Slashdot Mirror
How An Open Source Plugin Tamed a Chaotic Comments Section With A Simple Quiz (arstechnica.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader jebrick quotes an article from Ars Technica about how Norway's government-owned public broadcasting company "employs open source tactics to fight trolling":
The five-person team behind a simple WordPress plugin, which took three hours to code, never expected to receive worldwide attention as a result. But NRKbeta, the tech-testing group at Norway's largest national media organization, tapped into a meaty vein with the unveiling of last February's Know2Comment, an open source plugin that can attach to any WordPress site's comment section. "It was a basic idea," NRKbeta developer Stale Grut told a South By Southwest crowd on Tuesday. "Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it"... He and fellow staffers spent three hours building the plugin, which Grut reminded the crowd is wholly open source... "[W]e realized not every article is in need of this. We are a tech site; we don't have a lot of controversy, so there's not a big need for it. We use it now on stories where we anticipate there'll be uninformed debate to add this speed bump."
What do you think? And would a quiz-for-commenting-privileges be a good addition to Slashdot?
What do you think? And would a quiz-for-commenting-privileges be a good addition to Slashdot?
Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it
This would end Slashdot as we know it!!
But in a good way.
As an additional suggestion, people would only be able to post as AC if they got every question wrong... AKA "Hot Take" mode.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Will editor's have to demonstrate they've read the story as well? Little things like copy and pasted characters unsupported by the site suggest they hadn't.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
I don't know what this article is about, but I'm sure the Russians are involved somehow.
Disclaimer: I am Norwegian, so when I grew up NRK was the one and only TV channel available.
Even so, I do believe it is one of the best public broadcasters in the world: Less resources than BBC but able to do a lot of very good stuff.
http://nrk.no/ is one of the news sites I visit every day, and I use their program streaming solution to view the few programs I still care about.
NRK came up with "Slow TV", watching a train ride that takes 12 hours is almost hypnotic, and the full Hurtigruten coastal express trip is amazing.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
I don't know if it would work, but I would try it for random articles and see.
In the good old days there were fewer trolls, and for a long time the moderation system worked well enough to keep them under control. This might be enough to thin the troll ranks, and tip the balance back towards informed discussion.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
The system I like the best (that I'm not sure I've ever seen actually deployed anywhere) is the concept of charging $0.25 per comment. If the trolls are the ones ruining the industry, let them subsidize it.
thatsthejoke.jpg
But actually, why don't you agree with having to prove (via incredibly simple quiz) that you read the article you're about to comment on? If you comment without having read it, it's automatically off-topic.
It's like trying to discuss answers on an english test based only on the answer, without having read the question.
Hey, I have an idea. We should create a site trollcentral.com that will allow users to troll multiple comments pages at the same time. The site will provide a list of thousands of links from hundreds of websites, and your one troll comment will be simultaneously posted into all of them!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
These days the journalists do not fully research the topic. It's not what pays the bills and it's not their mission. At best, they just put together a few sentences and rush it to the front page. So I do not expect the article to be accurate and informative and I rather prefer to head directly to the comments section. People, who comment there, are quick to point out flaws in the article, add more accurate information, links, references and personal hands on experience. If the site, that you follow, does not have that kind of comments, it's not worth following.
How about commenters that pass the quiz get an automatic +1 mod? That could work. Not positive it'd be a good idea, though.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I'm assuming the poster would be in charge of the questions? That seems like something not everyone would buy into/have time for. Though if trolling is a problem it's a good investment. Reddit could use something like that but it'd be difficult given their post types (how can you make a legit question about an animated gif of a girl falling off a roof?)
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it
This would end Slashdot as we know it!!
But in a good way.
As an additional suggestion, people would only be able to post as AC if they got every question wrong... AKA "Hot Take" mode.
This would also get rid of a lot of automatic posts (bots), comment spam such as the "gay naggers" thing, and automatic gainsaying.
It would also slow down the insulters and auto-dissers by making them take a few moments to read the story. As a bonus, those people would become more informed over time.
I don't know if slashdot is interested in improving the site (whipslash has said that they maintain this site for other goals than popularity), and there may be other considerations such as "no money available", but it would sure make for a nice experiment.
How about positively reinforcing insightful/interesting/informative/funny comments?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I'm sure if you go back to the 1960s, 1940s, 1920s, etc. you would see the same complaint; "These days the journalist do not fully research the topic."
I don't think this is a new issue.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I think this solution is effective for a specific category of abuse, but I can easily think of ways to game it. The only barrier is motivation, which basically translates into the question "How much of a nuisance is it?" If the use of this approach becomes widespread, then they will game it by any of the methods I've already thought of (and I'm confident they'll think of others, too).
I think the better solution is to use EPR (Earned Public Reputation). To put it in the terms you [mykepredko] have presented, you would be paid with an increase in your reputation for the comments you made that earned positive evaluations, and your reputation would be penalized when you did things like propagate fake news or told lies. By setting the default visibility to a slightly positive value, most trolls and all of their sock puppets would instantly lose most of their visibility. I think this system can also be made extremely difficult to game by making the data available. Even an attack by a network of fake identities could be exposed by tracing the links.
Just an elevator summary on time grounds, but feel free to ask politely for more detailed suggestions. Getting me to put up some of the seed money as an investment would require a bit more...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
If you don't get any comments, you can't have troll comments. Brilliant.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Vade retro, Satana!
I think the better solution is to use EPR (Earned Public Reputation). To put it in the terms you [mykepredko] have presented, you would be paid with an increase in your reputation for the comments you made that earned positive evaluations, and your reputation would be penalized when you did things like propagate fake news or told lies.
But that's exactly what Karma score is now. You gain reputation, and along with that gain your posts eventually get a higher starting score because of your rep... on a continuing basis any post may be voted up or down.
By setting the default visibility to a slightly positive value, most trolls and all of their sock puppets would instantly lose most of their visibility
Like, say, setting reading mode at a score of 0 or higher instead of -1???
I think this system can also be made extremely difficult to game by making the data available.
While I wouldn't mind seeing that, method serves a fairly close purpose in (hopefully) reducing the impact of bad moderation (though what happens with the work you do in method does not seem at all obvious).
I actually think the Slashdot moderation system does a decent job as it is, but I would like to see this "read the story" comprehension idea implemented as I think it would help quality.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That would mean that those of us who leave a site when it pops up the "We see you are using an ad blocker to remove 90% of our content" beg screen would never be able to comment.
There are a lot of other sources for information on subjects that aren't full of click bait, but wouldn't supply the answer to the "quiz".
It's not a terrible idea, it depends on the questions. (And there had better be a bit of randomness in their presentation.)
Of course, in a few years you might get more bots commenting that humans, but at least they'll have read the summary.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The one drawback I can see happens when the quiz covers things presented not in Slashdot's summary but in a paywalled featured article. Not everyone wants to have to spend a nontrivial amount of money for a subscription to NYTimes, LATimes, Washington Post, Wired, or WSJ just to be able to comment on things that appear in the summary or one of the alternate sources.
OK so slashdot isn't perfect. But it does have a great moderation system. Why else do we all skip the article and go straight to the comments? All the crap gets downmodded very quickly, so the rest of us can quickly skip to the insightful...or funny...comments.
Well... we should do online voting and have to pass a quiz about the constitution but, apparently, requiring people to know what they're doing is discrimination.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Back in my day (and yours too judging by your #) Greased up Yoda Dolls and Natalie Portman's Hot Grits would rule the top 1/3 of any discussion. These days even on topic trolls get modded into oblivion.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
YES.
I also Moderate SlashDot, and I seriously thin that a quiz would be a good way to weed out the "dottard", "dullard" and "dolt" comments.
It need not weed out autonomous commenting. Sometimes, we need the blow-ins, sleepers, surprisers, and leakers.
;-)
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
... blockchain.
I mean, I like the idea a lot.
A lot of commenters don't read TFS or TFA, so I'm all for this new captcha idea, but goddam it, let's exploit the fucking blockchain buzz word so I can tell the people over at Soylent (when they show up) to fuck off because we are too mature for thay asses.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
It’s not, it’s just much more apparent now that information is so abundant.
Congratulations on your Dear Leader winning the... "election". :) You must be very pleased.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.