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.
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).
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?
Pants are still optional, but recommended for 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
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
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.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
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.
Since I'm not willing to grind out quantity, I just stop submitting.
Make the link point to the user's slashdot profile page.
"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.
...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 (!).
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.
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.
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.
Shinma
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.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
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.
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, 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.
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.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Seriously though, this is bollocks. Even the GPL, the most community-driven statement ever drafted, is fine with people benefiting personally from GPLed code.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
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!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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
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
>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.
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.
My blog
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Conspiracy Solves: BB Submits his stories mostly in the evening. SM posts most of his stories in the evening.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
As soon as an individual stands to gain something (especially if it can translate to money) the system becomes vulnerable to abuse.
/. 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".
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
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
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
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.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
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.
"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.
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.