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

The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well

[elrous0]

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.

Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well

[gman003]

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.

For /., 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.

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.

Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well

[elrous0]

what goes after the kilometer?

A Tesla Roadster's battery?

Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well

[grcumb]

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.

Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well

[YrWrstNtmr]

Is it possible that's because of the conservatives on Slashdot? Or maybe it's because of the overall quality of what passes for "conservative thought" circa 2011 and the cognitive dissonance such opinion requires.

And THIS attitude is precisely why expression of conservative thought seems/is difficult here.

Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well

[irreverentdiscourse]

I disagree, if the thought was well founded it would stand on its own... conservative or liberal.

Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well

[Kelbear]

Expressing a dissenting opinion is acceptable here if you're not being a combatative jerk at the same time.

For example:
Not acceptable: Obama is a liberal puppet intent on destroying America.

Acceptable: I feel Obama's decision to remove tax breaks for oil corporations will weaken the fragile economic recovery as the increase in the effective tax rate is passed down in increased gas prices to businesses and the general population.

Both of them will be disagreed with of course, but only the first one will get modded into oblivion. The difference is that the first is just throwing out perjorative language, which stifles the listener's ability to examine the substance of the post. This implies that the writer has no regard for communication and is not interested in an exchange of ideas. The second one avoids perjoratives, and provides substance so that those who reply will be invited to respond to the substance, rather responding to an insult.

I find both liberal and conservatives making the mistake of attacking the listener instead of trying to persuade the listener. Obviously Slashdot has a liberal bent, so if a conservative poster wants to dissent, they should be taking extra care with their post, not less. I always read at -1, and I have not noticed a single cogent conservative post being modded away. I have seen occasions where they have received negative moderations, but in all such cases, the positive moderation ultimately left those posts at +5.

I would welcome links to some examples of well-thought out conservative posts that were moderated away. Then we can look and see for ourselves if they were negatively moderated for their content, or for the manner in which they are presented.

Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well

[AgentBif]

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.

Three paths

[symbolset]

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?

Don't stamp out trolls

[cpu6502]

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.

lessons from usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Everybody choose their own view.

[migla]

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.)