Slashdot Mirror
Trusting Users Too Much
An anonymous reader writes to alert us to an article at Forever Geek
on sites that trust users too much and the users who game them. From the article: "Trusting users is a good thing. But implicitly trusting users is no good. If Digg has moderators who approve a story before it goes live on the front page, shouldn't they have moderators checking spam reports? Social sites give so much power and emphasis on users yet a handful still have the power to wreck these sites. Until these issues are properly addressed, social sites will continue to be gamed."
It seems like it's questioning it's existence.
Digg exists so that people can easily tell each other what they want to hear. Sometimes it's cool, sometimes it's bogus. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I remember once Quark had a teacher at Lobeling's (or somewhere) who trusted him to look after a room in his absence (or something). Only this teacher had pictures in his draw. Pictures of said teacher, romping with fully-clothed females! Needless to say, Quark did what any responsible young Ferengi would do in those circumstances: blackmailed his teacher into an A grade.
Maybe they could add a reputation system!
Don't even get me started on Digg.... *grumble grumble grumble* I've got a love/hate relationship with that place. Sometimes it's great...other times you get 4 or 5 of the same stories on the main page at a time or people posting politics related stories under the videos section...things like that.
"A person is smart, people are dumb." "People" are not ready to do their own editing on social sites....IMHO.
Seriously, this is a common and old problem, not just among users, but among all positions public or private. Ultimately you need a self policing policy to evaluate users, fair judgement on violations and termination where deemed necessary.
There's got to be, published somewhere, some guidlines and how scalable they are.
I was in a position to make or break the hiring of a student I knew was writing password spoof programs. I knew he had done it. I also knew he hadn't done any harm in it. I think him knowing I knew was enough and it more or less proved right in the long run, opting to hire him as a student worker anyway. Most of us started out the same way. It takes a bit more psychology to spot those who lie about innocuous activities and could present a greater problem down the road.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
like the slashdot user who just basically approved the same story as the last one?
...why isn't this in the "Games" section?
Don't forget about the Ubuntu news!
Here is a simple explanation with pictures of the observed phenomenon.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
The internet as we know it is still a baby. As new ideas happen and are implemented, the processes will be refined in some way. Here's a page that explains how such a system can evolve. First a small set of mods, then more, then BAD MODS NO, and metamoderation happened. Bad users on /. are unable to post, etc...
But you have to go to linux/unix section for the ubuntu news. The apple stuff is on the front page:
eDonkey Gets Shut Down
When is The Best Time to Buy Everything
iTunes to sell games for iPods
Curt Schilling (Red Sox ace) Starts New Game Company
Java: Remote Method Invocation (RMI) an applet example
iTunes Movies confirmed!
Steve Jobs - "Bill, thank you. The world's a better place."
Apple Anounces iTV
The Apple Product Cycle
TOR: German police are *not* cracking down on Tor.
iPod price drop confirmed this morning
What News Corp. doesn't want you to know about MySpace (extended cut)
Apple beefs up iPod gaming capabilities - including iTunes Store retail
"Software jedi" to write an new application every day for a month
New iPod Nano Pictures
One just got bumped so now there's 8, and page 2 still looks just as bad.
It's whining. People aren't happy with just contributing to the conversation, because there is no conversation. It's all about oneupmanship (or however it's spelled). It's about a better, more sarcastic comment then the one before. It's about popularity among people we don't even know. It's about bragging rights to who, I don't even know. I don't go bragging about comments I make here, at digg, or any other place I visit.
Social networking is about networking and being social, getting to know people and networking with them. It's right in the name.
Help forums and mailing lists are more social networking than these web 2.0 sites.
I ignore the home page and just check out the day's most popular page once or twice a day:
http://digg.com/view/technology/popular/today
It's not the front page of the NY Times and it's no doubt influenced by the much lamented front-page gaming, but I still usually find one or two interesting things that I hadn't heard about yet.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
One of the original sites to promote user created and sponsored content, succumbed to insipid infighting and trolling once a few decided to game the queue voting system. Suddenly who got voted to the front page had more to do with who was friends with whom, and nothing to do with the content and writing of the article in question. And so K5 began its slow slide to oblivion, the endgame of which we see today. Certainly much blame deserves to be placed at the feet of rusty and his admins. But only in so far as they refused to police the site, not out of a direct attempt to control the voting process.
Perhaps this is a lesson to those of us who had hoped the egalitarian internet we remember from the late '80s and early '90s might somehow scale to the general public. It didn't.
IOW: people suck.
-anonymous for a reason...
Pessimal: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? your grace."
Vimes: "I know that one. Who watches the watchmen? Me, Mr. Pessimal."
Pessimal: "Ah, but who watches you, your grace?"
Vimes: "I do that, too. All the time."
From Thud!
Sure, we see a great straw man drawn for us, but I don't see evidence that this is occuring. Does the author maintain there is a conspiracy against users like P9? What evidence is there for a conspiracy? Where are the conspirators meeting? There should be evidence of people meeting in other forums to conspire to bury P9? Is it possible that P9s stories he dugg up suck? I think all these things need to be considered, but I don't see any critical thinking done.
On a similar note, even though the author can dream up a scheme that might possibly bury Digg, is there evidence that an entity has gamed digg as he has explained? Maybe it seems possible that someone could grab 100 C class addresses to create 100 users and they could moderate someone into purgatory, is that all it takes? Has someone ran this experiment to verify that this is true? I don't know why someone could not run this experiment to see if what the author asserts could be true. This article seems more hyperbole and anecdotal in its evidence of gaming the system. For one, if it was possible to game digg, then why not setup a company to do so and make a little money? I imagine there are marketting companies that game all the systems. Just the fact that some people will take this article as true when it doesn't back up its assertions with evidence is an example of gaming. After all, the article is a diss against digg and I am sure some readers use it to back up their own notions that digg sucks. That sounds like gaming to me.
If your readers don't think critically about the content they consume, then you can take your pick of fallacies like generalization and straw man to write up an article that people will take as true. Isn't that gaming the system or the reader? I am not sure if Kevin Mitnick was known for his great technical hacking, but he was definitely known for his great social hacking of people that would willingly give up their passwords.
But your sub-titles recently, like "Web-Two-Point-Doh," have been really, really clever. Not that you need an idiot like me to tell you that, but I figure I give you eds enough (deserved) grief day-to-day it's only proper that I hand out a compliment on the (rare) occasion it is merited. And since the tags are among the few places here where you guys actually have the opportunity to inject some personality, I am gratified to see that at least one of you has one.
Good on ya, bud.
Trust no one. Keep your laser handy. The Computer is your friend. Happiness is mandatory.
"Out of the Crooked Timber of Humanity, no straight thing can ever be made" -- Immanuel Kant
Did anyone notice that this story emphasized the greatness of the /. editorial model vs. the "digg.com" model, and was curiously posted by "Anonymous reader"?
It may in fact just be the Ritalin talking, but I think our beloved /. Editors are getting their pokes in here and there...
No big deal, just an paranoid/schizo observation
I'm not fat, just big boned...
Snotman wants evidence of social gaming. Evidence of past behavior abounds. First, let's reiterate the potential problem. From the Fine article:
Register them on Digg. Have them randomly digg 5 stories a day. Then scrape the top 100 users on Digg, and add them randomly across the 100 fake users. Simmer for a week or 3, and then *bam* - start reporting any story dugg by the top 100 users as inaccurate.
The ease of creating a botnet of Windoze machines eliminates all evidence. Instances of actually catching a company hired troll like Barkto are rare. Even obvious astroturf, like the M$ PR created Apple Switcher are hard to detect. If that's not proof enough for you that some dishonest companies are abusing the net for there advantage, I'm not sure what is. Oh yeah, you can look up the court proven public disinformation campaign against DRDOS by M$.
As for evidence of gaming sites like Slashdot, visit these these losers one day. Use a text browser and a condom or you might walk off with more than you want.
Yes, it's pathetic but people do that kind of thing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Digg burial abuse seems to be overhyped. There are a lot of really bad stories on Digg, especially on the politics section.
For example, there's currently a story saying that MSNBC changed the question on a poll. OK, maybe it happened; but what's the source? Some dude posted a few screen shots on his blog. Correct or not, that story is possibly inaccurate because it presents no verifiable supporting evidence.
or DOUBTING IT'S GHOST???
Apple released a bunch of new products today, so it makes sense their are a lot of posts about it. Ubuntu didn't do anything of note today, so it makes sense it is not filling up the front page.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Does it really matter what set of rules you come up with? I can't think of any system that can't be abused, if you're willing to spend the time to do it. Even /. moderation - there's nothing keeping me and a few friends from creating multiple accounts, and modding each other up. Easy? No, but quite doable.
/. is, and Digg is quickly losing, helps. The biggest drawback is the echo chamber effect, where the remaining (surviving?) members all tend to have the same opinion.
Even though I pick on gamers in my subject line, it isn't restricted to them. Less savvy users employ similar methods. It usually starts with multiple email accounts. It even happens off-line: people take shortcuts to "fame" all the time.
But much like cheating at video games, those that cheat tend to get bored and move on fairly quickly. If a site (or any other community) can survive this - a normal growing pang - then they do fine in the long run.
Being specialized and stable in that specialization, like
It's like fark with user-moderators.
K5 but much less advanced.
Slashdot w/o the discussion.
Shit, we're talking about a site that only offers one more level of nesting over freakin' forums. Run and managed by a bunch of tech-TV rejects, and populated with all the "31337" technical people who couldn't stand being modded to oblivion on slashdot.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
I noticed that a lot of posts have been flagged as "Troll" today that most certainly are not. I'm wondering if a group of mods are trying to make some sort of statement.
However, with that being the case, I think I'm going to post this one as Anonymous.
it's +5, Insightful
I can. You create a web of reputation.
Every relationship between two individuals has a reputation or weight. As people interact the weights between them get stronger or weaker. Give preference to stories which are recommended by people with a strong reputation with you, get rid of stories recommended by people with a weak reputation. As they decide to like/dislike stories the weights change. As someone attempts to manipulate the system they will simply reduce the weights they have with other individuals and reduce their own influence.
Not easy to do mind you, it's an n^2 problem. Hmm, n^2 problems can often be simplified by cutting them in half, what's needed is a reputation server.
Deleted
The digg meta-shite articles are overflowing onto slashdot today! Crikey!
It's my opinion that the way to get people to behave responsibly is to trust them MORE.
This article is calling out how terrible it is because of a couple problems with trusting poeple. But sociology's a complicated thing. If these are really the biggest problems that Digg is having due to their trust model, I'd say they're doing pretty good. It certainly pales in comparison to the problems you get with people who are trying by social or technical means to break out of the little prison you put them in.
The Watchman: What are you?
Following Dark: The Following Dark!
The Watchman: You will not make him kill for you.
Following Dark: What are you!
The Watchman: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who watches him? Me I do. I am the Watchman, he created me.
Following Dark: What kind of mind creates its own Watchman?
The Watchman: One that is afraid of the dark.
Following Dark (With satisfaction): And so he should be!
The Watchman: Yes, but I don't think you understand, I'm not here to keep the dark out, Im here to keep it in. Call me the... Guarding Dark. Think how powerfull I must be. Now... *Removes grill on the lamp, letting the light shine and begin to burn the Following Dark* Get put of town.
Thats off top of my head so won't be anything like an exact quote, but it something like that.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
On large popular sites like digg, it would require an inordinate amount of bots to achieve this, and it wouldn't be hard to detect and block bot sign-ups and orchestrated abuses. Someone with malicious intentions would have to possess fake accounts which compose of 5-10% of the user base to really manipulate the social application against the spirit of the community, otherwise their influence would be statistically insignificant. On a site with 1 million+ users that isn't really practical and so far there's been no evidence of such an orchestrated attack being successfully pulled off. Ofcourse, there will always be people who won't like how the community generally votes/moderates and disagrees with the general attitude of the community, and these people will ofcourse try to blame it on social applications being fundamentally flawed or on some malicious conspiracy by a group of users. But the most obvious/likely scenario is just that the way things are is what the community happens to like things, and that complaints are just coming from personal frustration towards the democratic will of the community.
Untrue - just look at how P9 was modded to oblivion. There is your evidence right there (everything he submitted was reported as spam)
It may take 50+ diggs to get frontpage, but it takes *a lot less* to get removed from the queue.
Each amount of freedom and expectations is unique to each site's developed or developing following and culture. Rules, guidelines, or the lack thereof are set forth in the beginning and they're enforced mainly by the site creators. Eventually a culture that shares the original philosophy begins to amass and develop and the community begins to regulate itself based on the now evolving culture.
Slashdot's a great example of a more hardline approach with active moderators. Fark is a more lenient approach with article responses and conversation moderated only by word-filters and image moderators. The majority of crap entries are torn apart by the community.
Social sites, however, lack the general community that fosters the sense of personal responsibility for a site and its functions. To most users, MySpace and Facebook are services, whereas Slashdot is often reffered to, in the real world, as a very descriptive characteristc of a social belonging.
When sites develop enough of a community to have their users develop that sense of belonging, then you will see the need to closely govern the users deteriorate.
A reputation system is open to the same class of karma whoring attacks as slasdot, but with less limitation. Pander to the site groupthink for a few weeks to get your relation weight with a few influential members up to near the maximum, and you can post lies, damn lies, and goatse links at +5 until a sufficient number of users figure out what you're doing. Register a new account, lather, rinse, and repeat as necessary.
If you can game real-life interpersonal relations, you can game any mathematical abstraction of the same thing.
0 1 - just my two bits
When I drive down the street I trust that the people on the sidewalk will not suddenly leap in front of my car or I would have to drive everywhere at 5 mph.
With similar examples too numerous to mention we can confidently establish that trust has to be greater than zero for a viable existence.
The question of life then is, how much greater than zero? And when do we cut it off? etc.
Don't sometimes people 'game' things in the real world? Why would the web be any different, it is part of the real world.
Slashdot is a place where everyone who thinks within the same narrow space can converge and give one another resounding praise. All the while, moderating the minority (non Open Source fanatics) into oblivion.
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
I guess my point is that there didn't seem to be evidence of what he says is happening. We could create any infinite of stories that we assert are true without providing evidence. For instance, if you happen to listen to conservative radio, they maintain there is a liberal conspiracy in big media, but there is never any evidence of this so called conspiracy nor do they ever try to prove there is one that doesn't utilize a fallacy. Those sympathetic to that message embrace it wholeheartedly. I am not saying that what the author says is not true, just that he doesn't back it up. For instance, if it is so easy to setup these botnets and influence story rankings on digg, then why doesn't someone, like the author of the article, setup an experiment that creates a botnet to game digg? Then he could post his results and try to correlate what the experiment did to what was occuring on digg and draw a conclusion.
One other point I did not bring up, is that for the author to criticize web 2.0, he only brings up one example. This is far from creating a convincing article that this behavior occurs all over the place. This is called painting with a broad paintbrush.
I think the links to articles you provide are spot on as to gaming the system(not sure about anti-slash.org). I am not sure if this is abuse though. It is up to the individual to think critically about what is and what is not. Every burger joint advertizes they have the world's greatest burger. Is that gaming the system because it should be obvious this cannot be true? It shouldn't be a wonder that magazines that take advertising dollars from companies cannot be critical for the products for those companies. That is why consumer reports is a better magazine if you are looking for a more critical look at consumer products; they don't take advertising dollars to produce their magazine.
That got me thinking - if there are people who find trolling so important to them that they make a website out of it, then they've probably considered attacking Digg. So I went to their site, and did a forum search for "Digg". Lo and behold, the first item on the results was this. I'll let the rest of you figure out what to make of it.
Indeed. I tried to post a comment a minute ago and Slashdot told me my IP had been banned, and I hadn't been downmodded in days. So I reconnected myself to the campus network in the hopes that the DHCP server would give me a new address. Fortunately it did (different subnet too).
twitter, you can try and sell your conspiracy theories all you want, but there is a good reason why things like these and these and these follow you around. And they only follow YOU around.
the one that says "Trust me - I am a USER"
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
No surprise there. If it's free and cool, the assholes will be on it.
The only thing that surprises me is that the Feds have not busted down the door on those people. Their whole site is devoted to harassing people, they admit to running botnets of the sort that annoy the hell out of big business, telco, hospitals and everyone that runs a Windoze PC. More importantly, they use language that's sure to get some clueless TIA attention. Once that's established, you would think it's only a matter of time before they notice claims of copyright infringement, anti-semitic comments, blatant race baiting, pushing obscene images and a host of other offenses that would draw ire and investigation of actual law breaking.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
try popurls.com, it really is very good, i'm not involved with the site at all but it has the stories from digg, slashdot, del.icio.us, google news, yahoo news, metafilter, reddit, furl, and more on one page. slashdot for the comments, popurls for the links and latest buzz, no need for digg at all.
Yup. I figure that any sufficiently advanced religion is indistinguishable from satire.
http://outcampaign.org/
If Digg has moderators who approve a story before it goes live on the front page, shouldn't they have moderators checking spam reports?
You DO realize Slashdot has "editors" out there, right? And that it appears they're just too busy to check if the description is of any value (or possibly plagarized), if TFA has any merit, or if the story was posted before, right?
Frankly, I'd prefer a "trust the users" approach where I could vote a whole post "-1 troll" or "-1 offtopic" and get it removed from the bloody page. Relying on experts clearly doesn't seem to do us a heck of a lot of good around here.
AC for the obvious anti-slashdot rant. And, yes, to paraphrase Sideshow Bob, I realize the irony in appearing on television in order to denounce it, so don't bother pointing that out.
Caveat Lector: While I play on both Digg and Fark, I have a greater affinity for Fark/Total Fark. Its just where I went first. I've hoisted a tasty beverage with many of those loveable farkers.
If Digg added moderators and allow users to, oh i don't know vote, on links before they get posted then essentially you have what we have on Fark/Total Fark. Total Farkers get to view all links before they get posted to fark.com. We even get to vote on them now. Not to say that we users have the final say in what gets posted. There is that added overlay of Mods and Admins that add a bit of surprise or control depending on how you look at it. To be honest, this is fine by me. They keep it tidy. I just find it interesting that Digg may morph into Fark.
You mean hack.
Yes. It's a crime to troll forums. And they have big botnets, which they use to troll Slashdot instead of doing other things which would at least be mildly useful to them (for instance, getting credit card numbers and such), because clearly Slashdot is worthy of the effort necessary to build a botnet (and let's face it, even if they did want a botnet they'd probably want to use their own PCs to do it, they probably hate viruses and worms as much as everyone else does).
And you want them done for copyright infringement, oh, so it's OK to prosecute that when it's someone you don't like? How funny. Anti-semetic comments aren't illegal, neither is race-baiting, obscene images hopefully aren't illegal in the USA...
You just don't like them because they think you're an asshole, don't you? That's the crux of it, isn't it twitter?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
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From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoca cy
That seems like evidence that the system works. You game the system--it may work for a while, but eventually people catch on and--you effectively get banned from the site by the community. The site admins don't have to do anything, the community polices itself. What the masses judge as misconduct will naturally be detected and weeded out. This appears to be more effective than any kind of genius abuse detection script.
As for the burial processes being unbalanced, that simply requires modifications to the weight system. It's not a problem in the social design of the site. If there's a removed stories bin where people can vote to reinstate stories, then the problem is solved. Even without it, if it's really a good story, others will submit the story and it will keep being submitted by people until it actually shows up on the frontpage. That's the beauty of such a site. The collaborative filtering process directly reflects the community's interests.