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
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.
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.
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.
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 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