Slashdot Mirror
Reddit Turning SOPA "Blackout" Into a "Learn-In"
bdking writes "Reddit's planned 12-hour 'blackout' on January 18 sounds like an ineffectual, if not self-defeating, strategy for opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act. But the social news site actually will use that time not to 'go dark,' but to educate visitors about the ramifications of the House legislation that many fear will lead to widespread shutdowns of Internet sites."
Hopefully other major supporters(Google, Facebook, etc) will follow suit and get the word out how bad this piece of garbage is.
As soon as you submit a patch to Slashcode for slashdotters .
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
"Hopefully other major supporters(Google, Facebook, etc) will follow suit and get the word out how bad this piece of garbage is." And don't forget Slashdot. Participating in Reddit's blackout is something we could do also.
Can we get /. to join in the blackout? I suppose everybody who visits /. already knows about SOPA, but we really need to get everybody in on this.
:O Think of the lolcats!
They're going to ruin the internet. The INTERNET.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
What are you talking about? Are you trying to say SOPA/PIPA are "a needed evil"? Because if so, you are sorely mistaken. This would effectively allow copyright holders to create an internet similar to what actual communist have(ie Great Firewall of China). It would break the backbone of how the internet works. It would inhibit the ability to create dynamic content on the internet by sniffling innovation & discouraging investment(think no YouTube). It is a horrible piece of garbage crafted by greedy idiots who do not care about the freedom that has allowed the internet to become what it is today. Get your head out of your ass & look around instead of following what you are told. Now if you are saying the blackout is necessary, then I agree.
My experience has been that people do not really care about hypothetical consequences. People will not understand that SOPA is a bad thing until it is passed and bad things happen that directly affect their lives. If Facebook were taken down by a SOPA complaint, people would believe that SOPA is bad.
The blackout idea might help to convey the problems with SOPA. More likely, people will think that the problems are being exaggerated by the participants in the blackout.
Palm trees and 8
While I too am glad to see such action, at least get your terms right. This legislation hands over control of the 'net to corporations, not the people, nor the government - though the government, by this legislation becomes the instrument of the corporations.
I know that some folks like to use the newspeak-esque conflation of the terms socialism = communism = fascism = evil, but each of those forms of government are quite different.
Check your premises.
They should do a Doodle that is just a symbolic black censorship bar. I'm sure people would click on it just to find out why, and then it would lead to info on SOPA.
They could make up a list of words associated with trademarks/copyrights and every time someone either searched for, or posted a comment about something with one of those terms in it, they could use a popup "You used the copyrighted/trademarked term "(/insertstringhere)", Under the pending SOPA legislation, if the owner company sent us notice regarding this comment we would have no choice but to censor it. Please contact your representative and/or senator to let them know you stand with us in opposition to this extremely poorly worded piece of legislation"
While i applaud the attempts to get the word out to the general public the ONLY thing that will help the cause is money. The legislature must be offered more to can this than support support. Its really that simple. Sad, but simple.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Not because it will reach people who need to know; I suspect that most clueful people here already realize that SOPA and PIPA are awful legislation, written by industry lobbyists and supported by their pet Congressmen -- who have been well-paid for their votes. But because it will change the dialogue from "Reddit is blacking out" to "Two sites are blacking out" and then -- when another one joins "Three sites are blacking out" and then "Many sites are blacking out" and then "A lot of sites are blacking out" and that is when it will matter.
It matters because it shows we'll make sacrifices to make a point. It's easy to post something whining about how bad these bills are, but much, much tougher to actually give up something to back that up. The supporters of these bills know that. They're counting on the millions and millions of us out here to grump about it...and move on. To ignore it, as if it doesn't matter to us, doesn't apply to us. We need to demonstrate that it DOES matter, that we're not going to let it go.
A blackout isn't the end of that, of course. It's only the beginning. But it would be a good way to start.
Back when they were trying to pass the Communications Decency Act back in 1996, a bunch of the major web sites changed their pages to black backgrounds and included a link explaining why they were doing it. I remember that really getting my attention the day I went to Yahoo (remember when Yahoo was important?) and seeing that for the first time.
If someone like Google or Facebook did that to protest SOPA today, I guarantee that it would get major news attention.
I don't. I think that Reddit moderations are much more prone to "I disagree with this post so I'm going to vote it down" and groupthink. And uncapped moderations doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Slashdot comments on a scale of 1 to 5, that's reasonable. Reddit comments on a scale of 1 to a million doesn't really work, the top comments have thousands of upvotes and no one reads the later ones. Anyway, different user populations are going to vote differently no matter what system you implement.
Disclaimer: I am a reddit admin
Here is what I'm hoping to see as the result of the blackout:
* Awareness raised among the users who don't login to the site(a majority of our traffic).
* A day of action which encourages people to contact their representatives.
* Other web properties participating in some form of highly-visible protest. A lot of the big players are considering how far they can go in protest. Hopefully the step we are taking here will give them some encouragement.
Jimmy Wales recently indicated that he is interested in joining us. If Wikipedia joins in a blackout, the message would reach a huge number of people, and will hopefully make a splash in mainstream media and news coverage.
Well, as they say, 90% of everything is crap. On slashdot, something like 30-40% of comments get modded up, usually to 5, 33% or more of what you see still falls into the 90% category even if moderation is perfect. On Reddit, and with unlimited positive scores in general, you're going to see a much smaller number of comments moderated up to the point of visibility, so you're more likely to be limited to the 10% of comments that are actually good. The problem is, that assumes perfect moderation, which isn't the case. Slashdot is much more likely to catch a good comment that not everyone agrees with because it only takes 4 moderators to agree with it to move it to the top of the pile (baring of course, the "I disagree" downmods). A busy thread on Reddit might require several hundred people to upvote it before it's really visible to the average user which isn't likely to happen for an unpopular post, no matter how informative or insightful it is.
I've actually found the opposite - I've come back to Slashdot from Reddit because Slashdot's moderation system, as simplistic as it is, seems to be less susceptible to groupthink/hivemind tendencies. I'd bet this is because here you must have your moderation moderated, and only citizens in good standing are given mod points.
I'm still confused about how SOPA is supposed to prevent (or at least hinder) piracy and file sharing. All it does is break the domain name system, it's equivalent to defacing highway signs, the IP still work just fine. People can easily edit their hosts file to be whatever they want. How is this at all hindering the p2p file sharing? What are they going to do, make it illegal to share 32-bit numbers? I present to you http://3259460367/ ... This entire law seems seriously ill conceived and idiotic at best.
"Reddit's planned 12-hour 'blackout' on January 18 sounds like an ineffectual, if not self-defeating, strategy for opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act."
Yep, no trolling there.
I8-D
HOWEVER... I'd need a nice, simple, easy to understand block of text to put up explaining SOPA and why it's bad. No technical words, no fancy terminology. Hell, if I can keep it to 2-syllable words only, all the better.
Collateral damage.
Why those two words? Major carriers and websites are held liable for the content of their users even when one decides to go rogue and abuse their services. This includes sites such as Academic Earth, CosmoLearning, Google, Facebook, Reddit, Slashdot, Sourceforce, Steam, Wikipedia, and Youtube; and removing one of these can make a significant impact on progress.
The only good thing about the law is that they add provisions to prevent abuse. However, that should have been in the DMCA instead of SOPA - or at least within generic set of laws.
The problem with Slashdot is the huge amount of groupthink and related moderation. Slashdot has a HUGE problem with downmodding any non-popular opinion (within slashdot crowd). Reddit addresses that, while Slashdot does not. For example, look at any comment that even points out that piracy might not be right, open source programs might not be that good or that Microsoft could sometimes be right. They are instantly downmodded, based on groupthink and not even wanting to hear dissenting opinions.
Sorry, but a SOPA does away with due process. This is our constitutional right, and not something that any bill should take away unless there is an amendment to the constitution.
By Law, we're supposed to be assumed innocent until proven guilty. Again, SOPA assumes guilty until proven innocent. Again this is not constitutional.
Want to fix this bill, write the bill where it follows due process and constitutional law. Not something that gives a thug at the RIA or BSA or anyone else the ability to bypass law.
Look, I'm all for making things legal and right. I do not think that people should use the internet to steal. But we have laws already in place that allow for prosecution. The issue is not that we don't have laws, but rather that the RIA, BSA, and a few other companies want instant gratification.
Lets extend this mind set. There are a few shoplifters that go out to lunch, steal a few goodies, then go back to the office. Do we allow Police to shut down a building because someone could have committed a crime at lunch?
Obviously the answer is no. It's foolish to even think about since we don't follow due process. But when it comes to the Internet we should suddenly allow the same?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It sort of depends. I occasionally get anti-piracy comments modded up on Slashdot. They get modded down on Reddit. I think what might be going on is that Reddit has so many voters that if 60% disagree with you and 40% agree with you, you end up with a cummulative score of all the people who see your comment (+40 - 60 = -20) so your comment on Reddit gets voted down. On Slashdot, only a select number of people have moderator points. Because there are fewer votes going around, you end up with a lot more noise in the signal, which means you can get voted up more often even though it goes against majority opinion.
To say this in more mathematical terms:
If you have a coin that's biased towards landing on heads 60% of the time, and you flip that coin 100 times, you're going to end up with around 60 heads (-60), 40 tails (+40). Added up, that equals -20. Even with randomness, it's very unlikely that you'll end up with a positive value (i.e. more tails than heads).
But, if you flip that coin only three times, you might get three tails (for a total of +3 upvotes) some fraction of the time (40%*40%*40% = 6.4%). And one head and two tails (for a total of +1 upvotes) some of the time - about 29% of the time in this example.
The Slashdot moderation system is like the one with fewer coin flips, which creates more noise in the whole upvote/downvote system. I'm not saying that Slashdot's moderation is great or that there aren't problems with it; I sometimes get annoyed by it, too. I'm just doubtful that Reddit's system is actually better.
For example, look at any comment that even points out that piracy might not be right, open source programs might not be that good or that Microsoft could sometimes be right. They are instantly downmodded, based on groupthink and not even wanting to hear dissenting opinions.
They are not, if you do it right.
Yes, that means that you have to use better and more extensive arguments, provide references etc, while your opponent in the debate might not. But Slashdot is not advertised as a platform where every viewpoint gets equal treatment. If you want to participate, learn to deal with it.
I tend to disagree. Reddit has a strong arm of users who vouch for the "reddiquitte" and defend those who are backing opinion with tangible facts. Its rare that you see a well written post that gets downvoted into hiding so long as it doesn't flame others or use emotionally charged wording. Sure it wont necessarily reach top comment status but it is still visible.
Why can't we have both? Up/down votes (with no cap) given only to citizens in good standing, with meta-moderation?
Jimbo Wales is supporting a blackout idea, and they're rounding up the votes to make it happen. A tricky thing for Wiki to do on short notice as they typically govern by consensus.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So what's the point of all these "blackouts"? Most sites, like Reddit and Slash are full of people already aware of SOPA. Do you honestly think a group of congressmen are going to be like "wow, reddit went down today, we better clean up our act"?
SOPA, if precisely enforced) will eliminate user-generated content from the Internet, reverting it to a dumb tube where you can watch what you are fed.
Couldn't we technically have it all, though? We could have slashdot as it is, but also with the option of looking at is as reddit with just the +/- . We'd have the default blessed moderators wth their points, but everyone else could also moderate everything in any way they wanted to their hearts content.
We could allow people to tag every comment an every moderation and every tag with +1 leftistfuturist or whatever they desire. Ans every user could tag every other user as anything they like and we could have algorithms to calculate that judging from tags and moderations x/y/b, user thisorthat is probably a fundamentalistglobalnukewarmingrelativist.
The site could still present its default face just as it is and hand out modpoints just as it always has, but if we'd just throw enough hardware and databases and money on it, we could have it all. Just data, customiable in any way you want.
?
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Metamoderation makes Slashdot worse, because moderators who go against the groupthink receive a lifetime ban from moderating, so you end up with a system where only people with the "correct" beliefs have mod points.
Metamoderation is good for eliminating trolls, but it suppresses minority opinions even more than a straight upvote/downvote system.
Interesting, since your UID indicates you're rather new here.
Correlation is not causation. In this case, "when a particular individual signed up for an account" is not the same as "when a particular individual started reading."
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I agree that there are an awful lot of +5 comments, and relatively few +3 and so on. As it is, it really only sorts comments into bad, neutral, and good. I think that's something that could better be sorted out by changing the balance between number of mod points available per day and the cap on points. Make it go to +10 but don't change the number of votes given out each day. The percentages of top rated comments will go down, and it will be better at sorting out the good ones.
I think a cap is still necessary, as it forces mods to move on to other comments. After a certain point on reddit, the top comments just keep snowballing until you see comments with 3000 points. Not just parent comment either, the children comments are also overrated.. Meanwhile equally insightful or funny comments in lower threads are +40. That's worse sorting in my experience.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I've been browsing /. at +5 for years. Occasionally I'll delve deeper into a thread, to see the context, but my experience is that once an article has attracted a couple of hundred comments or so almost anything below about +3 isn't worth reading.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I've routinely found that the people who complain about group think think their comments are insightful and informative, when they actually tend to look like overrated trolling to me. I'm still mildly amused by the guy who thought that his claims that all environmentalists want to commit genocide should be +5 insightful, and not -1 troll. Clearly, Slashdot wasn't ready to accept his truth.
Fanatically anti-fanatical