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."
People can say whatever they want, moderation points stamp out trolls and assign relative values to posts (not always the best system, but not bad), etc. Of course, for it to work, you have to assemble a pretty smart/knowledgeable/literate bunch of people (that's the real trick). And you would still have to avoid kdawson stories, of course. Not a perfect system by a longshot, but one of the best.
Most of the systems I've seen on news sites for commenting have ranged from "suck ass" to "MAJORLY suck ass." Moderators are either too tough (nothing controversial gets through) of too lenient (leading to comment threads loaded with spam). Just go look at the "Wired" story comment sections sometime. Half of them don't work at all, the other half are loaded with spam, and some of their stories don't seem to let you comment at all. And that's from a *tech* magazine.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Full identification like Facebook, moderated semi-anonymity like slashdot, full-on unfiltered anonymous chatter. Each has fans and faults.
So make three tabs and call it a day.
I mean maybe I'm missing something, but is there a rule that there has to be one best way?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Everyone has a right to speak, even idiots. If you don't like what they have to say, then just add them to your ignore list. Trolls/idiots polluting forums is preferable to censorship like happens on some boards (Sony erasing negative posts about the hacking).
Other ideas:
- no point system or post tally. People don't deserve to get points just because they post a lot. People don't deserve to get points at all, for the mere act of expressing an opinion.
- threading is essential, so the replies are tied to the original post
- keep it simple. Plain text. Uses less bandwidth.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Make it impossible to post a comment without having first RFA.
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.
I've always thought that assigning negatives and postivies to Slashdot mod categories was limited. I'd like to see mutiple axes of moderation, with the axes you want to view left up to the users.
For example, I might really enjoy viewing (-2*Troll+Funny) as opposed to the default (Funny-Troll).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Where slashdot fails:
a) Anonymous Cowards are seldom read, and seldom moderated up.
b) the Javascript filtering makes it impossible to search.
c) Mandatory login to get rid of the 50 comment limit.
Where Twitter and Discq.us have fared better:
1. Universal login, so I don't have to keep creating accounts on 10,000 damned sites, blogs, and everything with a comment field.
2. Disqus - "Likes" somewhat like a karma system.
3. Twitter - Followers, eg follow those that contribute, so by this nature it "whitelists" when they comment, and hides all other comments by default.
Where they've failed:
1. Any jackass can create a twitter account, this is the number one problem, verifying identity, while keeping off trolls and sockpuppet/meatpuppet/astroturfers. We don't need to verify WHO they are, just that they are only ONE UNIQUE person. The easiest way to do this is by having state/national ID database that is queried upon creation of facebook, twitter where a [x] This is my true name, box is ticked. If the box is not ticked, they are defaulted to greylisted (eg slashdot anonymous coward) and have to rely on the karma system alone. If the box is ticked, then the karma system no longer applies and instead a civility meter is kept by twitter/facebook, too many people complaining about that person's behavior will push them into greylisted and down to blacklisted if they're being obnoxious everywhere. Once they're blacklisted, the site has to explicitly allow the person immunity from the blacklist (eg put them on a whitelist) to allow them, otherwise they're effectively silenced.
2. Search Spam. Twitter's search function tends to show more spam than anything useful. This could be better effectively if they simply "end-tailed" all the links being posted and eliminate links or entire spammer "teamfollowback"'s by looking for the same link being posted by people with no posting karma. 250,000 followers and only one comment, yes that's a spammer.
Let's ask /. this question:
How come after year, I mean it's been more than a decade for me here for sure (if I remember right), how come after all these years this site hasn't figured out the simple things about comment threads?
COMMENT THREADS!
Look at this fiasco - that's a comment about somebody leaving yet another comment in that thread, and quite a number of comments there are the same, redundant stuff, and why?
Because /. can't do comments threads right.
Of-course you can disable this crap on /.
(Account, Discussions, Classic Discussion System (D1))
and
(Options, Simple Design)
but a story on /. about a better design for comments threads - now that's irony.
So to the question:
How would you preserve the context of online discussions and stamp out trolls?
- I will say: forget trolls. Get the basics working and don't screw it up first of all - let the people SEE what the thread is first of all. Don't hide comments in threads by default.
As to trolls, etc: have simple "like/don't like" and have thresholds, nothing else should really be done. You can't get rid of trolls, and look what /. is doing and don't do it.
Do NOT force people to log out and post as ACs if they rich some weird 'threshold' (number of comments they can leave under their user name per 24 hours) - what good does that do? People register other accounts or they post as ACs. This is NOT good for discussions.
Do you have a discussion forum or is it a chat room (IRC like)? I think that's the first and only really important question. Do you want to keep history of all the comments or not?
Here is what /. is really doing that's pretty stupid: not showing the entire history of comments for non-AC users. As stories age, they disappear, contexts disappear. What's the point of having any history on line if it's uselessly unsearchable? There is no index.
There is no way really to link to an older discussion that maybe of some value.
Also for various political reasons on this site, comments are often moderated high up, and then after a while they are moderated down only so that people wouldn't be noticing them, even if they are totally pertinent to discussion, no trolling, no flame, those are just unpopular views and a coordinated moderation attack pushes them down where nobody is reading.
Don't allow political dissent to be drowned on your site by shills and just by those who don't like what you have to say. Have the "like/don't lie" feature - that's useful. All this other nonsense is just counterproductive if you don't want to run a site, that's dominated by one single mindset.
You can't handle the truth.
I've always thought that allowing users to moderate comments is a good idea, but it seems that a lot of people either don't know how, or think it's a waste of time. If users were exposed to the merits of moderating comments and the good that can come from it, it could be a good venue for filtering flaming and trolling. However, by that same token, users could simply utilize other users to downvote/rate other comments because of a disagreement, argument, or whatever. It'd be nice to find a way to prevent this while still allowing users to do comment moderation.
"...the number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected..." - Dennis Ritchie/Ken Thompson, 1972
So what does "harness the open web" mean? To the news organizations it probably means "make money". Comments are largely irrelevant for that. If news organizations want to attract readers (assuming that translates to "make money") they need to do two things - 1) report news that people feel is interesting or relevant. and 2) provide intelligent analysis of the news (not discussion forums). They could use a forum to generate ideas for further investigation/reporting/answering tough questions that the media doesn't do too often. Of course by the time they ask questions and do some further investigation the story will be a bit old. And this also doesn't work with stories about tornadoes and celebrities.
News is about trolling for eyeballs. The most sensational, shocking, scandalous and salacious stories attract the most eyeballs which means more advertising revenue. If it bleeds it leads. How can trolls be stamped out when the news media culture is rooted in a form of trolling?
Trolls may be a problem. Personnally, I think that special interests groups present a more formidable challenge.
Once they target a thread on an organized attack, either by themselves or through a PR agency too happy to cater to their needs, there is little that a few, by definition disorganized, moderators can do. The tone heats up in minutes, you can see that any of the seasoned intelligent commentators stay away from such threads. Sometimes, they back off from the site entirely.
Slashdot has a pretty impressive record, and the administrators surely have valuable experience in this regard. Even then, from time to time, you see the sturdy moderating system collapse under an persistent assault. This is always a disheartening experience for me, to see bullies have their... I mean our, cake.
In these times, I always wonder what we could do to prevent this from taking place. I do think that an awful lot is at stake: public interest, to say it in two words.
Why not take it a level further and allow commenting not just on news stories, but on any desired url?
A comment-system could even be integrated in the browser. Imagine just opening a webpage, clicking the "comments" button, and seeing a bunch of moderated comments (perhaps even in slashdot style). Now that would be awesome!
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
How about everyone getting to choose their own way of tagging and displaying every comment and user with an optional added numeric modifier for every tag?
Some days I might want to see (or hide) for example what the most popular "+3 Constipated"(and up) comments from anyone modded at least "+2 United-Fruit-apologist" by self described "Anarcho-Marshmellowians". At other times I might choose something less ridiculous, involving tags like "Conservative", "Insightful" and the like.
One could also choose to view comments in the style of reddit or slashdot (except maybe everyone would always have points, so the slashdot style would be filtered by mostly most popular moderators calculated in some way.)
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Quite the opposite seems to be true: if you dare to say anything about Apple that ranges from neutral to good (for example, I dare you post a comment where you're critical of hardware support in Linux and mention that you elected to go with Apple instead, because in your line of work, it lets you get said work done way more easily), you'll be instantly labelled an Apple fanboi and would probably be modded as such if the site so permitted. Just head to the most recent story about Apple being evil for not releasing latest WebKit LGPL code and browse through the comments.
What's needed in most news comment forums is human moderators consistently applying well-defined local cultural rules about what's acceptable.
When those rules are made explicit and then enforced, they can become a self-reinforcing part of the culture. Users get educated in the process, and educate the newcomers, requiring less professional community management.
You cannot replace this kernel of human etiquette with a technological solution and expect to get better "discussions" than, say, here on Slashdot.
So first find the sites that do rules+human moderation well enough already to host the level of civility and discussion you hope for, and distill out the minimum rules and moderator involvement needed to get there. Then add the tech.
And I've never seen anything even vaguely pro-copyright get above a 2.
Right here, in at least two stories there are many counters to your claim. GPL is a form of copyright and people demand that be protected and be upheld.
I think what you are complaining about is that everyone on Slashdot is upset with "The Mickey Mouse Act" and is disgusted that lobbyists determine how long copyright stands so now it's an unreasonable length of time. And yeah, anyone defending that deserves to be modded down. But you're not going to find anybody other than massive studios defending that because why would an artist care that their work is copyrighted past their death? Hell, I would demand it be public domain so that more people could enjoy my work.
You can post positions counter to "group think" but you have to pose them intelligently and try to achieve a neutral point of view when you do it. An example might be proposing copyright reform down to twenty years but enforcing it even more rigorously to ensure that the artist truly gets royalties for those twenty years. Swearing at people and calling them thieves only illustrates you don't understand the nature of copyright infringement nor how the biggest most powerful players have the public by the balls and all politicians in their pockets.
I assure you on copyright and patents, I have often posted comments asking people what they thought a responsible length of time was or asking them how biotech firms should recoup their losses on searching for/developing drugs if they should not be able to patent them.
My work here is dung.
you ignore the fact that anonymity allows one to express valid positions that aren't popular and/or outright illicit. this is crucial to a discussion being productive. the only thing your platform creates is cliquish conformity. That's hardly discussion. just because there's a 'consequence' for someone posting something, doesn't mean that the subject is incorrect. all the 'consequences' do is protect the feelings of the majority against the opinions of the minority and/or factual, objective truth. this isn't healthy, period.
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.
I agree with you about Slashdot with one exception: a distinguishing quality of the Slashdot metamind is that it's at least subconsciously aware of its own biases. Witness, for example, the fact that your post -- ostensibly critical of Slashdot's readership and moderators -- was modded up to +5. It's precisely that honest admission that the system isn't perfect, and that yes, Slashdot has its systemic biases, that keeps me satisfied with the moderation system as it stands.
Julian Assange isn't a US citizen. He can break US law all day long and it's A-OK. Now, if he broke INTERNATIONAL LAW or the laws of his country, you might have something there. But whatever law he broke would have to be covered by one of those inconvenient extradition treaties...
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