Slashdot Mirror
Popular Science Is Getting Rid of Comments
Daniel_Stuckey writes "From an article announcing the sites' decision to do away with comments: 'It wasn't a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter. ... even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. ... A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.'"
This comes alongside news that Google is trying to clean up YouTube comments by adding integration with Google+. "You’ll see posts at the top of the list from the video’s creator, popular personalities, engaged discussions about the video, and people in your Google+ Circles."
"Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again"
And here I was under the impression that everything in science was always up for grabs. This is just the mag trying to silence dissent. I happen to agree with evolution but I have no problem debating it with people who do not. Nor do I believe evolution is settled science, we continue to learn a great deal and there is always a possibility of some groundbreaking new development to come along and rock the whole foundation.
Between these sites slamming the door shut on public comments, walled login gardens, and NSA slimy fingers on everything, it's just super depressing. Feels like a mortal wound.
Seriously, critique the Slashdot comment system if you like, but it's a thousand times better than 99% of the sites out there. And it's pretty simple. Sites not ripping off this system seem like they conscientiously want a reason to slam the door on public conversation.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
All the better to just push an opinion.
A meaningless comment. In fact, pretty much a troll.
PopSci brings up a lot of good points, and they have made a decision that I think more and more on-line pubs will make. You are free to send them a Letter to the Editor, but these ugly snipe-fests that go on in many forums have little if any value.
The comments at the Seattle Times are a great example, having been taken over by extremists who apparently have no voice anywhere else.
The fact is that in most forums that don't have a "moderation system" become flooded with trolls that render the whole forum concept useless for any real conversation.
PopSci isn't the first to ditch forums, and will not be the last.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
As a long-time user who sometimes choses to post AC and is always logged in, I start at 2. It's my understanding that the 2 comes from having good Karma. I've been around long enough to remember when numeric Karma was visible to users. This resulted in contests to see who could rack up the most points, which became a problem. Sometimes people like myself would get bored and commit "Karma Suicide" to re-start the game. They hid numeric Karma to stop that. I haven't read SlashCode; but I understand the number is still lurking in there so that the system can decide where to start our posts.
Anyway, I digress. I don't want money factoring into the equation. The Slashdot moderation system went through several changes early on and has stabilized quite nicely AFAIK. Would any actual Slashdot employees care to comment on the last time a major change was made to the algorithm? It isn't broken. Don't fix it.
I don't think it's patented either. I too wonder why more sites don't adopt it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
> A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics.
True worldwide, alarmingly so in the US, where "it inconveniences my politics" carries the same weight in discussions as "there is no evidence for this hypothesis".
For some reason The Register also seems to have good quality comments. As does The Guardian, so it can be possible to build a commenting community that works. Maybe it's a British thing?
Good comments or comments you agree with? I ask because they aren't necessarily the same thing.
I couldn't agree more. My time is valuable and its too precious to waste on wading through troll droppings.
There really are many with an ideological bent, who are actively seeking to disrupt sites discussing science for purposes that have nothing to do with science, but rather to influence discussion that may come from the consequences of scientific findings.
The reality is that modern science has become so specialized that few commenters are really capable of adding anything to a meaningful discussion anyway. For example, what kind of meaningful input might one expect of the average commenter provide say on the discussion of the importance of Uryshon's Lemma or Gershgorin's Circle Theorem to modern bioinformatics or aerodynamics? It is a shame that the electronic equivalent of graffiti artists have vandalized so many useful commenting sites to suit their own personal and ideological fantasies, Particularly, since it denies so many a peek into the intrinsic beauty inherent in such discussions.
You're right, however, and without some form of moderation or peer review the entire effort takes on the character defined by the lowest IQ posting. Many may complain that scientist are retreating to their ivory towers, but the sad fact is that the vandal's sacking every website they can overrun make such towers the only safe haven to continue to do science. If they want into the ivory towers, they will first have to develop the credibility to enter.
Its far better to submit "letters" to the editor, with comments and let them make the best judgement as to which most advance the topic under discussion. This can be done by a few moderators on most sites. I would be quite happy not to see my own posts or questions, if I knew I was instead reading better or more informative ones.
In the earlier days of the internet, forums and news groups and such led to incredibly brilliant discussions. And I think some people at the time felt this would eventually lead to a paradise of "mass human thought engine" resulting into some sort of "hive brain" of human collective thought.
But in the real world, most people are just bored or bigoted or want attention --- and humans as a whole are more Homer Simpson or Miley Cyrus than Albert Einstein or Carl Sagan.
And this reality won. For now. Scientific and intellectual thought will find a new way to win again. Given enough time.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
> And this why we can't have nice things. Thanks a lot!
We can. But nice things require a lot of attention, the lesson is more that "nice things just don't happen by themselves".
Nice things have to be perpetually earned and re-earned. Sucks but true. There are always barbarians at the gate; there always will be.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
They have. They've scientifically developed a way for Christian fundamentalists to complain about articles about evolution, political conservatives to lambast every major article about climate science, a way for every nutjob conspiracy theorist to have their own say about events, a way for scientists in their actual field of specialty to discuss issues, and a way for generalist laymen who are genuinely interested in science to discuss it:
Let them discuss it in their own communities and on their own websites.
I keep hearing people say this, but I have found the comments on Slashdot to come from quite a diverse group. There's no doubt that there's some deep groupthink such as the anti-Apple and anti-Microsoft sentiments on this site, yet you can still find comments praising both of these companies modded up despite the overall bias against them.
I am strongly against this idea. First of all, there are so many people commenting on the site that it would be nearly impossible to block out all of the noise one commenter at a time. Secondly, there are some people that have very rational viewpoints and make great contributions to the discussion 90% of the time, but there's one or two topics in which they go off the deep end. The current moderation system allows you to mod them up when they're making good points and mod them into oblivion when they go mental.
That's the problem. Simply because it's unpopular doesn't mean it's wrong as you pointed out, but that fosters group think and /. has no shortage of people who believe that anything contrary to their very *special* world view is unworthy of being modded up. And of course then there are the mod trolls, or people who mod down someone they simply don't like because they can.
Om, nomnomnom...
Slashdot needs to give out more mod points. There aren't enough, and it limits the number of comments. People get depressed if they never have a comment modded up.
Right now, moderation does a good job modding down really bad comments, but a lot of comments that are good don't get modded up, because they don't catch the right person's eye on a quick read-through. It's ok to have some mediocre comments modded up, as long as the trolls and spam stay hidden.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In the early days of the internet, only those involved with academia were online. Even the least-educated were at the very least students in higher education.
Let me precis this argument:
(1) The moderation scheme here essentially filters out postings that disagree with the "group-think."
(2) Commenters here are "unusually intelligent" and they define the group-think.
(3) Therefore if you disagree with the group-think, you are probably not "unusually intelligent" (and hence your opinion is probably not worthy of consideration; you belong with the trolls and drunkards).
The problem is step (2), which is a lot of self-serving bollocks. I think the suggestion that Slashdot moderation fosters group-think is on the money.
i LIKE strange comments. i love youtube AS IT IS. i DO NOT want to see featured comments from "personalities." I like the offensive and non-PC stuff from unknown. That's why I watch YouTube and not other forms of media. I want the raw, uncensored, the good and the bad. I wouldn't be surprised if Google ruins it, as they're on a streak of ruining all of their products lately.
Like democracy, Slashdot's moderation system is the worst one out there, except for all the other alternatives.
I'd have to say this is absolutely the case as well. I've been pretty disillusioned with the simple up or down vote system that Ars Technica implemented just recently. It absolutely highlights the problems of down voting due to simple disagreement when it was initially instituted to help stem obvious trolls or abuse. Devolved down into the "downvote, don't agree" syndrome immediately and has led to some very strange groupthink because of it.
Funny part is that the real conversations/debates just happen further down the list/next pages where only the crickets chirp and the freaks are too stubborn to let things go while they speak out into an increasingly empty chamber. Not sure why I've been finding it so fascinating.
Slashdot, despite all its flaws, has been the best site I've known to watch it as it evolves. I applaud /.'s use of complexity in the commenting system and wish more sites like Ars would fucking use it. Not the simple up or down popularity contests that the majority of disqus using sites have become before entropy in the 4th dimension just wipes it all clean for another day, another article.
For good or ill, the human race is engaging in debate on a massive scale now that we didn't before. All the good learning and counter points that have helped me grow, or pissed me off entirely, have been in forums and comments. Not in books. For despair I read the comments under news articles. For absolute hope, the comments and forums in MOOC's are amazing!
Our roots as humans are completely on display in commenting systems in a way never before possible. Taco and all you fuckers here on /. have absolutely been pioneers in this fascinating area of computer science meets cultural chaos.
I don't think I could ever quite do it justice, other than to say thank you and fuckoff! I absolutely say that with love to each one of you bastards. Slashdot is broken and always was, but I know my thinking and knowledge has grown and is better off for even the small amount of participation I've engaged in here.
PopSci are pussies for giving in too soon without adding the complexity to the system like we have here on good, old, aggravating Slashdot.
Good points well made. There are definitely some posts that get down-voted because they go against the common opinion of the site but as you say better posts that go against the norm are normally ok. It does seem hard to get a postly highly rated if it goes against some of the stronger memes (suggesting punishing piracy isn't morally wrong for example) but that's why people with good posting records get rated up automatically.
What people tend to ignore is that 90%+ of the time two opposing views can exist on Slashdot without one side being modded to hell. At least one of the responses to your post was someone saying it was basically a load of bollocks and at the moment both your post and his are equally rated, which is a pretty good sign that group-think doesn't define anything.
Pay some people or give the better commenters the ability to temporarliy ban trolls. That's how you solve the problem, not by removing commenting.
If you disagree, you should write a comment explaining why, otherwise, what have you added to the conversation? You're just taking part in a popularity contest at that point.
I almost never mod stories when I have mod points. Why? Because the stories that I have enough interest in to read through I want to post in and you can't mod in stories you post in. Stories I don't post in I usually don't have any interest in.
This leads to a paradox where things you have knowledge of you can't mod, and things you don't know about you can mod.
I think you should be able to apply mod points into stories you post in, but make the limitations more specific -- ie, you can't mod the parent you replied to and you can't mod the replies to your post. This would prevent the self-promotion and group think because you wouldn't be able to promote favorable responses, either.