karma - can then be given points to mod these articles "interesting (+1)", "boring (-1)", "dupe (-1)", or "slashdotted (-0.1)" or "available/mirrored (+0.1)". The last two items need work, I know.
This solution allows us to pass judgement on submitters without the editors being forced to censor articles based on subjective tastes (we do that) and it allows us to cut back on the nasty comments when we slashdot the hapless host servers and find a dead link.
You could even set things up so that someone trying to greenlight a submission would get a message something like "I'm sorry, you've approved too many stories by this user compared to the other editors. Would you like to send it to another editor for review, or greenlight a similar-looking submission from the list below?"
Another thing I've wondered about is this: would it be possible to add a filter that auto-filters all submissions where the body of the submission is 50% or more verbatim from some googleable site on the internet? This would require submitters to actually write their writeups instead of copy/pasting... it would also reduce the number of dupes, as the search would often turn up the original slashdot post.
Of course, the filter above would have to be one of the last ones applied, otherwise the sheer bandwidth between slashdot and google would be of ludicrous proportions.
I prefer my brain to perform my filtering for me. When I find an interesing article with commentary that runs on about the poster.....I just move on. Over the years I have developed a pretty good sense for what is important to me. I let peoples code/work/writting etc speak for them. I really have no interest in what others think about them. I also try NOT to spread gosip for the same reasons.
Funny, I was scored 1 on my previous post. I looked, and then I searched... about 60 posts scored 1, about 7 scored 2, about 10 scored 3, I have never seen so many ass kissing 4's on any topic, some people shit all over this site and get 4. Is there an auto pilot left on???
Sig Hansen?
for basically the reasons you describe. I like Slashdot; it frequently has interesting, sometimes useful, information, and the noise level, while annoying, is almost low enough to be tolerable. (That's not a dig at Slashdot, it's a feature of any sizeable community...)
Problem is, there's no point in submitting stories to Slashdot. There's a VERY high probability that you'll never have a story accepted, even when the same story is later accepted from someone else. Twice in the same day. There are so many submitters, and the selection process is so bizarre in its outcome, that ever getting a story accepted nearly REQUIRES having no other life. That sort of thing is just not worth my time.
Cmdr. Taco: If you think I'm full of beans, let's see a histogram of # of users vs # of accepted stories (AND of rejected stories!); while the "0" and "1" bins will dominate, the plots will surely be interesting, and maybe even useful.
Nofollowing the submitter links makes excellent sense, given the built-in incentive to story-spam.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
It's not a bad idea to ignore important news due to the messenger, and you are ill-advised to wait for the same thing to come along later from someone else. Sometimes that won't happen, it delays the news, and it's unfair to the first person who found the story.
If there are multiple submitters, maybe they should get group attribution. Don't know how hard that would be to do.
Or, in terms applicable to Slashdot, many submitters OUGHT to make it likely that most GOOD stories will be submitted. Isn't that one of the principles of community development? Try looking at those "good" stories from frequent-filers and see how many were ALSO submitted by others. (Probably quite a few.) Are those who post the most submissions also posting the most unique-but-valuable submissions? If not, maybe you needn't worry about losing anything by capping submissions or acceptances or attributions or by anonymizing submissions entirely.
Seems to me you need to think carefully about what the problem is you are trying to solve. Then you can begin to address it. Poor problem formulations lead to poor solutions.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
You put it too crudely, and are thus correct, but for the wrong reason.
First of all, slashdot is owned by
http://www.ostg.com/sites/index.htm
not by Rob. Rob is not in a position to handle any money, and I doubt he gets a say about the slashvertisments.
Second, the OSTG press kit
http://www.ostg.com/pdfs/OSTG%20Media%20Kit.pdf
States on page 6 of 7:
Site Sponsorships:
Site sponsorships give you maximum visibility and unparalleled exosure to your target audience--- includine premium logo placement and positioning, exclusive site advertisment, and THE OPPORTUNITY TO CONTRIBUTE EDITORIAL CONTENT.
(caps are mine). So if you pay money you get to CONTRIBUTE EDITORIAL CONTENT.
So you are right. Rob does not take kickbacks. Instead, OSTG gives people the business opportunity to CONTRIBUTE EDITORIAL CONTENT in exchange for money.
You must be new here, CmdrTaco.
I've read this news site for several days now and they love dupes!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Perhaps one problem is that (newbie) legitimate posters are given no feedback when their stories are declined.
I posted a couple of stories a while back. They were original (I thought), interesting, had URLs, blah blah. They were declined with no comment whatsoever.
If I had had some inkling as to why they didn't make the cut, I could have worked on them, or remedied these shortcomings in another story. As it stands, I have no intention of wasting any more of my time and will never post another story.
BTW CmdrTaco to you enjoy re-reading the same posts in the first half of the next page?
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
Several posters complain that they submitted a story and saw a different submiter get accepted much later. It reminds me of the opposite phenomenon, when a Slashdot story gets repeated.
Both of these problems have technological solutions and it surprises me they are not implemented on a site such as Slashdot.
All submissions could have their text, their links and event the html of the linked page stored in a database. Links could be checked for equality with a previous submitted or posted story and for a "google find similar pages" match with a submitted or posted story. Specific terms could light up similar stories and submissions in the last 15 days. Server data, "google find similar pages", archive.org and similar services could be used to check page freshness and originality.
Of course, such research would be unthinkable for each story. But if it could be implemented programmaticaly - and if an editor while considering a story to be posted could have easy overview of similar submissions and posted stories as well as other sources with similar content: his or hers choices would be much broader.
Suddenly, posting at 11pm could very well make someone's morning story be posted on Slashdot.
-Kvorg
Sir, with all due rspect, the real problem is the editors and their rates of rejection. I've submitted a number of articles only to have them turned down without explanation. Why should I bother to waste my time further? If there was some feedback as to why you've rejected it, perhaps the submissions could improve.
Furthermore, why not let the readers, or a select group, decide which submissions could be accepted. Why does it have to be a small, elite and privileged group? It seems tyrannical and not in keeping with the open nature of this community or its medium.
In short, I feel you've done a poor job in fostering interesting submissions and the entire community is suffering from the need of few to promote their own status.
Words to men, as air to birds.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
People who get stories rejected would gripe a lot less if they got a told a reason for their story being rejected.
It doesn't have to be a time consuming endeavor.
Provide a drop down list to editors of various, brief, common reasons. ie "1 missing url, 2 off topic, etc... "
Im no /.'er. I read Slashdot for the articles and frankly rarely read the comments. Most of them are as bad as some of the trolls who post and 99% of them have no relevency. Some are worthwhile and very informative. But overall, as a past /.'er, I have learned that ego abounds and remaining an Anonymous Coward has its benefits. I don't care about the /. politics. I don't care who lame-ass troll poster "x" is. I simply care about approximately 20% of the content I see on the site. It helps me advance my tech knowledge on many levels and gives me something to do when i am bored.
:)
So, for all of you who do care, maybe it's time to take a step back and realize that what troll "x" does really has no effect on your life or that of the other readers except that maybe you have to put up with some annoying content occasionally which takes mere seconds to forget.
Apoligees four any speling or gramatacal erors. I simply don't care
I, like many others I suspect, actually DID spend my mod points trying to mod down the post being referred to last night. Problem is there are more out there modding junk like that UP because it's "interesting" or somesuch.
-- If it ain't broke - overclock it more.
That's one of thge best ideas I have read today, it'd also stop alot of the moaning when we can all see how much junk the editors have to put up with; If moderators could see everything that was submitted, it would take alot of the pressure off the editors, and any dupes would be our own fault; to name but 2 more advantages.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Now, this may be foolish, you may have reasons as to why you do not wish to do this, and this may have been suggested to you already: why not post it yourself? I mean, submit it using your ID (or some random ID), change the headline/comments but use the same URL? No one know will know what story came first due to the volume.
Sure, it may seem like a crap thing to do, but if you post something under an anonymous ID how is anyone to know?
My /. profile currently shows, for the calendar year 2005, eleven stories submitted, three of those accepted, one still pending. Where's the problem?
Could it perhaps also be that, despite all the care and consideration you put into each and every one of your quality-over-quantity submissions, they just weren't very interesting or well-written?
Breakfast served all day!
You could edit the post to reflect the Anonymous Coward user frmo the original user. The user who posted the story will not know nor care one way or another. Plenty of stories get posted by the anonymous coward. Also, feel free to edit any story, it is your site, and not ours. It is your job to foster the communiyt, well the mods and the owners. It is also "our civic duty" to help you since it is a large site.
But I am afraid to say, it is you the owner that gets the letters from lawyers, and not us the users that gets it.
I think it's amusing that Taco addresses the role of Slashdot editors as if it was anything more than hitting a button. It's plain that they pay no attention to grammar, factual accuracy, spelling, or if the sites that are being linked to are clearly advertisements with no substance. Maybe it's just my own perception, but it seems like the situation has been particularly bad lately. The editorial staff really needs to be cleaned up if Slashdot is going to be shifted towards the "quality" side of the quantity/quality equation, which has lately been converging to infinity if you get my drift.
What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?
:)
Post it! I don't give a rats ass about a user's reputation. I'm here for the submission's quality as being part of an article. I'm here for the highly-rated comments related to that story. Nothing more.
this article will generate hundreds of pieces of mail
So don't answer them in email. If they're not willing to post as a comment to your article, don't bother with them. Peer review at it's finest
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
Slashdot fails it (though is interesting for links). K5 has political discussion, original articles and childish flaming. Everything you could want.
Have A Nice Day!
"george harrison" beatles and his site is still the 5th result...
First and foremost would be incorporating karma and accepted/total submisisons info into the quality assessment. I don't think no karma should hurt you, but bad karma should.
Second, completely ignore the complaints. I don't care who posts stories, and neither should anyone else, assuming they are good stories. I think the idea of moderation of stories comes into play here. Being able to have subscribers mark things as dupe, lame, slashvertising, etc. before they hit for the rest of us would give you some insight into the crowd without turning over the moderation reigns entirely. Maybe this would just flag stories to be re-reviewed by editors if they got a large enough percentage of bad moderations. Obviously the MS trolls are gonna be attacking the Linux stories, etc. But you should be able to get a good idea of whether the story is good or bad.
Third, I also think the idea of gaining subscription pages for accepted stories if you're accepted/submitted ratio is high enough would be a good idea as well.
"The catch-22 kills me. I might have a URL in the bin worth sharing. Something a half a million of you might enjoy. But because a user with a "Reputation" submitted it, I know that posting it will spawn a giant forum cesspool. I could strip attribution and take away incentive for a user to submit. Or just throw away the article and forget it. Or I could post the story and watch as half of the discussion is simply about the submitter and not the URL that i wanted to share in the first place."
If you can label this person as having a "Reputation" in the first place, then I don't think there is any problem with simply adding nofollow, or anonymizing it. If you can make the judgement that this person is abusing the system, and you still want the story, there is nothing wrong with making this adjustment.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
If there were nothing to the beatles-beatles conspiracy theories, how do you explain the fact that since the uproar over his stories, the submissions have stopped?
..when people start voting up stories they want other people to see, rather than stories they themselves would want to read.
Distribute the solution.
In the same way that subscribers see articles before thay are released, allow
'friends' or 'friends of friends' to see a users submitted articles, and allow them to 'second' the article (or rank it) while it is in the submission queue.
> I'm in complete agreement with you. Good stories are good stories.
You and Taco are missing the important flaw in that concept. Motivation does matter, and not for the reasons most here are spouting, which mostly seems to be an irrational hatred that somebody might be making a buck.
Examine the root of the problem, as stated by Taco himself, the unmanagable story submission queue. Why is it unmanagable? Because a small number of people, probably not regular slashdot readers themselves, have found that by stuffing the submission queue here they can generate Google PageRank(tm) for their unrelated sites. So they submit vast quantities of marginal quality stories on their, correct according to the testimony of Cmdr. Taco, assumption that a few will pass muster, be posted and make their site rise in PageRank.
The problem is that this defeats the entire point of user story submissions. I'm fairly certain Taco and Co could check Google News and digg themselves instead of waiting for Beatles Beatles or whoever will be the major link spammer this month to slop every single story from the other major tech news sites into the submission queue, probably multiple times. The point of user submissions is the users are supposed to cull out the unrelated (to the slashdot crowd) junk. By rewarding their network abuse it encourages more of the same and discourages actual users from submitting a story once they know it will be competing with huge volumes of machine generated crud. It is the reason you NEVER respond to UCE/SPAM of any of the other sorts, because if we relent from the zero tolerance position we are boned.
So in summary, Sorry Cmdr Taco, you are wrong. You really have to find some way to discourage submitters you are convinced are gaming the system for the longterm good of the system. And you can't solve people problems with technology, any system expressed in software can be gamed if there is enough to be gained from it. At some point you human editors are going to have to exercise some editorial control over the users or they are going to control you.
On the other hand if a prolific user started submitting a dozen or so really good stories with good descriptions on a daily basis that user would be a treasure and not to be blacklisted.
Democrat delenda est
Nevertheless, you don't see me carping about how it's run. It's just one out of billions of websites, and any day is just another day on the Internet.
The simple fact is that the moderators have gotten lazy - they see a submission from a spammer like R.P. and go ahead and approve it. Even though it's spam, it's well written and topical and gets *something* up on the page. The moderators keep playing into the hands of spammers by defaulting to their submissions. That is what pisses off the Slashdot readerbase, not R.P. or any of the other spammers - the crap and cruft that the moderators pick, when good stuff goes wanting.
Let people filter out stories based on submitter.
Personally, I have found a lot of interesting information by following a submitter link.
By adding no follow, aren't you throwing out the baby with the bath water?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"In Roland's case, he likes to link to his personal blog where he writes mediocre summaries of stories that add nothing to the original."
That's different from Slashdot.... how? Really, Slashdot and its editors should not throw stones while sitting in a greenhouse, so to speak. For a site with, what, how many paid editors, the summaries are of low qulity, there are many dupes, submissions seem to be only rarely spell-checked and sometimes I am sure whatever editor took over a story never RTFA either.
Mod me down, I don't care, but you know I am speaking the truth.
In other words if you can trim off an introduction like "Hi my name is Bob I live in Canada and read /. every day here is a story you might like...." Why can't you trim off a link that adds nothing but "noise"? In other words aply a _uniform_ editorial rule for both text and links.
If Slashdot told the truth and, called 'em "story approval bots" the expectations about their behavor would come to match reality.
Why not simply (if thats posssible) automagicly down moderate comments about the poster so thoose of us who don't care who posts good stories and like to read what other sd'rs can skip the chatter .
i have no sig
How about instead of merely discarding submissions, have a few rejection options that would provide general feedback to the submitter?
1. Rejected - no comment
2. Rejected - not interesting
3. Rejected - poorly formatted
4. Rejected - flamebait/troll
5. Rejected - abusive
Might help improve the quality of the submissions so you're not relying on problem contributors.
I, for one, would like to know what you (Taco) have against spelling and grammar.
It would only irritate me, I suppose, if you didn't refer to yourself as a "journalist." Hah.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
Making such claims is, like any tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, ultimately an attempt to bring CmdrTaco down off his throne (and hopefully he remembers to flush ;) ) to address the issue. In this case, there was enough gnashing of teeth that it worked, right down to the point where the correct solution (nofollow attribute added to vanity links) is being implemented.
If he follows through on his resolution to be more involved with the meta aspects of Slashdot, then such conspiracy theories will fall to the wayside, because he actually will be accessible to the unwashed masses. This is the same strategy as the nofollow attrib - remove the motivation for users to participate in an undesired fashion, and the undesired behavior will stop. There's no need to have both the carrot and the stick when they contradict each other, after all.
Pretty easy change to make. That is, if you want people to submit stories correctly. Right now, all stories accepted seem to come from the same (suspect) crew of google spammers and karma whores. If you really do value quality submissions then you would want to educate submitters on proper submissions. From a submitters perspective it just looks like the spammers run the place when you submit, get rejected and a week later, the same story is picked up when submitted by the usual suspects.
It is pretty clear that there is a preference system going on when these same spammers get so many submissions accepted. Their submissions are not very good, so it is not a quality thing, and in the case of RP, he is clearly ripping off the originator of the content that he submits, which should be a banning offense.
As it now stands, slashdot is endorsing and favoring spammers and karma whores. There were plenty of suggestions to solve this problem suggested in this thread.
So, as part of the rejection process, a one click (selection box) reason for rejection: spam, repeat, misspellings, bad urls, not interesting, bad grammar. No extra work on the slashdot editors part and very helpful to educate your volunteer workforce, so they can improve their submissions for our mutual benefit.
''Should part of this process be checking the URL of the submitter to make sure that it is legitimate?''
You're fuckin' right, it should. Not doing that sort of basic validity checking is why Slashdot is just the world's most famous blog instead of a trusted news site.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Not only that, but until you woke up this morning and posted a response to this "Conspiracy Theory", my comment (which started this whole thing last night) was moded (between 4-5) informative. And now, lo-and-Behold it is -1 offtopic... With 10 reply's, and USERS modding the post "Informative" how then do you deem it to be offtopic? You can't expect me or anyone else to believe that it was none other than slashdot admins who modded me down. So you've stooped to a new low by censoring posts?
BTW - If ScuttleMonkey and this Beatles-Beatles guy aren't buddies, or the like, then pigs should start jumping out of mine, and every other /. readers butts shortly! I'm suprised... I expected more from you Mr. Malda.
Get your Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool Here for FREE! - http://fedora.redhat.com
This isnt necessarily a well thought out idea but i thought i'd throw it out there for the sake of discussion anyway.
The issue with these posters is that they are using the link in the story submission to increase their page rank (by being linked to from slashdot's index, which is a highly ranked page). So what if the link in the story text linked to a cgi that then redirected to the url the submitter provided?
The submitter gets to have his link, but it's coming from a url with a much lower page rank than the index page.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
The most popular story in the Seattle Times online was about the guy getting his colon punctured by a horse. Maybe popularity shouldn't be the most important criteria about what is published.
Using the nofollow attribute basically makes google result ordering useless... right?
Oracle and unix guy.
Unfortunately, I still haven't been forgiven for this :)
However, as the GPP mentioned, a lot of normal users have given up submitting stories because they know they will be beaten out by a link whore. I think that is kind of a shame because when a link whore posts a story and summary, it is usually very canned and normal (a good example is that Beatles Beatles guy...every summary is the same). When a regular user posts a story and summary, they try to convey in the summary what interested them about the story because they feel that others will also be interested.
I don't know about you, and granted, it is mainly about the story itself, but I prefer a nice, interesting summary with a bit of personal touch rather than someone who posts something along the lines of:
Just the humble opinion of someone who hasn't submitted many stories (because they are almost always rejected and then posted later by a different submitter, sometimes with a better summary, sometimes with a boring summary)"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Articles should continue to be submitted as they always have and /. editors should continue to select stories as they always have. Except at the point that a story is accepted it should be moved not to the frontpage but to the sandbox. In the sandbox, stories would be modded up or down by moderators who choose to use their points for such activities. After a time limit, maybe a few hours, stories above X can be moved to the frontpage and stories below X are discarded (the totals should be a net total and cutoff points me need to be tweaked). If space becomes an issue then stories are promoted based on which ones have the highest score. In this way the eds maintain a lot of control, as they should, but the mods also have a lot of input on what makes it to the frontpage.
When it was around, modfoo worked that way (well, something pretty close to that, anyway). Unfortunately the site never achieved the critical mass of users necessary, and was eventually abandoned. But I agree, a system of that nature would be a big improvement.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Robby, just what *are* you going to do with all that money, poor creature?!
Just an observation re your rant, on a not so related to ths post but what the hell: you seem to assume your submitters are guys who are eager for sexy photos from slashdot groupie girls, but some of us are actually girls, who are eager for a sexy new xbox 360 ;)
I submitted this story last week!
sorry cmdr taco. you are soooo web 1.0, and doomed to a slow free fall into irrelevance. maybe you should start a blog or something, instead of trying to be the center of a community that has moved on.
I think you should have some kind of painful feedback on the submitter's mouse, kind of like the videogame battle in Never Say Never Again. It would be proportional to the number of stories they submit within a 24-hour period.
Yeah, yeah, so maybe it's against the law. Sue me.
subject says it all really.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Welcome a self-governing metamoderating of upcoming
Slashdot news articles.
Give them away with 24 hour windows at random to a few
hundred people who don't have bad karma and a history
for trouble, and have been active on the site for over a
year.
Prune down the wheat from the chaff (so to speak).
...and it ended up as part of slashback. what a ripoff
I'm sorry, would you like a refund?
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Not doing that sort of basic validity checking is why Slashdot is just the world's most famous blog instead of a trusted news site.
The comments seem to do a pretty good job of finding problems.
Comments that completely reject the original submission usually make their way to the summary in the form of a followup -- this does *usually* happen, though it isn't perfect.
My big beef is that often article summaries -- and *especially* article titles -- are written to be sensationalist or with an incredible degree of bias. For example, maybe Bill Gates donates ten million dollars to AIDS research, and we see an article title that reads "Gates Uses Ill-Gotten Goods to Promote Personal Image", or Sun decides to keep the source to a particular product closed and we get a summary title of "Sun Attacks Open Source".
That gets the attention of people once or twice, but it's really irritating when it keeps happening day in and day out.
I don't have a perfect fix, but I do have some possible ideas -- one is to have editors, if they're unwilling to edit article titles because of concerns of censorship, at least post a followup at the bottom to try to make POVs a bit more neutral.
Another possibility would be to have some mechanism to allow one comment to be voted onto the article summary as a "correction". Not sure how this would work, but it'd be a starting place.
Another way, to try to deal with bias in comments, would be to have a post attribute "Biased". Slashdot is currently driven by opinion, and maybe this would be too strong (I could see it being -0 by default). However, it would be nice to allow someone to look for more neutral posts if that's what they want. I rarely think "Gee, there isn't enough heated argument on Slashdot" and often think "Boy, I wish I could filter out some of this advocacy stuff".
I *really* wish that Slashdot would dispense with the one-post-every-two-minutes rule. I understand that there are concerns about spam, but there's a pretty straightforward fix. Just require an *average* of one-post-every-two-minutes, but allow higher burst rates. Often, I have short responses to comments "No, that's not true, see the following webpage:", and write them more frequently than one every two minutes, and develop a backlog of comments. It would be really nice if the rule was, say, no more than five posts every ten minutes. This *still* keeps spammers down to the same rate, but allows some bursty behavior on the part of posters. An alternative would be to allow a "queue" of some size, say, five posts to be built up...but backlogged posts only appear every two minutes. That way, I don't have to sit around with a bunch of tabs open with finished-but-not-submitted posts open waiting for the current deadline to expire so that I can submit my post.
If this is unacceptable, removal of the two-minute limit for members would be probably the single most likely thing that would convince me to get a Slashdot membership. I already filter the ads, and the main irritation for me is simply the time limits.
I'd like to see the default post ordering be "show newest comments first". This would help ensure that all postings get a fair shot at being viewed, and help eliminate the first post problem.
I'd kind of like to be able to get the friends database in a text file on CD -- nothing in there is private, and it'd be really great to be able to analyze it with something other than screen scraping.
I think that it would be neat if Slashdot added an API to Slashcode to browse and post comments, so that people could make readers (a la Usenet readers). That would be a neat member perk. I can think of a ton of things that could be done from even a simple client, if only there was a good, reliable way of accessing Slashdot. Screen scraping is hard on the servers and not that reliable.
It would be nice if users could attach a couple of small files (even 1K) to their account that are keyed with a simple string. For example,
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
But, and maybe this is where I should have done more filtering work, the comments and moderation of comments seems to have dropped in quality. The signal to noise ratio is horrible IMNSHO.
I hear people complaining about this on an awful lot of forums. Two ideas come to mind (both of which may apply to some extent):
(a) People are wrong. This is supported by the number of people who consistently claim things like "kids are worse today than they used to be", when it seems pretty unlikely that society has seen a monotonic downfall in the ethics/virtues/whatever of kids. Nostalgia really does seem to make things look golden, and thus make the current state of affairs look worse.
(b) It is an emergent property of open forums to get more noise over time. This is supported by the number of people on *other* open forums, like Usenet, that complain about how noise is always increasing. Perhaps as a forum gets good and attracts interesting people, it gains a reputation, and new people hop in to meet those people and get a soapbox to address all the other new people. The number of hangers-on in the general population exceeds the exceptional, and thus the quality falls.
Oh, and one other possibility:
(c) The merit of a forum is measured as how much a person learns from it, and how challenged and stimulated they are by the debate. If the content of the content remains the same in that forum, eventually old-timers will have learned most of what the forum has to teach them, and they will start to say "there's not much interesting stuff here".
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Make it 1/day, 5/week, whatever you think is fair, but after that threshold, they still get the stories posted, but the links get a "nofollow". That way you're still sharing interesting, unique stories with the Slashdot readers, but people have no incentive to submit hordes of stories.
Doesn't work.
Even if each user only got *one* story accepted per userid, they could still just keep setting up new accounts. A slashdot UID is not an expensive ID -- anyone can create a number of them -- and thus, restrictions on a per-account basis, especially when money is involved, just don't work all that well.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
But again, i don't want to throw out a good submission just because a user doesn't have appropriate karma/history/low UID.
You've built a sophisticated system, Slashcode, that uses heuristics to try to guess what content is interesting to various people, so that they don't look at all of it. Sometimes people don't read all the comments, and sometimes it's going to screw up and people are going to miss good comments. But, on the average, it works well.
I'm not familiar with how you skim through submissions, but you might consider only reviewing, say, 50% of the submissions, or whatever percentage you can handle, and passing them through a heuristic filter first...and just having a rejection flag that says "didn't pass heuristics", if you don't think that that's likely to result in people spending time trying to beat the filter. The lameness filter applies to comments...surely something that looks for affiliate IDs or too many misspelled words in a submission could filter out submissions that are not very useful?
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I think that the idea of remaining ontopic came into being on Usenet.
On Usenet, to keep the hierarchy useful, it was entirely appropriate to try to keep discussions on topic. It was easy to just span over into another newsgroup that more appropriately covered some point. If you are discussing C++ in comp.lang.c, it's reasonable for someone to ask you to go to comp.lang.c++.
However, Slashdot doesn't have tens of thousands of newsgroups that are always active that a poster can follow up to or crosspost to to move the thread to another newsgroup. Slashdot has maybe six active stories on the main page at once, and no ability to "crosspost". So, unlike Usenet, if you want to post, you have to post in the active story. Maybe the article is about C, but if you want to say somethin about a similar, C++ feature, you have to stick your post in that story.
By virtue of that, I don't think that Offtopic is all that helpful on Slashdot, whereas on Usenet, it is.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
There is a Greasemonkey script that sticks a Coral Cache link on each link on slashdot.org. The only drawback is that you wind up with these [CC] snippits if you copy and paste text with links.
I guess that I'd rather have a script that adds a contextual menu item for links to "Go to Coral Cache...".
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Typing '@' requires a shift-2, right? And typing 'at' requires, well, a-t. So it's the same number of keystrokes, and doesn't make you look like you're trapped in 1994, wanking furiously over an issue of "HotWired".
I guess its part of the whole open source mentality, but at the same time I don't see anyone stepping up and submitting code to solve problems.
I've tried a couple times. Slashcode suffers from the simple problem that it's a pain to get running.
I'm willing to spend a week hacking on something, but not on just getting it running so that I can start hacking. On two different occasions I tried getting Slashcode running on my machine and gave up after spending a day on it. If it were easier to get running, I'd have submitted at least two patches by now.
For most OSS, this is not a problem. If something is bothering you about a software package, it's already running your your system. However, Slashdot is an OSS website -- it isn't running on my computer, and so it's a pain to test your changes...
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Treat the good submission as you would treat any other good submission and without regard to the submitters reputation. Reputations are illusionary. Especially reputations attached to login user names. For example, my score is '1'. So what?
Ted K. The former host of ABC's Nightline said it best when he described the difference between facts and truth. The presenting of facts is the job of the journalist and determining whether the facts are true or false is the responsibility of the reader.
Politics is defined as the often internally conflicting interrelationships among people in a society. A political strategy is to defeat an idea that cannot be defeated using facts by discrediting the source of the idea. When this happens it is proof that the idea is a good one and the flamer is unable to defeat the idea.
Institute a cap on the total number of stories a given submitter can get accepted (per day, week, month...whatever). A cap doesn't hurt legitimate submitters, while limiting the payoff for linkwhores.
A Slashdot UID is not an expensive ID.
Thus, restrictions purely on a pure-ID basis don't work. The spammer will just create more UIDs.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
My newspaper has a policy of publishing no more than one letter per month from the same reader.
Let's have a look at the problems that links in stories can create. I think there are merely two classes of problems:
Although I've seen a lot of comments here claiming that link spamming is not a problem, because it can only happen a) with the personal website link and b) with links inside the story blurb (which can't go overboard because they are checked by the editors). Link spamming in comments is not possible because of the automatic addition of rel="nofollow" to links in comment posts (although looking at the page source shows that this is not done in 100% of the cases, but this may just be a Slashcode bug [CmdrTaco, you may want to take a look at it]).
The reasoning here by many users is that the link spamming does not impede their /. experience. This is true. But, it will come back to you, namely when you search Google for something, and the topmost results are all crap, promoted by the said link spamming e.g. on /. (take a look at * * Beatles-Beatles stories and the link to his personal website, which is a disguised link farm). Therefore, accepting link spamming on /. does not disturb your reading of this website, but it will render Googles search system unusable, for the search terms which get promoted by link spamming.
Now on to the second class of problems: indirect links. Indirect links in a story are links to personal blogs which contain a further summary of the original article, which does not add any insights on the original story (this is a common procedure by e.g. Roland Piquepaille (don't confuse his account with that of the equally named troll!)). Instead of linking directly to TFA, these people link to their blogs, which in turn contains a link to TFA. This is annyoing because readers want to go directly to the story source, but it may not necessarily count as link spamming (at least as long as the linked to page is not a link farm). It may though be used to simply drive ad revenue to this person's blog.
What can we learn from these two problem classes:
Now this is where the rel="nofollow" enters the scene. Applying this attribute to the first class of problematic links does indeed help to extinguish the problem of link spamming. Since as of today, link spamming was mostly done through the means of the personal website link, I'd vote for adding it to that link. Links inside the article body are most of the time only of the second problem class, which cannot be mitigated by the rel="nofollow" attribute. To counter the indirect linking, only manual checking by the editors is of use.
Several comments here have brought up the question of being rewarded for submitting a story by means of increased PageRank. Some think this is legitimate, because these users have taken their time to submit a story. Others think that submitting a story should not be rewarded. This is kind of black and white thinking. I personally think that users should be rewarded for submitting a story, but not by increased PageRank, since this gives too much room for abuse. When reading the other comments here, I think that not many users are aware of the fact that submitters are indeed rewarded for story submitting, namely by gaining karma. This is a fact!
I therefore plead to add the rel="nofollow" attribute to the personal websit
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Thanks for making my POINT, MODS
The quality and content of the story should determine whether you use it or not. Methinks the Slashdot editors are too deep in the trees to see the forest. I pay attention to who submitted the story maybe once in... a thousand reads. The story is the thing. That's why I use Slashdot in the first place.
I did think having user feedback on the story and submitter could be useful (but not the users choosing the storys)this would help the editors see what people want without compelling them to go with the lowest common denominator and would help make a better slashdot.
but then i thought of another idea fork the comments
if you want to submit a story comment submit it to the story if you want to winge about the submission whinge in the whingers section of the story.
(maybe "muttering in the gallery")
moderation then takes care of the rest.
mod down anything appearing in the wrong section and meta moderate against anything modded up in the wrong section.
this should then allow those that want to read just about the story to do so and give a voice to those that are disgruntled- to those who want to listen.
both sections could be entertaining and interesting and make it easier to moderate and metamoderate.
often comments about the submission are interesting.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
post the rejects in a rejects section providing the submitter agrees.
if a reader wants to wade through the trash why not?
2nd fork the comments
story related or muttering in the gallery.
seperate the bitching from the story.
all mods will appreciate this and meta mods too
maybe if you posted the trash so to speak as trash if the posting did gather enough comments it might be worth rescuing and putting into a relevent section.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
I only see most of these things in the newsletter, so I'm generally a day behind, evidenced by 1042 comments on this subject.
I recently Moderated for the first or second time, and I used 3 of my 5 points to mark down some personal attacks on a complete stranger : they were totally off-topic, and possibly even semi-criminal.
As far as "personal web page links" are concerned, I don't have any trouble telling the difference between someones webpage, and a newspapers or "news websites" page.
Maybe I'm missing something. I enjoy the "digest" email newsletter I get from you guys every day, but I don't always follow any & every link.
I really don't see any of this as a problem.
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
As other people have posted, companies DO switch shifts. A local Kodak plant has the worst of all I've heard of: you switch shifts every week, starting with morning, then going to evening, then going to graveyard, then back to morning. They've been doing this for 20 years. Employees all loathe it. I think it's unconscionable to ask people to work this way. But they claim it's the only way to be fair about who works what shift: everyone works every shift. Some parts of the company do something even weirder, and have unequal shift lengths, so you might work 4 tens one week, five 8's the next, three twelves the third. It's a horrible idea. I don't know how well it'd work for /. but it sure isn't pleasant IRL.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
If I post a book review with a link to somewhere you can buy the book (e.g., Amazon), is it okay to post an affiliate link, so I make a couple bucks off the sales to whoever buys it through Slashdot?
(I haven't ever posted a review, and I'm not really planning on it any time soon, but I'm curious.)
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Why not add a separate moderation system for stories? it could be as simple as being able to mark each story as a dupe or an advertisement, or a troll. It wouldn't even have to do anything; just give people the chance to register their disgust without posting an entire comment. People are obviously trying to get this across, and giving them some other way to do it should help reduce the number of redundant "dupe!" comments.
Personally, I think slashdot's moderation system works quite well; there will be abuse and off-topic discussion no matter what you do. Thanks for all your hard work!
Rob, you're doing fine. Others have mentioned suggestions and the only thing I might echo is the rejected story thing. I hate it when I spend 5-10 minutes composing something only to see that it's been rejected. Keep it up, man, you're doing great. Slashcode is quite the legacy.
Paul
You mean jibe not jive.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. — Dorothy Parker
What is needed is something that would allow a viewer to add the submitter to an ignore list. That way you don't see stories submitted by that person. Everyone else gets to see the story.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
except that I submitted a story about a 1/2 day before you had posted the same story by another person. I used all the correct details to submit, but alass I was new and I was unable to post the url correctly (I just pasted it since I couldnt get the code to work), that kinda peeved me abit when I read the same exact story about 12 hours later. Otherwise, its a fine job you all are doing, minus of course the double posts that I sometimes catch. :D
You most likely lost your moderating rights because you abused them, unintentionally or intentionally. All your talk about the "dictatorial" editors going around stripping people of their moderating privileges for the fun of it is pure bunk.
While not perfect, the system here at Slashdot is far superior to the systems used at other sites. At least you, a regular user, did have the chance to be a moderator (even if you quickly lost that privilege). But even more important, the system automatically removed your moderating privileges when you did abuse them. It would do the same for anyone else, too.
A moderator who incorrectly or unnecessarily moderates legitimate messages (as you apparently did) is often far more harmful to a community than a spammer or a shit disturber.
On one hand, I'm very happy that you were given the chance to be a moderator. Most sites don't allow that. On the other hand, I'm also very glad to know that the system removed those abilities from you when you abused them, something else that is rare amongst other sites.
Either way, the system is very fair, and treats everyone equally, even if you can't or won't see that fact.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why not have editors doing what they do at a lot of places, manually going through the articles and remembering what's already been used? Certainly something like the same story twice in a week should be remembered.
As per this moment, there is are two updates. It's nice to see that Taco can be very open-minded about things. It's his site, after all, and really if he wanted to he could say "screw you all" and do whatever he wants. Instead, he's pulling a very nice compromise by throwing in the nofollow links, despite the fact that he thinks the whole thing is silly.
Certainly it shows a good deal of "community focus" that he would bring the discussion of said articles to the forefront, and even moreso that he has decided to follow up thusly on the user feedback.
Congrats Taco, keep up the good work!