Slashdot Mirror
On the Matter of Slashdot Story Selection
Let's talk about Beatles Beatles. For the uninitiated he's just some dude who submits a lot of stories. He actually happens to get a lot of them accepted. We have a number of users like this. Looking at the hall of fame shows you a number of the most successful ones. Now the motivation for getting a Slashdot story accepted (besides fame, glory and sexy women who start IMing you naked pictures of themselves mere seconds after a story goes live)is a return link to the website of your choosing. Your creds. Your 'Reward' for sharing a cool URL with a half a million Slashdot readers.
It's not hard to figure out what sorts of stories Slashdot likes. We have a format, and a subject matter. A persistent user can simply start spamming the bin with a submission about everything he finds that comes even close. If he does it enough, he'll get a few through. Especially if he manages to get something reasonable in at 11pm when there's little else to choose from.
Now there is no conspiracy. There is some Roland guy who's last name i can't spell who submits stuff all the time and people thought for awhile he was Timothy. Lately there is a Beatles Beatles user who conspiracy theorists now think is Scuttlemonkey. We don't know these people. They are not aliases for us. They aren't paying us. 3 months from now it will be somebody else.
Now these submitters each have their problems. In Roland's case, he likes to link to his personal blog where he writes mediocre summaries of stories that add nothing to the original. In BBs case, he just cuts and pastes paragraphs from linked pages. Both use their return link to link a web page which is, in my opinion, pretty worthless.
Now technically speaking, we could add a nofollow to their URLs. Or strip them entirely. But that puts me into the position of editing not just the submission, but the submittor, and i really don't think that this is "Right".
Part of the Slashdot Editor's job is to make a submission "Presentable". Usually this means moving a few URLs around. I'd guess a good half of story submissions use the word 'here' or 'article' or something equally stupid as their anchor text. I prefer relevant words to be linked. There are other minor things tho, like taking off extra intros like "Hi guys I read Slashdot every day and thought you would like this". We want the Slashdot story to be mostly distilled down to the essentials. Just the key 3-4 sentences.
Should part of this process be checking the URL of the submitter to make sure that it is legitimate? Does that really matter? Should we add a nofollow tag to those URLs?
My opinion is no. Those URLs are what you get for submitting a story to Slashdot. We selected it. The submission braved the Gauntlet. A hundred submissions died, and this one made the cut. I don't think it's fair that we strip creds from someone just because they choose to squander that URL on something stupid. Who am I to judge that after all?
Now the real problem with this is what it does to the discussion. Last night a nice story was posted. It came from one of our "Problem" users. And dozens of comments were posted about this user. The conspiracy theories. The hostility. Now a lot of this is normal Slashdot Forum Faire. Thats fine. But the problem is that often when this occurs, it swamps out the real discussion. The messenger becomes the story.
I think this sucks.
The story is not about Roland or Beatles Beatles or whatever other random user is submitting a lot of stuff this week. I encourage moderators to use their points to mod these discussions down when they see them. As a moderator, your job ought to be to steer the discussion on-topic. The submitter is almost never the topic!
The catch-22 kills me. I might have a URL in the bin worth sharing. Something a half a million of you might enjoy. But because a user with a "Reputation" submitted it, I know that posting it will spawn a giant forum cesspool. I could strip attribution and take away incentive for a user to submit. Or just throw away the article and forget it. Or I could post the story and watch as half of the discussion is simply about the submitter and not the URL that i wanted to share in the first place.
Damned if I do, damned if I don't, right? I'm seriously looking for feedback here. What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?
And moderators, use those offtopic mods to steer the discussion towards the subject of the article, not the flavor of the month conspiracy theory about story selection.
As a side note, I'm really going to try to write more articles addressing Slashdot matters on to Slashdot. But please understand that doing so is tremendously time consuming- this article will generate hundreds of pieces of mail and forum posts that I want to read and reply to. But there are only so many hours in the day. I would like to request that the forum try to stay on-topic here. Let's talk specifically about the issues i addressed above. We can talk about digg or moderation or whatever issues are of most interest next week.
Update a dozen or so users have made the same point: Simply wait for the same story to come from another user. If that was possible, I would do so. I'm really talking here about stories that are submitted just by one person. Part of why these users are successful is that they submit enough stories that they get a handful that only THEY submitted. I can't simply wait for someone else. That will never come!
update Allright it's been about 300 hours. I've read every comment posted so far, and replied to many. Even managed to whore myself a couple dozen upmods ;) I think we will add a nofollow to the submittor link. Several users raised good points and they ultimately convinced me that since the focus of the story is the submission, not the submittor, any link that detracts from the focus is less relevant. This will probably reduce some kinds of abuse in the future, but of course not all.
There's a lot of really good discussion in there. Some really good feedback. I haven't touched my inbox yet, but I see a lot of messages in there as well that I'll try to get to. I'll try to post again in another week or 2 on some other subject matter. If you have ideas on what that should be, you're welcome to email and suggest topics. We'll try to make it, if not regular, a frequent thing on Slashdot.
Toss it. The reason those submitters earn their reputation is because you haven't killed his or her stories before. You need some kind of editorial policy where all your editors share the same basic guidelines for what to approve and what not to, and this should include a corpus of "known troublemakers". It's basic due diligence and should be as natural as looking a wee bit harder for dupes and checking the spelling and grammar one last time before hitting "Publish". And yes, add the "nofollow". It doesn't detract from the story one bit, but it does kill some of the story spammer's motivation.
I'd rather live without a good story completely than having it ruined by a discussion about the submitter.
There are plenty more stories in the sea, but there's just one Slashdot.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Institute a cap on the total number of stories a given submitter can get accepted (per day, week, month...whatever). A cap doesn't hurt legitimate submitters, while limiting the payoff for linkwhores.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
An article about Slashdot on Slashdot... why haven't Slashdot been slashdotted yet? Inquiring minds want to know.
Just pust what's good. Don't let this issue influence your judgement about what to show.
/. personalities - be they you, Katz, Michael, or the plethora of submitters - run in a smooth continuum through moderation system whiners and /.-herd posters all the way down to ordinary FP and OT trolls.
/. personally, rather than simply move on. It can manifest in all kinds of ways, overt or quite subtle, and this is one of them.
As far as I can see, the conspiracy theories about various
Some people are just brats. They said something and it got modded down, or they submitted a story and it got ignored and (gasp) some other submission got in that looked similar, and then they decide to hate
That said, I'm certain that it's possible to trick, scam or abuse slashdot's editors with story submissions. I've certainly seen some questionable writeups go by over the years. It doesn't take anything away from the site, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
For the most part, the system works. Stories come and go, the comments are generally good, and moderation doesn't always do what we wish, but nothing else really compares to the results. If occasionally something looks questionable people will question it, just as always.
It can be alarming how sophisticated some haters can be, but frankly I haven't seen anything here that even deserves your response. It's good to clear the air, but anyway, I wouldn't worry about it.
If you want a project, think about an interesting way to reorganize, prefilter and/or score story submissions...
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
... but it seems to me that people complain far more often about advertisements thinly disguised as stories than they do about lots of submissions coming from the same user(s).
Are you seriously trying to say that Beatles_Beatles was the only guy so submitted all of those stories? I would be VERY surprised if this were the case. If you get one story from 50 submitters, what's the point of going to the same submitter time and time again? Give the rest of us a chance.
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
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.
Why is it that only Timothy posts Roland stories and only Scuttlemonkey posts Beatles stories?
I have half-heartedly submitted a dozen or so articles to /. - none of which have been accepted. My favorite topic, of course, is the danger of X-rays emitted by spark plugs. (See how I snuck that in) Any chance of there ever being a "Guide to writing acceptable articles for slashdot" that gives detailed advice on DOs and DONTs??? Just thought I'd ask.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
be more transparent. There are alot of things you could to help your cause. Showing rejected story list may be nice. I trully doubt only one user posted that story. If it's true that he was the only one to catch it then if people knew it they might be more ok with it.
That's one way to be more transparent, you may have to be creative to think of others.
One more thing.
Denying that what happened was suspicious is calling your community stupid.
Also try having the editors perticipate in a conversation about them and directly answer some of the comments(not sure if this hasn't happened, but it didn't when I was looking at it.).
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Since I'm not willing to grind out quantity, I just stop submitting.
The most critical thing I can see is that these type of questions aren't asked that often. I would like to see a once per week, or at a minimum once per month, question from the editors like, "how are we doing, what changes, etc." It doesn't mean you have to implement them, but we'd like to know that you at least halfway care what the readers think. When you take out a story from someone with a rep, that can be considered censorship, so print that pig and watch the fur + mod points fly. That's what the internet is for. However, you can go out of your way to make sure that people starting to earn a bad rep get steered clear of that, by telling them early and often when things are going south. If they continue to be jerks, or post ad after ad, that's when it's time to step in. The New York Times doesn't run ads masquerading as articles. I'm not saying this is the NYT, but you can understand our frustration as readers to click a link and get an online store.
stuff |
Make the link point to the user's slashdot profile page.
What should I do?
You should no-follow the links to submitter's pages, every time. They still get their "creds", in that the slashdot user base still gets a link to their page. They can profit from this link by slashdot users hitting their ads. They also don't get bumps up from pagerank, profiting from a googlebot sending more people their way who didn't find them through slashdot, word of mouth, or an individual linking them. And finally, it's got the added benefit of destroying the temptation to consistently bitch about submission system abuses for the benefit of raising pagerank.
You didn't read his whole post. He wants advice on how best you'd like it fixed.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
The "Waiting 5 minutes" is simply not true in many many many cases.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
"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 (!).
"There are plenty more stories in the sea, but there's just one Slashdot."
That's what you think.
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 editors are only human. Maybe if you hired more people to screen articles and provide feedback instead or along with the subscribers?
I've never noticed this before.
Sorry. I see lots of stories with oddly linked articles, text ripped from the article, or linking to a meta-article. I'd say this happened between 25% and 50% of the time.
I think that Slashdot needs to aggregate submissions. E.g., if there are 10 submissions regarding the FX60 processor, each with a different link, then make a single story linking to all of the sites, mention all of the people who submitted it (or the first one) and flesh it out a bit.
Make it look like you at least read the links.
And hey, having some more content of your own wouldn't hurt either. Besides the book and game reviews.
Even just attaching a longer opinion piece or editorial piece to a story.
he is trying to fix it, he's asking for feedback
If 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?
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
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.
No, not obviously. Often stories are NOT submitted by a non-problem user. If it was, there wouldn't be a problem ;)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Let's look at the supply and demand: apparently only 1 in 20 submissions ever makes it. Therefore, there is a massive oversupply, and it's quite clear that people don't need a link back to their website to be encouraged to submit stories to Slashdot.
Editors shouldn't just selectively remove link backs to a submitter's website - they should not put a link to the submitter at all, except maybe to the user's Slashdot user page (not journal). Perhaps I could understand the need to encourage people to submit stores if there were so few that the queue was almost empty, and every submission had to be posted - but this is clearly not the case.
Finally, I don't think people would have noticed * * Beatles-Beatles if his name wasn't so prominent, for example, if his username had been Johndoe or something else inconspicuous. Same goes for Roland Piquepaille who also has a prominent and eyecatching name that you'll remember the second time you see it - so some of the whole * * Beatles-Beatles controversy and Roland Piquepaille controversy is stirred up merely because their names stick in the mind.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I don't like this story. Only if there were a method where everyone could vote on good stories.
No Digg.
I don't think there is any be-all end-all solution to this problem other than dedicated moderators (and meta-moderators.) People need to be modded off topic if they are. Perhaps there could be some sort of penalty for bad moderation? ie. if 4 people mod a comment +1 Insightful, somebody mods it -1 flamebait, and then someone else mods it +1 insightful, the person who modded it 'against the grain' could be punnished by somehow being less likely to get mod points again. Maybe there could be some sort of 'smart' auto meta-moderation. just a few thoughts, too early in the morning bored at work...
I agree that it sucks when "[t]he messenger becomes the story." But you know, Slashdot is like Usenet used to be (before Slashdot and various other Web forums largely took over Usenet's role, leaving most newsgroups as purely the domain of spammers and trolls, I mean) in that, while there is a hell of a lot of noise, there is also a lot of signal -- and the noise really isn't that hard to skip over. Most users, it seems to me, can train themselves to scan posts quickly, decide if they're germane to the story or just a bunch of conspiracy-theory nonsense, and page down to the comments with some meat.
The moderation system should make this easier. Now, I'm not a big fan of the "Offtopic" mod -- I don't remember the last time I used it -- but what I do when I have mod points is try to mod up only on-topic comments (as well as comments that are good in other ways, of course: interesting, insightful, etc.) so that, hopefully, those comments and the threads they spawn will rise to the top of the page and leave the trolls and conspiracy theorists and **Beatles-Beatles dissas 'n' Piquepaille-hatas, yo, down at the bottom where they belong.
BTW, the reason I don't like "Offtopic" is because I think it's often abused; many mods will mark a post that way when it's a perfectly legitimate reply to another post which is kinda sorta ontopic. For example, in many science stories (regardless of the type of science in question) you'll see people ranting about how dumb and ignorant scientists are, often including links to creationist/ID propaganda or some bullshit look-how-clever-I-am Michael Crichton speech; and they may (or may not) get modded as "Troll" or "Flamebait," but people who respond to them and try to explain to them how science really works get modded "Offtopic" because the explanation isn't directly relevant to the original story. This is a problem, because these ideas need to be addressed whenever they crop up, IMNSGDHO. See also: rational discussion of the advantages of Mac OS X in response to "L0L M4XZ 5UX0RZ PCZ R0X0RZ" posts, usually in any given Apple story. "Offtopic" isn't a bad mod category in itself, but I think it should be much more carefully used.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Anyone have statistics on the times of day at which R.P. and **BB stories turn up?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
But never got around to it. Why are some stories accepted, but never posted?
For example: "Global Trends in 2020 09:19 AM January 24th, 2005 Accepted"
Accepted, but never posted. Editor just forgot to post it? <TinfoilHat>Killed after $someone complained?</TinfoilHat> OTBE'd? A bug?
Best Slashdot Co
For the same reason that APES live in a BESTIARY and BEES live in an APIARY: Because there is no SPOON. Next question!
-- thinkyhead software and media
... number of submissions. Shrug, if someone is sending 20 a day they need shot. Limit people to 1 submission a day so they're forced to submit only their best rather than taking the shotgun approach.
Shadus
But if the link is good, why NOT share it with the audience? I believe my first priority is to the readers here. If they would enjoy a link, why should the fact that it came from a user with a negative repution make me not choose the link?
I think a good part of the problem here is the perception (and occasionally documented fact) that other, non-link-whore readers have submitted the same story, sometimes days before, and been rejected. In other cases, the stories the link whores link to are months, maybe years old, or blatantly mis-represented in the summaries.
Thus we aren't really in the situation you describe of getting good, fresh links that we would not otherwise see from these people; when the links are good, there's a fairly good chance that someone else has submitted it too (and that chance would rise if people in general thought their odds of acceptance were better). And when the links aren't that great, the loss isn't either.
I would agree with the GP that there should be some sort of rotating queue or time limit on acceptance. Perhaps putting people who have had a story accepted in the last month at the end of the slush-queue, so that all stories from non-accepted readers get considered first.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Thank you very, very much for this thread. The Beatles Pascal thing isn't a particularly hot issue with me, but I recognize and appreciate the effort that opening a thread like this entails.
"What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?"
.
Pay no attention to the submitter of a piece. At all. Maybe have it be invisible to the editors.
Then, we can all assume that there is no favoritism, etc, except in terms of article/subject/writing style preference
And, ideally, this would result in truly the best articles being posted.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
Damned if I do, damned if I don't, right? I'm seriously looking for feedback here. What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?
/. profile page and hit up their bio and URL from there.
Instead of linking to an user inputed URL on the story, why not just give the option to link to their Slashdot profile.
That way they can't abuse Google page rank, but if anyone is still interested in the submitter they can go to their
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
/. should provide feedback to story submitters, informing them of why their story was declined.
/. to improve future submissions.
/. reader - I'm a published technology author (magazine articles, blogs, working on a book) - so, to have stories declined by /. from my perspective is very, very odd.
/.'s article selection process for everyone.
This would allow submitters to revise their submission accordingly, or to submit stories of higher quality in the future.
Instead, we're left wondering why nearly every story we submit is declined, and given no information from
Eventually we'll stop submitting stories - at least, I have.
Now, keep in mind, I'm not your average
Work out a better feedback system, and you'll improve
I have been around here for a while and over time I have had to boost the comment threshold quite a bit to drown out the whiners and trolls. However, reading at a high threshold gives a peaceful and interesting view of the comments. So much so, I was *unaware* of this "problem".
The moderation system is doing the job it was meant to do: whiners and trolls get left at the bottom and content actually rises to the higher levels where I see it. Some days I feel like I'm sponging off those who have mod points, but I mysteriously lost my mod abilities years ago, so there isn't much I can do about that.
I *literally* don't see the problem. Those who read at lower levels may, but I thought that was the point behind making that choice. I don't want to see whiners and trolls, they do. While you might think that meta stories are going to help get recommendations, the reality is you will get nothing but the same whines and trolls you were trying to avoid... promoted to "5". Oh, yay.
Sig under construction since 1998.
I truthfully don't pay a lot of attention to the name of the submittor. I've deleted like 80 submissions this morning. I couldn't tell you the names of any of them. The only reason I "Care" who a submittor is, is that there are a few users who, if i post their story, I get hatemail from readers who angrily complain that I am obviously under their employ!
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Part of the Slashdot Editor's job is to make a submission "Presentable".
Oh, I know, you must mean correcting obvious spelling and grammar mistakes, right?
Usually this means moving a few URLs around.
Oh, OK. But I guess it would also mean checking to see if the article summary is an accurate summary of the linked article.
I'd guess a good half of story submissions use the word 'here' or 'article' or something equally stupid as their anchor text. I prefer relevant words to be linked.
Well, yes. That would be nice. But about those spelling and grammar problems...
There are other minor things tho, like taking off extra intros like "Hi guys I read Slashdot every day and thought you would like this".
Uh, hello? Accuracy? Spelling and grammar? Anyone?
Speaking of Roland Piquepaille, he's not a part of ZDNet. Here's the story, with a creepy-ass picture where he looks like a cracked-out muppet.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I try to strip out extra URLs. For example if the story is on Foobaz.com, i'd prefer to link the article directly and not the article AND foobaz.com each with their own hyperlinks. Likewise some users include wikipedia entries and such. I try to strip those out. Ideally the only URL in the story is the attribution and the link the story is about. Occasionally there are a few links that add substantially, or might directly link things like pictures. Those I like to keep. But if it doesn't add substantially to the topic of the article, my preferencei s to yank it.
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This is clearly a shameless slashvertisement for /.
Next!
Just my two copper pieces.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Allow modding of both stories and submitters, not just content. Between the rotating mod points and meta-modding, most of these problems will quickly resolve themselves, including people bitching that it is the staff's fault. So, if a story is out for ten minutes and is quickly modded "-2 Slashverdisement" or "-5 Dupe," people who don't want to see that crap, well, won't. Most people who have made this suggestion have done so half-jokingly, but really, why the hell not?
Let them keep the link but use nofollow. They'll still get the "cred" of it being there, it'll still drive people to visit their site out of interest but the search engines will ignore it and so those who try to post articles to boost their pagerank will be left out.
Everyone is a winner. Except the pagerank scammers, but we don't care about them.
I like this idea of Taco posting stuff about Slashdot every month. Next time I'd like to know how they handle dupes and what they intend on doing/implementing to reduce the number.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
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.
The number of times you have run hardware/pc-tech stories where the submitter is the owner of the site linked is what gets me.
Granted some will then submit anonymous but its far better than seeing @nnnnn.net being the same address as the story and then getting bombared with ads.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
That said, anybody who works for a company that wants a piece of hardware reviewed, just contact us. We'll review almost any gizmo or gadget. I don't think thats a paid advertisement- we just like to play with gadgets and talk about them. It's almost like that is a core part of Slashdot... talking about technology, hardware, gadgets etc.
This constantly frusterates me. Other sites do this, and we pay the price. We aren't paid for our story selection process. Never have been. But the accusations always exist. I know i should ignore it, but it still gets old.
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CmndrTaco, You're doing a good job. You are approaching the issue circumspectly and openly. You are admitting that there are quirks in the system and that sometimes crap falls through.
Gee, sounds a whole lot like life to me.
My subject, "I actually have a life...". I spend too much time earning a living to go off on someone who posts utter crap. That's what the editors and moderators are for and they are doing a pretty damn fine job. How can I tell? Because I (and many like me) keep coming back. If you weren't doing a good job, I'd go elsewhere for my relevant geek news and never even tell you about it, probably.
I'm involved here. I Meta Moderate semi-frequently. I even used my Moerator points once (it took me an hour to figure out what they were for... it's not obvious to the unitiated).
You can't please all the people all of the time. Hell, you can't please most people some of the time. You gotta please yourself.
If you're going to classify someone as a 'troublemaker', and reject a submissions based on that, you really should provide a remediation process, and some kind of definition of what kinds of things get you labeled as trouble, so there's a clear picture of how to avoid landing in the don't-bother-to-contribute bin. Otherwise, the general openness of discussions on /. is taken down a step. BTW, that's not necessarily a bad thing, less openness. Its just your choice, as to whether or not to label someone trouble and reject submissions based on that, and open that can of worms. I guess its the lesser of two evils, really.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
The only qualification to that basic idea I'd offer would be: What makes it "tricky," again?
We already have the mod system, with categories that are overbroad but that basically work. We have a mechanism for pushing posts up or down the page based on recency, mod scores, or whatever the user's chosen in her prefs. There's a separate pref that lets us choose to see all stories on a topic, none of them, or just the "best," too -- only what counts as the "best" if we're not modding?
We wanna be able to mod "the latest Jon Dovrak troll column" as a troll. Half the posts to any Dvorak story are just going to amount to that anyway.
Similarly, we do have enemies lists that we can cause to mod down by a value we set, yes? Just let me do that to posters, by user name. Problem solved, no editorial intervention required.
(If it was up to me, I'd use some sort of mod system to screen proposed stories and determine which ones were worthy of the home page. That would require some real recasting of the mod system, but I don't see why applying the existing system to stories that are already up would take that much at all...)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Good stories are good stories if they come from you, me, or a guy who's return link is a pyramid scheme. My top priority has always been selecting the right story.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Kudos to CmdrTaco for having a meta-discussion! Because of this excellent show of good faith, I am going to remove my new sig which I installed today. Previously, it said:
Turn off ScuttleMonkey's stories.
Now, it is gone entirely.
I actually noticed when I did what I recommended in the sig (and I'm about to undo it) that slashdot basically went away. The fact is that right now, ScuttleMonkey is doing all of the work. Now, when the Beatles-Beatles goofball (may I pause to say that I'm the only person in the world who hates the Beatles? I even had a dream about hating them just two nights ago. That's pathetic) started coming up, SM was posting his stuff all the time. It's clear to me now that we aren't getting BB stories multiple times a day any more. We're just getting a slashdot that's put together mostly by SM, and he's approving BB stories that he thinks are appropriate, and so therefore all BB stories that have been approved (save one, last I checked) have been approved by SM.
Now, CmdrTaco, some responses to your questions and statements:
Or I could post the story and watch as half of the discussion is simply about the submitter and not the URL that i wanted to share in the first place. Damned if I do, damned if I don't, right? I'm seriously looking for feedback here. What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?
Now that I've thought about it awhile, my answer is go ahead and post a story if you think it's good, but don't sweat it if we want to talk about something else. Let the linkscammer get his reward ... but let us despise him all we want. I don't think it should ever be a big deal to the slashdot powers that be if we run a few threads into the ground discussing something besides the subject itself. As you noted, you have a moderation system in place to control these things. Let that system control it, so that we can self-select the level of offtopicness that we want on a particular day in a particular discussion. Allow us to have these off-topic vents, and I think you will find we feel a lot more charitable toward you. (I know that I immediately felt better just seeing that you posted this story.)
As a side note, I'm really going to try to write more articles addressing Slashdot matters on to Slashdot.
This is really cool! I know that for years you've stated that you didn't like meta-discussions, that you didn't like slashdot to talk about slashdot. And people have constantly disagreed with your stance. The really weird thing for me is that, for my part, I did think you were wrong to avoid meta-discussion for a long time, but finally came around to mostly agree with you. And by the time I agreed with you that a site should avoid meta-discussion, I was running my own webforum elsewhere, where I more or less took the same tactic. Now you're shifting back to what people want you to do, so I'm going to be watching closely.
Kudos for being bold and expressing this intent to encourage periodic meta-discussion.
We can talk about digg or moderation or whatever issues are of most interest next week.
Aw, can't I say just a little bit now? Because what I want to say is I hate it when I see people shilling for another site here. Whether it's kuro5hin, Bruce Perens's forum, digg, or whatever, there's always somebody screaming that slashdot's sky is falling, that it's terrible here, that you've repressed and oppressed me, and that I should go to some other site which is allegedly better (but which never seems to have the needed software features to work right). I have no account on any of those other sites. I'm not just a fanboy; slashdot is still the best. Those folks are just annoying me. Thanks for the chance to vent about them.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
That might be true, but all too often I read here in /. people complaining their story hasn't been accepted while RP's or someone's else has. That said, I think you're understating your problem. Your real problem is not stop people complaining from "famous" submitters. Your problem is improving the submission/approval system as a whole. This would do away with dupes, links to [self]advertising, shallow articles, and so on. Target the causes and not the effects (this was straight from a PHB manual).
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
It seems to me that the responses inside the story discussion only happen because there's no other place for the disatisfied to direct their concerns.
Slashdot really needs to have a place where the admins can have an ongoing conversation with the users. This is basic Cluetrain stuff, it's somewhat appalling that Slashdot hasn't "gotten" it.
Hell, even if you guys don't even read it, it would at least provide a place for complaints to go instead of swamping story discussions.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
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
To summarize his response, he (and hopefully the other editors) does try to track down the original story, but will leave the meta-link in place if he feels it adds to the story in a significant way.
You may have already seen this, but I figure linking to it directly will cut down on the "OMG he's not actually reading the discussion" posts.
that that is is that that is not is not
>If 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.
Specifically, the comment that I posted here.
I just wanted everyone to read the email that I just sent rob:
----begin email----
And that's what I believe - I'm thrilled that this story has been posted - It's exactly the response that I've wanted for a while now. It's not Jamie chiming in with "Nuh-uh!!!1", and it's not a bitchslap of comments off-topic (which does fuel conspiracy theories). It's fantastic.
If rob allows, or if the contents aren't private, I'll post any reply email I get from him; but, I will respect his privacy in communication if he does write me back and asks me to do so.
~Will
sig?
We can disagree on what makes a good Slashdot article- some people hate gramatical errors or spelling problems. Those don't bug me. For me, improper hyper linking bugs the snot out of me. I choose to edit what I think matters the most. You are welcome to disagreee. But I think Slashdot ought to remain an informal place. And just like how people in the pub might not use gramatically perfect language, people on-line don't spell correctly. I choose to leave things more "Real". It's a stylistic choice.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
/.'s job is to pick stories that provoke discussion
/. postings, you go for it.
it's raw material is : submissions & comments
if you can find a away to moneterize your
nofollow in comments is fair enough way to reduce spam
I'm sure once your submission queue is a more hassle you'll add nofollow to them too
good luck
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This is story moderation, something people have been clamoring for for years. I think it's a good idea since there are always a ton of things that people spend far too much time complaining about. I don't mind dupes since I often miss stories the first time around. Other people who hover over "F5" all day wouldn't want them.
/. after 7-8 years.
I for one would just love to see front page article descriptions that are all at least in the same area code as good grammar and spelling. But there's nothing going on (including digg.com) that is making me not want to continue using
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
ok maybe i'm just taking the bait, but I thought that this is exactly what I'm trying to do today. Admittedly I used practical examples to illustrate problems, but I don't think that was my point.
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I absolutely agree- and this illustrates a problem with our meta moderation system, and something that the redesigned system needs to address. The fact is that some comments make it to Score:5 and really are very offtopic. The system needs to account for that somehow. We have some ideas, but we'll talk about that some other week.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Altruism sounds nice, but is difficult to sustain. We spend those few hours daily (monthly?) away from our computer screens in honest-to-goodness real-life communities.
Do you work entirely for the public good? Or if in the off chance you do collect a salary to pay for little things like rent or a mortgage, do you give all of the remainder back? Few do, but our communities are successfull nevertheless.
A good community is able to provide balanced rewards for productive involvement--and that's what this discussion is about.
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.
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Isn't it a felony to do that?
rewriting history since 2109
Isn't this an almost exact dupe of this story?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I got a story accepted and I only got one naked picture. And I think it was CowboyNeal.
I work for a non-profit organization that benefits the city I live in in a pretty generous way. So I feel like I have a pretty good position to think like this. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's what I wanted to do because I believe in helping people who need help just because it's the right thing to do. I could have looked for more money (salary wise) in the private sector, but I'm not interested in that. Yes, I need to pay the bills, but I want to do so with a clean conscience and want to contribute as little as possible to what I perceive to be a problem: profit motive/commerce.
I also realize that even in the non-profit sector we still have to send our money to businesses that exist soley for profit. In many cases, that's OK because those businesses are reasonable. Especially the local ones. But I don't believe in supporting companies like WalMart where they only care about the stock holders. So that's a bit of a pulse on where I'm "coming from".
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I try to reply to my email. But there are only so many hours in the day.
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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.
Again, we're not really trying to discuss issues with the moderation system in this discussion. We have big plans for the system. We can talk about them some other day.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Taco, your suggestion that we mod offtopic comments down is troubling, in that it runs contrary to what I believe about the way Slashdot works, or should work:
Everything starts at the same level, subject to optional bonuses we can choose, but probably most of of us actually read at 2 or higher these days -- except when modding. I would think the best use of the limited modpoints we have is to mod the ontopic, useful comments up to the point where we all see them, rather than push the lame stuff further into oblivion. There's plenty of time to correct poor judgement calls in voting, once we get to the point of metamoderation. But that's sometimes days or even weeks away, when the discussion in question is cold, and no longer benefits from improperly downvoted posts recovering their standing. I'd rather see a few comments not of interest to me, than few comments of interest to me, which is what happens when we subtract from, rather than add to, the pool of visible comments.
As part of adding, sometimes we'll see points come up that are only mildly related, but worthy of note. But tangents are a major point of the spark of discussion created by the topic even being set before us, aren't they? Tangents are where we leave the space we all know and expect, and start to learn things, perhaps unexpectedly. Mindful of this, people are certainly less afraid to bring tangential information to the table if they think they might be rewarded for it, rather than punished.
I think we have a broader, more comprehensive discussion when interesting points are pulled up, rather than when the crap is pushed further down. As an editor, you have unlimited points to get rid of the worst offenses anyway. Let us concentrate on digging for the gems, please.
Now the motivation for getting a Slashdot story accepted ... is a return link to the website of your choosing. Your creds. Your 'Reward' for sharing a cool URL with a half a million Slashdot readers.
Here's my take: the 'creds' noted above are probably the motivation for the 'problem' user. One of the comments above mentions that BeatlesBeatles has submitted on average 4.5 stories a day since September. Apparently the return link is important to him/her, sure.
But for your average Slashdot reader who occassionally submits stories, I doubt that link is the real motivation at all. I've had stories accepted over the years, and typically my motivation is wanting to see what other people like me (i.e Slashdot readers) think about it. In other words, my motivation for story submission is the potential for generating an interesting discussion.
So part of my solution would be, yes, get rid of the credentials link. This has its own set of problems, but it would solve the initial one we're discussing. You might then lose some of the volume of links submitted, and get stuck with a bunch of 'virgin' story submitters who just don't know how to submit a good story.
If you're really ambitious, one possible solution to solve the 'virgin submitter' problem might be to provide better submission feedback. "This link is good, but please run a friggin' spellchecker." Or "We're not posting a link directly to your blog; please try again." Possibly putting a submission into a 'Draft' state, then waiting for the user to improve it.
Yeah, this would be potentially a lot more work for the editors, but hey TANSTAAFL. The best way to solve this problem is, in my opinion, to do all that you can to help the casual Slashdot reader to submit a good story.
--Mid
I mean it, everything. Every single link on the site. We don't owe google anything, we don't need to help them to get their results, and they lead to spammers messing up our site. So, not to put too fine a point on it, fuck them.
I am trolling
Think of your self as a magazine with contributing authors. Suppose I had an author that no one liked. That everyone complained about every time I post his story. The general opinion of my magazine will decline. I'm in the magazine industry to make money, not to be fair to the contributors. If the contributors is doing things to make people not like them for whatever reason, then I'm not going to lessen myself by allowing them to contribute.
I don't like the idea of removing credit. They did the work, if no one else posts the story, you can't strip the credit from their work. You have expressed this already, so I don't expect you'd ever do this.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
This is an exellent point. Why is a submission by some random geek better than a submission by someone who is involved? I'm not saying blatant ads on the front page, but if someone releases a product and wants geek exposure, they should be allowed to submit.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I never suspected that ScuttleMonkey or anyone else were submitting their own stories (with fake UIDs) or accepting bribes. I was just concerned about the perceived lack of professionalism. When you have three straight stories posted by Beatles-Beatles (December 11th), it is disconcerting. Also, when each story begins with the formulaic "* * Beatles-Beatles tells us . . .", I get confused. When you combine that with the fact that **BB's linked site is, uh, shday, I was discouraged about Slashdot.
I have to admit that for a time I was an instigator of the anger over Beatles Beatles. I am mostly over my paranoia now, but I still have some concerns. Now I need to get back to obsessively following MacWorld.
Hi Taco. Thanks for the commentary from behind the curtain.
/. ID. Whee!) And I've done the same thing most of my friends have as /. has gotten bigger, and as real life and professional concerns creep into our lives. We hit the /. front page, hit all the relevant links that interest us (tabbed browsing works wonders) and read the stories, but ignore the commentary. Occasionally we'll delve into the commentary to see what's being said.
/. users don't post much. Partially because we don't want to deal with the unruly mobs in the discussion area, but also because we don't have the time to delve into a deep conversation.
/. hordes, which is the point of the whole endeavor.
I think it's more important for the story to make it to the site, regardless of the submitter. I've been reading the site for a long time (note my 4 digit
I think this might be an opportunity to see how many people hit the site vs. how many actually comment. I've noticed as time has gone on, a lot of older
If someone is making it to the front page because they're submitting good stories, then more power to them. I have noticed that sometimes it seems there's favoritism, since I've submitted stories, with links, and they'll be rejected, but a few hours later, or a day, someone else will submit the exact same story with the same links, and it'll get accepted. That's annoying. And that's probably a bigger issue to deal with on the operations end. One the other hand, the story still got out there, and into the minds of the
So, I say, don't throttle people's submissions. let them submit away. Post the stories if they're good/unique, etc. If you've got someone who's posting a lot, it might be worth waiting a little while and seeing if another user posts the same story, so that you can bring an end to some of the "Tragedy of the Commons" we're experiencing. If the story still hasn't been posted after a reasonable amount of time, put it on the page. It's more improtant to have the info than it is to censor.
And that's my Karma Bonused 2 cents. Thanks.
Reeses
At least part of the problem, as I see it, is that the lack of editing on the part of the editors leads to the impression that these "problem" submitters just get their stories posted with little question and that other submissions are getting ignored. I'm not going to name any specific editors but there is a serious problem here. There are spelling and grammar errors in the article summaries that wouldn't pass 5th grade English and these occur with amazing consistency. On top of the lack of basic English, there is the problem that duplicates have become quite commonplace on the site. An editor is supposed to actually do something, not just copy/paste an article from a favored submitter and then add an additional poorly structured statement or question to enhance the posting controversey. These editing problems create the feeling that the actual article review and posting process is performed in a shoddy manner. This leaves a wide open opportunity for people to question the motives behind the posted stories.
Personally, I couldn't care less if Roland or whoever gets an article posted every day, as long as the quality of the site and stories remains high. You've had a great thing going here for several years now, I hope you continue the good work and improve the site where appropriate.
Anyways, that's just my opionion.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Let me propose what I think is an easy solution to this problem.
Instead of allowing the user that submitted the story a link to any URL, only allow them to link to their Slashdot profile.
The user could still put links to an external website in their Journal. They would also still gain some fame and notoriety if their articles are frequently submitted.
I think with the external links being 2 clicks away, and not linked directly from the front page would curb some of the people abusing the system, as well as people complaining about it.
Quoth the Penguin, "pipe grep more!"
How about providing each /. user with the means to remove submitter information from the head of any subsequent stories from a given submitter. Replace it with Anonymous Coward, or Cowboy Neals Pet Goat, or something ... It might help prevent negative comments about such a submitter reaching the critical mass required to "swamp out the real discussion."
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.
Once the threshold is hit, the article's links get stripped of references.
Done and done.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
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
But this is part of my struggle too-- I hate meta discussion. I hate naval gazing. I don't want to read about Slashdot on Slashdot. I want to read tech news. Geeky gadgets. Things that I think are important. I don't want to read a front page story on the NY Times about them changing their paper stock. I don't want to watch a segment on CNN about the CNN Make Up lady. I just want my news!
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
"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.
From my point of view, it makes no sense to toss out the stories based on who submits them. I never pay any attention to who submits them, and I almost never read the discussions around the stories. I simply use this site as a portal to news that might interest me. If you start tossing out stories because of who submitted them or what sort of discussion they might provoke, you reduce the value this site has to me. I care about keeping up with interesting news, nothing more, nothing less.
CmdrTaco said: 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.
When he gets a good submission from a bad source, he has the choice of
My answer to him is to keep doing it the way they are. It is fair, and eventually the OT discussion will be relegated to the bottom of the barrel, when the moderators get bored with it. The moderation system works.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
Umm... Me too? To be honest, I have never clicked on a Referral link in my life. Didn't care enough to realize they were there. And Viola! so-called problem submitters never caused me the slightest grief.
There's a parable in there somewhere...
"I am become Gerund, Destroyer of Verbs"
Thats actually a valid point that I never really thought about. I guess the only thing I can say is that we have these book reviews. People mail us books. We mail books to readers so they can review them. They are on-topic and appropriate books for Slashdot. We have to link the book somewhere, why not include a B&N link while we're at it? Honestly if we yanked the link it wouldn't really matter to us. It's not like we're making millions of dollars from it. But then we'd just be giving 1% more profit to B&N, so I guess we might as well have it on our end :)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
"And moderators, use those offtopic mods to steer the discussion towards the subject of the article, not the flavor of the month conspiracy theory about story selection."
I think you made a point that may help. Moderation is a privilege granted by Slashdot to responsible users. At least, that's the way I hope moderation is granted. In that regard, moderation is like a driver's license -- it's a privilege that can be revoked for bad behavior.
Slashdot lays down guidelines for moderators, with wide latitude given for personal judgment. In the end, though, Slashdot's administration is the final authority of whether moderators are taking their privilege seriously. If some moderators are doing a particularly bad job (such as modding up the-messenger-is-the-discussion flamebait), then perhaps those accounts shouldn't be given moderator points anymore. Moderator points are given in exchange for the implied promise of assisting Slashdot's administration in enforcing Slashdot's moderation guidelines. They are not given to promote an individual's agenda.
I presume that Slashdot has a mechanism in place to track how moderators applied their points (I haven't reviewed the published Slashcode), so the effort required to see who has been abusing their points for this particular agenda should be outweighed by the end result of improving the signal to noise ratio in those types of discussions.
I second this idea. Let me build on that- assuming a moderator can assign points to story submissions similarly to how you assign points to comments, the points range for stories could be fairly limited: -1 to +1 (stories start at 0.) As the parent poster suggests, it could take more than 1 mod point to mod a story ... or maybe only subscribers could mod stories, and it takes a full 5 points to do it.
I know this would require big changes in slashcode, but I'd actually buy a subscription to Slashdot if I knew I could browse stories at +1.
CmdrTaco, I totally understand that you guys have to wade through a lot of crap to get to the good stuff. That's part of what makes slashdot valuable: the fact that you guys do that.
BUT.
I think you guys are falling victim to the law of unintended consequences, when it comes to article submission. I've submitted a few high quality stories to slashdot - relevant, well-written, interesting and slightly off the beaten track. Not one has been accepted. How many more stories do you think I'm going to bother making the effort to write up and submit? Probably none.
If you want to boost the quality of your story submissions, you need to reward people for quality, not quantity. You need to give people a realitistic chance of having a story accepted. You've said yourself that people who flood the story queue are the ones who get rewarded. Right now, for the average joe who doesn't crap flood the story queue, the odds of getting a story accepted is vanishingly small. Therefore there is little or no incentive to take the time to bother submitting a well-crafted story.
Here's what I suggest: firstly, take away any PagrRank reward for submitting the story. It should be reward enough for a story submitter to know that they've contributed to their community. A simple no-follow attribute is all it takes to do this - or better yet, just make the submitter's link go to their slashdot user page. Secondly, as others have suggested, place a cap on the number of story submissions (not acceptance - we do want to reward quality) per day. Make it no more than 3 stories per day.
The end result of these measures would be a higher level of quality in story submissions from a widwer variety of people. This means less crap for you guys to wade through, better stories for the rest of is, and real sense of being able to contribute. It's a win for everyone.
Unlikely. We accepted about 12% of the story submissions we got in 2005. In fact your own account shows we've accepted 2 out of the 10 submissions you've sent in, so you're almost twice as successful (or "accurate" or "in touch with Slashdot" or whatever) as the average Slashdot submitter.
The Beatles-Beatles person everyone is so concerned about, by the way, has had only 4.2% accepted. So B-B is substantially less successful than average. It's just that he/she does not give up. The B-B-specific issues aside -- as long as they're genuine efforts, we do not at all mind having to sort through 23 submissions that we don't think are right for Slashdot, to get to the 24th that we think merits posting. So please, keep sending in submissions.
Don't take this the wrong way, but that seriously sounded like you took a metric fuckton of stupid pills before writing it. Nobody thinks bad spelling is "cool", "hip", "chic" or "more real". Nobody also expects perfection, but if running something through spellcheck would've fixed the problems then come on.
Perhaps you've not considered it in a different light: Not everyone who reads Slashdot speaks/reads fluent English. They're struggling at the best of times to glean meaning from the summary, and you're advocating putting more roadblocks up for them?
Sure, sure there's a "study" which claims the order of the letters in the middle doesn't hinder comprehending the word intended, but I've yet to see any actual study of whether this holds true for people in a language that isn't their first/second/third/etc.
Your job as editor is to make the stories/summaries as accessible as possible for your readership. This is why you fix bad linking, remove cruft from submissions, etc. This is the same reason that a quick once over of the spelling and grammer (preferably automated since we're all human) would be a plus. Hell, why not link the preview button to aspell so the submitter can fix it themselves? I bet most of them would, and the ones who don't you can flag in your view of the queue as lazy bastards and know you need to give them a polish anyhow.
- Financial Gain: When the submitter posts a review of the book, and the link to the book is one where they make money selling it. Slashdot is a news site, not your personal bookstore.
- Incorrect Information: Often the summary INCORRECTLY summarizes the article, fabricating facts that only leads up to even more people saying "RTFA". What is the point of the summary if not to summarize the article?
- No Information: When somebody just posts a link to their personal webpage where they wrote about something happening. I don't want to read your blog, I want the ARTICLE!
- Grammar and Spelling: How hard is it to spell-check the summary? Some of the articles I've seen are just embarassing.
</rant>There should be a general place for any sort of moderated discussion about slashdot itself to happen on a daily basis and in its own space. It could be in a dedicated section linked from the side-menu on the frontpage, containing a special daily "article" called something like "Topical Slashdot Issues/Feedback" (whose content would be regularly deleted, perhaps at the end of every day) where users can discuss current issues and problems relating specifically to slashdot, thus removing the tendency for such discussions to creep into frontpage articles where they are off-topic. Providing a regular place would be useful whether or not you or any other slashdot editor spends time taking part in it because it encourages users to discuss their concerns about slashdot there, rather than as off-topic discussion in the main frontpage articles. This sort of idea has been suggested before:
Scroogle
That's valid. It's good that you are considering these things, even if nothing changes as a result.
The end result is probably a compromise between what you feel is slashdot, and what works when used by thousands, and it ought to trend more towards what you intend than what we ask for. After all, we did start visiting it exactly as it was, and continue visiting with it exactly as it is. Actions are vastly louder than words.
(For what it's worth, i like the green colour. It's the prettiest of all of the news aggregation sites that i'm addicted to.)
For me, the defining-element cluster is skewed more towards the journal circle, and the community, than the front page.
Don't get me wrong, i still read the front page- but it's the people who have kept me here. For all of the trolls and the jerks, there are a lot of people who post genuinely useful stuff. I don't come here to hear it first, i come here to hear it in depth. I come here when i've already read most of the news i'll read for the day. Sometimes that community conversation doesn't work as well, but sometimes it offers a lot more background and related information than a news site could. It depends on the day. When it does, it's worth the days that it doesn't.
THAT is a defining element of slashdot for me.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
Slashdot fails it (though is interesting for links). K5 has political discussion, original articles and childish flaming. Everything you could want.
Have A Nice Day!