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.
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.