Slashdot Mirror
Keeping Web Discussions Open, Yet Civilized?
gsnedders asks: "With the rise of 'Web 2.0' and user created content, often in the form of comments, how do you keep the discussion open, yet civilized? I've found Slashdot's moderation to be very good — the good stuff gets moderated up, and the bad stuff down. On Digg, correct and valid information often gets dugg down, and offensive comments up, showing that having an open moderation system doesn't always work. However, moderation like on Slashdot, requires a large numbers of users to have enough moderators without giving everyone moderator access, therefore making it impossible to use on smaller sites. How can you keep the discussion civilized, while keeping commenting open, and not requiring large numbers of users for the moderation to work?"
stfu n00b!
Note that on Slashdot, not everyone has moderation privileges. Moderators aren't selected entirely randomly, either. Only users somewhere near the median posting rate are selected. This filters out both new users and overly active users. It works surprisingly well.
Now if only we could use it on stories, too...
It seems to me the only way for most discussions is simply to have some sort of a online-friendship type thing emerge via message boards or comments. If people don't know each other, they're going to be more likely to be "uncivilized". Slashdot's system works from the large number of users. Most forums can't really do that unless you have losers with no life sitting and moderating forums all the time.
On another note, I wouldn't say Slashdot's moderating system is THAT good (though it is better than competitors!!), I have seen good information or objective criticisms modded down and not very funny stuff modded way up, but it usually works so oh well.
the Political Inquirer
You've obviously never posted anything representing a remotely conservative viewpoint.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Who cares? You snotty-nosed heap of parrot droppings! Your type makes me puke!
Moderation is the key. Take a look a three sites.
/. just because they express something that a Digger doesn't want to hear like on Digg.com. I personally don't like Digg that much... or at least the comments and they don't offer or contribute that much to the parent story. I think Digg is mostly a trendy thing.
Slashdot.
IMOH, I think Slashdot has a "pretty good" moderation system and meta-moderating is making it better. Most of the comments are are insightful or interesting is moderated as such. People come to Slashdot really for the comments because I think most of the readers are articulate and can provide something interesting/insightful to a story. It is really an intelligence thing. Generally, nerds are smart.
Digg.
I think Digg has a "fair" moderation system. One can see that it is fair to you if you think like most of the Digg users. Now, some can say that about Slashdot but stories are not deleted on
Fark.
I think that Fark has a "poor" moderation system. They let any yahoo express his or hers opinion. I think that the majority of Farkers are jobless alcoholics anyway... but that is besides the point... Most Fark comments are just random knee-jerk reactions. Moderators of Fark don't care... all they do is focus beer and naked people anyway... nothing insightful or interesting.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Group moderation like Slashdot -Pro, very hands off (once past a critical mass of users). -Con, promotes group think.
Wikipedia style moderation -Pro, very hands off (once past a larger critical mass of users). -Con, promotes group think.
Direct moderation (approval of everything) -Pro, very accurate. -Con, very time consuming.
Retroactive moderation (normal form style - post first delete spam later) -Pro, very accurate. -Con, very time consuming and crap still shows up until it's dealt with.
I have never seen a working system that was not based on one of these principles. Things that have failed:
Anything with no moderation at all. Look at usenet. These systems are only sucessful if combined with user filtering - one prospective area might be a system with very good user filtering, but then you shift the burden from the admin to the users and why should they bother when there are people willing to do the work for them?
To give you an idea here is a small graph of spam activity. It took 5 days for comment spammers to find an open site and start abusing it, and once they find something that has worked once they just dont stop. And that's even before you consider the malicious idiots who aren't exactly spammers but just twist and distort and abuse other posters - how do you deal with them exactly?
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
This would seem to make sense because other posts may need to be read in context with the previouse messages.
However, this same principle negates the effect that the later posts are often times more valuable that the first posts, because they incorporate thoughts from the earlier posts (usually more efficiently). That is to say, when a new topic is opened up, the earlier posts will make the most basic statements. The later posts will combine these into more complex, but relevant conclusions. But these later posts are the same ones that would not get modded up because the simple posts have "gotten in the way," and the readers never follow along long enough to get to them.
See also: SlashDot.Org
Conservative viewpoints are discouraged on the Internet because the Internet has no central governing authority, thereby giving it a liberal bias.
Plus, all forms of ideology are gradually becoming unfashionable due to open communication on the Internet. Conservatism is more recognizable as an ideology and that's why it's targetted first.
And, there's the whole Bush thing too.
Use a double-tiered forum for reading and writing.
The top tier (the privileged tier) permits only those who have earned the privilege to read/write to the top tier forum. Top tiered folks can read and write in the bottom tier forum as well.
The bottom tier (common tier) grants anyone read and write access. Bottom tiered folks can read the top tier and quote from it, but can only write to the second tier until they earn top tier privileges. Use your karma system to measure worth?
By making the bottom tier forum a commons with granted access, you get the value of all input; by making top tier forum write access an earned privilege, posters are encouraged to post quality. By using your karma system, you let the readers determine who earns the privilege.
Provide all readers means to select either one or both tiers when reading posts.
Just an idea.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Could you develop a system that filters messages like spam? If a post contains keywords that add up to be more that the limit for the site (or user logged in) the post would automatically get modded down.
Early comments get most of the mod points.
Late comments, even very good ones, get almost no mod points.
Fixing this would help encourage civilized dialog by keeping some of the good quality commenters interested.
It's fine to reward early posters. But the magnitude of the effect is way out of proportion to what it needs to be, and it means that many excellent comments go unmoderated, just because they came an hour after the story instead of ten minutes.
What? Me, bitter? Heh.
I know you mean well, but what I think ends up happening with a tiered system is that the lower tier always ends up being a ghetto, that upper tier people do not want to wade through - and newcomers cannot get through (or are not willng to) because of lack of upper tier particiapation and response to comments.
Lots of people have said on Slashdot they value replies more highly than high moderation, and I think that's true for a lot of people.
I just don't think any forum that doesn't let a user spontaneously join and start commenting is going to have an easy time attracting new members, the lifeblood of online forums.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think one of the main things that makes the slashdot system work is metamoderation - the moderators are subject to random, annonymous peer review. When moderators mod posts up or down because of their own biases rather than the merits of the posts, they'll loose their karma when their ratings get metamoderated by someone not in their on clique.
Of course, it's entirely possible that the entire userbase may develop a bias of its own, but I don't think anyone can reasonably characterize slashdot as a monoculture.
What's wrong with group think? If you had an original idea, and nobody took it seriously, you might claim that it's due to group think. But if your idea got adopted, and became part of social consciousness, that would be due to group think too. So you can't really call it a con. It's just always present in discussions. If you really wanted to avoid it, you probably wouldn't discuss at all.
I've found this to be somewhat true, but not always. If a post contains direct criticism of the DNC or praise/direct agreement for Bush, you can count on a few "flamebait" or "overrated" moderations.
For some posts, such as this one I receive all kinds of complaints about how "right wing" I must be to dare complain that the DNC still hasn't come up with anything resembling a platform. I receive angry ALL CAPS COMMENTS - DON'T YOU KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING, IDIOT!?! responses. Still, it at least retained a respectable 4, insightful.
Then there's posts like this one which held onto its 5, insightful, but received responses like this where I'm reminded from someone about the left that I shouldn't "THINK", just do whatever the left says because what is happening is wrong, WRONG!
And all along I thought the right was supposed to be anti-intellectual...
I don't really care about the biases among editors, moderators, or whatever. I post what I think, and receive moderations accordingly.
I do, however, remember this when it comes to meta moderation time and, while acting within the rules, I act accordingly when I see posts modded inappropriately.
The moderation system, however, consists really of choir preachers - people mod up what they want to hear and mod down what they don't. That's all it comes down to.
And conservatives are known for molesting children.
Perhaps instead of showing comments in their entirety, you could show previews. The length of the preview could correspond to the mod points. For instance:
-1 = Below Threshold
0 = user name only
1 = user name + Subject Line Only
2 = user name + Subject Line and first line of comment (Or x number of characters)
3 = user name + Subject Line and first two lines of comment (Or x times 2 number of characters)
5 = Comment posted in its entirety
The usernames or subjects could be links to the entire comments for when the reader is interested.
The benefit would be an overall improvement in quality of post per inch of screen space.
Some of the complaints on this site are that disenting view are automatically modded down for no other reason that they are dissenting. Perhaps there could be checkboxes for categories to post the comment to such as "Devil's Advocate" or "Conservative Viewpoint". If people don't want to be bothered with other views, they can automatically fiter these out. Alternatively, if people want to see only the conservative viewpoints seperate from the liberal, they can select these seperately.
The categories might be somehow made dynamic, picking up on the number of times a non-common word is used in previous postings. That way, a policical story might get categories like "Taxation", "Economy", or "Elections", but a science story could get "Environment", "Economy", and "Hoax"
First of all, you need to foster a community - something that people care about. Then go with the idea of Karma (ripped straight from slashdot ;) ), and like slashdot use karma to set the starting rating of a comment. Now unlike /. grant successively more and more administrative role priviledges to users as they progress through karma levels. Say at 20 they get to mod down what they think are bad comments at 30 they get to mod up at 40 they get to delete comments and so on, make up your own numbers and actions. This allows the people who matter most to your community and are much more likely to hang around moderating and fixing things. This puts general control of the community into the hands of the people who care the most about it. Of course there will be the occasional sleeper troll who progress' as far as it can before attempting to do as much damage to moderation as they can before the sys-op kicks the account but the effort would most likely deter all but the most blatant a**holes.
Shh.
I'm a member of a bulletin board that has existed since roughly 1999, but that closed its registration a few years ago. Those of us who were already members before registration closed can still post there, but new members can't easily join (we've developed a few workarounds). The upshot is that it's a very select group who know they can't misbehave if they want to remain a member, but more importantly there is a very strong sense of community. Real flame wars don't happen anymore; everyone has a stake in keeping the community relevant and interesting.
Of course this, in the most limited sense of closing registration, isn't relevant to most sites. Instead, the meta-message is "make your visitors part of a community and make sure they feel they have a stake in maintaining that community."
The ways to give your members a stake in the community are limited perhaps only by your imagination.
I can imagine a system where you select a few good moderators, make every user register before being able to post, and initially make new members "provisional." As a provisional member their comments might not be displayed as obviously as those of full members, not expanded by default (similar in this respect to Slashdot), require votes from moderators or members affirming the comments are useful, etc., before their comments are displayed with the same emphasis as full members. Full members and moderators might be able to vote for particular posts as being "constructive" or not to elevate the status of the post. The critical part is that only full members in good standing with the administrators and rest of the community to contribute to that sort of judgement.
Provisional members would have to contribute for some period of time and/or number of posts to prove they are constructive contributors who make the site a better/more relevant/interesting/etc... place, only afterwards becoming a full member. Then when they've proven they're a constructive member of the community they can be nominated by two or more full members for full membership status, and have it granted at the approval of a good moderator.
Then in an ongoing sense reward members for their positive contributions. Slashdot's own karma system is an example of this, but some creativity come up with other ways of rewarding value and wisdom -- not to mention the total number of posts.
Consider a section of the site where only fully certified members can post.
Also structure your discussion so that people can get to know, or at least recognize, eachother. On the board I participate in that's easy since there are at most a few hundred of us, but I think it's possible in a larger setting as well. Make sure there are ways for members to communicate reasonably directly, not just in the context of a discussion.
Well, those are just a few thoughts. I hope things work out for you.
New stories should cost more to moderate than old ones. Moderating a post in a day-old story should only cost 1/10 of a moderation point.
OK, probably integer math was used.Equivalently:
Give 50 moderation points instead of five. Adding one point to a new story will cost you 10 points. Adding a point to an old story costs only 1.
It is possible to get there -- but I believe you have to consciously work for it. The "standard" will quickly degenerate if you don't educate new users when they arrive. (My politeness level isn't always that high on Kuro5hin, but much better here on slashdot.)
To get a "nice" culture, I think you have to work for it. Perlmonks got there by a quite simple voting system -- and the oldtimers put energy into whipping new arrivals into shape.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
This post will almost certainly get modded into the basement, but what the hell.
I have been watching the blogs and noticed an interesting phenomenon that arises there, as a function of the lack of moderation, quality control, or anything like that. The fact that bloggers can post what they wish and also delete comments that might challenge their positions can lead to some pretty unhealthy outcomes.
Although I hate it when folks post commercials for their blogs as much as the next person, I am going to suggest that interested folks might want to look at a couple of recent posts that deal with these issues. My post Poison Girls describes in detail the kinds of things that can go wrong when there is no quality control. Another post, Blogs and 'Community Solipsism' also deals with this issue. Both posts offer concrete examples.
I am an academic and thus have some investment in the blind refereeing process. It is far from perfect, but it keeps some of the worst excesses of 'anything goes' at bay. Hopefully, something like the slashdot system will get implemented for blogs too.
What really concerns me is seeing people who lack competence in a field, still pontificating at length on topics. People who do not know better tend to get sucked in by the more manipulative types. They end up listening to worthless advice, yet taking it as gospel. For instance, I have a colleague who is pretty much a failed academic. They have had nothing appear in print for over six years (however, they are tenured). Yet, they are currently offering apparently sagely advice on being a scholar. The putative advice is bad and misleading. Yet, there is nothing that can be done about it.
My best response is to remind folks that, as the Bard said in the Merchant of Venice, "All that glisters is not gold" and that is especially true in the world of blogs, yet it seems that the problems appear to continue. Any comments or suggestions on this matter would be very welcome. I live in fear of the day that a high school kid starts claiming to be a cancer physician and offering bad advice to people with serious health issues. In the blog arena, it appears that it is likely to be believed by some. This is a very scarey thought.
Collect a fee for a posting license. Suspend the licenses of those who misbehave. Cancel the licenses of those who post inappropriately.
Something Awful uses this straightforward technique.
>> For instance, I have a colleague who is pretty much a failed academic. They have had nothing appear in print for over six years (however, they are tenured). Yet, they are currently offering apparently sagely advice on being a scholar.
I obviously do not know the particular circumstances of this case, but I think you may be generalizing too much from that one data point.
I was an academic myself in a previous life --- I had tenure, and I wrote papers at the department's recommended rates, but I left anyway because prospects of promotion were limited by dead man's shoes, and I was lured away by the comparatively huge money in industry. However, I was there enough years to know how research and publication and academic success are related.
Here's the rub: publication rate is an *artificial and invalid* metric of research effort. It is not even a valid metric of research success or of research relevance. Instead, it most strongly correlates with interest in self-promotion, rather than with scientific or engineering dedication and capability and insight and work rate.
And even worse, in many fields it's your social networking skills and your ability to write the papers that reviewers want to see that gets you published, rather than the intrinsic scientific value of your work and writing.
So, in the general case (but perhaps not in yours), I do not really agree with your premise that a low (or even zero) publication rate makes for a bad scholar. An unsuccessful scholar, perhaps, but to make an analogy which I think is appropriate, being high up in the pop music charts doesn't correlate with musicianship.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Slashdot readers are getting older and wiser (yeah, right), while Digg readers need to see the latest, coolest stuff to pass on to their friends. Plus, Taco was never a TV personality, so points to Rose in that regard.
The stuff I pass on to people are the comments, not the video of the guy that lit his fart on fire and rocketed into space. Rob, have you tried that yet? It might help with the Digg wars.
"Anything with no moderation at all. Look at usenet. These systems are only sucessful if combined with user filtering - one prospective area might be a system with very good user filtering, but then you shift the burden from the admin to the users and why should they bother when there are people willing to do the work for them?"
Personal responsability. If one wishes a desired outcome? Then they should be involved in it's creation. Depending on others to do what you should have done is fraught with danger (just look at politics). No, generic filtering to catch the obvious abuse. e.g. spam, and each and every user can see what they want to see by using personal filters. Yes, that's not perfect and has it's own problems. But at least those problems belong to the poster, and aren't imposed by an outside entity. e.g. moderator. Nor imposed on others.
BTW I noticed you didn't include moderation by a group of paid and trained experts.
If a post is simultaneously receiving loads of troll and insightful mods, the community is probably split along some axis. (left/right, mac/linux, sick-sense-of-humor/think-of-the-children, etc, etc). Groupthink is enforced when, for example, a well thought out conservative post is labelled "troll" because 6 liberal moderators have outvoted 4 conservative ones.
If however you could identify the prejudices of the moderators, you could build a system which didn't enforce groupthink like this. Instead, a well thought out conservative post could be labelled (say) +5 insightful/+5 conservative. A good, balanced comment would get votes from both sides (+5 insightful/neutral), out-and-out troll still gets canned, etc.
It could let you see *good* posts by people you disagree with. Or, if you're sure your mind is closed on some matter, it could let you NOT see them.
Lots of problems, of course. eg... identifying the axes, identifying the prejudices of the moderators (does the system let them tick a "conservative" box, or does the system work out for itself where the moderators are, or even what the axes are?)
Instead of having a cliff, could the threshold for minimum comment points be adjusted upwards? Thatway, if a reader looks at such a story with 300 comments, perhaps only the ones with 3 or more points would be displayed by default. By having fewer total pages with higher quality posts per page, the reader experience would be improved, especially if the reader was looking at an archived story. It would be akin to an automatic comment summarization.
I agree. In general, I tend to read at 2, Threaded, Highest Scores First, which generally shows me older, higher moderated comments (and any decently moderated comment made in response to it).
I find that most of the top four or five parent posts on an average Slashdot story have 2-3 moderated replies on them, at least.
When I have moderator points, I read at my normal 2/thread/highest, but never moderate anything I see. I then go back, change the story to 0/flat/Newest (ignore threads). Reading like this is fairly difficult, but I can generally keep track of what is being talked about from my original read. I then tend to moderate only comments scored as 0 to me (10% of new users, any AC comments), trying especially hard to get Anonymous Coward comments.
When I have moderator points, I generally moderate about one out of every three stories I read, and only about one or two messages per story.
My point? It is not the easiest thing in the world to do. I know that when I have moderator points I am going to to spend significantly more time on each story I read. In the end, though, I do not mind - I know that I am making Slashdot a better read for the people reading the story after me.
One additional comment: The same "early bird gets the worm" works in reverse on actual stories. A story at the very top of the homepage is probably going to get a lot more moderations than an older story sitting at the very bottom of the homepage, even though some very insightful comments might still be being posted.
I suppose on a small scale you could do moderations like Slashdot does metamoderation: Just choose some posts at random and have users moderate them up or down on a regular basis.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Which is going to collect more flames, a board about collecting 17th century navigational instruments, or one about abortion?
Seeding with a group of initial users who will set the tone for others *might* work but don't grow too fast or there won't be time for cultural transmission.
Have an "ignore" command and encourage people to use it. The damage from trolls comes when people read them. If they wind up talking to empty air they'll escalate for a while and then stalk off to stalk someone else.
Careful with allowing anonymity. Sometimes you need it to get people to come forward. Anonymous Coward here makes really good points sometimes but his overall posting history is dismal.
Yes but it holds no real sway with the internet populace. They have about as much respect from the general public as Bush does in Australia when he's waving the latest trade agreement that destorys our health system. Which is perfect for the Internet.
Basically as long as the authority is to busy in a power struggle to govern effectively (set rules and enforce them on the net) we can do what ever the hell we want. It is the number one reason the internet has been so successful.
I ate your fish.
Conservatism in its purist form is the opposite of ideology, it is a type of cynicism. It is the belief that the average decision made by a human is more likely to be bad than good. Ideology is a strong belief in a cause and the desire to base ones choices around this belief.
People like Dubya get mislabeled as conservatives as a bit of a euphemism, but conservative governments are careful, slow to act and even indecisive. George Bush however is a cowboy and could never be any such things (with the exception of Hurricane Katrina I guess), he likes to start silly wars with dubious causes, he tries to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor, this isn't conservative at all, this is changing the status quo. A conservative government would have stayed out of Iraq and just bombed Afghanistan until they were sorry for helping Osama.
If you want to see conservative, you need to look at Japan, in Japan the bureaucracy has the power so nothing ever happens, laws take decades to pass (child porn was only banned in 1998 IIRC) and havn't invaded a country for 65 years. The American government knew that if Japan was to loose its bad habits its government would need to be slowed to the point of total stagnation and now they are a nice country that everyone but China likes.
And by the way, how can something be biased because it is totally open? A person can be biased for sure, but society as a whole tends to be right about most things political, because politics are dictated by society. Which leads me to my next point, society has thought some really crazy things over the years, but its always been right about it. These days ephebophilia is out but homosexuality is in, who could have seen that coming a century ago? Back in the 70s western women were fighting for equal rights at the same time Muslim women were putting their headscarves on for the first time in almost a millennium. Portugal deposed its hardline Catholic government at almost the same time as Iran had its Islamic revolution and brought about a theocracy. Being conservative is to acknowledge society's indecisiveness and leave it alone. This is cynicism to the highest degree.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Only
...)
- Ad Hominem attacks
- Threats
Should be modded down. Nothing else. (and remember that what is perceived as an attack to a group external to the discussion is NOT an ad-hominem)
Slashdot's moderation system is overly left. It is not a very good example. It's not republican or democrat or so, people just tend to very strongly choose their own side. E.g. the mp3 downloading debate (stuff like "it's not wrong" when the parliament has decided it IS wrong,
Meta-moderation seems to help though.
...how about a one-click option to turn that on its head when you're moderating?
That way, you're more likely to see the real gems that need to be promoted, and to spot the trolls at 1 and 0 that need to be smacked down.
I'd share certain criticism about how perfect Slashdot moderation is. But, essence of this scheme can be effectively applied on other scale and other ways. Probably even with better effect, why not. Idea of "karma" is to reflect accumulated competence speaking to the point, and making good ones (in theory). In particular, amongst other beforementioned imperfections of slashdot, I see insufficient use of inertia, when certain short replica of irony can be misunderstood and drop your "karma" quickly to Bad, OTOH some fun-fun-fun replica, supposedly, have sudden opposite effect. Too much concentration on momental wording, IMHO.
I'd suggest caring more about longevity of accumulation of competence - then occasional passers by might be very naturally not entitled to the same status, like oldtimers, wise-speakers. However, if newcomer is speaking wisely, he could accumulate competence points relatively fast. Ensuring this accumulation, and then making use of it by giving certain powers, like those of moderation - should work quite well for smaller communities.
Servant of karma
How about encouraging participation by actually making it easier for people to post and talk, rather than worrying about how to prevent them from doing so?
For instance, see http://blog.topix.net/archives/000106.html
And could comments be ordered according to number of replies?
And could stories themselves be modded up or down, like digg?
Also, could there be a way (other than posting anonymously) for people to collapse their own comments to just the subject line? Sometimes there may be a mildly important comment to be made within the context of an earlier reply, but not neccesarily within the comment of the original story.
For instance: a story about a politician making a controvertial statement about global warming. Most comments may follow the path of debating the points of global warming itself. Whereas, some posters may be interested in a discussion thread detailing statements from the same polititian that are contradictory to the statements in the story. These comments may not be relevant to the story, but that doesn't mean they are irrelevent entirely.
Morons.org is an atheist/gay politically charged site. I like their method of moderation. Basically, anyone the mods flag as a troll cannot be replied to. It just locks the thread and sends it to the bottom of the list. Doesn't censor them, since they can still be read, but it also removes the primary impetus for trolling... being fed.
The rankings could go one step further by allowing reader to group comments together according to similarity.
Also, links to could be added to comments for readers to find other comments simillar, or dissimilar to the one being read.
This would save page space for comments that are actually relevent to the topic.
Also, could the comment preview include a spellcheck feature?
And could each story have a comments summary where all of the links from the comments are presented together (along with links to the originating comments), ranked by mod points?
Thou shalt not count 4, nor 2, excepting that thou then proceedest onto three. Five is right out.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
One thing you can do is to "seed" the system by giving certain trustworthy persons a larger number of (or possibly unlimited) mod points, and then make the number of mod points that any other person receives in a given timeframe contingent on their reputation or karma or whatever you call it, so that those who are frequently modded up get more mod points.
However, you really should look at the system Perlmonks uses, which is very effective. First, new posts appear only in "Newest Nodes" (i.e., not on the front page nor in their respective section) until they are approved; those who have reached a certain level of experience is permitted to do the approval. Beyond that, nodes which have major problems can be Considered for editing or even reaping -- sufficiently experienced persons can Consider a node and can vote on what should be done with it. Finally, there's the Experience system, which is somewhat analogous to slashdot's moderation, but the number of votes you get every day is contingent upon how much experience you have. It's a fairly complicated system, but it works very well.
I do think also that, depending on the nature of the forum, it can be useful to allow moderators to apply objective labels and then let the users determine how to interpret those labels. The slashdot system does this fairly well overall. I particularly like that I can go into my preferences and assign a different numeric value to certain labels (e.g., "Funny") to make posts that receive them more or less likely to be shown to me.
The set of specific labels it uses could use an overhaul, but in any case you're going to want to tailor that depending on the subject matter of the forum. For a political forum, for instance, I think I'd want posts to be able to be categorized as "Radical", "Liberal", "Moderate", "Progressive", "Conservative", or "Reactionary". For a religious discussion forum, I might want labels like "traditional" versus "progressive" or "creative" versus "orthodox", but these labels would not be appropriate on a forum dedicated to, say, linguistics.
OTOH, some labels might be useful irrespective of subject matter, e.g., , "clear" or "unclear" (referring to how well the ideas in the message are explained) and "on-topic" or "off-topic".
I tend also to think that if the subject matter is expected to be at all contentious, there should be an explicit "agree"/"disagree" mechanism, so that users can freely express that they agree or disagree. It won't completely eliminate abuse of the moderation system, but it might help, and in any case some people just love to be able to express that they agree or disagree with something, so it's good to accomodate that. Along with a post you might see a line like "16 people have agreed and 13 disagreed with this comment".
But you would use the moderation, not the agreement, to inform site functionality such as which comments are automatically expanded and how many votes any given user receives in a day.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
These comments could be ordered according to the number of points they did get when they were on the original story, but might inelligable to get modded up once cross-referenced to the new story.
Also, these posts would be the ones to get pushed first to pages 2 and 3 as needed, as they are essentially page fillers for when the real posts start appearing.
Additionally, could there be pages for "Discussion Only" that have continuous comments posted? These could be started according to categories instead of stories. The stories in each category could be inserted as milestones among the comments, but the comments would mainly be ordered from newest to oldest.
There would be less emphasis on points and replies, so commenters would have to be made aware that they sould copy the relevent text into their comments, as there may not be as strong a connection to "Parent Posts" as there is in the current system.
Because this could be so easily manipulated (Browser prefetchers, people that just open the page and close it immediately), it could only count against posters that never bothered to follow the link in the first place. Also, less time viewing the page would count against a poster.
Most trolls never bother to read the articles in the first place, so this would help to count against them. Also, it would help to irritate the trolls, as it would take more of their time to post a comment that could actually be read by others.
The problem with your proposal is determining which posts "earn" one the right to the next tier.
I have seen all too often forum posters that seem to have this grandious opinion of themselves (apparent in the writings they post) simply because they have posted a large NUMBER of posts. One can often go back and see that the posts are just witty comments of no real consequence. Just ALOT of them. The grading system of posts has a moderating effect, but it can still be abused simply by posting alot. After all, the grading sytem doesn't really afford "negative" scores (scores that would actually drag DOWN ones standing). Alot of "1" scores still does NOT tell you whether or not the posts had any real value.
Not to mention that maybe there are "lurkers" out there that are, for the most part, non-posters. But who is to say that, maybe, this guy/gal just came up with some brilliant idea that he/she choose to speak up about this ONE time. Because they don't post often, their "brilliant idea" is relegated to a location that is, by and large, ignored by the upper-caste crowd.
Tiered posting is, in my honest opinion, a move towards "elitism" in a medium that should NOT be limiting the free exchange of ideas.
Time can also be considered for that effect, with low-cost moderations having a low effect on karma.
Interesting. Since we are talking about moderation here...
Why did the parent get modded up, which didn't have much to it--a grammar correction and asking the guy if what he did worked, basicly. Not very interesting.
Yet, the grandparent, which had a great, apparently working idea, didn't get modded up at all.
Maybe hankwang has some friends with mod points??? Or have the grammar nazis taken over? Haha. Maybe Mr Wang is rich and has hired a third world nation to mod up his posts. Find out in the next episode of Slashdot Moderation Master Detective: The people must know!!!
You must not have been reading slashdot lately. There have been plenty of reasonable posts on the other side which have been modded down, and plenty of questionable posts for the things you have said which have been modded up.
More likely extremist groups, shills, and such are working together to control moderation. So something which talks up their side is modded up, and anything which talks down their side or talks up "the enemy" is modded down.
Not that I know. Actually, I had switched off the +1 karma bonus for that post because I didn't think it deserved that. :)
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
The loss of quality is not immediate, or theoretically unavoidable, but the fewer moderators there are, the greater the effect of any individual one. Given that most of us aren't professionals at debating or philosophy, our moderating is likely to be average, and likelier to be poor quality than outstanding. With few moderators, it seems statistically inevitable that over time quality of the comments will deteriorate. (The problem is similar to choosing rulers via monarchy with its tiny sample size of one family, versus democracy with its huge sample size of hundreds or thousands of people with enough education, free time, money, etc.)
Pessimistic message: There's no way for small blogs or forums to guarantee good moderation, unless they find the Holy Grail of leadership: how to consistently find and appoint the most competent people to any given position. Anyone with the answer to that will probably be in line for the Nobel prize.
However, even if perfection can't be guaranteed, maybe something could be done by increasing the randomness of how moderators are selected. That seems counterintuitive, since it feels like what's needed is a _bigger_ effort to select the best. But the track records of efforts to improve selection are dismal. The value of large sample sizes is that randomness is more easily achieved. So maybe what's needed in small groups is a bigger effort NOT to select the best, but instead to improve the randomness with which moderators are selected. Might be worth a try.
Or else moderation is pointless. If you can't recruit serious members of the community to do the job, there's no way to keep a good web forum going anyhow.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
For occasional/irregular readers blessed w/ mod points, the late comments are a good area to sprinkle moderation joy. The early comments are often already moderated into position before "Capt'n Occasional" arrives.
After a quick scan of the early posts, Capt'n should heigh on down toward the end to trawl for gems.
How can you keep the discussion civilized, while keeping commenting open, and not requiring large numbers of users for the moderation to work?
Fuck You.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I really like the aspect of Digg where you can edit comments a minute or two after you post. I do wonder sometimes if you let a user edit a comment at any time if it would refine conversations a bit... On the other hand I think you loose too much perminence when you allow that, I do like words to stand. So I think the Digg compromise is good, it gives you a quick second chance but overall lets a conversation firm without a base for a thread dissappearing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Until they develop a device where you can remotely punch somebody in the face over the internet, people are gonna continue to say whatever they want. Even then the remote punching system would wind up being abused. Since anybody who voices their opinion would wind up being punched by somebody else. The only way to avoid a scenario like that is to charge money for the punches, so if you want to hit somebody you have to mean it, maybe $20 a punch. But then you have to factor in things like potential injuries caused to whoever you punched, since they could be drinking some coffee or something and get scalded when they get slugged. Then also if the person has asteoperosis [sic] or is a hemophiliac, there's a chance of death with the system. I suppose in that case one could argue that they'd better keep a civil tounge in their head. But things don't work like that. It's an interesting prospect none the less.
....is the issue here, and while forums can have moderation scores and other mechanisms to limit the riffraff, they will never be able to solve the anonimity issue that allows people to say things that they simply would never say in person-and get away with it.
As a long standing participant in one forum for more than ten years now, and while our community has it's great points, it also has been through various wars over the years, and continues to have long term brush fires. Trolls and other miscreants have come and gone-as has good participants who have been turned away by the level of discourse either temporarily and permanantly. All manner of mechanisims have been tried including rating point of the user anonymous and overt, rating of the user post(s), moderation of postings/users via the point system, adding the ingnore feature anonymously (and overtly by letting the ignored person know they are ignored), having "trusted' particpants being moderators with banning/suspend priviledges, various "karma" like features, and others.
The bottom line never changes however: people can and will say things via the anoymous nature of the internet that they never will in real life (where there can be real consequences far beyond a forum ban).
I disagree with quite a bit you wrote in the posts you're commenting on, and a little bit with the post you've just made. However, I feel that the moderator who modded you "interesting" was fair, and hence I (just) meta-moderated him as such.
Additionally, I should add that the people who moderated you flamebait/troll were being unfair and/or funny. I respect the fact that the points you do make in the posts mentioned at least seem to be your own, are reasonably well thought out, and are respectfully stated.
However, I think you've misrepresented the person who said you shouldn't think. He's saying that some things are so obvious that one shouldn't have to think about them. Not that one shouldn't question the "left" in general. (Do you really believe that "not torturing" is a leftist issue? If so, I think a lot of liberal groups would love to have you film a commercial for them.)
P.S., I'm not saying I agree with the guy (questioning the "obvious" is never a bad idea), just that I feel that you misrepresented him.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
First of all, I do want to acknowledge that, in general, your arguments were fairly reasonable, even if they suffered from some selective perception. (Who among us doesn't?) Furthermore, it is nice to treat other sides with respect. I will attempt to expose some of your selective perception problems - and I'd appreciate it if others do the same for me.
In my opinion, you're falling into a common fallacy that I see from all parts of the spectrum. The use of the unspecified "you". It seems to me that when you say "you", you mean people who disagree with you. The problem is that the people who disagreed with you on issue A might not be the same people who disagreed with you on issue B, so you might see hyprocisy from these mythical "yous" where none exists. (Well, OK, we all suffer from some hypocrisy - unless our standards are too low.) Frankly, I'm very, very bothered by the current Bush (largely for environmental issues), but was only annoyed by his father. One problem I had with his father was the whole "not remembering" or "not being aware" of anything dealing with the Iran-Contra affair. It would have been just as easy for me to criticize "you" for railing about Clinton's indiscretions but not giving credit to Carter for his moral purity.
Same problem here, but different side of the coin. You're painting all conservatives with your own colors. It seems to many "liberals" that most conservatives do not face reality about the situation in the Middle East. I personally know several who do, but it seems to me that the most vocal ones in the media do not. (For the record, I think this can be said about liberals as well - many "face" reality about the situation in the Middle East, even though they might draw different conclusions than you do, but the most vocal ones in the media sometimes propose ridiculous "solutions".)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
OK, first of all, I agree completely about Chavez and Il. However, blaming Carter for bin Laden is some pretty strong revisionist history. Who helped arm al Qaeda? For that matter, who helped arm Saddam Hussein? I think you can attribute some blame for these groups to at least 4 presidents, but putting Carter into that group is a stretch. A lot of people also like to forget that the Iranian hostages were actually freed while Carter was still president. However, if you want to credit Reagan for the timing of their release - you wouldn't be alone. (Disclaimer, I'm not buying into the conspiracy theory, I'm just pointing out that it cuts both ways.)
However, I'll admit to being quite young during the Carter administration (6-10 years old), and my "memories" are colored by both of my parents (one Republican, one Democrat). My father (the Republican) has said that Carter makes such an excellent former president that he should have jumped straight into the role (i.e., by-passing the actual presidency).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I wasn't actually trying to judge whether or not we should have assisted al Qaeda and/or Saddam, as this is always a difficult game to play. I was merely pointing out that blaming Carter for "emboldening" al Qaeda is a fairly large stretch. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of my political viewpoints are shaped based off environmental issues. Things like the "Clear Skies Initiative", "Healthy Forests Initiative", redefining water ways, and the "Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act" have strongly colored my opinion of George W. Bush. Btw, despite these "rosy" sounding names these were all bad for the environment. Granted, the last one was a congressional act, but Bush did come out in favor of it.
To the degree that I do have an opinion about foreign policy, I'm a nerd through-and-through. I think the prime directive is an excellent concept - although just like several captains of the Enterprise, I feel it's only a guideline.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I wouldn't consider myself a doom-sayer, but my policy with the environment is somewhat similar to my foreign policy. Also, I have faith that we're ingenious enough to reduce our CO2 without stalling the economy. Furthermore, part of the reason that some "doom" never happened is because people took steps to avert the doom. I was a computer programmer during the whole Y2k scare, and if we hadn't taken it seriously, it would have been an issue (many in the younger crowd don't "get" that, but I suspect that you do). Similarly, when people began dying due to air quality, we adjusted. When a river caught on fire, we adjusted. None of these destroyed the economy. However, good science suggests that the earlier we act to reduce our CO2, the cheaper it will be, and the less likely it will impact our economy.
Enough people have recommended that book, that I'll make an effort to read it. I'll even try to read it with an open mind, but I acknowledge that my biases will no doubt influence me.
Having been a public high school physics teacher, a professional programmer working for two politically conservative bosses who I respect enormously, and now a Ph.D. student doing research in computer science/neuroscience, I think I have a somewhat unique view on many of these topics. I don't think that makes my view correct, but I think it does make it important - if I do say so myself. I do tend to lean liberally, but have many conservative opinions. In fact, from a brief look into some of your previous comments, I think you and I might each have more in common with the Democratic or Republican parties than with each other. As in, if the Dems believe A & B, the Repubs ~A & ~B, then perhaps you could be described as believing A & ~B, whereas I might be described as believing ~A & B. Of course, this is very simplistic and probably not even very accurate. Nevertheless, I can respect that you make up your own mind about issues and can find fault with both sides. In fact, even if my description above is accurate, I'd at least consider the exact opposite of what I believe to be logically consistent, which is more than I can say for either the Dems or Repubs!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?