Ask Slashdot: Going Beyond Comment Threads?

asa writes "The Knight Foundation and Mozilla are running a series of news innovation challenges. The goal: get the world's smartest hackers thinking about how news organizations can harness the open web. The current challenge is all about comment threads. This seems like the perfect question to pose to Slashdotters: how would you foster more dynamic spaces for online news discussion? How would you preserve the context of online discussions and stamp out trolls? All ideas, technical, practical or impractical are welcome. What technologies (federation, atomic commenting, moderation, algorithms) would you employ? What are the immutable social dynamics? Knight and Mozilla will work with the best challenge entrants to deploy the solutions in newsrooms at Al Jazeera English, the BBC, boston.com, The Guardian, and Zeit Online. Submissions are open until May 22nd."

Comments

Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well

[PopeRatzo]

There's one major flaw I've noticed in the /. system

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a certain number of people who disagree with widely-held opinions will claim themselves to be victims.

"People didn't like my pro-DRM, pro-100 year copyright, pro-death penalty for file-sharing opinion because of the mean Slashdotters and their horrible group-think! And it's hard to express conservative opinions on Slashdot because of the mean Slashdotters and their horrible group-think, and when I called them a bunch of terrorist-loving, mooching pirates and liberal morons they modded me down for no reason!"

I'm sure you can find places on the Internet where special pleading will succeed, but it probably won't be a site full of people who are acquainted with debugging faulty logic.