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 not enough content on the front page every day. I know there are many submissions that are made everyday that never make it to the front page. Perhaps loosening the filter or helping people post quality front page material would help. Sometimes good stories never make it through because the guy who wrote it has bad grammar or something. That's a shame.
Fresh, solid and intelligent articles on TECH, and a banning of any and all trolls. Start there.
You're welcome and thanks for the feedback. We will make sure of this.
I've reached out to him.
In no particular order:
* Editors who can spell correctly and understand english grammar.
* Some form of control over dupes, perhaps a commitment along the lines of "we won't repeat stories within 2 weeks of each other". This isn't about updates to previous stories, but ones where they are effectively the same posted back to back.
* Fix the mobile interface or get rid of it. As an example of busted - the "top commented" story does not display on my iPad4. I literally cannot see the most active content on the site when I visit using it (it's up to date and using Chrome).
* Expand the friends/foes list limit. I've got a hell of a lot of trolls permanently downmodded from over the years and am capped out. Either this, or find another way to control trolls. I realize this doesn't affect ACs at all.
* Consider rewarding users with good karma with less delay between posts. I write pretty darn fast and have wandered away from more than a few good posts due to the speed limit.
* Come to think of it, I've never noticed a place to report bugs or a bug tracker. Is there one? I haven't gone looking.
1. WRT Unicode, the biggest problem is "smart quotes." The quickest solution to get rid of this annoyance is to use a regex to replace smart quotes with regular quotes. The rest can wait for more testing before rolling it out.
2. The current comment score cap works. It's less likely to promote group think as it can quickly be knocked back down or up without having an unreasonable distance to cover. People who worry about comment scores need to get over it - it's just a number. And if you're not browsing at -1, you're missing some good stuff that's gotten buried by the echo chamber. "It ain't broke, don't fix it."
3. Direct messaging? Are you kidding me? Promote use of journals more if you want to encourage inter-personal communications that might be off-topic in a discussion elsewhere. People can also put their email, skype, etc info in their profile if they really need interpersonal communications that are not public.
4. Reducing time between comments? That's only a concern if you have crap karma, and it's easy to go from zero to excellent in a few days, so anyone making any real contributions will quickly find this is not a problem.
5. Fix the color scheme that makes it almost impossible to see the link to the source of the article in the title bar. Go back to putting the link at the top or bottom of the story if it isn't already embedded.
6. Fix the mobile app on android. If you don't know what I'm referring to, try it for a while. You'll get the idea.
7. Do NOT allow inline display of images. Those of us who have already learned not to click on goat.se links don't need to be forced to see it again and again.
8. Get rid of the page between when you click on a link in your message list, and the actual message display. It's redundant.
9. It's not hard to allow people to append to their comments, with a time-stamped notice along the lines of "EDITED: 2016-12-24@whenever added the following" and then the new text. This way, nobody can change their original post, but they CAN correct it in the original place.
10. Increase the .sig length - even tweets are longer. People often use sigs to quickly identify other users (nobody looks at the user name).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I miss the old days where there was a side bar freshmeat feed of new SourceForge releases. Could we possible increase the SlashDot / SourceForge links this way? A running feed of releases would be nice, and it would help bring us back to our FOSS roots.
Also, in the scientific community (I'm in the cancer simulation field), "grand challenges" are popping up, where there would be a dataset or two, and a challenge to create an analysis or modeling tool for those data. Some really amazing creativity can emerge from those challenges.
It would be interesting if such a thing could be done here, similarly to the "ask slashdot" articles, but then linking to a development space on SourceForge to keep it going. I would love to engage the developer community here on our data standards and other cancer projects, and I hope they'd like to pitch in.
Thanks -- Paul
PS: Please consider stopping the SourceForge spam. I'm not sure I need any more "SourceForge Resources" emails on "Flash Storage for Dummies" and business intelligence / analytics / etc.
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
I've been a lurker for years at Slashdot and I always found the top headline stories fascinating, but this story made me sign up for an account immediately. I truly believe the internet is a better place because you exist. I love the spirit of Slashdot and the community around it: please keep true to your origins. So what made me sign up? Your mobile experience is awful. The performance is abysmal and the experience of dynamically loading stories is terrible. Your content is so fantastic that it gets marginalized by the bad mobile experience. If the budget allows, make a native mobile app for iOS (that fixes half of your performance issues right there). HTML5 is awful on mobile and the performance is awful. Specifically, the dynamic loading at the bottom of the page (i.e. infinite scroll) instead of pagination is painful on mobile. If you reload the page, you lose your place and have to dynamically reload the page totally. I could live with the small fix of pagination vs infinite scroll but then I think about offline content and performance and my yearning for a great native OS experience increases exponentially. Please do not ignore a great, native iOS experience.
You must be new here.
This. There are several missing important moderations. "You must be new here" should be one of them. Along with "+1 Troll" (or "+1 look at that") a positive mod for things which are sufficiently bad to be worth reading.
The moderation system here is archaic and broken, and needs an overhaul. Instead of helping to promote discussion, it is often used as a tool of censorship and oppression. Given Slashdot's dwindling number of users, and its dwindling number of comments, anything that stifles discussion instead of enabling it is extremely harmful to this site's survival.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not calling for something like the even more horribly broken systems we see at reddit, or Hacker News, or Stack Overflow. We don't need a moderating system here that enables gangs of abusive mods to go around attacking others. But major changes are needed here.
First of all, all comments should be shown by default, whether they were posted by logged in users or anonymous users. It's not 2004, when each story here used to get 300+ comments. These days it's rare to see a story get more than 100. As I scan the front page today, many of the stories that have been up for hours now are still under 50 comments. So the moderation system does more harm than good when only 1 or 2 comments are shown by default for each story.
Second of all, there should be no concept of a downmod. Downmodding is a feature that is always abused as a way to censor comments that are perfectly valid, but which happen to express the "wrong" point of view. Downmodding should be eliminated.
Third of all, the editors here should never moderate comments. Ever. There has been some suspicion that they have been doing this, as we often see perfectly good comments among the earliest posted get modded down to -1. These are vague -1 mods without any Troll, Flamebait, etc. specifier.
Fourth of all, this site needs to list who moderated each comment. It should show the username of the moderator, and what rating was given. 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.
Fifth of all, there needs to be a way to deal with abusive moderators. Clearly the meta-mod system that's currently in place is not working well, as we see far too much abusive moderation. When it comes to abusive moderation, even one incident is one too many. The entire community, both registered and anonymous users, should be able to flag and revoke the moderating privileges of mods. The threshold for this should be low. Even one vote of non-confidence in a moderator should be enough to immediately and permanently strip that moderator of any and all moderating privileges.
Sixth of all, the posting limits needs to go. Like I said earlier, this site needs more comments, not fewer. The delay between comments should be minimized, down to perhaps a minute, if not less. Even this is not ideal, as it inherently imposes a daily cap on the number of comments which can be posted, which itself is a bad thing to have.
At this point, it would perhaps be preferable to remove the moderating system altogether. It made sense a decade or more ago, when the volume of comments was such that some order was needed. But those days are long gone. Now there are so few comments that they should just all be displayed, with users given the option of hiding (just for themselves, of course) comments that they no longer wish to see. What moderation does take place ends up causing way more harm than good.
This is a historic opportunity to greatly improve this site, and give it a leg up over its competitors. Those competitors, including Hacker News, Reddit and even Stack Overflow, are known for having moderation systems that are easily and readily abused to censor other users. Slashdot should learn from this, and strive to go the other way: create a technology-focused community where free discussion, even if it isn't the prettiest or nicest discussion, is enabled and promoted. Let us discuss issues with a freedom that we just don't find on so many other sites. But in order for that to happen we need to see some major changes to the moderation system here. Either it needs massive reform, or it needs to be completely eliminated.
It's not uncommon for comments to be moderated down not because they're not sensible, but because they're unpopular.
I would consider creating a "Devil's Advocate +1" moderation. Possibly also a Devil's Advocate badge for people with enough Devil's Advocate points.
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.
Heh. Remind me of the comments I've seen in assorted places, to the effect that the intelligence of any group of humans is an inverse function of the number of members.
There's dispute about just what the inverse function is. This might be settled, in a sense, by the easy observation that the large body of internet groups show wide variation in visible intelligence, and it's fairly easy to show that this variation is very poorly correlated with a group's size. The conclusion is that there's not just one inverse function between population size and intelligence, there are many such functions.
This opens up what could be an interesting research proposal: Can we collect enough detailed data on populations, including not just their sizes and apparent intelligences, but various other quanitites that might be measurable (and which the groups' leaders will tell us)? If so, maybe we can infer useful information about why some online groups have the intelligence levels that they do.
Or maybe it's all just a hopeless mess. The value of the current IQ tests gives us little hope. But we do have something they don't: many petabytes of comments on all topics by billions of humans, most of it backed up so that repeated access is possible.
OK; it probably really is a hopeless mess. But think of how useful it could be if we could give discussion leaders useful guidelines for improving the intelligence of discussion groups. OK, with things like politics and religion, they'd just use it to drive the level down, but for most other subject, it could lead to an improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
How do you feel about logarithmic scaling instead of absolute caps? Both for rating comments and for karma? The system would track the actual numbers, but normally we would only see the rounded exponent.
If you like the idea, then we have to argue whether the base should be 2, 10, or e. Even the natural log comes out in the wash?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Personally, what I see i: 2. The comments. Every single thread devolves into many, many political bullshit rants. Democrat idiots, Republican assholes, liberal, conservative, Socialist, Communist, Fundies blah blah...... #1 you can maybe fix #2 not so much
One of the aspects of this that I've actually seen some partial results for: The current thread layout tends to make it difficult to get beyond the first or sometimes second reply's threads, which fill up many screens, and it's hard to wade through it all to find the non-BS sections of the message trees. It could be a lot more useful if the Nth top-level replies were easier to find, and then also look at the 2nd-level replies to each. I don't think I've seen any really great solutions to this, though I've seen a few that seem to work a bit better than what /. does. Anyway, the problem can be seen in a lot of discussions by starting at the bottom, and noting that most of the messages there have few ratings or replies, meaning that hardly anyone has read them.
Of course, it's possible that something like this is available in the New! Improved! /. UI, and I just haven't recognized it. If so, maybe some more documentation is in order. It's also possible that just adding several more selectable numbers in addition to rating, depth, karma, etc., and provide some easily-accessible config settings so we can tweak them all until we
each find a setting combo that we like.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"There's no doubt that the Slashdot community is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and prolific communities on the web."
I agree with that. Unfortunately, there are people who use Slashdot comments as a way of acting out their anger and wasting everyone's time. I have some ideas about how to help improve that situation.
I'd like to help Slashdot, as a volunteer.
Slashdot has a higher percentage of stories interesting to me than any other site I've been able to find. To choose stories interesting to technically-knowledgeable people, it is necessary to understand their sub-culture. Dice Holdings didn't seem to have anyone who even began to understand that culture.
I've seen ads on Slashdot from IBM, for example. The person who wrote those ads obviously didn't understand how to get technically-knowledgeable people interested. One opportunity for Slashdot managers is to help technology companies improve the quality of their advertising. Too often ads are designed and written by departments that have no one interested in the product. Better ads would draw more customers and would make Slashdot more popular with advertisers.
I was an advertising copywriter for technology ad agencies in Los Angeles. This is an ad I wrote to get business: Professional writing is more than just writing. (That sentence is a Service Mark.)
Let me know if there is some way to have a discussion about how I might be able to help.
You must be new here.
This. There are several missing important moderations. "You must be new here" should be one of them. Along with "+1 Troll" (or "+1 look at that") a positive mod for things which are sufficiently bad to be worth reading.
The simplest way to get this is to separate the qualitative from the quantitative i.e. have one drop-down with the score (+ or -) and one with the qualifier. More or less the way metamod works now, but with all the options all the time.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Slashdot used to be a technology site. Under Dice it became a collectivist yes-man only question what we tell you to question navel-gazing tool.
I personally grew tired of all the Gamer Gate articles exclusively from the "men are bad" side of things.
I got tired of all the "We already have accepted that climate change is 100% man-made now how do we convince the idiots" articles.
I got tired of the "You're all bad people because women chose to go into job fields other than technology" articles.
The Slashvertising I wasn't 100% against - I completely understand - the site needs to earn a little money to stick around, but come on, a lot of it was lame and much of it was sneaky by trying to pass itself off as an article.
Slashdot actually became anti-science during the Dice years since they actively discouraged doing what scientist do - questioning everything - by posting globalist slanted crap.
Of course I among others enjoyed calling them on it.
If you go back to what Slashdot did in just about any iteration before Dice you're doing a good thing.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Finally, remember this is news for nerds. Keep the BS articles (I'm looking at you Forbes) to a minimum.
I think this is a good point but it needs some clarification. Forbes, Time, US News & World Report, and the like are not the places the editors should be perusing for the stories to put on this website. Instead, they should be looking at publications like Scientific American, Nature, Microwave News, Microwave Journal, ArXiv, Ars Technica, PLoS One, etc. Of course, that may frequently run up against paywalls, so the editors will have to do some sleuthing to find ways to link to something that the general audience can access. But I would rather have problems running into paywalls rather than news-lite from Forbes et al.
Add a disagree mod.
Because we don't have one, people use mods like troll and flamebait inappropriately. We need an explicit "disagree" mod to allow mods to express their intent. Whether it's -1 is a different question, but I'd be OK with it either way. We really need to emphasize the idea that someone can disagree with you, but be sincere, not trolling, if we want to be different from the non-geek sites.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but yeah, what AC said.
I've seen a couple comments requesting no downmods, eliminate trolls, get rid of AC. All have some valid reason for saying so, but to give in to that would be detrimental to preserving one of the more important features of /. - the opportunity to come here and not be too coddled. I get that we want to favorably alter the signal to noise ratio, but I don't think that's the way to go about it.
When I hear someone say "Get rid of AC," I interpret that as "Children should be seen and not heard,' where adults == people who have taken the time to register, and who have some form of local reputation on the line. You're not wrong, but you're missing out on some priceless truth from time to time if you do that.
You will never eliminate trolls as long as you have the internet. Wasting too much energy in that regard is unwise.
Think carefully before tweaking the mod system. It ain't perfect, but it has achieved a remarkable balance.
"Slashvertisements", articles buffing some *amazing-cool-new-product-service-thing*, need to be reduced. There is a big difference between a new technological discovery or application for said discovery, and the latest gizmos that somehow involve technology.
Get the polls the hell out of the main article feed.
I've seen whipslash respond to the Unicode and HTTPS requests, so no need to drum on those.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I don't know if you are interested in this but...
During the 2nd war in Iraq, one of the most interesting accounts was a lone blogger in Baghdad who made nightly posts about what was going on and his views on the situation. He wasn't a journalist or anything, just a guy in an apartment watching missiles destroy buildings in his city. Sadly, he wasn't allowed to continue his reporting after the fall of the regime.
Since we're nerds, it should be possible to get interesting views from conflict areas around the globe in an anonymous manner. Perhaps partner with WikiLeaks to get anonymous interviews and points of view from these areas.
They say that the first casualty of war is the truth, but we're now living in an age where the average reader can dig down to find original sources for some of the media bias and spin.
I would love to read the (anonymous) views of a Chinese engineer, or Indian customer support person, or a Cuban hacker, or Ukranian spammer.
I would find it much more interesting than a talking-head video of some software package founder.
If you're interested in being a primary news source, having the occasional "scoop" where the MSM refers to Slashdot as the breaking story, and have the courage for a high-level of journalistic integrity, then you could do this. Let WikiLeaks handle the anonymity and authentication, you just post the interviews.
It's not for the faint of heart, but it's something you could do.
Having a "+1 disagree" would work, though...
All the three -1s are used to silence opponents, and some use sockpuppet accounts.
It would be nice if the new and improved slashdot could do some log file analysis, and at least strike down on patterns of posters that quickly get +1 while the parent gets -1. Once in a while can happen, but there are some posters where this happens far too often for it to be chance. Statistical anomalies should be easily discoverable.
Add a disagree mod.
I disagree. (You see what I did there.)
If you disagree, respond and explain why.
I strongly believe however that there should be a "-1, Factually Incorrect" mod. There are simply too many cases of someone posting something like "You can't install your own apps on MacOS X," or "Restriction on drones are prohibited by the Constitution," or "Android has 95% of the smartphone market," or "Abandonware is not legally copyrighted anymore," or "Hitler was a religious Catholic." And many of these comments are rated up - leave aside my somewhat joking political examples - because the comment sounds informative but mods don't know any better. The comment is usually followed by a stream of "OMG you are demonstrably, factually wrong" posts but often those are invisible to those browsing at higher mod levels and the net effect is to present a demonstrably incorrect statement as true.
These statements aren't necessarily trolls (again, except maybe the political ones) or flame bait, and they aren't just overrated. They are simply wrong in some way that could be factually demonstrated or logically proven. There really does need to be some mod for "your factual claim is provably incorrect." Preferably followed up by some comments citing counterclaims to the contrary.
"95% of all Slashdot
"controversial" comments
The comments are a symptom. One easily ameliorated by the existing comment moderation system once the cause is addressed.
The real place "controversy" needs to be addressed is the stories. No amount of comment moderation will suffice to deal with the squabbles created by mdsolar's anti-nook crap, global warming click bait and gamer gate grievance mongering, among many other sad themes that have damaged Slashdot. That stuff needs to stop so the malcontents that live for it go away and let the place heal.
And no, just turning over story selection to the (existing) crowd will not work. They'll squander their employers time indulging their favorite cause and keep feeding in the same click bait. What is needed is a few people with good judgement and some patience to allow time for recovery.
As I write this it occurred to me to survey the last few days worth of stories. Except for the Clinton coin toss mistake — which promptly descended into a giant flame fest — it looks pretty good. Keep that up, add some more Linux/BSD/MCU/etc. related stories and something good could happen.
If I'm right and there really has been an editorial change, keep it to yourselves. Talking about it will just produce a giant sh*t storm.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
About the intelligence of a group, this is an open forum and 'by design' those with the strongest opinion will appear to be the voice of the 'group'.
The moderating system helps (can help) to suppress the over-abundance of loud mouths with hollow rhetoric and hopefully bring forward the more shy but insightful including AC's.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
All moderation is already massively abused. That's why there is metamoderation. Perhaps metamoderation should be promoted more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A visual distinction for new comments loaded, if I "Check for New Comments". I would like it to be a little easier to find the new comments that were added. A shading change on the subject line or on the border would suffice; something small. Just some visual cue to let me know that this comment was added after the initial page load and/or "Load all Comments". I would think it would only work for "Check for New Comments" because (like this thread) 250+ comments be marked as "new".
A number of times I read all the comments on an interesting subject and at the end I want to see what was added after (could be a lot or few). I "Check for new Comments" and I spend most of my time re-reading the same stuff to try and find the new comments.
Cheers and best of luck.