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Dealing With Venom on the Web

Posted by Zonk on from the not-the-guy-with-the-symbiont dept.

theodp writes "In a world where nastiness online can erupt and go global overnight, BusinessWeek finds Corporate America woefully unprepared and offers suggestions for how to cope, including shelling out $10,000 to companies like ReputationDefender.com to promote the info you want and suppress the news you don't. And in what must be a sign of the Apocalypse, BW holds Slashdot's moderation system up as a model for maintaining civility in message boards."

9 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? by GenKreton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You must admit, Slashdot's moderation system is infinitely more successful than Digg's system.

  2. Re:Well... by Bearhouse · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "If /. were even more serious about keeping the crap out, they could disable the anonymous coward.." There's a fine line between an effective system & censorship. Some posts by ACs are interesting, informative, funny... I'm happy reading the good stuff, and if that means I have to burn some time & points modding idiots or sickies down, well, that's a price worth paying. All societies cost - I live in France, and hate paying the high taxes. On the other hand, when I travel to some other places, I miss the ameneties that those taxes bring me and my family.

  3. Metamoderation helps by e9th · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At least it can help weed out the most abusive moderators. I seldom call a mod unfair, but when I do I suspect I'm not alone.

  4. Re:Well... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think allowing AC posts is great. I often want to contribute to discussions here, but I only post anonymously. Not because I'm afraid to stand behind my opinions, but because it's not uncommon for employers to google potential applicants.

    I try to maintain the same level of civility on the interweb tubes as I do in RL, and AC posts allow me to express opinions that, while I would be willing to have a civil discussion with most people on, may not acceptable to many of the businesses for which I may want to work.

  5. Re:Well... by maxume · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So if you registered "GeeIDidntThinkThatThrough" as a user name, exactly how worried would you be about someone searching for information about you associating the posts with you?

    --
    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  6. Digg moderation is horrifically worthless by Dogtanian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think the digg model works much better, the moderation is almost instaneous. Are you on crack? The Digg moderation is *totally* worthless. Half is rabid fanboys downvoting en masse *anything* that attacks their chosen obsession (typically Apple). Combine this with fairly incomprehensible moderation elsewhere (i.e. I look at it and can't fathom why that particular post was moderated that way), and you have a system that's totally useless for its intended purpose.

    The lack of nesting makes it harder to filter out irrelevant discussion subtrees; in short, with Digg, you display all messages or you miss out. Slashdot's moderation may be far from perfect, but it's outstanding compared to the adolescent pack mentality on Digg.
    --
    "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
  7. Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? by zeroduck · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Of course Slashdot's moderation is also at the whim of the subset of users that have mod points on a given day.

    The more I think of it, the more I think that's a bonus. A huge problem on digg is that people will go through and mod up or down anything that they either agree with or disagree with, without regard to the actual content of the post. At least when mod points are scarce, users generally only use them on posts that are actually deserving.

    As has already been said, there's a great difference in the userbases of each site. I'd be willing to bet that the average Slashdot user is better educated, has more experience (in industry, in life, ...), and is older. Digg is just in it's infancy compared to Slashdot; I think there could be a lot of improvement when they fix their commenting system and their user base ages a bit.

    As a community, Slashdot is pretty critical of itself--but it really is one of the best online communities out there. If you don't believe me, you spend way too much time here.

  8. NO! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Slashdot moderation is seriously flawed.

    A lot of good comments go unnoticed because they get a 0 score (for being ACs), while an entire ocean of useless babble get automatically promoted to +1 (registered users) or +2 (karma loaded jerks).

    And how does a jerk get +2? Just think about how many people voted for some idiot... as one writer once said in my country: "All majorities are dumb."

    Heck, I've seen a lot of +5, Insightful which are (IMO, granted) totally clueless. It really hurts to read them... automatic scores do lower the content-to-noise ratio.

    Of course, it's important to avoid useless racist posts; but a lot of valuable content comes from comments -- and in those, a lot of good-willing ACs contribute with things they wouldn't otherwise say... yes, I know, there is no real anonymity on the Internet, but what is stopping ill-intentioned guys from faking names? (Good people do not want to lie, they'd rather go AC).

    Some stories get 300 +1-rated posts and another 80 0-rated ones: what would go wrong in displaying these extra 80?

    Say what you want. On Digg, you can get the "upcoming stories": non-voted, not-yet-manipulated. On /., registered people see the stories first (I infer this from what I read in the past) and ACs are de facto ignored (this I know from experience).

    Digg is now what /. was 8 or 9 years ago. /. got older, with clogged arteries and deaf: I've written oh-so-many-times about this and nobody has done anything about it.

    As of the last year, I've been even refraining from posting. I may well one day surrender and register, but I'm sure to feel defeated if I do so... and, besides, will /. still matter?

    1. Re:NO! by GTMoogle · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There's no surrender in registering. What are you losing? I have no idea.

      What do you stand to gain? You can realistically have a conversation if you accept e-mail notifications. You gain the ability to moderate down those nonsense +5's, metamoderate the ones that put them there in the first place. Save your prefs, etc.

      The system only has value by having people registered. By refusing to you're merely complaining about things you're being too lazy to help fix.

      There's an advantage to attaching a name to your words, but you always have the ability to take the penalty and detach that name to say something that either needs to be said, or probably shouldn't be said but you feel like it anyway.

      Stop seeing registering as surrender, stop celebrating your sloth (or maybe paranoia, but I have no idea what your reasons are. I can't even understand them). Really, it's just another column in a database that can't realistically even be linked to you. You seem to care by what you say, so why don't you care enough to participate that much? Stage fright?