Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Can We Improve Slashdot?
Hi all. Most of you are already aware that Slashdot was sold by DHI Group last week, and I very much enjoyed answering questions and reading feedback in the comments of that announcement story. There's no doubt that the Slashdot community is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and prolific communities on the web.
I wanted to use this opportunity to get a discussion going on how we can improve Slashdot moving forward. I am not talking about a full re-design that will detract from the original spirit of Slashdot, but rather: user experience, bug fixes, and feature improvements that are requested from actual /. users. We appreciated many of your suggestions in the story announcing the sale, and I have taken note of those suggestions. This story will serve as a more master list for feature requests and improvement suggestions.
We welcome any and all suggestions. Some ideas mentioned in the sale story were, in no particular order: Unicode support, direct messaging, increased cap on comment scores, put more weight on firehose voting to determine which stories make the front page, reduced time required between comments, and many more. We'd love a chance to discuss these suggestions and feature improvements and pros and cons here before we bring them back to our team for implementation.
I wanted to use this opportunity to get a discussion going on how we can improve Slashdot moving forward. I am not talking about a full re-design that will detract from the original spirit of Slashdot, but rather: user experience, bug fixes, and feature improvements that are requested from actual /. users. We appreciated many of your suggestions in the story announcing the sale, and I have taken note of those suggestions. This story will serve as a more master list for feature requests and improvement suggestions.
We welcome any and all suggestions. Some ideas mentioned in the sale story were, in no particular order: Unicode support, direct messaging, increased cap on comment scores, put more weight on firehose voting to determine which stories make the front page, reduced time required between comments, and many more. We'd love a chance to discuss these suggestions and feature improvements and pros and cons here before we bring them back to our team for implementation.
There's no doubt that the Slashdot community is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and prolific communities on the web.
Used to be. Can you return it to that?
Because seriously.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
It's lamentably inconsistent with the business sense of "moving forward", but it should be stated that the old "no_beta" slashdot was superior in nearly every way. That is, the less you manage to do, the more the loyal old farts (myself among them) will sing your praises. Make glitzy choices which head opposite to a clean text interface and you will lose four geeks to only one newbie gained.
He used to work on this site, would sometimes post stories as "Cmdr Taco".
Oh, yeah, and started the friggin' thing.
It'd be like Apple bringing Steve Jobs back, only not as expensive.,
I actually like the current 5. If something has 5, it's enough to notice and probably worth reading. Other moderators can then spend time to up or downvote other comments, rather than pile on the bandwagon.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Judging by the number of AC comments modded up to +5, I think that's throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I haven't seen much of a difference in quality between AC and logged-in comments. Both have trolls. Both have thoughtful insight. I'm not sure the ratio is much different.
HTTPS though, yeah. Agreed on that.
Just a short list of ideas off the top of my head: * UTF-8. I used to get around it by using HTML entities, but nobody ain't got time for that now, and it's been a source of complaints for over a decade. * Click-bait headlines have no place in a site dedicated to serious technical subjects (or that at least takes technical subjects more or less seriously). * CmdrTaco, Hemos, and the rest of the original crew used to occasionally become involved in the discussions and rarely felt the need to withhold their opinions (iPod, anyone?), which gave the site a more personal feel -- a hybrid between a blog and a news site. This still can be seen in sites like some of the sites run by Gawker Media, and it seems effective in maintaining the readers involved. * If there will be editors, they ought to edit.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
I don't want to toot the site's horn too much, but have you looked at other communities on the internet lately?
Slashdot might not be objectively good, but compared to plenty of other places it may as well be the pinnacle of internet civilization.
If there were honestly something better in a general sense, there would be far fewer people here.
I hate it when a summary says "frobozz version x.y.z has been released, this release has many new features and bugfixes", yet never tells me what frobozz does.
I also hate summaries along the lines of "Researcher discovers exploit in ABC using TSR algorithms tweaked with RNG enhancements. This can lead to new discoveries in FNG with QRZ and CDR possibilities". Then the summary never tells us what any of those acronyms mean.
Finally, remember this is news for nerds. Keep the BS articles (I'm looking at you Forbes) to a minimum.
Should we weight firehose voting more heavily so that highly voted stories make the front page regardless of an editor?
What I'd like is an option in preferences to have the highest firehose voted stories included on the front page. I already get preview stories highlighted in red, maybe have the five highest ranked firehose stories highlighted in yellow.
The temptation will be to push them as a default option, but resist that temptation. Advertise it like the firehose is advertised (and there ought to be a link on the footer all the time) but don't make it the default for established users and only make it the default for new users if adoption and feedback are consistently positive.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Trolls have always been an integral part of slashdot, and part of the "uncensored" appeal of the site.
Agree 100%. To this day I still laugh at myself when I get suckered into a goatse/rosebud/tubgirl click. If ye can't handle the gutter, read at +2 or higher.
To reference back to an old post of mine from 2003 ''Reading
Trolling is a art,
Slashdot was "News for Nerds"
Lately though, half the posts are some SJW topic.
Bring back the tech.
Eliminating AC is pointless. As with any other site lacking sign-up fees, you just get throwaway accounts spamming the same crap that would normally be posted by AC's.
This is another black eye on slashdot, IMHO. The search function has never been useful. I don't know how they managed to devise such an awful search function - it often seems to return anything but what I am actually searching for - but they did. I remember some time several years back the search function was broken enough that slashdot allowed google to index the site and the searches all went through there, which was a massive improvement.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Polls belong on the sidebar. But don't believe just me. Go back and look at all the prior discussions about it.
Actually just go back and look at /. history. Whenever the old management did something contentious there was always a lot of vocal and well reasoned arguments as to why what they did was BS. The trouble was that nobody at /. actually listened.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Better would be to allow people to comment in a discussion they've modded, so they can explain why, or if the discussion later on takes a more interesting turn.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Think carefully about the AC's motivations. He's not offering to help you or Slashdot.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
There's a reason for two decades of success on a fickle internet.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Not great points, he's been modded down to -1 by his peers :) You did ask for our opinions, you may want to watch comment scores for this gathering of ideas.
Trolling is a art,
He might have worked for DICE. We are not DICE so those won't be around anymore.
More specifically, it appears that some of us (such as myself) are on a list of people who never get mod points. I have not had mod points in ~2 years IIRC. My karma is consistently excellent here. Others have reported the same.
There also have been times when people have been given differing numbers of mod points. It used to be that people would only get 5. Then some people started getting 10. Some people claimed they got as many as 15. I never heard an explanation for that, either.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Perhaps people should use their own intelligence to filter out the signal from the noise, rather than having everything curated for them - otherwise ... well, for one, they'll never learn to distinguish signal from noise on their own - like the chemtrail conspiracy nuts.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I will give the Slashdot community credit in one area: it is possible to express an unpopular perspective without being moderated into oblivion. State your perspective clearly, and you may even be moderated up. That's difficult to find elsewhere.
Anonymous posting has become a haven of trolls, far from it's original goal of protecting people when discussing work conditions and the like.
Allowing anyone to post as anonymous without login simply paves the way for endless trolling. The value of the comment section has diminished greatly over the years because of stupid comments.
Enforcing authenticated login, federated from elsewhere to tender to the laziest if need be, would at least allow for some accountability by weeding out repeat abusers of the comments section.
Logged-in, members could still post with anonymity to allow a return of the original intentions.
NO NO AND NO
Anonymous is a defining feature. There are tools to tune out trolls and spam and they work (they may need fine tuning but are otherwise powerful). Do not be lazy, use them. Without the freedom to post in a TRULY anonymous fashion then speech is stifled and groupthink, echo chamber like discussion worsens. I want to be challenged by viewpoints that do not met my expectations and may run afoul of social, governmental or employment considerations. I want to be able to post them should the desire arise as well.
To repeat.. the coward should remain among us with no blocking or authentication at all.
Silence is a state of mime.
Another thought: Stop Auto-Refresh. If I have to do something else, I want to come back to a Slashdot page the way I left it.
You must really hate mobile users with a band cap if you want all comments shown by default.
Downmodding serves a purpose, and abuse is corrected by the "intelligence of the herd." Besides, if you want all comments shown by default, you should also be browsing at -1. There's absolutely nothing to prevent the individual user making that choice - but it should remain a choice.
As for identifying moderators - your " If somebody's deemed responsible enough to moderate, then they should be willing to have their name attached to any and all moderation they do - by the same logic, you should have to be logged in to post any comment. Furthermore, by that logic, nicks or nyms shouldn't be allowed, but almost everyone hides behind a nym. And you're posting AC - hypocrite much?
"When it comes to abusive moderation, even one incident is one too many." - come off it. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and really, I've been mod-bombed, and you don't see me getting upset about it. It's just people expressing an opinion, not deciding as to whether to launch WW3.
Posting limits need to STAY. The quickest way to get fewer active users s to allow anyone to crap-flood. 30 posts in 4 hours and 50 posts a day is usually enough. Yes, it's frustrating to hit those limits when you have several heated discussions going on, but let's keep some perspective here - it's only the internet.
Moderation needs to STAY. It's one of the ways to keep users engaged.
Several of your points are so obviously detrimental that it's obvious you're just trolling.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
More: a lot of the Slashdot crowd is hardcore on privacy issues. So you should make it a policy to not retain any more information than is necessary to operate the site - for example, no IP logs or anything like that (except to the point needed for spam fighting). As for data gathering for advertising purposes, that's going to be a controversial one - as an ad company, you probably have interest in that, but a lot of Slashdotters are going to be uncomfortable with that. If you do plan to pursue that route, may I suggest a middle ground? Make it optional, enable it by default if you must, but make it easy for those who care to shut it off.
(I'm not among those who care, but I know there are plenty of people here who do)
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
I'm not sure what the higher mod cap achieves. When I have points the fact that some comments are maxed out just means I have to look for other worthy comments to mark up (or down).
Nullius in verba
There have been in the past (can't really speak for now yet) a lot of articles that made the front page and seemed to have bypassed the firehose. Those articles tended to be crap, and had submitters that always posted links to particular websites. The submitters and said stories were universally derided but they still kept coming. Nerval was a prime example, but there were others EG The Hackaday guy and people like Bennet Hasselton. It was things like that that gave us all a bad feeling about /.
(Now that I think about it, the bypassing the firehose wasn't the problem - it was the low quality of story)
If you are cleaning up your act as you say (and I really believe that based on your engagement) then all you need to do is correlate individuals with high submission rates against the domains that their stories come from, and ask is this reasonable?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Please! Don't do it! I beg of you! Say NO! to editing of comments! EVER! A person can post a response and or correction. Editing will ruin everything! Comments set in stone is Slashdot's saving grace, that and the archives. Don't ever let them be edited... And resist the temptation for unicode also. You don't need the hassles.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
For a tech site, slashdot should be an IPv6 enabled website
You could improve the mod system a bit by having it detect "controversial" comments - those with many both up and down mods (just find the statistical outliers). Those should always be kept visible. We need downmods to self-police garbage posts, GNAA posts, APK, and so on. But we need someway to prevent a comment being censored if 10 people mod it up and 12 people mod it down - any such comment is interesting and should be kept visible, rather than becoming a scale of the political leanings of the mods. Maybe mark it in some way and disable further moderation.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Being one of the greybeards who still reads Slashdot, I'll add a few:
- Add the ability to edit comments until they are moderated or have a reply
- Stop linking to Forbes articles and posting Slashvertisements
- Stop running articles about Martin Shkreli or other things that have nothing to do with "News for nerds"
- For the love of all things absurd, please add CowboyNeal back as the final poll option
- If you need money to operate the site, try asking for it from readers. That way you can reduce or eliminate advertising useless junk that nobody wants
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I just waded through this whole mess of comments. 99.9% of them are stupid ideas. By far the most important way to KEEP slashdot good is DON'T FUCK WITH IT. It doesn't NEED "fixing", and these ideas would ruin it.
Back when I first registered here, metamoderation consisted of examining how posts had been moderated and judging it was deserved or not. That is, you'd be given a post and told that it had been given a +1 Informative, and asked if it deserved that. I really enjoyed helping out that way and almost never failed to metamoderate.
Now, you're shown a set of posts that have been moderated and asked if they're good posts or bad posts, with no idea of how they were originally rated. You have no context, no way of knowing if you're being asked to judge an upmod or a downmod (For all I know, you're being asked to judge all the mods a post received in one lump.) and no way to tell what effect your decision will have.
It's been years, now, since I've even bothered with metamodding, but if you went back to the old style where people knew just what moderations they were checking, I'd gladly start doing it again, and I doubt I'm the only person here who feels that way. Metamoderation used to serve an important function here, and I'd like to see that come back.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Agreed. PLEASE -- Keep the mod cap at +5. It's high enough to make excellent posts stand out, and it's also high enough that a single downmod by someone who just wants to disagree isn't going to make the comment invisible. There's absolutely no reason for higher mod scores except to have a "popularity contest," and that's not what good moderation is about... here it's just about making the decent posts stand out from the herd.
I have always thought that there should be a way to flag and remove obvious garbage posts rather than simply moderating them to -1.
For example, if enough people flag a post as garbage:
Run an automated check vs a list of common garbage posts; if there is a high % of match (like a plagiarism detector), remove the post or remove the content of the post.
If it is not on the list of common garbage posts but it has a large number of flags, perhaps it can be reviewed by either moderators or employees to determine if it should be added to the garbage list.
My thought is that if less eyeballs will see the garbage posts they lose their ability to troll and the quantity of them will decrease.
I couldn't disagree more. A "disagree" mod that didn't affect a posts score would be pointless. What's the point of disagreeing if you can't post a contrary argument or idea?
As for if the "disagree" mod has a -1 value, down voting is in essence silencing a person as I imagine a lot of users don't browse at the 0 score level. A person shouldn't be silenced because you disagree with them. Meanwhile most would agree that relegating those who post Obama erotica or the like to a 0 score is fine as they're not contributing to the conversation in a positive way. Sure, some people miss use the tools Slashdot provides to drown out Trolls and Flamers as a means of stifling legitimate ideas or arguments but that doesnt mean we have to legitimize the process by giving it an actual mod title.
I doubt the modding system will ever be perfect but providing a "disagree" mod would only serve to stifle discussion and debate if it was scored and would be just pointless if it wasn't.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
1. It's nice to see you're already communicating with the users. It's something I could never get previous leadership to do. Keep it up! You won't be able to bring them everything on their wishlist -- but don't let that stop you from telling them what you are bringing them, and why the other stuff got pushed lower on the priority list. They're reasonable folks; as long as you're working with them, they'll be on your side.
2. Small changes are better than big ones. Don't push ahead with a massive, grand plan and assume the community will jump on board (like video and beta). If they tell you they don't want it, they don't actually want it. When in doubt, trust Tim L. and Tim V. Nobody cares about the site and its users as much as those two.
3. Build for the community you have, not for the one you want. Don't chase the hockey stick. It's not going to happen. But there's still a path for evolving Slashdot to support an incredibly broad tech/geek community.
4. Nobody should make decisions about the site without being an active user.
5. Ask the community for help more often. The biggest area that needs it right now is submissions. They're the base from which all content flows, and they've been slowly drying up. Submission needs to feel less like screaming into the abyss. Consider reviving the IRC channel to give people direct, instant access to editorial. Try to find ways to solicit particular submissions from known experts. (For example, a submission about a new C++ release from an actual C++ engineer is worth its weight in gold.
6. Reward readers for doing things that benefit the site. Used a mod point? +1 subscriber (ad-free) page. Got a score:5 comment? +10 pages. Accepted submission? +10 pages. Or more. Be generous; these are your most valuable users.
7. Empower and invest in editorial. It is literally their job to know and understand the community, so they shouldn't lose fights centering on the community.
8. Ads have been in a bad place for a couple of years. Pulling it back will cost you revenue in the short term, but may ensure the site's sustainability in the long term.
9. Slashdot's founder, Rob Malda, still cares deeply about Slashdot. I'm sure he'd be willing to offer some advice.
You've been saying a lot of the right things about Slashdot an SourceForge. I sincerely hope you make it all happen.
Best of luck,
Jeff
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
I have mod points right now. I could easily have downvoted this. BUT there are enough people who think you are insightful to mod you up and simply modding people DOES NOT add to the conversation.
If you disagree with a comment
Post. A. Reply.
Do NOT stifle discussion just because you disagree with someone. I've modded people up who I think are horribly wrong about something but they make a good point and are adding to the discussion in a meaningful and non-toxic way so they are free to hold different opinions.
I cannot say this strongly enough. DO NOT DOWNMOD JUST BECAUSE YOU DISAGREE! We need to be free to disagree with each other and hold opinions that differ from the norm so that we can talk about this stuff. If we just downmod people we disagree with this whole site becomes an echo chamber of whatever the predominate pre-held opinion is. We should never encourage people to mod IN ANY DIRECTION (up or down) simply because of agreement or the lack thereof. Mod based on the informative nature, the insightful nature, the funny nature, etc. of the post. NOT HOW MUCH IT COMPLIES WITH YOUR WORLDVIEW!
whipslash, you are doing yeoman's work...
I know absolutely nothing about the company that just bought slashdot, nothing, but judging by your comments on this post you understand the slashdot system and are trying to fix it by tweaking things like firehose weighting...I'm glad you're not trying to re-invent the site.
I've relied on slashdot for *no bullshit* and "see-it-here-first" techie news...what they call "stuff that matters"
More than anything, slashdot for me has been educational. I learn about the issue reading through the comments. Haha, yeah lol, there are trolls and idiots but I just ignored that...the good comments here can be from phd's researching the topic or the engineers who actually code the AI gadget in the article under discussion!
I've been reading since 2001, but didn't even log in to comment until 2006, because I honestly didn't think I had anything to contribute because the level of discussion was so high and relevant. True story!
As long as slashdot has the user-base and maximizes the capabilities of the slashdot CMS to foster productive discussion this will be one of the best techie news sites anywhere!
Thank you Dave Raggett
have always thought that there should be a way to flag and remove obvious garbage posts rather than simply moderating them to -1.
I disagree - reading at -1 is not for the meek, and I think garbage and meme posts from cows to GNAA to APK keep /. colorful and creative. There doesn't seem to be a problem with the garbage posts staying above -1, and I like the "we never delete anything" ethos.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
- Add the ability to edit comments until they are moderated or have a reply
This would have to be done carefully, i.e. you can't post an edit after someone has clicked the reply button (not actually posted the reply). And the person replying would need to be notified if the post had been changed since the page was loaded.
Earlier in this discussion someone suggested to allow appending comments to your own post with a timestamp, but not editing the original text. That might be a better approach.
I'll add my +1 for putting Slashdot on IPv6 quickly, and then Sourceforge too when you have time. Virtually all ISPs, colos and hosting providers offer IPv6 already, and all the well known CDNs have done so for many years. With IPv6 uptake at 10% and growing ever faster, it's beginning to look bad for a tech site not to have IPv6 enabled. (It works perfectly, seamlessly and effortlessly, by the way.)
While many good ideas have been suggested in this thread, 4 of them stand out for me as very clear technical interests for many techies:
The huge interest in security and privacy among Slashdot readers make the first two items of special importance. It's no longer an innocent world of academics and enthusiasts like yesteryear, and readers need to protect themselves and the companies from which the site is often read with link encryption and effective script restrictions.
It's no surprise that use of NoScript is huge among the technical readership, nor that the JS orgy of forbes.com was despised so much.
My best wishes for this new era of Slashdot. I'm looking forward to another (almost) two decades of interesting technical discussion. :-)
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
"-1 Factually Incorrect" would be massively abused. Want to talk about the gender pay gap? -1 Factually Incorrect. Global warming is/isn't real? -1 Factually Incorrect. Renewables can provide base load. -1 Factually Incorrect. Nuclear is safe. -1 Factually Incorrect.
If something is factually incorrect, just post a response explaining why. Responding is always better than moderation, because then your response can be evaluated and moderated on its merits and people have a counter view to judge the parent comment by.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
We have disagree, it is called "overrated."
Yes, clearly labeled slashvertisements are fine by me too. But no ads disguised as regular stories.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
I must say, for all my gripes about Slashdot, the lack of Unicode support is pretty far down the list. If they have to spend a limited time on their code, the JavaScript issues on their mobile site should take priority. It is very hard to moderate or read my messages using Firefox mobile on Android. The Chrome and Adblock browsers don't fare much better.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
There's absolutely no reason for higher mod scores except to have a "popularity contest," and that's not what good moderation is about
Actually, being able to easily see the best comments in a 1000-comment thread would be useful. Other commenting platforms have this feature and it works really well. One thing it does is make the time and subthread of posting completely irrelevant. Currently, +5 posts at the bottom of a story are read far less often than those at the top, I believe.
The key point is the 'popularity contest' and 'best' part of it. If the moderation process is unable to provide accurate ratings, the final 'ranking' will be inaccurate and unusable. Otherwise, it makes sense to include a 'sort by highest rated (post/thread)' functionality.