Slashdot Mirror
Comments About Comments
theodp writes "This weekend's NY Times is all-about-the-comments. First, Michael Erard recounts the history of Web site comments and explains how their technical origins have shaped the actual commentary we've come to expect as usual today. On dealing with people-behaving-badly, Erard writes, 'Only a few [high-traffic sites] seem to have tried user-moderation systems like the one developed by Slashdot's creator, Rob Malda. Founded in 1997, Slashdot rapidly began to suffer from what Malda called 'signal-to-noise-ratio problems' as tens of thousands of users showed up. Rather than embracing the chaos (which was a hallmark of Usenet, another digital channel of communications) or locking things down with moderators (which e-mail lists did), Malda figured out a way for users to moderate one another. Moderation became like jury duty, something you were called to do.' Next, NY Times community manager Bassey Etim, who oversees 13 comment moderators, offers up his comments on comments, agreeing that 'the comments are where the real America is.' Finally, there's Gawker's next-generation Kinja, which aims to further blur the lines between stories, blog entries, and comments."
It's obvious that comments are what make some websites attractive. This is one of them.
In Slashdot I usually find very interesting what other people think about the news. Sometimes, there're some jewels: Comments about people who really know what the news is about and offer their perspective. I same those comments as bookmarks. I wonder why there's not a "favorite" option to save them.
Made even more appropriate by not actually being the first post.
I never understood the desire to 'first post'. It's like saying "I've not a single useful thought in my head, and look how fast I can let everybody know it!"
'the comments are where the real America is.'
There was this article recently on Yahoo! Finance about people giving Liberty to prevent a financial melt down.
Anyway, the article and many commentors parroted the argument that the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 caused the financial meltdown. Many commentators and pundits have "reasoned" that the law caused the meltdown because it "forced" banks to lend to poor people who couldn't afford the loans. Did they have data to back up what they said?
Fuck no! Rush, Hannity, O'Rielly and all their clones pulled it out of their ass.
Here is what some economists found out
...the available evidence seems to run counter to the contention that the CRA contributed in any substantive way to the current mortgage crisis.
tl;dr; Most of "Real America" just mindlessly parrots what they see and hear in the media.
More moderated = more groupthink.
That is not a good thing.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
However, without moderation, the noise often overtakes the signal and you're left without any discussion, debate, or sharing of useful information whatsoever. Also not a good thing.
I think that says more about the general discussion around things like politics than anything else.
People dont want to discuss it, they want to yell it at one another loudly. The louder voices tend to 'win' more.
He misspelled "grammar".
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Moderators should be identified.
I disagree. Moderators who must be identified would just lead to harassment of moderators. There's always going to be asshats who moderate stuff down they disagree with (and I doubt every asshat who does that being exposed for doing that would change their tune), but I'd foresee that exposing the handles of moderators would be like not allowing anonymous posting; it'd try to cut down on the problem, but also cut out a lot of moderation that doesn't follow the conventional groupthink.
Much like commenting, at least the choice of moderating anonymously should still be kept (at least for Slashdot's method). Similar to non-anonymous posting, though, non-anonymous moderations being weighted differently could be a possible avenue for improvement.
See, the funny thing about that is that I've had many very liberal opinions modded into oblivion solely for their conclusions. So I'm having a hard time getting convinced that there's some sort of liberal effort to mod down your posts.
I took the liberty of reviewing the recent posts of yours that had been modded down. In some cases, you indeed have a legitimate gripe: Reasonable people can differ about the correct way to handle the Syrian civil war, for example. But here's something else you wrote that got modded to -1 quickly:
Spending money on a bullshit "green" scams does not benefit mankind either. Green energy with Democrats in power is like defense with Republicans in power, a buzzword to facilitate transfer of taxpayer money to private hands.
Here are some legitimate reasons to mod that down:
1. The use of the words like "bullshit" and "scam" were unnecessarily abusive. You can argue that the programs in question are a poor use of funds without language like that.
2. You provided no evidence or logical argument for your position. Among other things, nothing in your post refuted the idea that the green energy programs were exactly what they said they were.
3. Since green energy programs cost taxpayers approximately 3.5% of the amount we spend on the military, equating them is misleading. (The 3.5% number comes from the $90 billion cited by the Romney campaign divided by approximately $2600 billion reportedly spent on the military over the same period.)
A non-troll post that would probably not get the same treatment would have been written something like this:
"Green energy programs in the past have not been very effective. After spending $90 billion on them, green sources still account for only 7.3% of energy consumption. This will be just yet another waste of money."
I am officially gone from