Slashdot Mirror
Dealing With Venom on the Web
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."
This is great for a big corporation. But the real damage is done when one vindictive person freaks out on the internet and takes it out on a small business. The small business can't afford legal actions and they can't afford to pay some firm $10k to deal with their reputation. However, there are plenty of websites where you can register and file complaints in the public about a specific company. Even if you've never actually done business with them. Or even if you're just going nuts on the company because you forgot your medication.
I have personally dealt with this where I refused service to someone for harassing my other members on my online business. It's actually less a business than just a hobby, but my name and business name are out there and involved nonetheless. This underage person freaked out and spent months inventing various things to complain about and posting them on every recommendation site possible. They even went so far as death threats and attempting to extort getting their account back or else they'd spread rumors about improper discussions with said person by myself (the owner). Now, again, I never did any actual business with this individual and I knew nothing about them other than they were harassing my users so I shut down their account. That was the extend of it. Yet they have been a thorn in my side for two years now and there is nothing I can do about it. Anyone searching for my company online will find the most horrendous things said about me by a completely anonymous nutjob.
Today, yes. It wasn't always so, and some of us do remember a time when there was a big hue and cry over this as well. And I do not know how many of you here remember michael, and the whole moderation abuse that happened.
That said, Slashdot has a relatively mature audience compared to digg (I know, I know). While there are imbeciles here too, for the most part, the Slashdot crowd tends to be in the industry and/or college and seems a tad experienced in the ways of the world.
Digg crowd, for the most part, seems to be full of highschool kids who just learnt about the Intranets and decided to hop on and share their extremely mature views on things. And give these people the ability to moderate anyone and everyone, you have an inherently flawed system.
Not that Digg doesn't have the occasional good article or two, but the comments and the participation are not anywhere close to the levels seen on Slashdot. Once again, age plays a role - Slashdot comments, ignoring the idiotic and inane ones, tend to contain a few genuinely good ones. Even if you took an article on something obscure (say, something obscure in medicine or chemistry or whatever), you will find the occasional comment by someone who knows what's going on.
This is hardly the case with Digg, which has a bunch of kids who have no idea what's going on, and is choke full of nothing but opinions and little else (not that Slashdot doesn't have its fair share of asshats, it's just not as big a number).
My two cents.
Slashdot moderation maintains civility?
:)
I'd say on most days it does a fair job of at least hiding the blatant trolls from view. The nice thing about Slashdot's threaded system is that heated arguments don't mean the entire story is taken over. Besides, I think arguments in the comments is one reason some people read them.
Of course Slashdot's moderation is also at the whim of the subset of users that have mod points on a given day. For example on April Fools, all somebody has to do is say "Please mod my post insightful! kthxbye." and they hit +5 in minutes. Alternatively, a story like this might prompt someone to say "Reverse the polarity of the moderation flow!" suggesting moderators go nuts modding up trolls and flamebait and modding down everything else. (That would actually be pretty funny. Read More -- 10 of 381 comments). And of course moderators would probably do it, just to spite the system
(That actually sounds like a funny April Fools joke for next year. Give everyone mod points for the day and then randomize or invert what they do. Heck, even just giving everyone infinite mod points would be funny, and probably break Slashdot in the process).
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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I don't browse at -1, I just have a flamebait modifier of +5. And let you tell you, it's *hilarious*.
An author over-hyping a situation for his new book. How
If you've ever worked for or with a PR company, you'll know how wrong that is. "Transparency" is exactly what they do NOT want.
And so on. This is nothing more than an ad piece.
As everyone was walking out, I talked to the asshole and said "You fucking pig, shouldn't you be helping in NYC, not fucking harassing innocent students who are trying to make a difference?" I got arrested, charged with felony riot, disobeying a peace officer, summary harassment, and disorderly conduct. The two most serious charges (riot and disobeying...) were dropped the next day. The two other ones, I plead no contest to in exchange for 48 hrs. community service and a year's probation with the informal understanding that I leave the state after graduating that spring and completing the 48 hrs. In retrospect, I should have fought it and plead not guilty, but I was young, naive, and had a stupid attorney.
Anyway, after two years, my record was expunged. However, the original newspaper article; written before I was interviewed but NOT before the police chief was interviewed, remained the first thing that appeared under a Google search of my name for another year or two. Was kind of interesting to explain when I was interviewing for jobs!
For some reason, this no longer appears at all when you search for my name (I think the campus and local newspapers have put up a robots.txt file, and, anyway, there's more recent stuff by me and my business website on the web).
-b.
Let's suppose scox does not like what is posted on groklaw. So scox signs up for "ReputationDefender." What can ReputationDefender really do? Ask somebody to remove the content?
Accord to the website: "Our trained and expert online reputation advocates use an array of proprietary techniques developed in-house to correct and/or completely remove the selected unwanted content from the web."
Yeah, okay. And that would be what? Send an email to the website maintainer? For $15.95 a month, I doubt that ReputationDefender will be filing any lawsuits.
I think the very worst I have seen is FreeRepublic. Libertarians get banned there from posting all of the time for having the wrong views. Hell, even many conservatives get in trouble there for pissing off the wrong people. The "Admin Moderator" user/users will basically just yank your posting privileges if you buck the status quo. You don't have to be a troll or "mobying" (pretending to be a conservative for liberal causes, to manipulate right wing media). You just piss off the wrong people and instead of getting moderated down, you're silenced.
I'd say on most days it does a fair job of at least hiding the blatant trolls from view.
Unfortunately, it also lets fanboys/shills for platform/company/philosophy X hide comments critical of platform/company/philosophy X. And they do, with great regularity.
By "groupthink" he means people like me, who were banned for being pro-Windows. With enough -1s, inclusive (not a couple of comments scored -1), you will eventually receive one free /. vacation. It's gotten much better recently, but it used to be the point that posting a comment like "I don't think Linux is easy to use at all. The Windows GUI admin tools are much better" would land you at a score of -1. Enough of those, even over relatively long periods of time, and you get banned.
Been there. Yes, it's stupid and moronic. Yes, it happens. There are plenty of mods who feel "overrated" is there to be used on comments with which they disagree.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
It was always for the comments.
:)
Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation system was carefully thought out, and kept ahead of the wave of forum-spam and general "hey look maw ahm on the interweb" disruption that you find in every other forum. For that, it should be held up as an excellent example of the ThinkAboutItCarefully pattern.
Oh, and my UID's lower so thhhhppppt.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
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.
I read people posting and complaining that they never get to moderate. I've often wondered why this is, especially in how slashdot manages people who get negative metamod's, etc.
Personally I think I get to moderate alot - Probably about once a week, sometimes more often. There are times when I let my 3 days slip by, because its too hard to keep up.
But I do take the moderating seriously. I actually rarely moderate people down, but rather try and pick the good posts and push them up. On a personal stand I've pretty much stopped using underrated and overrated moderations - I may as well be judged for my actions too. Then again, I've never posted anonymously (which you will just have to take on faith as I obviously can't prove this).
Anyway, whatever I do, the mod points seem to keep coming back.
Personally I like to think its because the way I moderate is approved by the majority of meta-mods.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
I like Tufte's thoughts on moderating, particularly his point about avoiding "the chronic internet disease of 'All Opinions, All the Time.'" Different websites have different goals of course, but there is nothing inherently wrong with refusing to allow anyone to publish any opinion on your website. Tufte's own forum is much lower traffic than Slashdot, but it has the interesting property of discussions that are years long, and the majority of posts are on-topic and very useful. Slashdot discussions more than a day or two old are all but dead. One thing I see often enough that it bugs me is a post like, "So and so behaves in ways X, Y, and Z" and a followup post correcting it, "No, it's most like X, Y, and W"; further posts support the correction or provide links to further info, but as a reader I'm still stuck reading the whole conversation when I'm more interested in the correct information that could have fit into a single paragraph. Discussion sites tend to shy away from editing and consolidating correct information, preferring to leave everything as individual posts. It would be a lot of work to implement, and perhaps even impossible, but I get the impression that the reason nobody tries is not due to the difficulty but because individual posts are treated as sacred; any editing is "censorship". At the very least, one should not be afraid to delete the GNAA trolls and the like at -1...
Admittedly, editing of comments may be a waste of effort on Slashdot. But many tech blogs will post an article and some points will be corrected in the reader comments. The blog publisher will update the article yet leave the comments as is, creating a confusing page of comments that refer to an article that is no longer there. Is there any reason, other than it's too much work, to not delete the comments that no longer make sense and credit in the article those who made corrections?
Many years ago I was threatened with a lawsuit over some comments I made on-line. I'd posted under my name and wasn't hiding anything. (The dispute was with a company, not a person). The next day I got a call from their lawyer; fortunately the matter ended up being settled out of court and I didn't lose anything. If I'd only said the factual matter of the case there probably wouldn't have been any question, but I blew my top about every bad thing I felt about them, all statements I would had to have defended. I also had found out just how expensive legal proceedings are; even if you win you lose.
So today I usually think twice about whatever I post, and there's many times I decide it's better to just hit the delete button. I've been shocked at what some people post online in their blogs; or anywhere on the web with the same user name over and over. They never seem to think that it's very easy today to link it all together and see all the things they assume no one will ever know. You could say I'm just being paranoid, but in today's world it's better safe than sorry.
Yes this is exactly how all moderation systems fail. Regardless of forum, any community driven karma system becomes dominated by agendas. Karma tends to promote group think and more individual opinions are stifled. Even though trolls, redundant posts, and other useless posts are pushed down, so are plenty of thoughtful, intelligent posts.
On Slashdot, for stories that I care about I typically read threads on 0 up to see a more diverse selection of opinions, because the +5 points are usually either jokes or pro group-think posts, and you'll find the more insightful replies buried.
Fark is mostly "weird and amusing stuff from around the board" though. There doesn't seem to be a common concept behind the stories singled out. That being said they are often worth checking out, if only for the giggle value.
I took a peek at Digg when it started and looked at it every now and then for the first few months. Now it's below useless. Even the stories that get voted up are for the most part regularly more fit for News of The World than for some kind of techno geek website.
Bah, it's september all the time nowadays, what can you expect...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
...and I have personally renounced it.
I unchecked "Willing to Moderate" in my account preferences, because I know I'm an intensely biased, flawed person, and I would happily ostracize my enemies and laud my friends regardless of the quality, or lack thereof of their posts. I hate a lot of people. A lot of the people on here, come to mention it. Having mod points gives me the power to act on the desire to do something about it, and power (even the power to demote your post because I think you're an idiot, or meta-moderating with an agenda) corrupts. I, apparently, am quite easily corruptible. I couldn't enjoy reading this site, because I was looking to deal with people I thought should be pushed down. Now that I can't do anything about it, it's a lot less frustrating to read things here.
However, I've set my highlight threshold to +4, because experience has taught me that even a bunch of my fellow random idiots on the internet can't be wrong all the time. Approximately 90% of the stuff that gets modded that high, I can only assume as a result of some kind of emergent reasonableness from a sea of unreasonable stupidity. The other 10% is easily skipped, and doesn't enrage me like reading the vast sea of idiocy those posts have somehow risen above does.
It's a bit hypocritical of me, to take the product of the moderation system without contributing to it, but if that matters, you shouldn't allow people not to opt out. I don't contribute to any open source projects, either financially or by helping at all, and use the hell out of their software either, and that doesn't trouble me much either.
I have almost the inverse of his problem. I post anonymously, but only when posting from work.
:]
Why? I don't want them to learn my Slashdot username. Not that I really have anything to hide, but it's more out of trying to retain some semblance of privacy. And they do have that annoying censor firewall in place, though my boss is nice enough not to care what I do online so long as I get done what he wants done.
Oddly, I end up submitting almost as many stories as comments, and waiting an hour to post another anonymous comment is kind of annoying, but that's somewhat better, because it makes me think about which comments are the most useful, rather than dashing off every post that comes to mind
Slashdot moderation is *far* from perfect... but it's a hell of a lot better than elsewhere. You have to wade through a lot less crap to get to the good stuff than you do anywhere else. Fark comments aren't worth reading, although the photoshop contest pics can be cool. I don't even read Digg, and sites like Groklaw are nice enough, but it's really time consuming to find the interesting posts. Unless PJ reposts them as a story, you'd never know that the 39th post in that huge thread was the interesting one, while all the rest just said "when will SCO get delisted?" (Short answer? They'll hit bankruptcy first.)
Meh. Personally, I held off on registering until I was forced to because they stopped letting you enter in the name that would appear on your posts manually. (This is why my /. number is about twice as high as it otherwise would be; my then-roommate Altus has a lower number because he didn't wait)
Really, it's just another column in a database that can't realistically even be linked to you.
Actually, when the aggregate of all your posts, plus writing style, which is extremely hard to disguise, is considered, it's not that hard to link it, if anyone cares to.
Me, I support anonymous posting, including being able to post with a handle but without registering. I've never been happy with the present system.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.