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.
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.
Sorry, didn't read TFA, what are we talking about again? Ah, comments.
I like making comments about comments about a story about comments about comments.
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);
except you can't use them in this thread...
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
'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
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!
Slashdot's system only lets users mod a comment one point at a time, they can't mod a comment higher than 5, they can't use all their mod point on one comment, they can't mod their own comments, and enough people are given mod points at any one time that the biases should reflect those of the users.
You can also read the FAQ.
Last Post!!!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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 tried having multiple accounts, but the arguments between accounts quickly got out of hand.
At first, it was just the other account made way too many stupid arguments, but it soon escalated to threats of physical violence. I had to keep a close watch on myself to keep me from slashing my own tires. (I tried hiding, but I quickly learned that I knew where I lived and where I liked to hide.)
After two or three "unfortunate incidents" I decided to close all but one of the accounts. Things settled down for a while, but I still have to keep a close eye on me in case I go back and login to one of the "closed" accounts.
---
Only two of my personalities have delusions, but one of them is paranoid and the other is out to get him.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
Ah, but there's the evil metamoderation. I've had my own comments come up when metamoderating!
Muahahahaha!!!
Free Martian Whores!
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.
The simple answer is that there is no perfect moderation system; they all suck in different ways. Democratic systems like that on Reddit give the power of moderation to the users, and democracy is frequently called "tyranny of the majority" for a good reason: unpopular, minority opinions are always suppressed because the majority doesn't like them. The alternative is non-democratic moderation, where the moderation is done by a group of elites, which is what you usually see on sites like newpaper sites. The problem there, of course, is that you're subject not to the biases of the majority of the users, but the biases of the elites or the owners of the websites (so comments the newpaper owners don't like get deleted). Or, you can try to have a hybrid system somewhat like Slashdot has, where there's some elites who have super-moderation capabilities but the users also have powers, and also some of the users are given more powers (metamoderation). This sounds good in theory, but doesn't seem to work out in practice any better than the alternatives, it's just different.
Personally, I think the big problems with moderation on Slashdot are 1) users don't have many opportunities to moderate (they're only given points once in a while), unlike on Reddit where any user can mod any post at any time, and 2) users aren't allowed to moderate posts in the same discussion as one they post in, which leads to many users (like myself) not bothering to use the moderation points they're given. I don't feel like being restricted from speaking my mind just because I tried to mod up someone's post.
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?
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.
I've thought about setting up a second, sock-puppet account with which to argue with myself, but haven't yet, either due to laziness or a general lack of self-interest...
Or are you afraid that the sock-puppet account will get moderated more favorably than your original account?
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
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