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.
... but it seems to me that people complain far more often about advertisements thinly disguised as stories than they do about lots of submissions coming from the same user(s).
But if the link is good, why NOT share it with the audience? I believe my first priority is to the readers here. If they would enjoy a link, why should the fact that it came from a user with a negative repution make me not choose the link?
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
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.
That's a horrible precedent, though. If you become a popular submitter it is because you submit relevant stories. You end up in a cycle where a submitter becomes popular, someone complains, and you blackball him because of it.
Why should you punish your best submitters, even if they are doing it for their own benefit (URL on a popular site)?
I do think that using Slashdot as a forum to talking about slashdot is a great way to generate discussion and help people understand what's happening.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
be more transparent. There are alot of things you could to help your cause. Showing rejected story list may be nice. I trully doubt only one user posted that story. If it's true that he was the only one to catch it then if people knew it they might be more ok with it.
That's one way to be more transparent, you may have to be creative to think of others.
One more thing.
Denying that what happened was suspicious is calling your community stupid.
Also try having the editors perticipate in a conversation about them and directly answer some of the comments(not sure if this hasn't happened, but it didn't when I was looking at it.).
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Since I'm not willing to grind out quantity, I just stop submitting.
Make the link point to the user's slashdot profile page.
So a better solution might be to cap the number of submissions, not "accepted" submissions.
If you only have a change to submit three stories a day, you know damn well that you're going to submit only the best. And if someone can come up with three great, published submissions a day, then let them whore their blog all they want: then they truly deserive it.
I thought the hue and cry after Roland Piquepaille was unnecessary. So he was trying to drive traffic to his blog and maybe become known as some kind of net pundit. That, it seemed to me, was fair enough. Isn't that essentially what we're all doing, sounding off here on the topic of the day?
But this Beatles guy isn't doing that. He's using his links back from /. to drive up the PageRank of his link farm, with the apparent overall aim of trying to push spam sites up Google, for money. This, as far as I and, it seems, a large number of /.'ers are concerned, is not fair play. It simply isn't cricket, and we don't like to see our community effectively supporting spam.
That's what gets me upset about **Beatles-Beatles, that didn't worry me about Roland. This kind of link farming and search engine spamming spoils the net for all of us, and a major geek centre like this one should be firmly against that.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The thing here is, Beatles Beatles, or whoever it'll be next, aren't "known troublemakers." The conspiracy theorists in the forums are the ones making trouble. Why should someone be punished for being a troublemaker when they are doing the thing that keeps the site alive?
What you're saying is, essentially, that a prolific submitter should have a halflife. Planned obsolescence. Once a submitter's name becomes "known," the editors should no longer accept their submissions, regardless of their quality?
That's not an appropriate or acceptable solution. Submissions are the lifeblood of sites like this, and to institute such a policy would discourage members of the community from submitting stories.
Shinma
This is a very perfect example of an arms race situation. I can't ban them, they'll get a new account/ip etc. And it doesn't solve the problem. We deal with the same issues in the moderation system.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Why not make the "nofollow" a matter of karma? Those with por karma have a nofollow added to their link, just as their comments are started at score 0 or -1.
You could even get tricky and make a separate karma just for story submission, with some sort of moderation system. This moderation could be done by the editors themselves, or it could be opened up to the readership. I've read dozens of comments over the years where the submitter wished they could moderate the story. Perhaps it's time to add that functionality to slashcode.
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.
Taco, why not implement the ability for users to configure whether they see stories submitted by 'foes' on the front page (and perhaps move stories submitted by 'friends' TO the front page)?
Clearly, some people will say, "Yeah get rid of user X stories" and other will say "No, I want to read them". The answer is configuration, and you already have the infrastructure in the foes/friends system.
I've juried story submissions, in a rather different context, and I can tell you what any editor, of any type, can tell you: 90+% of submissions are crap. (Yet another example of Sturgeon's Law in action.) They're either subliterate and unreadable, wacko rantings, or just plain boring, often some combination of all three. Crap. The number of people who make submissions that are even worth considering for the first cut is very, very small, and it's not surprising that people who make a lot of successful submissions are (almost tautologically) those who have figured out how to write submissions worth reading.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
We deal with the same issues in the moderation system.
;)
Hey now, let's keep this on topic. You can talk about moderation next week.
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?
Seriously though, this is bollocks. Even the GPL, the most community-driven statement ever drafted, is fine with people benefiting personally from GPLed code.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
>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.
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.
Perhaps you should give out "submit points", sorta like mod points. Thus a user would have to make some contribution to the community (meta moderating, etc.) before they could submit stories. This has the combined benefit of putting a limit on the number of stories a particular user could post in a given period of time, and it also means they can't just turn around and make a new user and submit immediately (they'd need to build up the "submit points"). If the system for giving out points is done just right, it would probably also cut down on the total volume of submissions that the editors need to wade through.
Basically it rewards users who are active in the community with the privilege of submitting stories, and not users who are just trying to get their page full of ads in front of as many eyeballs as possible. It's not a perfect system... just figured I'd throw the idea out there in the hopes that it could be refined.
It's not what Beatles Beatles is linking to that makes him a 'troublemaker.' It's the problem of Beatles Beatles using Slashdot to spam Google PageRank.
By linking to his sites, we are allowing him to participate in the ruining of a perfectly good tool. So when people Google for 'Beatles,' they're going to get his site, and all because he's abusing the Slashdot submission system.
But maybe you're right. He is submitting good stories and that's good. Maybe the Google PageRank problem is Google's problem to solve and not Slashdot's.
The problem is that some of us old-time hackers think it is our job to make the Internet work. The fact is that it's not anymore, and it's up to the companies like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft that have stepped at and taken control to make it work. It's not ours anymore, and we shouldn't worry about it.
My blog
>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.
Because people whose name I'm used to seeing on positively-moderated comments have claimed that their story with the same submission (and often, superior comment text) was submitted earlier
Yet they have absolutely no clue when stories were submitted either. This touches on your incompetent editors comment - stories can take days to go from submission to actually appearing: During that intervening period they might reject a lot of duplicate submissions of one that's already in the queue for posting, and then all of those people are pissed when 18 hours later a story that seems to be "later" was accepted, but actually it was first in.
"Maybe we could moderate entire articles."
/. readers now.
Kuro5hin had this. Rusty set it up, and we got some content going. It worked out very well. We got some great, well written, well thought out stories. We also got some great links.
Then something happened. It became about politics. Because and others like me did not have the personal time to mod down every stupid story that came in (from our point of view), the site gradually became more about obscure US politics than about technology or interesting things that were happening.
I hear there's a new "anti-slashdot" called Digg, and I'm sure that unless they take steps, the same thing will happen. Slashdot has a group of people who are paid to keep a particular "topic" of story flowing, and they have mechanisms to enforce it. This keeps the site, as a whole, focused on a topic to the point where the discussions become valuable and fun. The foot traffic is the other advantage.
Much like on K5, lots of people like to jaw and whine about this and that, but unlike K5, you don't have to worry about the story flavour changing over a few months. There's a state format, clear intent, and enforcement of it. Not that K5 is bad, but it's just not interesting to me and probably most
Story moderation is not a panacea.
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