Slashdot Mirror
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."
the problem is that 'stamping out trolls' also ends up stamping out minority opinions as well as unpopular truth. this fosters a groupthink mentality that allows consensus to take precedence over correct information/conclusions.
Many usenet readers provided an astonishing number of features that we have lost in the move to web forums. Maybe something was gained, but much was also lost.
Killfiles were useful to stamp out trolls. These days there could be a feature similar to adblock subscriptions that would block known trolls across all forums.
The reader features themselves on the better clients were MILES more advanced than what is done today in web browsers, even with AJAX. A web browser is a good tool, but it isn't the right tool for everything. It doesn't seem like the right tool for large scale discussion forums, although it can "suffice" for them - it just isn't as good as a dedicated application. Also with a dedicated app, you get your choice of which one to use. With a web forum, you get whatever the forum software gives you to. It takes choice away from the user and places it with the site.
There's one major flaw I've noticed in the /. system: groupthink and herd mentality. Anything that perfectly fits a certain mentality will get upmodded, most things that disagree with it get downmodded. Thus, people who disagree with that thinking (or even just don't care about it) have a disincentive to post, and the site attracts people fanatical about that viewpoint, perpetuating the problem.
/., the "mentality" is "MAFIAA evil, government evil and incompetent, big corporations bad (except google 'cuz they're good guys)", but it could just as easily be anything. If, say, a firearms news site adopted the /. system, it would probably end up with a strong "Kalashnikov gas-operated rotating-bolt system is perfect, Stoner direct-impingement system is evil" bias (or vice versa). Or an indie gaming site might end up with a "no sequels, artsy plot-heavy faux-retro side-scrollers only, and if it becomes popular YOU SOLD OUT" mentality.
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PS: Don't deny that it happens. I've seen anti-MAFIAA comments get +5 Insightful in articles about space travel. And I've never seen anything even vaguely pro-copyright get above a 2.
I disagree, if the thought was well founded it would stand on its own... conservative or liberal.
the problem is that 'stamping out trolls' also ends up stamping out minority opinions as well as unpopular truth. this fosters a groupthink mentality that allows consensus to take precedence over correct information/conclusions.
Does nobody else see the irony of a comment like this being moderated to +4?
The fact that it's been validated by the system it critiques invalidates it.
You make a seemingly poignant and clever remark. However, his comment is not obscure, minority, or controversial... his comment is mainstream, rational, and well accepted, particularly among the SlashDot crowd.
What he refers to is daring, perhaps "crackpot" opinions that go against the grain of the PC ethos of the internet community. A lot of crackpots are annoying attention-starved irrational, overly emotional, etc, and they often get the down-votes they deserve. But we all know and admire the few epic heros who changed the world with their unpopular opinions because they ended up being a step ahead of the world in insight... We should make sure that the internet does not make it easier to squelch these people, but instead allows them to blossom.
He's talking about people like the guy who makes rational attempts to critique or debunk global warming science, the guy who enters a discussion forum on a San Francisco newspaper and tries to argue that it's wrong for gay couples to raise children, the Saudi who tries to argue for equal rights for women in his country, that guy who thinks Jar Jar was a worthy attempt at levity in the Star Wars mythos.
These guys, if they make their cases with reasonable doses of civility, credible knowledge, and rationality, should still be heard, even if their opinions are loathed by the majority. These people make us sharper as a society. They are out of the box thinkers. And some of them could be right.
Yet, in a pure crowd-sourced voting system, the unpopular opinions will always get squelched unless they manage to provoke a flame war before they are forgotten.
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