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."
Clearly, they must be new here.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
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.
My biggest beef with the Slashdot moderation system is the overwhelming majority of posts that are modded high and "funny." It's such a letdown when you want to read good replies only to find that 80+% of the +4s and +5s are "Funny."
"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.
I don't browse at -1, I just have a flamebait modifier of +5. And let you tell you, it's *hilarious*.
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 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.
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.
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).
As a member of the company's advisory board and a long-time Slashdotter, I can assure you that ReputationDefender does not engage in any illegal activities, pretexting, cracking, etc. in the process of getting information removed from the web. I recognize that some of the marketing copy on the site is less than crystal clear, but in a busy startup, getting the website copy rewritten isn't always the top priority.
In any case, services range from sending polite requests on customers behalf (automated and manual depending on context), search engine optimization techniques, arranging for legal intervention in certain cases, and more. You can find much of this information on our Frequently Asked Questions page. Many of our customers have found our techniques effective and feel like we've provided them with excellent value for their money.
Nobody can make bad content posted repeatedly by a determined adversary disappear entirely, obviously, and we would be foolish to claim that we could do the impossible.
I should also mention that we hold ourselves to a very high ethical standard regarding the types of intervention we perform and the types of clients we will take on, and we are very sensitive to First Amendment issues and not trying to interfere with the dissemination of genuinely newsworthy content. However, there are a lot of people out there who've faced crazy stalkers and people trying to unfairly bash them, or just chunks of stale information out there that they really didn't want to be public, and having a service offering to track down that information, figure out who's responsible for it, and attempt to get it removed, or in some cases reduce its impact, is quite valuable to many people.
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.
Slashdot moderation is seriously flawed.
/., 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).
/. 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.
/. still matter?
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
Digg is now what
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
...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.
While there are imbeciles for the most part here too, the Slashdot crowd tends to be in the industry and/or college and seems a tad experienced in the ways of the world.
/.ers with diggers? That's like comparing six year olds with two year olds. Or six year olds with Fark-ers. Or six year olds with Fox News.
Sorry, just clarifying the sentence for you.
And comparing
Clearly the six year olds are more intelligent, but they're still six years old...
This is left as an exercise for the reader.