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."
Personally, I like making comments on comments. I especially like self-referencing ones.
. . . comments on my comments!
Earn my blessing, or my wrath!
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
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.
Good to see Gawker making a positive contribution to the world in which they exist.
>> Only a few [high-traffic sites] seem to have tried user-moderation systems
Haven't been to YouTube lately, have you?
Sorry, didn't read TFA, what are we talking about again? Ah, comments.
Kinja is one thing . . . Gawker's aberration with fake video play buttons, cross-linked unrelated topics and animated gifs is another. Please don't relate the two if you care for either.
I like making comments about comments about a story about comments about comments.
The more you moderate a forum, or prevent users from posting anonymously, the less honest it will be. If you really must moderate, do like Slashdot and let the users do it.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
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!"
Horribly depressing.
Yo dawg, I heard you like comments, so I made a comment on your story about comments on comments, so you can comment while you comment.
do {print "Mini-Geek Rules!\n";}
until ($TheEndOfTheWorld);
'Never look at the bottom half of the internet.'
'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.
The easiest way to score a First Post is to not even read the summary, let alone the article, Since everybody then dogpiles onto the First Post, it lets the least qualified poster set the direction of the whole discussion.
Dumb,
If you structured it so "last post" was a thing, people would never stop commenting. At least the race to first post is self limiting.
John
. . . . because of the existence of chatbots, trollbots, etc., since at least the late 1990s (automated software agents programmed to seek and respond in specific patterns), and since contracts have been publicly announced in the last few years (meaning they've been effectively working on them the previous decade!!!) to program "ConsensusBots" --- automated software to "persuade" (i.e., misinform and disinform) large numbers at popular newsy sites and social networking sites --- many, if not most, comments today are highly suspect!
Comments to an article which comments about comments means our comments about the article are comments about comments about comments. And if someone replies to my post then the site may hit a stack overflow due to excessive recursion.
Yet the exit nodes are blocked by default.
That's Tor's problem. It doesn't disguise itself very well. An intentional 'flaw', maybe?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Coincidentally, 4chan is trying to make its moderation more transparent. They've created a page (https://www.4chan.org/bans) that samples recent moderator actions. It's informative about how users of a fairly permissive cesspool still break rules.
Last Post!!!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
So we added comments to your comments, so now you can comment on your comments.
Also by poster, as some tend to be more interesting than opthers.
It's a shame Slashdot hasn't done anything to make its moderation system more dynamic. The +1 bonus doesn't really do much to separate from the noise when just about everyone gets to use it. It would be nice if karma could be used promote top posters even higher. Something like a +2 or +3 bonus if you've had three 5's (possibly excluding +5 funny) in the past month.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
. . . especially when the needs vary with each site. I run Flayrah (a furry news/features site) and implemented a comment moderation system based on weighted ratings and user karma across comments and posts that fades and folds comments as their rating decreases. It works pretty well for us, but it took a lot of time to balance, as well as technical expertise which most site-runners don't have. Sometimes people complain about the "rule of the majority", but in practice they tend to do quite well. The alternative was more heavy-handed moderation by selected moderators, who have their own biases.
Agreed. It's less a jury and more a beauty contest, where the judges are all in the audience... and nobody has enough time to vett all the comments so the sooner you reply the more likely you are to get noticed.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Wrong.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Meaning: racist, misogynist, vain, hide-bound, jingoistically ignorant; all smothered in the secret sauce of the implied threat of violence.
... Like on Slashdot. What usually happens is that, over time, certain behaviors or ideas end up getting reinforced within the community. For example, "government bad", "open source good", "patents and copyrights bad", "bitcoins good". Or just the general cynicism about absolutely everything.
Eventually the community becomes so polarized that anyone who disagrees on some minor point gets modded into oblivion. The rating system ends up as a popularity contest, where the most commonly-held opinion will always win, no matter how banal the comment is. So people are forced to either adopt the popular opinion, or give up on commenting, perpetuating the cycle, and devolving into groupthink.
I think, despite its flaws, 4chan has my favorite kind of comment system (if you're willing to wade through the shit). Put all comments on the same level; let users decide for themselves whether or not they agree with each other. You'll always have a healthy mix of perspective that way.
Since moderation is on-topic ...
The biggest weakness with Slashdot's current system is the way that early posts get a disproportionate amount of attention, and mod-points. When a new story shows up, so long as I post within 5-10 minutes it's pretty easy to get modded to +5, even as an AC.
Try it yourself - as soon as a new story hits, quickly summarize your gut reaction to the summary, hit post, and watch the mod-points accumulate. The downside, of course, is that anybody who shows up late will struggle to get heard amongst the noise.
Oh yes, and I really dislike it when 50% of an entire comments section consists of replies to one post. This seems to happen because people want their post to get noticed.
Can anybody think of a good solution to these problems? Or are there other moderation problems which need dealing with?
... became widespread and new generations grew up with the internet, 99% of internet comments are mostly garbage. I've found that Websites run by intelligent, educated people who put their real face, name, background on the net tend to be more informative than random commenters as the net has grown. Since as more of the general population and new generation of kids begin to lurk and comment on websites comment quality goes through surges of greatness and mediocrity as generations come and go.
As an adult I find partisan comments the most uninformed, history and politics for anyone with any intelligence is IMMENSELY complex. Trying to apply black and white solutions and old out-dated 19th century political ideologies to complex problems is not sign of intelligence. Most of slashdot tends to fall into the extremely distorted american political spectrum since most slashdot commenters/moderators are american.
I find as the internet became a mass phenomenon slashdot comment quality has become almost as awful as the rest of the internet. The political comments tend to be the most uninformed since it highlights the deep indoctrination of the american public. Since most comments tend to be from the most populous country (america), 300 million vs say 30 million in canada.
So you get a massive boatload of nonsense when anyone mentions politics, anything deep and requiring serious thought and analysis can only usually be found through those who are honest and open and put a face to their opinions.
Those of us who see the world through technical eyes know many of our current values, ideals and institutions are not in line with what is actually true about the universe. We're doing all sorts of irrational bone headed shit in all areas. I find america and americans bizarre in their adherence to simple minded political and values based sloganeering. It's not the sign of an erudite mind.
In order to find solutions you have to study how institutions change over time and they must be informed by how the universe and nature actually operate, all of our institutions are totally out of line with this kind of thinking.
This is likely to get modded down to "-1 Disagree", but I guess that's the point. If someone says something positive about religion, protecting their children's innocence, etc... it gets modded down. Don't think like the loud members of the group? Here's a mod down for you. Think that the teleology of the universe points to a cosmic designer? Here's a "-1 Disagree" for you and a bunch of hate to go with it. You must think like the hive mind or go unheard.
Comment moderation like that on Reddit and Slashdot censors dissension and encourages hate.
Slashdot closes comments on old stories. So you could make it a thing to try to get your last post in under the wire...
Not that anybody would care. A first post at least potentially has some visibility (though it's usually downvoted to the point of invisibility for most people). Nobody is ever likely to notice your "last post" and become envious; it's not much of a game.
You did that on purpose, and you're wrong.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Moderators should be identified.
If you are going to moderate, you should be willing to stand behind your moderation. Anonymous moderation leads to people down modding things they simple disagree with rather than flagging actual abuse.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"the comments are where the real America is"
Uh, nope.
Apparently you are mistaken, since as I reply, your comment has a score of 4.
It is true that some people mod down comments because they disagree. But there are often other cooler heads who bring balance to the moderation.
Usually, controversial comments get modded down because there is no actual substance to the comments. And since such posters often start with an attitude of paranoia and overestimate their own importance, they DO get modded down, and they think they are proved right.
I like to moderate week-old comments, when I get mod points.
Imagine the poster's surprise: "Hey! I got modded up for a comment I wrote last week!"
Gives me a warm feeling: two parts happiness, one part mischief.
-kgj
No that's a really ghastly idea. The one thing about Slashdot that is decidedly old fashioned and brilliant is that there are no celebrities on here - it may have problems but having celebrities definitely isn't one of them.
One thing that would be of interest to me would be to see the posts with the most up-votes and down-votes - being able to find the most controversial posts would be as interesting as seeing the most admired.
I think as a Brit I have learned a lot from reading the posts over the years and I think that the signal to noise ratio is pretty good on here, the attention span of most site users is higher than average so I enjoy reading through with nothing hidden when I have the time.
Threaded posting has still not arrived on important news sites like the BBC and they contribute little towards debate unlike Slashdot.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Obvious troll is obvious. You're baiting people to disagree with your anti-semetic attitude so that you can reply, "See!!!oneone111!!! You're a hypocrite since you want to censor me, but you don't want to censor religious people!!!"
AC that you linked to was obviously trolling to make a point. He was just promoting the caricature of religious people that sites like Slashdot tend to promote. This is exactly the kind of hate that I'm talking about. He pretends to be a conservative making anti-semitic remarks to "prove" that religious people are all ignorant hateful people. The irony is that rather than proving this lame caricature, he proves to anyone who can discern that the obvious troll was being obvious that this kind hate and bigotry exists on sites like this.
Right, because I wrote that it will get modded down. If I say that it will then it typically won't. So basically they're trying to prove me wrong by modding up instead of down. I simply don't buy the idea of the "no substance" argument and here's why. This is how Slashdot typically is IMHO (and yes, I'm exaggerating a bit):
Christians are dumb (Score:6, amazing!!!)
Flying Spaghetti Monster! Woo! Turtles all the way down!! Yeah!
Re: Christians are dumb (Score:-72, religious moron)
That's just a caricature of Christians. Many Christians such as ____ and ____ feel differently. Here's what they actually think...
Re: Christians are dumb (Score:9001, over nine-thousand)
Ur stupid. You think that's a valid proof of god
Re: Christians are dumb (Score:-pi x infinity, why does he bother)
I wasn't trying to prove God. I just was saying that this isn't what Christians actually believe.
Other than the scores, I'm actually not far off. I once was told that my proofs for God was so full of logical fallacies when in fact I wasn't trying to prove God, but rather correct a misconception. The poster went on to explain how sad it was that ignorant people like me exists. If that isn't hate, I don't know what is.
Frankly, I come to Slashdot partly as a place to see some discussion without all the fantasy lala fairy-tale nonsense. To avoid the mass delusion which runs most of the world. So your argument actually seems like a feature, not a bug. Someone calling your ideas "dumb" is not the same thing as "hate" and propaganda such as that is a good example of something that should be treated with down-moderation.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
No Comment
. .
I agree. The solution is obvious. Just don't let anyone post first!
(Also, I have yet to see a conversation take off in the direction of a serious discussion about the golden girls. I think we're safe.)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I'm pretty sure you just uncovered the secret to Slashdot's success.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I made this comment about political threads some time back -- there should be no votes/mods on political threads. It tends to be a mosh pit anyway so let it be an every-voice-is-equal one.
I come here for the love
How many thoughts do you think Olympic runners have going through their heads during a race? It's all about the race to first. It's the passion. It's the drive. It's upholding a tradition, a legacy, and a way of life.
The G
I really dislike these comments, now what he said was said in a nice way but he's being purposely deceptive. i.e. he's being sophsitic. Sophist : The use of fallacious arguments, esp. with the intention of deceiving.
"Think that the teleology of the universe points to a cosmic designer?"
This is not the problem, the problem is that you don't state what your religion is if you have one. You don't give us any information and so you come off as 'reasonable'. Most religious comments are made by people who haven't thought long and hard about their claims.
There is a reason why people downvote, because many people are uninformed and JUST WRONG and they are blissfully unaware that they are wrong. Most people who say 'you don't respect my opinion' HAVE NEVER CHECKED whether their opinion is uninformed or not. That is, they don't put any effort into checking whether their opinion is true or not. Religion is bullshit that's why people who are religious are downvoted because a sizable chunk of slashdotters have religion in their family and are more familiar with religion and god then people who espouse such nonsense. Many of them were once religious in their youth and ended up rejecting it because - I know this is hard for you to believe THEY studied and read many religious and scientific books and came to the conclusion religion is bullshit. They put in the damn effort.
The hate comes from people who are blissfully unaware they haven't done their intellectual homework when they espouse their 'opinions'.
When's the last time you've seen an exorcist?
Matthew 8:30-34
30 Some distance from them a large herd of pigs was feeding. 31 The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.” 32 He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. 33 Those tending the pigs ran off, went into the town and reported all this, including what had happened to the demon-possessed men. 34 Then the whole town went out to meet Jesus. And when they saw him, they pleaded with him to leave their region.
When people say "the universe points to a designer" they 90% of the time mean "the god of the holy text/bible in the family I was raised" they DON'T MEAN. "I've examined the scientific evidence and have come to the tentative conclusion that deism is a reasonable hypothesis".
Classic "Chewbacca defense". When all else fails, confuse them. First, you state that I'm being purposefully deceptive by not telling people what my religious beliefs are. I don't think that knowing my religious beliefs strengthens, weakens, or changes the argument. My statement that people who disagree with the majority often are censored and hated upon should stand regardless if I'm a Christian, atheist, or whatever. I provided two examples and one of them did deal with religion, so you got hung up on that. If you must know, I am a Christian, but I only reveal that to dismiss your personal attacks against me.
First you use weasel words like "most", "many", etc... You use these words to attribute your facts to me with an escape route in case I come back and say, "Well actually..." So I wouldn't suggest crying about deception while being deceptive. But since your are talking about me when you use those words, I will reject each one of them.
1.) I haven't thought long and hard about the claims Christianity, I have never checked, etc....
I would beg to differ. I'm not going to turn this into a debate about whether or not God is real so I won't present the evidence here, but I have thought and continue to think long and hard about the claims of religion. Influences that have lead me to this conclusion include Christopher Hitchens, Lawrence Krauss, Hugh Ross, C. S. Lewis, etc... Yes, I purposely left a few more controversial names off in order to not distract from my original point that dissenting opinions beget hate. I put in my homework.
2.) I believe in the 'god' of the family I was raised in.
Seriously? I was not raised in a Christian home, but rather a messed up broken home. I don't believe in the god that says it's okay to beat your spouse and abuse her. I don't believe in the god that says it's okay to engage in destructive behavior that ruins lives. I don't believe in whatever god they followed. And even if I did, this is a textbook example of the genetic fallacy.
3.) I've never seen an exorcist. The Bible mentions exorcism. Therefore the Bible is obviously wrong.
Better question - Have I ever seen manna? The Bible mentions manna. Why hasn't manna been seen since the Exodus? Obviously it never existed, right? This is exactly the same kind of nonintellectual argument that some Christians make when they say, "We can't find the missing gap therefore evolution isn't real." It doesn't work for the Christian and it doesn't work for you. I could go on this long tangent about the doctrine of angels, but again that deviates from my point.
The point is, is that you cannot make these kinds of assumptions about people and then respond with hate or ignorance. Yes I'd rather not see any religious or political talk on Slashdot, but I'm going to step in and correct ignorant comments such as, "Christians all believe X" or "Religion is the cause of all wars" since they simply aren't true. And why defend bad arguments anyway? If you want to convince someone of an idea, wouldn't you want to argue against what they actually believe rather than a distorted caricature?
The +1 bonus doesn't really do much to separate from the noise when just about everyone gets to use it. It would be nice if karma could be used promote top posters even higher. Something like a +2 or +3 bonus if you've had three 5's (possibly excluding +5 funny) in the past month.
Not needed. "Top posters" get modded up. Hell, I usually get more than three 5s every week, often in a single day.
Free Martian Whores!
First post is a chillingly difficult thing to obtain, and a position not given up willingly by the contenders.
Bullshit, it's not hard at all. I try to avoid FPs because some folks will mod a comment down without even reading it just because it's first, no matter how on topic and insightful it is. Why take the trouble of commenting if nobody's going to read it?
You want not only first post but a first post that gets modded to +5? Now, THAT'S rare, but I've done it (had one last week). First, buy a subscription! I don't know what one costs because some anonymous person bought one for me. Subscribers see the stories before they're posted, and the time stamp is there so you'll know WHEN it's posted. So you have a half hour or so to RTFA, think about it, and say something interesting, insightful, informative, whatever (never go for funny on a FP, nobody will see your comment. Funny FP==troll in many minds). Do it in a text editor and copy it, when the story is posted you can post your three paragraph explanation of what the submission was fumblingly trying to say.
Another reason I try to not get FP is because the next day message notification says there are thirty responses to your comment.
PS: leave the hurps and durps at reddit and 4chan where the idiot children live, they're not wanted here at an adult nerd site. They're annoyingly stupid, not cute.
Free Martian Whores!