Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Moderation Phase 1.1
As Slashdot grew to have hundreds of comments each day, I coded a fancy moderator system. One that didn't involve deleting comments, but rather just organizing them for people who wanted it. Over the following months, friends, family, pets, and even a few bots tried to do the job. At the end we had 25 people moderating a total of about 5 comments per day. It was obviously not working- any regular reader of the comments knows that the signal to noise ratio is simply terrible in those flamebait articles. The system grew to have thousands of comments each day, and the 25 moderators (of whom only a 2-5 were active on any given day) simply couldn't keep up.
I have a new system that I'm devising, but I've decided to experiment with the old system. I think I can learn from it, and make the new system better. Or else, this "Tweak" might even work and then I won't have to write the code. We'll have to see.
So what is the change? Simple, we had 20 or so moderators. Now we have 408.
What?
Yup.
The system was tracking moderation done to each user internally for just this purpose. (I had a score of 2, Anonymous Coward had a -1628 *grin*) All users with a positive score were given moderator access.
Last week wed. we had 2,800 comments posted on Slashdot. 11 of them were moderated. This week 15-30% of comments are being moderated, and its my hope that this number will increase.
Now a lot of you guys are going to scream and cry about censorship, but that just isn't the case. Anyone can disable the actions of the moderators by simply setting their default user preference to -5 or something really low. Tada! Slashdot in all its flamey off topic glory. But my goal is that users reading with a preference set to 3 will only read the absolute best comments. That type of reader doesn't want a discussion. They don't care about the 300 comments- they just want those 2 comments that are really smart, insightful, and often, better then the story that they are attached to. Try setting your Comment Limit to 10, and your Comment Order by Score. Suddenly the few comments that you see are interesting. They're useful.
The goal here is to create a better dispersal of scores. Last week, a +4 comment was virtually impossible, but we've had 40 since the new system took place. Sure, not all of them were great, but as a whole, they were good comments.
Now the danger. With 25 moderators, it was pretty easy to keep an eye on things. But with 400 its going to get simply crazy. We're going to have abusers. I've already revoked access from a few people. For you moderators, read those The Moderator Guidelines carefully. The rest of you might be interested too. The general summary, is the moderators shouldn't let their own opinions factor in. They do and thats the problem. Its my hope that since we have 400 of them, we'll have some abusers (who will hopefully surface and have their access removed) but they'll be outnumbered by honest, fair people who don't let their own ideals interfere with the task at hand. Its a difficult task, but an essential one.
A few of the more important rules for moderators:
- Impartiality. This isn't "I agree with That", this is "That is worth reading, and that isn't". This is obviously the hardest, and most subjective part of the task, and the one that will require the sharpest eye on everyone's part.
- Anonymity. Any moderator who posts that they are a moderator will probably have their access revoked. I simply don't want moderation to be an ego thing.
- Accountability. Anyone who sees clear breaking of the above 2 rules should send me info (I need a URL to the comment: cid & sid. Click the reply button and send me that URL if you need it). This isn't "3 Strikes and Your Out". If someone is abusing their trust, they'll lose it.
As an aside, if you have problems, bugs, or complaints, email them to me. I don't read all the comments. We have 2800+ of them on a good day. There's no way I'm gonna read them all. Send problems to me. Posting complaints is usually off-topic. Emailing me is much more likely to get a response, plus if you want to complain about how much I suck, don't do it in a story about CD Vending Machines or Wearable PCs- its simply off topic. Do it in this story! Its on topic here. Or email me so I'm sure to read it and cry.
Where is this heading? Think of a news site like Slashdot without a guy like me, or a group of guys at the center. One where the best comments become the articles on the homepage. If we could make that work... wow. At some point I'll have a page of the top 10 comments from the last 24 hours. I think that will be really interesting- I'll probably have a general discussion at some point specifically for this purpose.
Its a delicate thing trying to make all 75,000 of you happy- Your tastes are diverse, and there's just no pleasing all of you 100%. So I'll keep trying new things, and make as many things customizable as possible, so most of us can have it the way they want it.
We're getting closer. But until then, hang in there. Constructive criticism is appreciated (although I simply can't reply to everyone) I even read the flames, although if you make me cry I don't reply.
Update: 03/23 01:53 by CT : Responses to some of the comments:
- No, simply creating new accounts won't work. You had to have had a comment moderated up by the original 25 moderators.
- No, moderators can't moderate their own comments.
- I yanked someone already for revealing that they had access. Someone didn't read very carefully.
- An absolute minimum for comments? Set it to -10000 or something. I doubt we'll ever see a comment that bad *grin*
- I'll probably figure out a clean way to reassign moderator access occasionally. I haven't thought that far ahead yet.
I thought I would share my criteria for the comments which I have moderated (9-10 total, so far):
I marked two comments up. Good ideas, well written. With a new guideline Rob posted today, I will probably use more points to mark up rather than down.
I downed one "first post" comment for the obvious reason. Most of the time, the other moderators nailed the first post type comments before I even saw them.
Two comments were troll-bait. Just saying "M$ sucks, or RH sucks, etc. is liable to get nailed quick, unless the poster (AC or not) has a good point to make.
I marked down two (maybe three) comments that were primarily obscene or had racist remarks in them. Note that I didn't say "any" -- just those where the content was primarily the obscenity or racist statement. There have been plenty of posts I disagreed with, only one of which I downed (see my next point)
Lastly, I downed one comment (don't remember why), realized that it was sort of an "agenda" like hit, and went back and used another moderator point to restore it's rating.
This may not be exact because I'm not trying to remember every little detail, but although anonymous, I think the goals are good, and will try to do an adequate job for all of the Slashdot reader core.
Just write interesting stuff.
While I can appreciate the desire to try and form some order out of chaos, this whole moderator thing sits very ill with me.
Why? Because I've had my posts moderated before, in some cases, severely.
I'm not talking about "First Post" or "THiS SuX" or profanity-filled invective or other such stuff that I think we can all agree falls firmly into the "noise" department - I'm talking about on topic, carefully written commentary.
I've gone through some of these posts, trying to keep an open mind and objective viewpoint, looking to discover what it was that was so objectionable to require moderation - and I found nothing.
My only conclusion is that the moderator in question disagreed with the content of the post, and moderated it in an attempt to supress the viewpoint.
I don't consider myself all that radical, but yet I've been moderated. If this has happened to me, then surely it has happened to others.
This is wrong. It's Evil.
Worst of all, I was never given a chance to "face my accuser". Not ONCE have I learned WHY the particular post was moderated.
Rob, there should be some sort of "moderation history list" tagged to every comment. Each downward moderation should have a REASON tagged onto it, and the identity of the moderator should be listed - even if that identity is just a moderator number, untraceable by anyone other than you back to the meatspace person.
Like this:
[18:02-03/22/1999] Downgraded to -2 by #402: Offensive language
At least this gives us victims a way to track who is doing what and for what reasons to our posts.
DG
Thats exactly how it works. Except only 400 people see those little buttons. I'm trying to keep tabs on it so that people don't push idealogies, and instead are fair and impartial. We'll see if it works.
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
Pants are Optional
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Ooops... I pressed the submit the submit button too soon.
/. readers to post sensible comments because they would feel that their comments would not be drowned out by the noise of non-sensical ravings and rantings.
2. It might encourage other (more sensible)
I do have some questions however:
-- Who guards the guardians? -- How are the moderators evaluated? I don't know if there is a mechanism by which we can identify and evaluate how the moderators are doing their work...
I might have a suggestion though:
-- Identify the moderator who gave the rating -- not by their user name but something like the id that telephone operators give out so that we can complain to their supervisors but not know their real name...
-- Allow a search of articles/comments by moderator id so that everyone (not just CmdrTaco) can evaluate what they do and complain if they show a distinct bias or not...
Also some minor nitpicks:
1. comment count on main page should be based on comment level a user selected.
2. comment spillover should also be based on comment count that reflects the comment level a user selected.
Other than that, I like it very,very much!!!!
Why doesn't anyone realize that forcing a 0 threshold default while setting negative scores is just as bad as integrating IE into Win98 while saying "well they can install Netscape". We all know good and well that 80% of people stick with the default options, so marking a message in the negatives effectivily deletes it since most people will never change their default threshold.
... where's my packet monkey when I need him?
This is a hypocritical method for moderation.
If you want to use scores, that's fine but DON'T ALLOW NEGATIVES and leave the threashold at 0. That way, the default is to see ALL COMMENTS and if someone wants your 408 moderators making decisions on what they read for them, they are free to do so.
I also find it hard to believe that 408 people will agree on what's "worth reading", I suspect there will be scoring wars a plenty in the coming days/weeks/months and this will soon become EFNet with the people with power helping their friends and holding down the people they don't like.
*** DaBuzz joins #slashdot
<DaBuzz> Can I get a +v?
*** Buzz's_Friend sets mode: +v DaBuzz
*** Moderator_with_ego sets mode: -o-v Buzz's_Friend DaBuzz
<Moderator_with_ego> HAHAHAHA you guys suck, I own you
Get the point?
If you can read this message, your threshold is too low.
1. Allow the user to decide how much to penalize AC's. There could be a box in the prefs screen that would be set to however many points to adjust an AC post's score. That way, if a user really hates AC's, they could set it to -4000, or if they think they should be equal, set it to 1 (adjusting all of the zero's to one's) or whatever. Maybe this idea could be generalized into a very flexable killfile.
2. Have the moderators directly select what score they think an article should be, rather then plus or minus relative to the article's current score. This would avoid the potential problem of several moderators adjusting a comment down simultainously. How it is now, a comment could end up at -400 when all 400 moderators really only thought it should be a -1. Of course, it may be complex to figure out how the moderator scores should be weighted and rounded.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
I'm afraid I disagree with both of your ideas.
Let's start with the use of real names. There are several reasons why this is a bad idea, and only one actually decent one: accountability. Admittedly, some folks would be less likely to post offensive or just plain stupid things if their own real name was attached to it for all to see, and that is a plus. They might also be less likely to post unpopular or controversial views, and that is the biggest weakness. Other people really value their privacy a great deal, and wouldn't use their real name to post *anything* much less something juicy or passionate, and they would be a great loss, too. And some people just don't use their real names much on the net, so using it doesn't make a lot of sense anyway. I knew a guy in college who always went by his nick, doubt. I happened to know that this was derived from his real name, and even knew what it was, but nobody used it. If there was some post with his actual parent-given monniker, I'd have no idea who that guy was. But if it said 'doubt' I think, hmm, oh yeah, I know him. I use reemul on the net. I'm not trying to hide behind some pseudonym, I just like the name. Anyone who wants to track down all my real-life info is welcome to mosey on over to internic and lookup the contact info on my domain, listed above. I think it even has my phone number.
Next is cost. Your (I feel) arbitrary $29 figure might have some utility in filtering the participants in Slashdot, in the sense that it may limit users to only those who feel that Slashdot is important enough to pay the money. This would certainly have the effect of drastically diminishing the numbers of casual users, folks who only wander by from time-to-time and post rarely if at all. But is that a good thing? Perhaps a person attracted to the site by word-of-mouth or a link in some other article has something valuable to say, or is at least amusing. Why cut them off? And certainly I doubt that this would cut down on trolls and flames. If I pony up the cash, I get to say whatever I want. Killing my access means that Rob would have to give me a refund, with all the touch costs and handling fees and problems with the credit card billing company. Ugh. So we may get less folks, but perhaps less inhibited folks. And what about people for whom $29 is a hardship? The students, the struggling freelancers, the international readers on the down side of the exchange rate? I wouldn't want to lose them, either. On the other side are folks for whom $29 isn't really that much at all, who could pay it and still not really care about the site. I blow that much on my lunch break buying a book and a nice meal most every weekday, $29 doesn't indicate commitment on my part.
(And just for you conspiracy theorists, do you think that the all those Microsoft employees you suspect are posting will be deterred by a measly little $29 fee?)
So, while I understand your concerns, I don't think that your ideas are the way to go.
-reemul
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
Putting total and visible message counters a/o percentages would also give readers some idea of the S/N ratio in a given forum, which might also be interesting (entertaining?) information.
What I really would like to see is an option to distinctively mark all messages in a given forum based on my custom score threshold limit rather than physically removing them from my sight. Say coloring the subjects of good messages green, bad ones red, and neutral ones black, or perhaps using some sort of text indicator for lynx users.
That would allow me to see which messages are the "most worthwhile" and avoid things which are "bad", but it would still allow me to easily read a bad message if I have to in order to maintain the context in a given thread.
Just a thought from the peanut gallery...
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Rob, as much as anything, geeks love numbers. Everyone is asking about this score level, or that, moderator this or that. How about this idea:
Give each moderator a public/permanent number and publish their stats. Show how many articles read or downloaded, how many voted up(with a list), how many down.
That way I can identify with a moderator or a few. I can look and see modXXX has voted these up, and I agree his opinion, so I bookmark his(her) up-list. After a couple of weeks of scouting out the mods, I won't even have to vist slashdot.org anymore, just the pre-read bookmarks. Or allow us to use the prefs to select from a list, include the threshold and say "show all articles voted up by mods x, y, and z and anything else that is above 3", or something like that.
Even if someone chose to go by the raw score, they could still look at the mod stats and see what each has been doing.
Next, let the readers rate a story. Perhaps it will have to be confined to logged-in users, but anyway, giving the story a simple +/- and the sum would be much more efficient than posting another "Jo* *atz is a gasbag" reply.
Finally, along with the current summary header that includes the number of articles, add how many up/downs there have been or perhaps an average score. 217/0.76 or something like that.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Allow logged-on users to post as AC? Put a checkbox next to the submit button that says "Post Anon". That way, the posts can be anon, and untraceable by the rest of us and the user can still have "user" privledges like preferences.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Well, it looks like you did get flamed for it, but I'll add my two cents anyway.
/. could offer some sort of "premium" membership with extra features for members only (no, I don't know what those features might be). But, since banner ad revenues are enough to make Yahoo a billion dollar company, I don't think slashdot will need to start charging money to make ends meet any time soon.
/. moderators log in as AC to talk about the system without acknowledging their "moderator-hood" and therefore losing it. :)
You can find several examples of sites that cost money which do have intelligent conversation. The Well is probably the best example. I just signed up for an account today, since I figured that, in the worst possible case, I'm only out $10, and in the best case, the quality of conversation will be well worth my money. Delphi and the former BIX were also good examples, although Delphi Forums are now free and BIX seems to be dead.
However, your premise that the opposite applies (charge money, and the conversation will be intelligent) most definitely doesn't hold. Simply look at AOL: most AOL users are paying $22/month and 99.9% of them I wouldn't want to talk to if they paid me!
If Rob's tweaks pan out, and I think they will (simply adding more moderators is a great start), then I'd be willing to donate a reasonable sum of money to keep the system going, if it was necessary. Perhaps
As for anonymous access, we've already gone over the reasons why it's highly valuable. For example, employees of companies posting information "off the record". Even more important are the reasons you can't think of in advance: just today, I've seen
-Jake
--
Jake
To all moderators:
Unless a posting is out-and-out abuse, let the comment sit for an arbitrary length of time (30 minutes, for example). If the comment attracts good-quality responses, it's probably worth keeping. (Unless, of course, the whole thread is abuse heaped upon abuse.)
To all others:
If a posting is not worth a rebuttal, don't post one. This will help the moderators sort the gold from the dreck.
-----
Could this score info be included in the "user account" (and perhaps the "user info") pages please?
One thing that should be pointed out - not all the unfair negative scores are intentional. I just noticed a comment, Score=1, that while not deserving to be stricken from the page didn't deserve to be filtered up, either. So, I hit the checkbox to knock it's score back down a point.
Apparantly somebody else agreed with me, and tried to fix the problem at the same time, because when I came back, the comment was gone completely, Score=-1.
Rob, a request: Could you set all Moderator thresholds to -100, and just let those who really want to change them back? One of the most important ways to spend a moderator point is fixing an unfairly negative-scored post, but I suspect 98% of the moderators still have their thresholds set not to see negative-scored posts at all.
Every castle needs its Court Jester. Like it or not, "MEEPT" is our Jester.
He/she/it should be given an unchangeable status of +99999, provided the priviledge only be abused in ways that would be fairly and democratically irksome and/or distressing to ALL SlashDot readers accross the board. This would provide much needed comic relief in times of strife and quite possibly bring about an end to World Hunger and Y2K paranoia.
Humbly,
Skip Kent
**>>BELCH
#end_lurk_mode
;-)
Lurk mode off.
99% of previous comments unread due to extremely slow link (I apologize if I cover something previously posted)
Comment: This is probably one of the best moderation systems I've seen so far.
Question 1: Is there a heirarchy of moderation, i.e. are there "Super" moderators who can change/revoke moderation that another moderator has done, remove moderator status from lower moderators, etc?
Question 2: Is there some sort of trial period (please don't mention a duration or specifics) for new/added moderators?
Question 3: Is there/will there be a system for moderators to provide feedback to comment posters as to why their comment was moderated (i.e. "flamebait", "MEEPT!", etc.)? This would be good to help those of us who think we're writing good comments, yet we're either stating the obvious or are off-topic but don't know it.
Question 4: Now that my brainstorm is getting underway, with all the recent customization, how about an area for "trusted" "part-time" story posters? Like those of us who have a story on Linux that's more than the "Linux on CNN" stuff, but almost never gets posted, e.g. the BeroLinux-Linux Mandrake distro merger? Something where people can turn off part-time story posters if they choose, and maybe combine the moderation feature into that so part-time posters are rated on the importance/quality of stories they post. To me at least, this seems like something that could provide more news (especially on those slow days) and still leave the "original" Slashdot for those who want it.
Question 5: How about a way to alert/flag stuff for moderators to moderate? Like a MEEPT! post (sorry to pick on MEEPT, but that's the only example I can think of right now) could get flagged for moderator attention, or something that goes waaaaaaay off-topic. Sounds useful.
Question 6: Is there some sort of "real" democratic system for the suggestion of new features and other feedback? I mean, is there like a congress of moderators or people who vote aye or nay on stuff after reviewing it, and their vote counts so many points, and higher-ups can veto it, etc.?
Question 7 (rhetorical): Will this actually be read and responded to, and acheive a high score?
---
I'll gladly take full responsibility for this comment if you'll gladly mail general@lilithfair.org telling me why you like/dislike it.
James R. Turinsky, LilithFair.Org/SomeSites.Com owner/administrator/Linux user and advocate.
If any of you are interested, we're discussing /. decision here.
And say what you want.
NewsTrolls does not censor.
VIVA THE MINUSES! VIVA THE NEGATIVES!
--diva
diva Pasty Drone NewsTrolls, Inc.
I know there's probably some really obvious point I'm missing, but I don't understand why /. doesn't just switch to an NNTP interface. *Particularly* with 75,000 users, and with most articles getting 200+ comments within the first couple of days.
Using NNTP, people could use whatever newsreader suits them best, and do their own filtering and/or scoring the usual way.
There could be a slashdot.headlines group, for instance, where all articles are (cross-?)posted, with followups set to their relevant sub-topic groups: slashdot.debian, s.redhat, s.microsoft, s.tech, and so on. Moderate the s.headlines group to ensure that it contains *only* the headlines, and not followup discussions, and that's pretty much all that would be needed, it seems.
Many of the most worthwhile usenet groups are moderated. The rest tend to look like this:
alt.talk.alt.newsgroups
Headers:
1. 4001 best nude teen pics
2. Make Money Fast!
3. New Site best porn on the net!
4. Ware Can I getz sum WaReZ?
5. Best infant porn site!
6. I like alt newsgroups
7. Sell your product on the Web!
8. Bestiality quicktime videos right here!
9. Dis group sux
10. Be your own boss!
Sad as it is.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Moderation is great, and I'm thrilled Slashdot is taking a nice step in that direction. But designing a moderation system is also very tricky: it has to be user friendly, but safe and reliable. This balance will greatly depend on the integrity and quality of the moderators.
In other words, moderators have to be moderated. For now, this work (of moderating the moderators, let's call that 'metamoderation') is handled by Rob, and so it is up to him to tune the balance mentioned above to help him in his task.
I will try here to consider the challenges of metamoderation, and propose some more technical tools to assist Rob in that task.
The goal of moderation is to assign a rank to all comments, and rank them well. The available ressources for that work are the moderators. Of course, all moderators are not perfect.
Ok, what do we mean by "a perfect moderator"? Well, we have two possibilities: it can either be Rob (this is the case if you read slashdot passively, and have a total trust in Rob's jugement to guide you through your slashdot experience), or it can be you, the reader (obviously, you know better!). The second solution is obviously better, but is more difficult to implement. Now, we can define the true rank of a page to be the rank decided objectively by the perfect moderator.
If the perfect moderator were able to rank all by himself, it would be just great. Oviously, that is not possible. Thus we need to use non-perfect moderators, and thus, have some kind of control over the error introduced. The way it is done right now is totally static: In the first phase, Rob used his human jugement to hand-pick 20 moderators. In the second phase, he used the assumption that a person who posts good comments is a "good" moderator. One could design a more complicated system, but let me delay this discussion until later.
Ok, so now, we have a bunch of good moderators, so we need a voting system. The moderation guidelines talks about the requirements of this system for the rank results, but doesn't talk about the requirements for the voting system. This causes some problems. Here is a scenario using the current voting system:
Some article talks about night people vs. day people. If it is posted during the night, night people will push down messages bad for them until they becomes -1, and will be upped later to +4 by day people when they wake up. If the message had been posted during the day, the contrary would have happened.
Altough this scenario is very improbable, it reveals a few flaws in the current voting system. So here are a few requirements for a voting system that may solve some of the flaws
Enough with the criticisms already. Here is a suggestion for the voting mechanism:
every moderator gives a score between -3 and 5 (or something) to any message they read. All other messages have the status "not read" for that moderator.
Ok, I admit the memory necessary to keep track of all that info can be a problem (but you could for example close the votes after 24hours, and delete that info), but there are clear advantages:
Ok, I touched many things here, and I have many more ideas, but I can't keep on writing forever....
Slef.
-- Slef
is, if you don't like it. Go away. Or send Rob constructive criticism and deal.
Or hell, take the source and start your own copydot.org. Make it everything you want it to be.
Rob has done a damn fine job. Not enough people take the time to say so.
This sig is false.
>Think of a news site like Slashdot without a
>guy like me, or a group of guys at the center.
>One where the best comments become the articles
>on the homepage. If we could make that work...
>wow.
It has been made work. It's called Usenet
(+ killfiles).
I thought filters were a good idea. They let you
choose what you wanted to read. But I don't think
much of other people deciding that for me. The
ability to filter out keywords in the subjects of
comments would have helped to eliminate a lot
of flames from view. It would certainly be better
then letting an anonymous group with random
agendas loose on your site.
K.
-
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
Okay people...lets look at some reality here:
;o)
Fact is, the moderation system that Rob's coming up with is prob the best that could really be asked for.
It's basically peer-review, which in a world with people making comments varying from "first post" to the recipe of coca-cola, is probably the best possible form of censorship available (sorry Rob, but any limiting of comments is a form of censorship, though not necessarily in a bad way)
If you want the mindless blabber, then set your preferences low, if you want meat and potatoes, have some higher standards...very simple. Granted, the anonymous coward postings are lower...WONDERFUL! We don't need fingerpointing, but some credability is a great idea, IMHO. And even though there is a lot of good stuff that comes from AC posts, they'll get adjusted as moderators read them and up their status...and *POOF* they appear on my comment list too! amazing, isn't it?
This way of doing things lets the people that actually might contribute something useful help decide what the comparatively useful comments might be. THIS IS A GOOD THING!
Rob: not to kiss ass or anything, but fact is, you've done a great job handling the sh*t we feed slashdot sometimes, and I'm glad you're doing your best to look at your 'baby' as the community that it has become...great job...and on the same note, letting or helping us rule ourselves, well...welcome to democracy...:o)
Good job rob...(and David...and anyone else that fails to be mentioned)...:o)
BTW...When do we get to write the new constitution?
Although direct democracy moderation might sound like a good idea in theory, it would probably not work well in practice - imagine a KDE vs. GNOME flamewar in an article's comments if everyone were able to moderate. The scores would have as bad a signal-to-noise ratio as the comments. So a specific group of moderators provides a useful buffer.
But moderators must have accountability too, and if there are a lot of them, Rob will have a hard time managing this himself.
So how about this suggestion:
* Make article scores floating point.
* Give each moderator a weight, which is the amount by which he can change an article's score
when moderating. Initialize all moderators to 1.0 and make 1.0 the maximum (or pick other suitable parameters).
* Let everyone vote on whether or not they like the way an article was scored. This would feed back to the weight of the moderators who moderated it towards it's current score.
Thus, ultimately moderators who consistently score articles up or down for bad reasons will have their weight lowered until their moderation does not really affect anything.
This sort of applies the principles of representative democracy to moderation: moderation will be insulated from the momentary whims of the masses, but ultimately in a long-term sense, moderation is under the control of the entire community.
That's an interesting idea, but I wonder if it could serve to silence a minority opinion? I mean, I'd like to think that if I didn't agree with an opinion, but it was well crafted that I'd upgrade it, but I wonder if, in reality I'd really do that? Multiply that by a few thousand.
As a case in point, say somebody writes a well thought out response that shows, point by point, why Windows NT is a superior OS when compared to Linux. No rhetoric, no flamethrowing, just a carefully reasoned comment. I certainly wouldn't agree with it. And I'll bet that not only would most of the readers not agree with it, but many would be vitriolic in their disagreement. Suddenly, this comment is relegated to the moderation basement, all because it's an unpopular position.
This is a long winded way of saying that a cadre of impartial, careful moderators can do a lot of good at weeding out the chaff, while protecting the voices of the minority. The new system seems like the right way to go.
Perhaps you could place a total number of comments, as well as the total number of shown comments at the base of the article. That way users can tell what number of comments they don't see. I would like this, because if my normal access reveals 10 out of 200, maybe i might decide to change the level. Also some stories have quite amuzing low level debates. This could clue me into that if there is an unusual number of unshown comments.
--- If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question.
...how much people like to whine.
/. and the other is his clearly stated belief in not censoring anything that anyone has to say.
/.ers).
/. is about in the first place! /.ers come here to read what has been culled off the net. They could crawl through the net and skim the cream of the technical stories themselves... or trust Rob to do it. But who really wants to sift articles about SAP's Q2 projections and new spew about Office 2K just find the good stuff? Not I! That's why I come to /.: I trust Rob to choose wisely when it comes to posting interesting articles.
/. are the comments. They have always been scored, the only new change is who gets to score them. It never was and still isn't censorship. It's a review.
Rob has two issues that he has to weigh: one is the signal/noise ratio on
Let's look at the two extremes:
In one extreme, he could delete every message that he didn't like. (Or now with scaling issues, the larger moderator pool of
In the other extreme, he could just let post show up in the order that they were posted and not touch a thing.
The system (both the old and the new) that he has implemented has inherent beauty and balance. Since day one, he has never deleted a post. He scores it. This gives you a choice... it's an optional rating system, not censorship! If you don't like, DON'T USE IT!.
Think about it this way: it's a recursion of what
The other dimension of
You know, some people won't go to a movie that doesn't get a good review? They find a film critic they like in print or on the net, and if he/she says the film sucks, they don't go. This is the same thing! Lower your threshold and the scores are meaningless, raise it, or keep it at zero, and it's just like consulting a movie review.
Everybody gets a choice... I don't have to sift through stupid-ass flamewars to find the content that I love.
You know what... I think I'll raise my threshold to 1.
--
"In Cyberspace, no one can hear you be sarcastic"
- Humor
- Flame
- Pinhead Post
Then you could also have highlights for each day such as "Funniest Posts", or "Toasters", or even "10 Stupidest things said today!" I just hope I don't ever make the last list....e to the i pi equals negative one
First, The kudos to Rob, et al: Way to go. There are very few collabarative discussion groups of this size _anywhere_ which do not suffer from the problems people have are complaining about: excessive noise, moderators "playing favorites", and overworked moderators. You are pushing toward a brave new world. : ).
/.'ers time and intelligence.
Even places like Photo.net with similar daily hits to slashdot do not have this sort of borad-based moderation in place... Phil Greenspun, database-backed web design guru, might be interested, in fact.
A few thoughts:
1) Although nothing makes up for the versatility that humans have for moderation, perhaps an adaptive scoring system could be added on: functions like "set score += 1 if post contains 'linux'" or "set score = -10 if post contains 'luzer'" implemented on a per-user basis would be more expensive, but even more valuable than the current system. In this way, the moderators scores could be taken as a base. Those who are happy with the moderators, and only want to make sure they see their own posts at the top have an easy road ahead of them. Likewise, those who feel the moderators are fascist pigs.
2) The scoring system has one strong benefit people do not seem to be mentioning: Conscientious moderators encourage better, and more posting. My goal is clear: Get ratings of 3-4 on all my posts! Additionally, I am more motivated to post knowing that if my post is good, it will reach a wider group of people.
The broad-based scoring implements a small free market economy of ideas: the posters of dreck can continue in their ways, (reaching fewer and fewer people) while those who want a voice will be forced to value their fellow
Thoughts?
I'll try this again.
How about a simple scale like 1-10? Each post starts out a 5 and each moderator has 10 radio button for each post then can select a _defined_ level for a post. 1=First Post, LINUX r00lz; 10=well informed, thought out and presented argument. Then if a moderator submits a new level, it a _averaged_ with all other moderations to give the story a new level. This way if I want everything I set my level to 1. If I want only the best posts, 9 or 10. This also alleviates the problem of an okay post being lowered by numerous moderators to a level way lower than it should. The same goes for increasing the level.
Yo!