On the Matter of Slashdot Story Selection

Conspiracy theories again run rampant as users accuse Slashdot Editors of being in cahoots with scam artists. Sounds like just a normal day at the office for me. Except that I've decided to say a few words on Slashdot article selection process and users who try to abuse it. Read on for my rant.

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.

Comments

Nofollow that fellow

[richie2000]

What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?

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.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[Oculus Habent]

That's a horrible precedent, though. If you become a popular submitter it is because you submit relevant stories. You end up in a cycle where a submitter becomes popular, someone complains, and you blackball him because of it.

Why should you punish your best submitters, even if they are doing it for their own benefit (URL on a popular site)?

I do think that using Slashdot as a forum to talking about slashdot is a great way to generate discussion and help people understand what's happening.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[toleraen]

I don't think you need to limit the number of submissions and add the nofollow tag. If they are just spamming to get their page rank up, they'll stop submitting with the nofollow tag in place. But if they are legitimately submitting good stories that people will want to read, they shouldn't be tossed out just because they submitted a few stories already. Just add the nofollow tag, that seems to be what most of the fuss is about.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[GeekyMike]

I think everyone has a chance to redeem themselves. Just because some guy decides to abuse the system doesn't mean he cannot learn from his mistakes. Learning from mistakes is what seperates us from the scriptkiddies

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[shinma]

The thing here is, Beatles Beatles, or whoever it'll be next, aren't "known troublemakers." The conspiracy theorists in the forums are the ones making trouble. Why should someone be punished for being a troublemaker when they are doing the thing that keeps the site alive?

What you're saying is, essentially, that a prolific submitter should have a halflife. Planned obsolescence. Once a submitter's name becomes "known," the editors should no longer accept their submissions, regardless of their quality?

That's not an appropriate or acceptable solution. Submissions are the lifeblood of sites like this, and to institute such a policy would discourage members of the community from submitting stories.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[falcon5768]

the problem is, there is no way anyone on this site SHOULD become popular. If people are becoming popular its because the editors are too lazy to pick the first one and edit it, and go for someones who they can trust. There are millions of users on this site, there is no reason a handful of them should become as well know as they have. We have one guy already this month who for 7 straight storys had HIS pcked over others who submitted them first. THATS a problem.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[croddy]

I'd rather live without a good story completely than having it ruined by a discussion about the submitter.

The solution to that is to mod down the idiots ranting and raving about Beatles-Beatles and his website. It's not to reject interesting stories just because some people are so stupid that they see the name of a submitter and become instantly filled with hate.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[eno2001]

Personal benefit is the problem. No one should benefit personally in a community driven environment. The only reasons to submit stories are to share information with other people. I should get NOTHING in return other than knowing that others of a like mind enjoyed the submission if it was accepted. As soon as an individual stands to gain something (especially if it can translate to money) the system becomes vulnerable to abuse. If you can't contribute something with nothing in return, then you don't belong in a community.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[ergo98]

We have one guy already this month who for 7 straight storys had HIS pcked over others who submitted them first. THATS a problem.

How in the world do you know who submitted what when?

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[Lifewish]

No one should benefit personally in a community driven environment.

And here I thought that the entire point of a community driven environment was that everyone benefited personally. How naive of me.

Seriously though, this is bollocks. Even the GPL, the most community-driven statement ever drafted, is fine with people benefiting personally from GPLed code.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[Captain Splendid]

Uhh, did I miss something? Isn't this what modding, metamodding, friends and foes lists are for? With just five minutes' tweaking, /. gets a lot more readable.

IMHO, things are just fine. The problem here isn't crappy links/submitters, it's the OT discussion about that that's the problem, and quite frankly, that happens (in wildly divergent ways) in pretty much all threads.

Quit yer bitching, and go mess around with your preferences, for I do not have enough cheese to go with all this whine!

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[(trb001)]

The only reasons to submit stories are to share information with other people.

Fine, fine, altruists we all are. However, if someone should happen to have information that they feel like sharing, other people appreciate that sharing and the sharer happens to benefit from it...so what? I don't see the problem here, and I fail to see where the abuse you mention poses a problem. Good content is the goal, all else would seem to be periphery to me.

If you can't contribute something with nothing in return, then you don't belong in a community.

I think more appropriate would be "If you won't contribute something with nothing in return, then you don't belong in a community." I really see no reason to forego gain for yourself "just because."

--trb

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[morgan_greywolf]

It's not what Beatles Beatles is linking to that makes him a 'troublemaker.' It's the problem of Beatles Beatles using Slashdot to spam Google PageRank.

By linking to his sites, we are allowing him to participate in the ruining of a perfectly good tool. So when people Google for 'Beatles,' they're going to get his site, and all because he's abusing the Slashdot submission system.

But maybe you're right. He is submitting good stories and that's good. Maybe the Google PageRank problem is Google's problem to solve and not Slashdot's.

The problem is that some of us old-time hackers think it is our job to make the Internet work. The fact is that it's not anymore, and it's up to the companies like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft that have stepped at and taken control to make it work. It's not ours anymore, and we shouldn't worry about it.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[SatanicPuppy]

Nobody is twisting your arm to click on the dumb self-refferal link, any more than they're making you click on the homepage listing we're all allowed under our usernames.

Frankly, I could give a damn about the person who submitted the article. I'm interested in the article itself. If it's good or bad, I don't get pissed off at the submitter, or at Taco, I just move on. It's just not that big a deal.

Now if someone has an incredibly insightful comment, I may check their homepage, because they personally sound interesting, but that's about it.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[ergo98]

As soon as an individual stands to gain something (especially if it can translate to money) the system becomes vulnerable to abuse.

Welcome to reality.

If you can't contribute something with nothing in return, then you don't belong in a community.

This is completely nonsensical and contrary to human behaviour, and most of what people do on this planet is for personal gain (either monetary, or reputation that can be easily converted to monetary units).

The problem was Roland's submissions had nothing to do with him pimping his link on his submission - it was that his submissions were TERRIBLE, and it was simply a very visible demonstration that the Slashdot crew perhaps doesn't put enough care and concern into vetting the content. Roland is actually a great eye opener, because it should make people aware that many of the "legitimate" sites are quickly hashing out disposable info purely for the purpose of getting a /. hoarde incoming (often submitting their own stories anonymously). You see the same thing on Digg these days, with a lot of the top-Digged stories being disposable content written entirely to pander to the Digg community (such as "Why 2006 Will Be The Death of Slashdot" that was frontpage material yesterday). This stuff is written entirely to gain from the "contribution".

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[drinkypoo]

We have one guy already this month who for 7 straight storys had HIS pcked over others who submitted them first. THATS a problem.

How in the world do you know who submitted what when?

Because people whose name I'm used to seeing on positively-moderated comments have claimed that their story with the same submission (and often, superior comment text) was submitted earlier - often days earlier. Then, a roland pika-troll or a beatles^2 story comes along saying the same thing, only with less information, asking moronic leading questions, and linking to some site that they sell ads from.

I don't have a problem with people making ad revenue based on slashdot submitter links. That does not bother me at all. What bothers me is that the better submissions are being thrown over for these apparent slashvertisements for these clueless asshole submitters. There are basically only three options here:

• The editors are corrupt and are taking story submissions from specific parties in exchange for some kind of compensation, and now, lying about it.
• Slashcode is eating some submissions.
• The editors are completely fucking incompetent. This is the option that seems to best be borne out by the rampant spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors that make it onto the front page in the form of story submissions, some of which are written by the editors themselves... not to mention the constant story duplication.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[ergo98]

Because people whose name I'm used to seeing on positively-moderated comments have claimed that their story with the same submission (and often, superior comment text) was submitted earlier

Yet they have absolutely no clue when stories were submitted either. This touches on your incompetent editors comment - stories can take days to go from submission to actually appearing: During that intervening period they might reject a lot of duplicate submissions of one that's already in the queue for posting, and then all of those people are pissed when 18 hours later a story that seems to be "later" was accepted, but actually it was first in.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[Pollardito]

no kidding, a link from Slashdot that doesn't have rel=nofollow is telling Google that we think his site is useful. adding rel=nofollow isn't editing, on the contrary it is a way to Google to say that we can't comment on the quality of that site. this is exactly what rel=nofollow is supposed to be for. here's some snippets from that article detailing its use :

When added to any link, it will serve as a flag that the link has not been explicitly approved by the site owner.

in the post above the site owner, CmdrTaco, has explicitly disapproved with the content on the site ("Both use their return link to link a web page which is, in my opinion, pretty worthless."). the very least that you can do is add meta information that says that you aren't linking there for its usefulness

Once added, the search engines supporting the attribute will understand that the link has not been vetted in some way by the site owner. Think of it as a way to flag to them, "I didn't post this link -- someone else did."

the links in the article are being checked for relevance and content, but for some reason the link by the submitter is being given a free pass, so it should be rel=nofollow. do it to every single submission and no one can claim bias.

imo, the most relevant solution to this problem was glossed over in one paragraph in order to hash over solutions that no one will agree on.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[Sierpinski]

I suggested months ago to Taco that he keep a database of abusive submitters and auto reject them. It would save them time and keep the occasional nutjob post from getting through. Taco told me it was not possible. At least he was kind enough to respond.

They would just create new /. accounts from a different email address and start all over. Reject by IP address. To prevent (or lessen) problems from this, make it a 2/4/etc week ban, automatically unbanning them after a while. If it happens again, perma-ban.

On a side note, aside from the blatant attempt at profiteering on some submissions, I can't stand wading through all of the 'this is a dupe' comments. If the person reading sees that its a dupe right away, they can skip that article and move on. Otherwise let the person who doesn't know that its a dupe RTFA without having to sift through hundreds of dupe comments (sometimes which get modded to +5 informative/insightful.) Anyone who mods a 'this is a dupe' comment up at all should be flogged and never allowed to moderate again.

Why let trolls and cranks influence the site?

[Concern]

Just pust what's good. Don't let this issue influence your judgement about what to show.

As far as I can see, the conspiracy theories about various /. 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.

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 /. personally, rather than simply move on. It can manifest in all kinds of ways, overt or quite subtle, and this is one of them.

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...

Maybe I'm new around here...

[th1ckasabr1ck]

... 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).

Re:A simple suggestion:

[CmdrTaco]

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?

Longterm reader's thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:I disagree

[pezpunk]

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.

simple

[lubricated]

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.).

No bother, I just stopped Submitting

[redelm]

I put some of what I consider quality in my Submissions. They get posted on K5 everytime. But at /. , it appears the editors aren't very careful readers, and quantity matters.

Since I'm not willing to grind out quantity, I just stop submitting.

Simple solution

[wampus]

Make the link point to the user's slashdot profile page.

Re:Caps

[CmdrTaco]

The "Waiting 5 minutes" is simply not true in many many many cases.

Stripping Attribution

[sparkhead]

"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.

The reward for having a story accepted...

[pnuema]

...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.

Roland

[Lord Byron II]

The reason I can't stand Roland is because his postings suck. They "feel" like they're trying to get me to click the link to his blog and I don't like that feeling. His posts are closer to ads for his blog than summaries of the relevant stories. Which brings me to my second complaint:

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 (!).

Re:A simple suggestion:

[RevDobbs]

So a better solution might be to cap the number of submissions, not "accepted" submissions.

If you only have a change to submit three stories a day, you know damn well that you're going to submit only the best. And if someone can come up with three great, published submissions a day, then let them whore their blog all they want: then they truly deserive it.

Re:Ask us again

[CmdrTaco]

This is something i'm going to try to do more often. It's just very hard to keep up with it. I'm going to have to spend many hours replying to comments and e-mails based on this story. The Slashdot system is good for many many discussions, but not so strong when *I* am the single lynchpin, and people use email, IM, and the forum system to communicate with me.

It's all about the PageRank

[meringuoid]

... and what they do with it.

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.

Re:It's all about the PageRank

[robbo]

Simple solution: the submitter URL in the story should point to their slashdot user page (for *all* slashdot stories, btw). They can post their home page url in their user page, if they like, but it will be minimum two clicks away from the front page. They get the reward of recognition, but its diluted. This might reduce the incentive for people like BB to submit a lot of stories, and will hopefully reduce the jealous ranting in the discussions.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[CmdrTaco]

This is a very perfect example of an arms race situation. I can't ban them, they'll get a new account/ip etc. And it doesn't solve the problem. We deal with the same issues in the moderation system.

Nofollow Karma

[Milo Fungus]

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.

Re:Nofollow Karma

[b1t r0t]

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.

Although you haven't been able to see the effects for a long time since they hid karma behind a vague description, you do realize that getting a submission posted is worth 3 karma points, right?

I don't see why links for the submitter's name shouldn't always be nofollow links. The submitter's home web site is not the subject of the article, so there's no reason Google should be able to associate it with the article. Hey, if he's got a worthwhile page on george-harrison.info that's worth linking to as the point of the article, I've got no problem with that. It's just the automatic link to the same site attached to his name that is the problem here.

Also, web site links in the headers of posted replies should be nofollow links as well. The whole point of this BeatlesBeatles controversy is a link to his web site which is not part of the topic. The same should apply not just to "george-harrison.info", but also to "(http://www.ourmedia.org/user/38299)" (<--hey, check it out, a nofollow link, CmdrTaco is censoring me! Help help, I'm bein' opressed!) and other such links in the comment headers and signatures. Okay, so he's got his link on the front page, but the idea is the same. Links to a submitter's / comment poster's websites are off-topic, and should be rel=nofollow. If nofollow is good enough for comment text, it should be good enough for home page links, too.

The same should probably apply to links in signature lines as well.

So for some strange reason, we can't post links in comments without getting a nofollow slapped on it, but we can set our homepage and it won't get a nofollow, and every time we post a message, we're doing the same thing as BeatlesBeatles! Oh man, I feel so dirty. Oh wait, I don't have a home page set up. But look at the HTML source to any message you've posted and you'll see what I mean.

Same thing you do with "unpresentable" stories.

[SharpFang]

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.

Ignore the noise

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[D-Cypell]

Taco, why not implement the ability for users to configure whether they see stories submitted by 'foes' on the front page (and perhaps move stories submitted by 'friends' TO the front page)?

Clearly, some people will say, "Yeah get rid of user X stories" and other will say "No, I want to read them". The answer is configuration, and you already have the infrastructure in the foes/friends system.

No user URLs in the story.

[vertinox]

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?

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 /. profile page and hit up their bio and URL from there.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[Archibald Buttle]

OK - so you get 30-50 submissions per story that are usable...

Why not then pick one of those submissions that links to the story itself - rather than a submission that links to a blog that has innane commentary on a story and a link on to the real story.

Submissions that contain links that are directly relevant to the subject should IMHO be given priority over submissions containing indirect links.

I don't want to read a blog of somebody's opinion about a scientific discovery that gives a link to NewScientist - I'd rather read the NewScientist article directly.

Re:Submitters don't need a link back

[TheLetterPsy]

First, I'd like to say that I appreciate you taking the time to address this issue, as it has been taking over more and more of /. discussions.

What I find disappointing, however, is that during your entire rant, you fail to address why, if BeatlesBeatles' submissions were actually so great, why were they not picked up by other editors? Why is it that it is just ScuttleMonkey accepting?

Although the true conspiracy theorists would just attribute a different ed posting a BeatlesBeatles to that same ed being 'in' on the conspiracy -- you have to admit that we are of a rather skeptical and scientific mind. By this I mean we see patterns such as these and feel compelled to think that there is something 'fishy' going on.

Yours is a difficult position. Though I think story moderation may be one area for you to explore. That might even take care of the dupes, too!!

Apart from BeatlesBeatles and ScuttleMonkey -- keep up the good work.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[jamie]

The problem with doing this for submitters is that there are too many of them. Think of the "long tail" graph. For the year 2005 we have 9 submitters who got a story accepted more than 3 times a month. After those 9 we have 4405 more submitters making up the "tail." And of those, 3558 (86%) only got 1 story accepted the entire year.

The only part of that graph that it would be useful to track a submitter's "reputation" is for those top 9 or so, the top 0.22%. And my guess is that the only tags readers would apply to them are negative: "I don't like this guy." But we already know they are decent at submitting stories to Slashdot, because they have done it successfully 3 times a month. So what does this tell us except that we (the editors) think they write interesting stuff, but some of the readers don't like them? And we know that already.

Anyway, those readers who dislike Beatles-Beatles don't really dislike the user account submitting the stories, you dislike the URL he/she links to. So what's to stop him/her from creating a new user account and linking to the same URL with slightly different text? Or a slightly different URL?

Moderation works for users because the bulk of it is positive: our posters work hard to build up a good rep as someone who has something to say, with the reward being that they get to speak a little "louder." As far as I can tell what you propose for submitters would work the other direction. I'm not saying a successful reputation system for this can't possibly be built. I just don't think this is the right direction to go in to build it. And it would be a lot of work and I question whether it would ultimately be worth it.

(BTW: Beatles-Beatles is not in that top 9, he/she had fewer than 2 stories a month accepted for 2005.)

Stop posting news that doesn't matter

[Von Rex]

Most people here don't give a damn about the URL behind the submitter's name. People who make big deals about that usually get marked off-topic anyway. But what I find very concerning is the general lack of quality of the stories submitted lately.

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.

1. Informercials disguised as stories. Particularly those for products which are not innovations in the first place. Most particularly for products which do not yet even exist. It makes me want to scream at your editors to RTFA before they publish it to half a million people. Often the first page of the comments for such stories are filled with +5 comments saying "This should not have been a story because there's nothing interesting or innovative here". You should take that as an indication that your editors screwed up, rather than trying to defend their story choices.
   
   
2. Minor gaming stories that should not be on the front page. There's a gaming section of this site. Minor stories, like interviews with game company staffers no one has heard of, should go there rather than the main page. If you noticed, most of the gaming stories lately have about 20 comments on them, and most of them trolls. This should be an indication to you that your recent practice of promoting gaming press releases over substantial tech stories is not an interest shared by most of your readers.
   
   
3. There seem to be certain subjects which automatically get promoted to front page stories by the editors. For example, anything remotely to do with Star Wars or Blizzard. This has always happened to some degree, partly as a geek culture, tongue-in-cheek type of thing, but lately there's been too much of it. It's noise, not signal.

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.

Re:Mix It Up!!!

[Col. Klink (retired)]

Some of this is clearly self-fulfulling. Why should I both submitting a single article when you appear far more likely to accept a link from someone who floods your site.

Why not modify your incoming queue to sort by frequency of posting. You wouldn't have to drop all Beatles_Beatles submissions, but you'd see submissions from non-flooders first. If Beatles_Beatles was the only one with that scoop, then you'd be able to post it. But if someone else had the same link, you'd give priority to someone who isn't flooding the queue.

And then, ff people thought they had a better chance of getting an article submitted, they'd be more likely to do so.

But I also think editors should really be editing. I know you hate to hear this, but that includes (1) spell checking; (2) dupe-checking; and (3) fact-checking.

1) Spell-checking. If you think discussion quality is decreased by a Roland submission, why can't you accept that the discussion is also decreased by spelling corrections. Not to mention that I just don't see how you can't take enough pride in this site to try and make it look professional.

2) I understand that you don't want to drop a good discussion even if it takes place under a dupe. I would have thought the subscriber-preview option would have allowed you to catch dupes before general distribution. You could also close discussion of the article for the first 5 minutes while it's subscriber-only and add a "this is a dupe" button to allow the subscribers to alert you right away. For another software solution, why not write a script that would move discussion from one article to another. You could then delete the dupe and move the discussion to the original article. Of course, the real answer here is that editors should be editing, and that should include searching for dupes. It often feels like editors really don't read the site. Again, I don't see why this isn't a matter of pride for you.

3) Fact-checking. You seem to admit that you basically accept anything with "key words". The site often looks like the Enquirer with such oversensationalist headlines. I usually wait 10 minutes before reading such articles and then read the top-rates comments to discover how badly you misrepresented the article. RTFA should apply as much to the editors as to the readers (perhaps even more so). I'm not asking you to spend a day researching everything, but if an article is exceptionally sensationalistic, you should at least spend a few minutes looking into it. Retractions should really shame you, but it never seems to bother you.

Fix the underlying problem

[tm2b]

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.

Bullshit

[Lord Apathy]

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.

No more popular submitters please

[gad_zuki!]

>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.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[Alan Hicks]

But if the link is good, why NOT share it with the audience?

I'm going to get a new hole in my ass ripped open for this, but here goes.

Most of the articles (and discussion for that matter) really aren't up to snuff. To illustrate this, a friend and I did a little experiment. We both submitted the same stories and in each case mine was more well written, lacked grammar and spelling mistakes, and in general was much better presented. They were submitted within a few minutes of each other. In each case when one of the articles was published on /., it was the more poorly written article. This held true even when I was the maintainer of the content being linked to.

I don't know how others feel, but /. has really gone way downhill over the last three or four years. It feels like the editors aren't even trying anymore. Articles that are well-written are not preferred over something that was just slapped together. The subject matter isn't as good anymore. Where before there would be a story about a change in the virtual memory layer of the linux kernel, now we get "Linus Says GNOME Sucks" or "How to Get Free Stuff at Trade Shows".

So naturally when readers see the same people getting their submissions posted over and over again, and the articles truly suck, people think something's up. My advice, start looking for real geek news. MontaVista is looking for a new CEO. Linux may soon have all its semaphores replaced with mutexs. There's plenty of real hard core geek news out there; I can't believe that it's not being submitted to /., unless most of the real geeks have moved onto other venues.

Re:Mod Article Down (-1 Troll) :)

[ConceptJunkie]

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.

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 /. after 7-8 years.

Re:digg yourself

[Autonomous Crowhard]

Exactly!

We've got meta moderation, why not story moderation? Why not have the concept of Poster Karma?

If you post too much crap then you lose linking privs until you staighten out. post even more crap and you don't even get your name on the post.

Re:I appreciate Taco actually coming forward...

[CmdrTaco]

Conspiracy Solves: BB Submits his stories mostly in the evening. SM posts most of his stories in the evening.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[molo]

I prefer to reward speed over quality. But that is a flexible rule too.

Have you considered changing your personal policy to reward quality over speed? It would remove a lot of the criticisms about story submission choice, possibly including this whole many-submissions issue.

-molo

Re:strip down the attribution process

[CmdrTaco]

This goes back to a fundamental struggle for me. Maintaining the feel and nature of Slashdot, while preparing and improving it for the future. What things can be removed? What things are essential to being "Slashdot".

I think at the core of Slashdot is the fact that our homepage is created by a small group of editors, following submissions from thousands. I think it is the moderation of the comments attached to the stories. I think it's that particular green color that I'm so fond of. And I think that it's 'A reader writes' and the start of every story line.

I just think some things are core to what Slashdot is, and changing them is a bad idea.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[Raphael]

I prefer to reward speed over quality. But that is a flexible rule too.

I do not understand how this argument applies to the story selection. As an editor, you are the one who decides when you look at the stories and when you publish them. By the time you look at 5 stories that are on the same subject matter, these stories are already there (in the queue) so the time at which they were originally submitted is mostly irrelevant and will not have any influence on the time at which the story is posted.

There is currently no feedback to the submitter saying "your story has been accepted because you were the first one to submit it" or "your story has been accepted because it was well-written" or "because it had more relevant links". Similarly, there is no feedback to the ones who get rejected saying "your story has been rejected because another submission on the same topic was received earlier" or "your story has been rejected because of its lousy quality". In most cases, those who submit stories have no way to know if they were first or not. Therefore, I would argue that there is no clear incentive for submitting stories as fast as possible.

On the other hand, if we look at the feedback posted in the comments, I have seen more complaints about the quality of the stories than about the fact that other sites got the news first. This seems to indicate that it would be better to reward quality rather than speed in order to minimize the complaints and other off-topic discussions on some stories.

If I may suggest something, it would be that you try to look at all 5 stories on the same subject matter and pick the one that has the best summary or the best links rather than the one that was submitted first.

Re:Link to the original article

[orac2]

I think part of the difficultly in finding an optimum solution (or least-pessimistic solution perhaps) is that you may be running together two problems, which both manifest the same symptoms -- people endlessly bitching about submitters in the story comments -- but actually have different causes.

Beatles Beatles is in one problem set: a submitter sends in reasonably well-written, blurbs with direct and relevant links. The only fly in the ointment is that he links his name back to a web site that raises the hackles of slashdot readers who believe he's Googlewhoring for Fun and Profit, and thereby gaining an unfair advantage over Joe Slashdot. I think the solution there is to keep an eye on people who've had a lot of stories accepted, and try to make sure that, going forward, those stories you accept from them really are just the ones that he/she, and he/she alone, have uniquely submitted. Even though slashcode's weakness when it comes to searching could make implementing this less than perfect, any attempt at it would reduce the howls of "Hey -- why does XYX get another PageRank boost over me when I submitted the same story!"

I realize this policy could be seen a punishing "good submitters" -- why shouldn't you have the at least same chance as getting random story X published as a dozen other submitters, many of whom may never have contributed to the community before, if you're a good submitter? -- but good submitters will still get their unique stuff up there (and if they're really good, this will translate to a fair number of stories accepted), and you're increasing the number of voices that are being heard, always a good thing on a community driven site (other venues, such as blogs, do exist if I really want to hear one specific person's take on things.)

Roland is in the other problem set: there the objection is that the links within the blurbs themselves are not so direct and relevant, but place an annoying layer of intermediate submtter opinion that doesn't add anything of substanstance to my understanding of the story or its context. (and my needs for superficial submitter opinion are ideally already satisfied by the blurb :) ). Dealing with this is trickier -- some Blogs can add substantial value to a raw link and should be granted their intermediary position, while others Just Don't and readers would be better served with a direct link. However, assuming there are no other submissions availble with a direct link, I don't think you should just take the link, bin the submssion, write up your own blurb and post it with no attribution.

Instead, for links to things like blogs which are commentaries on some further linked item (rather than original content, a la Russinovich's infamous Sony BMG DRM post), you could make it a policy -- as part of the normal "submission clean up" process -- to add a direct link to the ultimately linked item into the blurb. Those that want to read the commentary can do so, others can bypass it.

I guess what I'm saying is that the solutions are to be found not in the realm of tech fixes, such as nofollow tags or even more baroque meta-uber-moderation constructs, but in non-technical things like editorial policies and judgement that relate do directly to the value you deliver to Slashdot readers I which I think is entirely within your remit and avoids some of the issues you've been concerned about in other threads.

Don't repeat Kuro5hin's mistakes.

[Inoshiro]

"Maybe we could moderate entire articles."

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 /. readers now.

Story moderation is not a panacea.

Re:Don't repeat Kuro5hin's mistakes.

[HawkingMattress]

I hear there's a new "anti-slashdot" called Digg, and I'm sure that unless they take steps, the same thing will happen.

Oh you know i tried to read digg for a few days regulary. Let me tell you, 99% of the content here is already crap. You can tell that most digg users are 14 years old or something from what is posted and popular. And the comments... the comments are worse than what you would find if you could browse slashdot with only 0ed posts, maybe with less spam and f1rst psot, but even less interesting than that.

After those few days when i came back to my beloved slashdot it really felts like i was reading some geniuses posts... And i think that there is really a small percetage of really intelligent people here after all, or at least people *really* knowing their shit, enough to teach something to most readers when it happens that the topic talks about it.

Granted 90% of the /. population seems to think they are geniuses and are all full of themselves, while they are just computer savvy. But the moderation system works well enough to keep the discussion interesting. In fact i think the moderation system works surprisingly well, even if there are a few silly mods here and there...

Re:Don't repeat Kuro5hin's mistakes.

[ClamIAm]

The popular quote about why people use Unix is usually "All software sucks. Unix sucks less than everything else". I think the same could be said of Slashdot.