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.
Institute a cap on the total number of stories a given submitter can get accepted (per day, week, month...whatever). A cap doesn't hurt legitimate submitters, while limiting the payoff for linkwhores.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Are you seriously trying to say that Beatles_Beatles was the only guy so submitted all of those stories? I would be VERY surprised if this were the case. If you get one story from 50 submitters, what's the point of going to the same submitter time and time again? Give the rest of us a chance.
create a /. staging area, where us, the real users, can rate stories, and let us decide what makes it to the front page... The the RPs and BBs of the world will only show up when their linkback page is actually relevent and useful...
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Why not simply link to the original article, instead of these cut-and-paste pages?
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
The most critical thing I can see is that these type of questions aren't asked that often. I would like to see a once per week, or at a minimum once per month, question from the editors like, "how are we doing, what changes, etc." It doesn't mean you have to implement them, but we'd like to know that you at least halfway care what the readers think. When you take out a story from someone with a rep, that can be considered censorship, so print that pig and watch the fur + mod points fly. That's what the internet is for. However, you can go out of your way to make sure that people starting to earn a bad rep get steered clear of that, by telling them early and often when things are going south. If they continue to be jerks, or post ad after ad, that's when it's time to step in. The New York Times doesn't run ads masquerading as articles. I'm not saying this is the NYT, but you can understand our frustration as readers to click a link and get an online store.
stuff |
If ScuttleMonkey does not know Beatles-Beatles, then why is he almost the only one who has ever posted his stories?
I have seen many, many, many submissions by Beatles-Beatles. I can't remember even one of them being posted by someone other than ScuttleMonkey. If it was simply a matter of Beatles-Beatles submitting a lot of stories, which you seem to infer, then they would be spread out among a number of editors, not all of which would be ScuttleMonkey.
This seems to poke a huge hole in your reply. There is something else going on here.
There are several ways you can combat this. WHy not change it so two edtiors need to approve a story instead of just one? Or, why not only have one external link / day for submitters? Then they wouldn't spam the queue so much.
As for your parent commect - the issue is not soley whether or not the user would enjoy the link. There is an issue of journailistic integrity here. Just because a story is facinating does not always mean a journalist should feel comfortable reporting on it. In the same way, just because a link is good does not mean you should be posting it.
If someone submitted a very interesting story, but their referrer link pointed at a child porn site, would you still post it?
Slashdot could do with a fair bit of editorial rearrangement for new products or services.
Make a 'new products' category to stick all those 'This is cool, but it sounds like Logitech paid for the ad' stories. Similar for new services. If a company is cool or scary enough to rate its own story section on slashdot, then you can post under those categories... Like for google. Otherwise, let users filter them out.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Perhaps you should start a feedback score for an article
E.g.
Dupe
Advert
Biased
Boring
People who submit too many times will have a lower score and a past history editors can look up.
Sheesh. Here you dare to submit your own story, which asks legitimate questions, and even asks for feedback. The hubris!
You're lucky that the feedback has (as far as I read) thus far only accused you of
- Cronyism
- Faking user identities
- Taking kickbacks for posting stories
- General stupidity.
OKAY, FOLKS. TIME TO WAKE UP.
Let's take 'em, here:
Cronyism/faking poster names. IF ROB WANTED TO POST FAKE USERNAMES, DON'T YOU THINK HE MIGHT TRY TO COVER HIS TRACKS A LITTLE BETTER? Occam's razor kinda dictates that this Beatles Beatles guy is legit, 'cause Rob could cough up as many accounts as he wanted if here were attempting to run a propaganda site.
Kickbacks for stories. Ummmm... duh. Let's face it: we read Slashdot (or, at least, *I* read Slashdot -- and have for years; check my user number) because we enjoy the stories, and the commentary. If we EVER found ANY conclusive evidence that Rob was taking kickbacks from advertisers, I think it would be safe to say the site would be abandoned wholesale. Instead, just like UFO abduction stories, people love to discuss potential cabals and conspiracies, but offer no proof whatsoever. PUT UP OR SHUT UP.
General stupidity. Okay, maybe this one's valid, maybe it isn't. But, akin to Howard Stern's take on similar situations, IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, STOP READING. I can think of no better vote. No, you DON'T own the site. Rob does. (Or the media conglomarate. Not sure. Doesn't matter.) But we, the users, in a very real sense do dictate the site's future. If we stopped reading, it would go away. So, if you're so pissed, STOP READING. If you think the stories that are posted are stupid, STOP READING. There are plenty of other sites that are spawned in Slashdot's image, that offer different editorial direction and/or mechanisms. Feel free to avail yourselves of them. And, while we're at it, if it's not to the point where you want to wholesale abandon the site, you can -- gasp -- get mod points to change the feel of a story's discussion. Use 'em.
In the meantime, I think Rob and the crew -- with the odd exception (see: magnetic longevity rings) -- try hard, and succeed most of the time. Certainly enough that Slasdhot's one of the sites I refresh the most. I, personally, will continue reading, as long as CmdrTaco and Hemos are associated with the site. They ain't perfect, but they do a damn good job, and have done it long enough and well enough to show it ain't a fluke.
Party on Way^H^H^H^H Rob.
Party on Hemos.
I've been visiting Slashdot for about 3 years now and _I didn't know_ the submitter username linked to a page of their choosing until just now. I always assumed they were links to the submitters user profile and thus never clicked or even hovered my rodent over them.
I'm not sure if i'm making a point here, perhaps that submitter link just isn't very significant?
Maybe we could moderate entire articles. Maybe it would take two mod points to mod an article, or once in a while, less often then you got post moderating points you could get article moderating points. There's always going to be articles that slip through. Dupes are another thing. Maybe if enough article moderators call something a dupe, it should just be marked as such, so that we don't even have to bother seeing them. Same goes for stories that we find not interesting, or funny. Maybe I feel only like reading funny articles today, and so, people should be able to mod the entire story as such. I think moderating stories would go a long way to help people weed out the stuff they don't want to see. And make the job a little easy on the editors, who always get blamed for everything that gets posted that shouldn't be.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
For example, if some company comes up with a really cool new gadget that everyone here would be interested but nobody else knows about it, would you get upset if they submitted a story about it? If AMD was the submitter for the release of their FX-60 CPU and linked to their site in addition to extremetech's benchmarks, would that be unacceptable? I would hope not. At least not if someone else didn't submit at least as good a submission.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
This is specifically one of the things that we want the new mod system to deal with. Essentially this is a matter of self-tagging your comment. "I know i am offtopic. I'll say so". It would go a long ways towards keeping articles on topic.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
>If you become a popular submitter it is because you submit relevant stories.
.sig's. That gets rid of a lot of chaff and leaves us with a lot of wheat. So for the submitters: You can give them the gift of visits. You *dont'* have to give them the gift of abusing PageRank. But don't make it a special case, make it a rule--put 'nofollow' into ALL submitter's personal URLs.
Not entirely true. It could be because you submit tons and tons of stories. Countless times in these threads we see posts saying "I submitted this story and it was rejected, here's a link to my writeup which has more/better/clearer/less biased info" and the alternate writeup is indeed better, and usually sooner. Getting a story onto slashdot requires exactly one thing: appearing interesting, yes, but the key is it has to appear interesting to the editor who happens to see it in the queue. Submitting tons of stories increases these chances.
Submitting stories to Slashdot is a numbers game. It is *not* the case that the first or best submission gets accepted, even when it's staggeringly on-topic. The 'Editorial' page of this site's FAQ lists Taco's favorite subjects: "Linux, Legos, Penguins, Sci (both real and fiction)." I submitted a story about a guy who created Star Wars scenes with Lego. Can't get much more on-topic than that. It was rejected. Later that week, someone else's submission of the same site was accepted. The stories that get onto Slashdot depend on exactly one thing: the editor who reads the submission. So: on topic or not, good or bad, if you submit zillions of stories to Slashdot--even if they have mediocre writeups--you'll become a popular submitter. (And sites like Reddit and Digg make finding interesting stories even easier. You could proabably set up a bot to scrape those sites, submit them as stories, and have a high amount of success.) And of course, posting lots of stories probably means you will have mediocre writeups. Great: just what slashdot needs: a system that rewards mediocrity.
If I didn't have two jobs I'd start submitting stories like mad and document how many got posted just to prove this but I don't have the time. But any longtime slashdotter (or the site admins themselves) can tell you the same.
And Taco: I love the site, I think you've done a great thing here, but it turns my stomach to hear you talk about the serious editorial duties you perform when you won't even do 2 quick google searches on each story: one to make sure it isn't a dupe and one to see if the article is totally bogus--a scam, a hoax, factually incorrect, etc. (There was a hoax here a week or two ago, which was already known to be a hoax by the time slashdot picked it up. The hoaxness was mentioned in comments and in a slashback a few days later, but still--it should have never made it onto the front page.)
Also: "Both use their return link to link a web page which is, in my opinion, pretty worthless." Um, hello? You've not heard of Google, page rank, and the uncountable fortunes that await someone with a high google score? Please. You *know* this is a hugely popular site. You *know* the power of it, and google's. Leaving the combined power of these two sites in the hands of anyone with scads of free time is silly.
Here's my take: I don't like 'nofollow' in blogs as a general rule. Lots of good stuff does show up in google because blogs mention it or it shows up in the comments. Slashdot comment spam stays out of google beacause google browses at +1, IIRC, and I think google also sees slashdot without
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Hear hear. I actually haven't had a problem with *any* of the BeatlesBeatles stories. Most are interesting, and are very much on topic. The thing that *pisses me off* is the people who post large threads to that story about how they hate BeatlesBeatles.
What I would *love* is a way to colapse or skip entire threads. Or perhaps let an off-topic moderation 'trickle down' to replies to that post (how can they be anything *but* off topic if replying to an off-topic post?).
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Again, that works in theory. But not always in reality.
/. editorial staff expanded beyond you and Hemos that /. started to noticeably dive in quality. I don't know what the answer is, I don't know what the relationship between editors is. You might try suggesting they stop going with the easy, safe submissions of known submitters versus others that include better links and equal if not better text.
the spammer is taking the time to submit many many stories to get a couple through. The casual user only submits the stories he thinks are the absolute best. If we pick a dozen stories, they can't all be the very very best. There will be a few stories that are not as great... and a few that simply are of interest to a different subset of readers. A spammer submits 10... if i order them in terms of how widely known they are, #1-5 are submitted 20-30 times... but number 8 and 9 maybe only once or twice.
Okay, so you're saying that when the only person to submit an interesting yet slightly obscure story is a queue spammer, that queue spammer is going to get their submission posted. This makes sense except...
The queue spammers are getting their submissions accepted on stories that are not obscure, when there are 20-30 submissions, and a casual perusal of the comments shows half a dozen irritated submitters who had at least comparable if not plainly superior submissions on the same story which were rejected. Yet the queue spammer not only wins, but wins several times in a row. Clearly there is more going on here, and your explanation sounds more like "theory" than "reality".
I'm not going to claim that the spammers are being deliberately picked or given preference due to some unknown deal. I am going to claim that, consciously or not, certain submitters are being accepted more readily than others irrespective of the relative merits of the submissions, and I don't think this claim lacks ample support. At the very least, the fact that a story that links to a blog is frequently picked over a similarly well-worded submission with links to primary sources shows that the system is not working even for those most popular stories.
I think part of the problem here (meaning this very story) is that the problem is not you, yet you have to come to defend the editorial process as you exercise it. Frankly, it was the moment
The enemies of Democracy are
Amen to this! Please, please - for those of you who weren't around to watch K5's slide from great to completely horrible, listen to Inoshiro. User moderated content isn't going to work, unless it is a combination of user moderation and and editor selection. I don't want content selected by the average of a cross-section of hundreds of thousands of people.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I haven't had a story stay in the queue for more than 8 hours. Ever. (only one has been accepted, and it ended up as part of slashback. what a ripoff.) Most of the submissions I'm talking about were submitted at least a day earlier, some of them several days.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The overwhelming percentage of the content posted @ /. consists of the comments - it's what /. is for. The comments @ digg are truly horrible but, and this is a fairly large but, most of the links that are popular @ digg and make the /. front page are visible @ digg much much earlier. If anything digg is a little like CNN (lotsa crap but it comes fast and if anything important happens it'll prob at least make the ticker even if the signal:noise ratio is low) and /. has become a bit more like a magazine.
I don't think the two compete. I'm pretty sure they shouldn't. I certainly follow digg via rss (and rarely bother with the comments at all) and browse /. @ +4
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
One thing that might help is to have a field for the submit URL. It would be pretty easy to have the code check for dups and to group the submissions by URL. If you have 8 submissions for one URL the editor could then pick the one that he thinks is best or combine them.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.