Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Moderation:Phase 1.1.1
- Moderators can't moderate their own comments.
- Simply creating an account does not make you a moderator.
- New moderators will be added and old moderators removed over time. I have ideas about this, but we'll work it out. This will eventually be automated, but right now I'm still resolving technical stuff. A lot of you have suggested great ideas (most of which Jeff and I have already discussed long ago) so just hang in there.
- The same moderator can't moderate the same comment twice in a row.
- I yanked about 15 moderators for abuses and violations.
- I rewrote parts of the Guidelines.
- I've been rewriting and cleaning up a lot of code. Lemme know if you see bugs. There will be bugs.
- I've decided on an absolute range from -1 to 5 for scores. I may change that later, but for now, that seems reasonable: It allows users to have an absolute minimum to browse at, It also will mean that abused comments can be promoted relatively easy.
- Moderation dropped over the week from 30% of comments back down to 10-20% as the bulk of moderators got over the initial excitement (presumably). This is much closer to where it should be.
- Moderators have been told to concentrate more on promoting good comments then demoting bad ones. I'll probably enforce that somehow someday.
- I'm working on better controls for customization of the comments on the fly. It might be a bit flakey, but give it a whirl.
- Remember that if you go to slashdot.org/index.shtml or index_F.shtml, your user preferences will not work. Start at slashdot.org and the system will detect if you are logged in and send you to the correct page.
Overall the feedback has been positive. Let me reiterate here that if you don't like the system, you can simply turn it off. 400 moderators is a lot, and we will have people abusing the trust that we have to place in them. If you don't want that risk, I don't blame you a bit. And if you see abuses, please let us know. We've revoked many people's access already, and we'll continue to do it.
The goal here is to allow enough filtering that the guy who wants to just read 10 good comments happy, but also allow the guy who wants to read a thousand flame infested offtopic comments while slugging out a good debate in the trenches to do just that. And hopefully everyone in between too. I think we're getting pretty damn close to making that possible.
Well, something tells me you can keep looking forward. Rob said it has "too many customizations" remember? I really think he just dosen't want all of us laughing at his sloppy, bug-ridden perl scripts. But maybe I'm on crack.
Don't mind me. Just Testin broken crap.
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
Pants are Optional
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
yakkity schmakkity
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
Pants are Optional
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
As for the Point Pool, I don't quite think it'll work that way, but I might implement something that would accomplish the same thing cleaner. It won't be tied to a story in any case.
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
Pants are Optional
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
I like mine. I ain't given anyone else one ;)
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
Pants are Optional
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Yes I thought about it and no I won't do it. I'd rather add useful features with my CPU cycles than gee whiz ones.
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
Pants are Optional
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
I guess its a bit of a Gee-Whiz feature, but how difficult would it be to implement a counter for how many times you have loaded slashdot in:
/. etc. (although that might be a bit harder :))
a day
a week
a month
a year
How many minutes of your life do you spend on
Anyways just a thought.
-Adam
Nested is good, but it does the entire set of comments and replies, what I'm talking about is selecting a particular thread and that thread becomes nested while the rest of the comments stay threaded.
I like the various customizations that are appearing, but every once in a while I still wish for one particular feature with the thread flattening. Instead of the entire section of comments flattening, what about an option to flatten a particular thread within that group of comments? So if you see a comment with 15 replies and you want to read those replies all at once, click a flatten toggle within the header of that comment to see a flattened reply list consisting of only those comments and replies. Hope that makes sense, any comments??
Am I the only one who isn't seeing the new mini-preferences/Reply To stuff in NS 4.51? I can log out and see it as an AC, but if I move off the page and return, it's gone.
slashdot broke my sig
The one suggestion I saw the most in the previous article was a way to see what a moderator has done, by moderate number 123 or so, to keep their anonymity.
Otherwise, it looks great.
Perhaps you could devise a system where in addition to moderated points, each author's post average would be tallied and a top X could be created with decreasing order by moderated points secondarily sorted by average moderated post for the author, that way the 2 point message from a person who averages 2.3points/post ranks higher than the 2 point message from the person who averages 0.6.
I rather like this new moderation system though, makes the comments quite readable again.
The new system makes /. comments readable again. Thanks, Rob! Now I have my minimum score set to +2 so that I can't even read my own articles :)
I know you've hinted at this in the past but I wouldn't mind being able to view an image/table free version of Slashdot. A 'Lite' theme if you will. It wouldn't help reduce CPU usage but it could help your T1 saturation woes :)
Looking forward to the new Slash code release..
Good for you!
I wholeheartedly despise the "free email!" syndrome. It's a sure way to tell that some
marketing idiot has gotten his hands on what the developers are doing with the site.
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
One word: SlashNET.
I was getting rather upset in the Katz thread because people were silencing anyone who had a criticism of Katz! I'll admit many of them were just abuse, but not all of them were. In particular, I liked the fellow who said 'Stop coding and pray? No thanks' so much, that I basically restated the idea in such a way that it didn't get immediately moderated..
Now, the bottom limit makes it much harder to silence people saying unpleasant opinions. I don't like unpleasant opinions either- it's just that the unpleasant opinions that _I_ don't like, particularly baseless slams at Apple, get moderated _up_, while unpleasant opinions about Jon Katz get _suppressed_.
This does leave me the option of always trying extremely hard to make sure any critique I might have of Katz is so articulate that once it gets suppressed, another moderator more sensitive to controversial opinions will come along and moderate it right back again, either due to agreement or simply on principle... it might not be entirely fair that my viewpoint requires extra effort just to be equally heard, but I _am_ a Mac/Linux user, so I'm very much used to getting marginalized and I don't assume I will automatically get a fair shot.
Rob's finetuning is making it easier to feel that if I have something to say, and say it articulately and politely (deferentially? and is that really necessarily? Here it seems to be), then I won't simply be shut up based on the content of my opinion.
This is not as easy to accomplish as it sounds, so kudos to Rob for this whole process- it's shaping up well.
Yes, it'd be a perk for moderators "for helping". However, I'd sure there's hundreds of folks out there who'd love to help, just to help and be involved in pointing what's good, without the extra benefits.
As someone else said, having moderators get special advantages would create a 'caste', where you have those special people and those who aren't.
Eh? T1 situation? They've been on a T3 for a few months now.
Go to your preferences page and check the "Slashdot Lite" option.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Ideas: You are probably already thinking about this, BUT
1) Anyone with a accumulated score over X should automatically become a moderator. Meta-moderators (the Slashdot Mammals) could mark certain users as being "in the penalty box" so they can't moderate no matter what. This has the advantage of cleaning up the comments (via moderation) but ALSO the advantage that we aren't being ruled from above (by either a dictator or a ruling class). I may have to change my name from "FascDot" to "DemoDot"...
2) The way to make moderators score more positives than negatives is to link the two mathematically. For instance, imagine each moderator has a "pool of points" for each story. Initially the pool is empty. If they moderate a story upwards, the pool gains points, when they moderate downwards, they lose points. Moderators with empty pools can't moderate (for a given story). If you make a minus more expensive (it costs 2 moderation pool points to lower a story by 1) you suddenly get twice as many plus mods as minus.
are you dumb? NO ONE EVEN CONSIDERED FREE, each of them offered to pay. /me thinks you're the corporate geek.
My impression is that it is working. I really don't have a problem "manually filtering" but this is still nice. It just makes it more manageable and more interesting. I was already competely addicted to Slashdot, now you've gone & sunk the hook deeper. Thanks guys!
purple microdot.
:)
e.
Moderators numbers could be displayed so that each promotion/demotion was tracked and anonymity of the moderators preserved. This would allow a user to complain about their judge on an abuse page.
e.
Hi,
/. resources.
1) It would be nice to be able to see our own posts no matter how high our threshhold value is set.
2) We may end up with a lot of people repeating each other since we can't see all of the posts. Not necesarily a bad thing but it would use
3) A "report moderator abuse" link off all pages would be a nice feature to have. (Very odd, but now that we're moderated it _feels_ strange to say that sort of thing and wonder if a moderator will bump my score as a result of commenting on moderation... [Read any Foucalt...?])
e.
Thank you for hearing our cries of a min/max value! This means that no one post/person can be moderated to the point of being muted. (I have my threshold at -1000 right now, heh.)
Also, the change on the threshold bar showing a threshold of "0" being "almost everything" is a very nice compromise. My biggest problem has been that new people will not realize that scores below 0 were even possible since common sense says that 0 is a starting point, now they can see from the drop down that there IS a -1 that shows EVERYTHING. I am satisfied with this solution (plus it looks damn good). I would have preferred a -1 default (or minimum of 0 score) but compromises are good I guess, they keep us sane.
Also, the controls being put on moderators to curb abuse is a very welcome change. Hopefully this will prevent many power struggles that idealist people have now and then (even me! *grin*).
I guess I can change my sig now since I'm somewhat happy with the changes made to the moderation system and I know you're only doing this to please me. heh.
Kudos Rob
If you can read this message, your threshold is too low.
I second that idea. I was thinking the same thing as I was reading the original post.
I am still concerned how replies are promoted and seen. I haven't seen very many cases of second level comments with a score higher than 1. And your comment deserves at least a 2.
Later,
Xamot
?
One way to overcome this would be with an aging of scores. They mean less as they get older. But this would be difficult to implement and would mean keeping all scores individually with dates on them.
Another way would be to only keep score from the past few (days/months/years). Using some reasonable amount of time. This would be much easier to implement and while you still need to keep scores with dates you don't need to keep them for an eternity.
Later,
Xamot
?
Hehehe!
Besides that, it promotes the idea that moderators are better then the rest of us. This would only create a caste system where us lowly peasants have to suffer with the slashdot effect while the Oh Holy Moderators get to ride in the electronic fast lane.
Being a moderator should be about promoting good comments. Period. That's it. End of story. Something that is a serious responsibility not a social status badge.
Ok there was some sarcasm somewhere in there too. :)
Later,
Xamot
?
Hey dillon: you got demoted to 0 just for being sarcastic!
I thought we covered the "Sarcasm isn't evil" idea under the Userfriendly/Segfault thread. He was sarcastic, but he did have a point.
If it was demoted for redundancy, I question that redundancy should get demoted below 1. Sometimes people need to read things from different angles or viewpoints, even if the jest is the same as another post. But that is just my 2 cents.
Later,
Xamot
?
Secondly, what makes a "good writer" isn't always what makes a "good moderator", any more than a "good programmer" makes a "good documentor" or a "good tester". Professors have to be teachers and researchers. They often fail at (at least) one of these.
Agree! But the problem is picking the good moderators out of a crowd of 75k(?). So far the best idea I've thought of is having moderator trial periods where their moderation isn't counted or doesn't count as much. At the end of the trial period their moderation must be reviewed by some person that gives them a thumbs up or down.
Of course this creates clerical-type work and can promote the same ideals as the reviewer over differing opinions.
Later,
Xamot
?
I have no idea what the moderator's interface is like, but I would assume that being granted moderator status does not require you to exercise that power. It has been said that some twenty percent of replies are being moderated; surely the moderators as a whole are reading more than that fraction of the comments, they're just not rating more that that fraction.
Mashed potatoes can be your friends!
Using a purely democratic approach allows the majority to push valid but unpopular opinions to the bottom. There are Apple and BSD users who read this site, and I wouldn't want to see their views discounted any more than they already are.
TedC
It also reduces the higher level settings to reflect popular opinion instead of good, well written posts that might express opinions and views unpoplar with the majority of posters.
TedC
It would be especially cool if the poster could write their own huristic algorithm to determine what gets filtered.
TedC
The on-the-fly thingy at the top is really nice. Good work, Rob!
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
I think that the effective priority of a post should be the maximum of all of it's children.
That is, every post's parent's will have an equal or greater priority than the post itself.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
Posts should be rated based on a number of criteria instead of a single numerical ranking.
For example:
topicality (0..5)
agreement (-3..3) (Strongly, moderately, barely) [disagree|agree]
humor (0..5)
style (0..5) (style in the sense of grammer etc.)
interest (0..5) (not interesting, very interesting).
This would allow a much broader spectrum of opionions to be represented. For example, a moderator could indicate interesting off-topic articles; humorous, well-written articles; off-topic articles; relevant articles that they agreed with; and so forth.
To make the job easier for the moderators, keep a record per (user,moderator) that remembers how the moderator has ranked the user in the past and initialize the voting boxes with those values. Then the moderator only needs to change the different values.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
i agree with u Rob ... /. has come a LONG way and is truely impressive, and not a bloated [language-of-the-week]-filled mess like most news sites *coff* MSNBC *coff* keep up the good werk! :)
What? No slashdot.themes.org? :)
--Phil (I just discover "Nested" and Rob yanks it... Please fix it soon!)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
What's with the Reply button? Now I can't reply in a new window but have to wait 10 minutes for a comments box to download at 300 bytes/sec on a single window.
As for groups of albino geese generating the pages, I'll accept nothing but bona fide Microsoft Certified System Engineers generating my pages!
'Look closely'.
This link should lead to a page containing only the article it was attached to, not at the default threshold, but at threshold 0 or a special 'look closely' threshold.
I request this feature because I usually read the comments at a threshold of 2, but don't want to post comments that have already been posted in a thread but not (yet) moderated. (Currently I refrain from posting in stories and threads with lots of articles because I'd have to scroll to the bottom or the top of the page, lower my threshold, wade through lots of lower scored articles and be finally able to find out if I contribute something really new.)
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
I still want to be able to see who lowered or raised a comment's score. Yes, this means revealing the list of moderators' names, but until there's accountability among moderators, abuses will be more frequent.
On the other hand, there is the KISS priniciple.
While there are problems with having a fixed range, there are also problems with having an infinite range. Topics that are ready by lots of moderators will, with an open-ended scale, tend to have a wider range of values. So, in one story, a score of "3" might mean "one of the best comments", while in another, it might mean "above average".
While I like the idea of moderation, I think there are still a lot of kinks to be worked out.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
The next group were selected by how well these moderators liked the posts that people made. Everyone who had a positive total score from the first moderators became moderators.
How should future moderators be selected?
First, you don't want a strongly self-selecting group. If only pro-linux people get positive scores, then you will only have pro-linux moderators, and the cycle repeats.
Secondly, what makes a "good writer" isn't always what makes a "good moderator", any more than a "good programmer" makes a "good documentor" or a "good tester". Professors have to be teachers and researchers. They often fail at (at least) one of these.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
I've already found a group of people who like what I like.
:)
/.
--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)
Learn to "open in new window"
...
/. starts to do everything I want I may never see the sun again...
It's the only way to use threaded.
Also, Rob has mentioned that hew is considering a threaded toplevel nested/flat rest type mode.
Maybe stuff like Nested@1 Nested@2 Flat@1
thing could be done. Personally I love the threaded overview when the messages go over 100 but when I click into a message set I tend to pick threaded and let it pull the full thread...
OTOH, if
--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)
I think part of the "duty" of a moderator should be to decide if the article is "at the right level", not just blind up or down what they like.
If the article is a 4 and you think it's a 3, you should probably leave it alone, if it's a -1 and you think its a 4, act.
Knocking them all to 5 isn't going to happen if the moderators have the restraint to notice that others have already floated the article to the right range...
--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)
I agree except on the second point. Most people seem to only read through the first 20 comments or so before forming + sharing their opinions. This results in large amounts of repition for those who read the comments all the way through (this was particularly noticable on the $500 Bill G book story, I think about 100 people independently made the discovery that it was a box set of books =). Not being able to read many of the comments b/c of a threshold won't make a large difference then, b/c most people don't read them all anyway
---
Remove the -x- from my email address to send.
I would like to see not only rejected stories, but also ones that the authors (or whatever they should be called) haven't looked at yet.
Perhaps allow everyone to be able to vote on the unread stories, as someone above me already commented on...
Personally, I'm enjoying being able to read through the comments and not get the crap posts. Threshold set to 2 seems to be great...
There's a problem with that: People can and will abuse the system if given votine rights. The way it works now, if I'm not mistaken, moderator points are given to people who post a certain number of comments and have not been moderated down too much. This is a calcualted risk; these people are obviously at least semi-regular users, and they would be more likely to respect their duties and not abuse them.
It isn't complately fair, I know. But there is no other way unless you want Rob or the Mammals to personally visit every single person who has ever posted on Slashdot.
everythings looking pretty damn good..
im happy to see the (Score:X) put next to comments that are replyed to comments. its good for just eyeing up Scores and seeing what to read, without not seeing lesser. everyday is something new exciting with slashdot lately, and i look forward to tommorrow, and the next day, and...
what about customizable stories also? mine would involve Microsoft. *g*
--
Scott Miga
"I like the suggestion that people who accumulate scores above a certain threshold should automagically become a moderator because that lets the system call attention to people who have been posting Thoughtful Comments."
A few things to consider:
* Good writers are not always (or often) good editors. The skills and temperments required for the two tasks are usually different and not often found in the same person. Lester del Ray was an exception, but most writers who try editing fail.
* Those who are busy writing good, thoughtful posts have probably used up so much of their discretionary time that they won't be able to put much thought into moderating. And vice versa. 'Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, write about it. Those who can't write, edit.' Seriously, I have a lot of respect for teachers, writers, and editors, but most people don't have _that_ much free time.
Not rejecting/flaming your idea; just offering a few points to ponder.
sPh
Agreed. Geat work. But point of clarification. When I change the threshold, am I changing one global setting (for me). Does it go out of scope when I leave the site? The story? Or is it equivalent to changing my preferences? It'd be nice to have the "on-the-fly" widgets change settings for just this topic. That way, I can crank my threshold way up or down depending on how many folks have responded.
Also enconuntered a bug:
Error:Undefined subroutine &Slash::selectStories called at (eval 317) line 16.
I was viewing this page, set my threshold to +2, and then clicked on the BACK button (using Netscape).
Yeah! And no "Internet" either. All that damn technology! I want to read slashdot on paper, the way God intended.
The idea is you make all (logged in) users moderators. Everyone can vote. Gone are all the silly rules about giving away that you are a moderator. Gone is the elitism of a handful of moderators. Best, it'll work better, because there is more data available.
In effect, you will be choosing a group of people to act as personal moderators. They are choosen by selecting people with whom you have agreed with in the past.
This isn't my idea, and it isn't new. It was tried on a system called GroupLens, which was integrated into newsreaders like slrn, tin, and gnus. Check out the ps paper by Miller there.
The only downside is it might tax /. too much. Not sure. But I'm even willing to help if it's needed, because I think it's a Good Thing.
Your first point is a good one, because more data is a good thing for lots of reasons. But there is still a problem. All that accumulated data is just clumped together. If there was enough data (and /. is surely capable of that), then it would be better to get the opinions of people who liked the articles I liked. In the same spirit as people who like country music aren't likely to recommend an alternative CD that I'm likely to like.
Or something like that...
I think you missed a point. With collaborative filtering comments are scored based on how others who are interested in the same kind of comments I'm interested in score. The only way that anti-linux comments would get filtered out, therefore, is if I also gave them low scores.
The idea is that you get a giant amount of data about comments. But rather than just clumping them all together you find people interested in the kind of stuff you like.
I'm a damn poor writer! With that in mind, realize that I missed collaborative filtering's best points in my comment. It's that you only see articles scored by people that vote like you. If you score "first posts" low, or not at all, then those comments get scored low by your "group".
Arggh. Read the paper if you have the time.
This is a good idea and I'm a piss poor writer, so I'm going to try again.
With a collaborative filtering scheme everybody gets to vote except AC's (for reasons that will become obvious). But you don't see comments scored by everybody--that would suck I'm sure. You only see scores by a group of people that score articles like you do.
The mighty Perl program that implements this has a big table it looks at. The columns are message ids for all the comments. The rows are users. The cells are scores.
What the program now does is find people who score like I do. That algorithm is the tough part to come up with. An example might be people that just score as close to me as possible. It might also use how often I score (scores per day/week) as a metric.
It results in better scoring, using more data, with everyones involvment, with an end to elitism and rules up the wazoo.
See the link I posted earlier to some good papers about all this. Like I said before--I can't write.
That would be cool. Never thought of that.
The idea is you make all (logged in) users moderators. Everyone can vote. Gone are all the silly rules about giving away that you are a moderator. Gone is the elitism of a handful of moderators. Best, it'll work better, because there is more data available.
Yup, I made the same comment in an email to Rob and a post here before seeing this. I think you're (we're) absolutely right and am glad I'm not the only one promoting this as a fair solution.
I sent Rob an email regarding this suggestion, and I'm sure he's read it along with the thousands of other comments he's received. Still I'd like to present it in an open forum.
/. readership opinion changes over time.
/. community between those with and those without these moderation privileges many moderators will abuse their responsibilities; Rob already seems quite aware of this problem.
/. insiders. And since it relys on volume of votes in order to get a decent sample of user opinion, the system actually gets more accurate the more users vote (or rate) an article. This means that no one moderator could cut a comment down because of personal distaste for its contents.
/. community rated any one comment.
Why not allow anyone with an account to rate article quality? Then use this to create volume and quality metrics for individual comments and account holders. One could even maintain a database of votes which could provide valuable information of how
I realize Rob has already decided that not everyone will have moderation authority, but the problem with this is that by dividing the
One way to democratically resolve this issue is to let everyone who was willing to create a non anonymous account simply rate any article (but their own). Through such a system users would have by definition a fair sample of user opinion regarding comments; it makes rating articles a voting right and responsibility for the user community instead of a special priviledge for the few
One problem with such a solution is that many people might cut interesting comments down because of personal opinion. That is, giving intelligent comments a bad rap simply because many users don't agree with its content. It seems to me the solution to this is to provide extra selection critiera as radio buttons for each comments like:
o) This comment is complete flamebait crap.
o) This comment is so poorly written as to be meaningless.
o) This comment is well written but wrong!
o) This comment is both well written and I agree with its contents.
Then allow for a signed integer value for users to give to the comment.
Based on this users could set threshold values for the volume of readers who have rated a comment along with which values any end user finds interesting. Also one could create GIF charts on the fly for each comment which would quickly show users how the
Just a suggestion!
If anything is flamebait then this is. Right or wrong may be fine for the number of lines of sourse code that so-and-so has written but what about the times when /. delves into more ideological discussion? For example, the discussion of Falwell vs. Teletubbies brought to the surface a number of ideological differences between slashdot members. Would it be fair so mark another's opinion as 'wrong'? And I don't even want to get INTO the whole KDE vs. gnome religious war. Perhaps if such a system as you suggest was put into place (not likely) a more appropriate method would be to rank the relevence of the comment instead of critiquing its writing style and verity.
Hi Will,
The problem I see with your statement is the notion that moderators could make moderation selections fairly and objectivly. People simply aren't objective no matter how hard you try. So it seems to me that the best solution to this problem is not to attempt hiding personal opinion over content, but to make it as open as possible. This way we get to both cut out those obnoxious 'first post!' and 'Meept!' comments and get a general consensus on readership oninion. Also, I'm not suggesting those radio buttons are the only solution to this problem, but I think it might work well.
Yup. I'd pay for one. Start that poll!
This would be excellent - I have sent off two or three stories that interested the hell out of me that never made it fast the Tacofilter, for example that TI patented a MP3-player built into headphones the other week. Surely other readers have sent in nuggets that slipped through the sifting pan we call Taco.
BUT it should not be a seperate page... the STORIES should be moderated and graded the same excellent way as the comments. ALL stories that get sent in should 'appear' on the main page with, say, 0 grade to start with and the Tacomammals and the moderators can promote them past users' filter levels as they see fit. Maybe Taco should have special powers to promote the stories he likes to 5 so folks can see the 'old' slashdot editorial filter if they want. Now there's a use for those CPU cycles.
Slashdot is really breaking new ground here and y'all doing an excellent job.
I just went through the comments on this article with both -1 and 0 thresholds, and see almost no difference between the two.
/.'ers are becoming, in essence, self-censoring to either gain approval or to avoid disapproval... a lot like real life.
Moderation is a positive feedback system. People like to be liked; they want to be voted for.
HAVING moderation (at least as taken from the comments on this article, which may or may not be a good sample) would appear to be a self-reinforcing feedback loop that reduces the NEED FOR moderation.
I think the overall system and range of values are likely fine as is -- this is such an improvement already that spending further CPU cycles will likely gain diminishing returns. There is only one tweak I'd personally like to see -- that a thread carries the score of the highest-scored article in the thread, not the root comment.
Rob, this is great coding by the way -- you're doing an outstanding job!
Not everyone has the time to wade through hundreds of messages. Don't use the moderation if you don't want to. I for one, love it. I set mine to filter out most AC's. I am so tired of "I'm posted first!" If you have something good to say, logon, and say it. There is no reason to hide behind an AC, when you aren't required to give your REAL name.
My personal preference would be to have (Threaded, Sort by Score) pages sort by the highest score in each thread, then display the scores for followups next to the followup names. This would have the disadvantage that the largest threads would invariably filter to the top, but it would mean the people who want to read all the Score:4+ posts and skim everything else (which is why we're sorting by score anyway) would be able to do so most easily.
I have a couple what-ifs:
1. O.K., a moderator cannot moderate himself. Is there any restriction on moderators +/- other moderators? Are they anonymous? Can you see who moderates the moderators? What about moderator wars?
2. Is there any form of voting by moderators on whether to remove or add a user? For example, say CmdrTaco/Rob is out of town, or otherwise unable to remove a moderator (due to abuse of power). Could a referendum be held by the moderators to remove said moderator?
3. Regarding stories submitted, a system where moderators could (+) flag stories, and if a story reached a high enough + rating, it would move to the front page?
4. On the other hand, say a story had been posted before. Could moderators with a + enough rating post an update refering to an older story?
5. We've got rated comments. How about rated articles? Say a user comes to Slashdot once a week. Unless he or she wants to search through the back issues there isn't an easy way to seperate the wheat from the chaff... if there was an option, say Weekdot (rhymes with Geekdot), could display stories sorted upon ratings. The problem with this is that different people have different interests. However, with a wider selection of moderators, it should average out, so that the more interesting or relevant stories 'float' to the top.
And CmdrTaco: Doing a good job so far. Don't fear giving moderators power... just make sure that there are consequences, and an evaluation system built in.
Slashdot: A working meritocracy?
--I hate people when they're not polite -"Psycho Killer", Talking Heads
But then at the same time, I think the default threshold should be -1 for all so the -1, (AC who a moderator didn't like), should would still be displayed by default. That way it takes at least two moderators to take out an AC and 3 to take out a named poster.
This way -1 gets not great/off topic, -2 gets noise (MEEP), -3 gets raw (no matter how low the message sinks). Then you just need to have up to 7 threshhold settings, (-3 to 3). There should be no caps.
--Karl
Wouldn't that invite people to inflate a few posts to get points to demote others? Maybe just a hard limit for the number of positive/negative moderations that one could do would work better - easier to code, too. Just set the limit for positive higher than that for negative to encourage moderators to promote rather than demote...
Brian
Hi,
Where do I download the new code? All I see released is the v0.2, and that's some revs behind I would imagine....
Thanks,
Well, there _is_ accountability, just not accountability to us. Rob said that moderators can't change the score of an article twice and that he's removed some 15 for abuses, so the system has to be keeping track of things. So you should be able to email Rob if you see an abuse and have it fixed.
I would pay for one. You could put it on your resume and they would know what a slacker you were.
Seriously, I think a lot of people would pay for slashdot email addresses.
Of course, you would need some way to take credit cards and bill them automatically, but shouldn't be too hard?
support gun control: take guns from cops
I would gladly pay $50/year, X 25,000 slashdotters = alot of F***ing money for Rob!!!
support gun control: take guns from cops
Excellent idea! I hate having to scroll down a huge list of posts trying to find where I was when I followed a thread down a few levels - glad to see I'm not the only one!
Rob, I absolutely love what you've done, functionally it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The look of it is going to take a little bit of getting used too, but great work Rob
Food: It's whats for dinner
There is slashnet, fire up ircII or your respective irc client and goto irc.slashnet.org, and type /list for channels. =) If you have any problems with IRC send me an email, I can help ya out with it.
Food: It's whats for dinner
I had given up ploughing through hundreds of garbage posts to get to anything useful a few months ago. Suddenly, I don't have to. Thanks, Mr Malda.
I think this whole idea is really really good. It's definatly the best thing to happen to Slashdot. I like slashdot, but I used to hardly ever read the comments. Picking out the interesting, well thought out comments from the "You suck" comments was starting to get really boring.
Now we have the slashdot posters moderating themselves. People who have posted interesting and well thought out comments get to become moderators. The moderators raise the score on other well thought out comments. This not only raises the S/N ratio, but encourages people who just couldn't be bothered, people who just couldn't be doing with getting flamed, people who were intimidated by the loud mouthed nay sayers. Those people can just bump up their comment threshold and post away.
Bit of a shame to stick the "Open source" in the title, but it's the sort of community action that makes Linux and other open source projects tick. The comunity at large overseeing itself.
Good work Rob (and all those un-named moderators) keep up the good ideas.
-- Hulver's site
I think that if a comment is very good, then replies to that comment should get a slightly higher score from 'halo effect'. Provided, of course, they are sensible and on topic.
Similarly, if someone posts a comment which is good, but not great, and then there are several very worthwhile replies to that comment, then the parent comment should get bumped up a couple of points. After all, the replies wouldn't make sense without reading the original comment too.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Personally, I have little use for "pure" democracy. I prefer representative democracy, although in the US today we have worst of both worlds (poll-based, knee-jerk, sound bite democracy).
--
--
This signature left intentionally blank.
Eh, I've already got toiletduk@fishdot.org which is good enough for me :)
So Rob, you aren't interested in making an islashdot? Let the user pick their flavour? With how hip you are to the new case designs, I would have thought you'd go for the gee whiz features. If your monkeys are already spending cycles to create dynamic pages, how much more would it cost to make them change the colour tags?
Regards,
"Zow"
The best thing would probably be a customizable AC penalty. That is, all articles start with score 0 and this is the score which gets moderated. /. reader can then by himself decide how much bonus points he wants to give articles for having been written by loged-in users and can set his threshold accordingly.
Any
Assign each moderator an arbitrary number, then display the appropriate number(s) in the header of a moderated article. Then the slashdot readers can ferret out the moderators who are biased for or against certain posters. And, like you say, it would make it easier to report abuse.
Additionally you could have a separate page tracking all the moderators by number with all sorts of fun stats. Find out which moderators are more active than others, which are slackers, which prefer certain articles, etc. At the very least it would prove an interesting diversion.
The only downside I can see are the number flames that would undoubtedly ensue. "Fsck you, 319! Who the hell do you think you are???" Actually, maybe that would be amusing. For sophomoric folks like me, anyway.
I'd pay $15-$20 for an @slashdot.org address, even if it were only one alias and no other fancy stuff. Just to be cool. hehe. loser.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
I hate to say it, but I was on the verge of abandoning what has probably been my favorite site because I have grown so tired of all the nonsense comments of late.
Like most people here, I want every reader to be able to say something, but sometimes I only want to be able to read the relatively intelligent responses. At other times, I like to wade into a good flame war. The new system will allow either type of user to utilize the site.
I actually haven't seen much in the way of results from the system yet, though. I suspect you probably ought to get the percentages up so something like a third of articles are moderated on a given thread.
By the way, I love seeing a good site like /. evolve.
\
Has this been suggested already? I'm not sure...
Let's first suppose that I commonly use flattened or nested mode (maybe works fine with other modes?)...
Let's also suppose (hypothetically) my threshold is set to 1, I'm using nested mode, and I'm a moderator(*).
Now all the messages above my threshold would be displayed in a "full" mode, showing the posting's Title, Author, Score, and full posted message. Any messages below my threshold would also be listed, but in a less-prominent manner. These "below-threshold" posts would show up only as a small line containing the Subject, Author, Score, and # of replies, with a link to the full message if I decide to read it, or if I find that there's a reply to a "score==0" posting that is within my threshold.
This would clear up problems if I was a moderator(*) because I could use my threshold while still having links to lower-scored posts available, that I might score them higher/lower, etc.
This also might clear up problems that people have with complete censorship. So no matter what your threshold is, a low-scoring posting would never be completely invisible to any user. Or, Hell... the option to always/never display below-threshold postings can be in the preferences.
Thoughts, anybody?
(*) No, I'm NOT a moderator, btw. This is a purely hypothetical situation.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
subject sort of says all
Basically, cut away the bad steps to the good reply, and then show tem (as a reference) above the good message when the user asks for it. Messages receiving this treatment could be marked as such.
BTW, please show scores in the thread overview lists.
IF the default for a new or not-logged in user is always the lowest score...with a big option to the newbie on how to change what she sees (to include the moderation).
/. as you said "in all it's flamey glory".
.org instead of a .com) and ultimately you can do whatever you want but I hope you realize the importance of the unadulterated /. to be the first thing a newbie sees...
If the default is "0", you deprive the world of the reality that is
It's your site (although that is more questionable in your case since you're an
(Article this weekend)
--diva
diva Pasty Drone NewsTrolls, Inc.
You said:
"What I think is novel about the slashdot solution is this: people can see whether a post has already been elected or demoted, and thus not waste their vote on that post."
That is EXACTLY the problem.
I am my only moderator, not you, not a moderator, not a Yale professor. I decide if the post is crap or not...for myself, by myself, without the "pressure" of others' opinions.
As I do in real life...I have a finely calibrated bullshit-meter and since I believe that everyone here is adult enough to have their own as well, I am against this moderation.
It is censoring as long as the default for newbies/not-logged-ins is 0.
-diva (boola boola!)
diva Pasty Drone NewsTrolls, Inc.
moderators will choose only subjects they like.
;) Removal sucks - that's what the points are all about. They have to be unable to remove anything, in order to retain the freedom of writing.
I think I noticed some of that too... back somewhere. Mostly I've been relieved getting rid of the crap.
I'd rather see moderators removing stories that were sended twice, or dead links, or hoaxes
Or do a s/sended/sent/ where requirt
Moderators should not be allowed to post on the main page.
Err... How come the main page has not received any flood from these 400 extra people? I read through the moderator rulepage or whatever, it didn't mention that - what am I missing?
That number thing would be nice, especially if you could choose your lucky^H^H^Hfavorite numbers to follow. But that's a bit of a load of work. Then again, I'm beginning to want to adopt these scripts myself... Hmmm... There seems to be a 'code' link on the left...
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
Ditto! The S/N ration was *reaaally* starting to get on my nerves. I tweaked the threshold up a notch and suddenly insight emerges from the murky depths! Makes it worth reading from work again!
Thanks again, CmdrTaco!
In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
I am using threshold -1. I can not see any comment bellow 0 in any story. Bug?
First post, meept etc. Most articles have nothing bellow 0. Some have a -1 (yes, I see -1). But I do not believe all noise has moved away afraid of the moderators.
It may have been caused by changing the system in the middle of the day (ie, moderators moderated post bellow -1 and now the system uses -1 as the negative limit). But then again it may not.
I like the suggestion that people who accumulate scores above a certain threshold should automagically become a moderator because that lets the system call attention to people who have been posting Thoughtful Comments. But I think you'd also want some control over how many moderators there are total, perhaps expressed as some percentage of the number of active users.
Or you could go to a slightly less-automated version in which posters with high scores are automatically nominated for moderatorship. Rob and/or the Mammals can then choose from the top of this list when they want to expand the moderator pool.
Either way, it's a decent idea.
--JT
While I kind of like the idea of average scores, there's a downside: people mature.
Way back when, when I first discovered usenet, I was rather lacking in clues, and I'm sure that I'd be terribly embarassed at what dejanews could find. We were all newbies once.
As slashdot becomes one of the old, established places of the net, some of the "First Post!" losers may become productive, insightful posters, and it'd be a shame if they could never escape their past idiocy.
--
I've noticed both a drop off in postings and an increase in the quality of the postings since the new moderation was announced. I might just be imagining it, though. MolochHorridus suggests that people are afraid to post because they will be judged. I hope he's right.
The flamers and ACs are already judged by everyone who has to wade through their crap. It's like the old usenet rule: "Would you say it to a crowded auditorium?" Maybe the moderating is giving these people a clue: people are reading.
With 400 moderators, a good posting won't be obscure for long, and a "First Post" won't hold a postive score for more than a few minutes. The few tyrant moderators have too much competition from the good ones to keep anyone down for long. And, like Rob says, if you want to slug it out in the trenches, nobody will stop you.
Oooh - what if people were allowed to lower their own scores? i.e. "This is a stupid flame, but I have to get it off my chest." You post, but with a -1 or something, so that the moderators don't have to bother kicking it down.
I'm still wowed by this system. The Bazaar system of moderation. Whoda thunk it?
--
I think anybody who actively seeks to be a moderator should be immediately and irrevocably disqualified.
Same goes for Presidential candidates, but that's off topic.
Just seems to me that seeking such a thing demonstrates a significant character flaw; the lust for power.
I agree. Averaging scores may not work since if there are a lot of bad articles in a thread and one good one, it'll get knocked down.
I like your idea of sorting by highest score in a thread. (Secondary criterion might be the second highest score in teh thread.. so we get the best threads at the top.)
I suppose a system could be set up to allow the user to nuke their average score and start over fresh every now and then, or give them a one time option of "reprieve" or "pardon" of past sins from Governor CmdrTaco.
Who knows. Maybe it could work. Then again most of my ideas hardly ever work. ha.
Another option would be that after a certain amount of time EVERYONE's average scores go back to zero or what ever the starting point is. We could have the start over points on soltices or something, spring, summer, fall, winter.
----
Remember! Pants first, then shoes!
Has anyone considered posting the users average score that their posts have earned in the past along with their current reply's score? It may be alot of extra work, but I'd be very curious to see some people's overall scores. I would be more inclined to pay attention -and read more carefully those who have higher average scores overall. It may be an unwanted, unnecessary feature in some people's eyes though.
I would second the idea that was submitted earlier about paying for Slashdot email addresses. It would be a great way to help offset the cost of running Slashdot.
Keep up the great work Team Slashdot. Its been informative to read, and even more enjoyable since the customization features have become available.
Ok, this is half-farcical, half-serious.
With all the new customization features going on in slashdot, has anyone thought of...
themes?
customized colors
customized page layouts based on XML layout files stored on the server
customized icons
take it with a grain of salt, but give it a good munching
-Laxative
(1) It would be a perk for moderators. So what? Those who help out get favors. Airline pilots and stewardesses fly free. People get free products. Perks are part of a position. Get used to it. /.?
(2) Has the thought that those guys *might* be interested in helping Rob out occurred? In Open Source(tm) software, the effectiveness comes in sharing the work load. What's wrong w/ applying this to
Erik
I'd just like to say that I consider this to be an AWESOME idea. Also, an area where moderators could discuss stuff about moderation (though I guess these pages suffice for now). The moderators could weed out the bad crap so he Rob doesn't haveta waste time w/ it. Kinda like (but not really) old co-sysops on BBS'. (Remeber those? before the Great BBS AKA Internet was formed).
Erik
SCORE:
A person's score is the total of all moderation points assigned to him/her. Thus, the longterm value of a poster would be easy to gauge -- a score of 400 means that over the course of posting, s/he has been moderated up 400 times. An average of his/her scores could also be generated to determine the poster's relative value -- if a random lurker makes 1 +4 post, then that poster has more "relative" value than the poster who makes 100 +3 posts; it's obvious, though, that the poster with 100 +3's is more valuable to Slashdot in the longterm. And this only really requires the storing of two values per poster: total, and number of posts. The rest is simple arithmetic.
Of course, if you want to get really into a whole "ranking" system, you could create a situation where the either number of +3 & +4 or just +4 posts are stored for each poster. (I'm assuming max val of 5 for a post means that a named poster can only get +4 added to his/her score.) Thus, the poster of 10 +4's would rank at 10, while the poster of 20 +2's would be lowly zero.
OTOH, ranking or simply showing a person's score and average could cause either statistically-bad Heisenberg effects like snowballing around recognized good posters or overcorrectional down-moderation against known argumentative persons with high scores. I guess that's where meta-moderators or auto-promotion/demotion of moderators comes in.
The maximal usage of these values would be to place them next to the poster's name and comment score, so that you would know right away the longterm value of the poster.
Also, putting up an article or getting a mention into Slashdot that spawns an article should also either figure into that person's score, or into a separate statistic.
--Jim
If score were simply to be kept as a total of all moderation points, aging would be simple -- just subtract an amount per week from the poster's total equal to his/her "average" score, as well as subtract one post from the post count for the user. Thus, the user's score would be aged, AND his/her average would be preserved. Or, if you feel like being gentler in the aging process, you could subtract .5 or .25 or some other fraction of the average score from the total, as well as the corresponding amount from the post count. (Face it, averaging the score will make it a float anyway.)
I don't know if it would be a good idea or a bad idea to put in some mechanism to also "protect" good posters during periods of inactivity. Sure, if someone posts 8 +4's, but then takes two months off, they're back where they started (if the weekly aging value = 1 * average), but hey, I don't know... They can always rebuild their score if they're still valuable (ie, they didn't get grouchy in the time off). Of course, ranking might be good for that.
--Jim
AUTO-REPORTING +4 POSTS:
I know that once I read through an article on Slashdot, it gets more and more tedious to go back and comb the comments for interesting bits. A very useful stat to display both on the main page and the side column would be the number of +3 or +4 posts, so that you could get an "at-a-glance" indicator of whether it would be worthwhile to take another look.
--Jim
VOTING:
As an alternative value to moderation scores for all the anarchists out there, a "voting" box could be set up, such that, if a person doesn't have moderation privilege, s/he could still vote his/her (dis)pleasure with a post. This could be a good gauge of how the "plebian majority" feels, which might mean that the moderator class might somehow become disconnected from the plebes. Of course, one puts into effect auto-promotion and auto-demotion of moderators, this probably couldn't happen if it was properly thought out. (Oops, just jinxed it all!) Auto-promotion and auto-demotion could *possibly* be linked tenuously to voting, but more so to statistics gathered by each moderator's moderations, and finally to the moderation applied to the candidate's posts.
This could also be applied to articles, in the same way that someone else suggested. (Sorry, can't remember.)
Of course, voting's main value would probably just be in comparing how the majority feels, compared to the moderators. Its value versus CPU time could be questioned...
--Jim
Yea, I would pay for a /. e-mail address. emil@javamud.org looks nice, but emil@slashdot.org looks even better. :)
Or perhaps where threads are sorted by median score, or some sort of average score, with higher weights given to comments higher in the hierarchy.
pooptruck
Another way would be to only keep score from the past few (days/months/years). Using some reasonable amount of time. This would be much easier to implement and while you still need to keep scores with dates you don't need to keep them for an eternity.
An easy way to implement aging would be to use an exponential decay aging function. The user's current accumulated average is stored, along with the date of this average's last update. When a new comment's weight is frozen (e.g. after it's been around for a week), it is averaged with the score, with the old score's weight being e^-kt, where t is the difference between the update date and the date of the last score computation, and k is a decay constant. The new post's score is weighted by one minus this value.
Under an exponential decay system a user's old posts still influence their score, but with diminishing weight, without requiring a detailed record of that user's history.
The catch is that once you've added a post's score to the average score, you can't remove it or update it if that post's score changes in the future (hence the one-week waiting period before addition in my example).
I don't want to read things posted by ac's, but I honestly don't care what 400 slashdot readers think of anyone's post, and I don't want articles to be hidden simply because they go against the flow, say bad things about Linux, or call someone an idiot. I don't trust slashdot readers to give me 'the cream'. How about it, rob?
-lx
Perhaps CmdrTaco should add a "number of times moderated" field to comments.
I ate something that disagreed with me. Maybe I should have cooked him first.
especially the nested thing. I've wanted that for a long time. Good job slashdot.
-matt
Bravery, Kindness, Clarity, Honesty, Compassion, Generosity
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
I still have reservations about being able to lower scores; "first posts" are unlikely to have increased scores. However, having a lower limit of -1 seems like it should stop the would-be censors. I would still prefer a lower limit of zero so that you would see everything by default. And all posts should start at zero, regardless of whether or not you are anonymous. The upper limit is not so important but I can see the technical reasons for it being there.
-- Blame any errors on your own stupidity. All wrongs reserved.
Apparently it is possible for someone (probably Rob) to nuke messages completely. When I posted the preceeding, there was "First Post" message. Now gone, and I'm running at a threshold of -1. This particular message was no great loss, but obviously if "First Post" messages can be nuked, so can others. This would seem to be an "undocumented feature". This seems to be inconsistent with the described moderation features, so it seems reasonable to infer that only a very few people have it.
Expiring minds want to know.
-- Blame any errors on your own stupidity. All wrongs reserved.
How about giving us all one vote a day?
And then have as default:
Show all, sort by score
All comments starts from zero.
"Score" would be the sum of scores in a thread.
Moderators would be useful for hiding comments that do not stricly conform to the idea of free speech in the US of A.
Slashdotters getting a kick out of beeing offended should of course have the right to choose "show the offensive hidden pages"
send + more == money?
I also want to see the stories which get 'slashed' :-) I'll admit to ulterior motive, only one of my suggestions made it to the front page.
I dont like this idea at all.
moderators will choose only subjects they like.
I'd rather see moderators removing stories that were sended twice, or dead links, or hoaxes.
Moderators should not be allowed to post on the main page.
and,
moderators need a number,
so when a moderator abuses his power to demote good messages that he doesnt agree with,
he will cease to be a moderator.
---
---
I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
Try to use a nested view instead of threaded.
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I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
This is generally a bad idea.
Minimum value is bad because:
I would like a destinction between Flamebait and Offtopic versus "First", "Meept", and
"This message is intended to suck moderation points"
Maximum values are bad too:
There must be many levels of messages.
this will help the "10 best comments" on the HOF page.
Even the rating will lose, I'd like a better 5-pointer to go before the other 5-pointers.
---
---
I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
I second this opinion.
But seriously, Rob may as well just HTMLize
trn and avoid maddening feature-creep.
--
Make mine methylphenidate.
A slightly more refined suggestion would be to not allow moderators to moderate posts when their filter is set. There definitely should be a "no filter" setting that people can use and moderators must use when moderating.
If moderators want to use the filter, they shouldn't being moderating posts at that time.
--
Make mine methylphenidate.
If a poster wanted to make sure that her/his posts were visible to the majority of /.'ers, then it would be in their best interests to make the posts relevant and insightful, actually have content, even. I wonder if we're going to see the caliber of postings and posters increase. A sort of electronic evolution of sorts.
To that end, I think that it would be helpful if the score of an individual's posts would display on their user page. Just a short blurb in the already-displayed list of past messages. For those who wanted to work on see what other readers of /. thought of their posts (albeit the moderators only), that woudl help them see if their posts were highly thought of or not.
A possible benefit: a poster who might not feel that his/her posts had anything of value to the community (and there are several, I'm sure) might discover that they actually do have something relevant to say. It might encourage them to contribute more.
On the other hand, prolific posters who discovered that their comments' scores were consistently low might want to pursue an understanding of why. That could lead to improvement of their posts, to the betterment of the community. The fact that there are hundreds of moderators reduces the likelihood that a single poster will consistently be given false feedback.
This system might just produce better writers all 'round.
Believe nothing, not even if I say it, if it violates your sense of reason -- Buddha
Suggestion: Just use the same aging system that is used for the load average. :) I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it is basically an exponential decay over time... of course, you would want a *much* longer decay period than for a load average. ;)
--Kevin
P.S. Taco, I love the new way preview works!
--LeBleu
If you're reading this you're part of the mass hallucination that is Kevin the Blue.
Using back does not put load on the server in most cases, because your browser caches the file locally
4 is a good idea!
--Kevin
--LeBleu
If you're reading this you're part of the mass hallucination that is Kevin the Blue.
I guess you don't know about slashnet. It's a slashdot IRC network. Fire up your local IRC client, and go to irc.slashdot.org. And IRC sure beats the pants of of those lame web-based live chat thingies.
Awwwwwww, go on, I'd hand over $NZ50/yr (~$US25) or maybe even more for a slashdot.org email address. And as noted, you only need forward...
Go on, it'll be a nice additional revenue... you *know* you've been wanting that K7 with a 10000rpm SCSI and TNT2 graphics topped by a nice 21" trinitron to play Half-life on...
Gromit
On of the main problems I have with this system is how the system handles threads. I view the comments in threads (as do most I would guess. It is the default if I remember correctly). Unfortunately, really good posts are sometimes the result of replying to other posts. In threaded mode, the threads are sorted by the first post in the thread. If a higher scored post ends up as a reply to a post, it will not be viewed high on the list when I sort by score.
I hope that I will be able to see all of the high scoring posts at the top of my comments list, and not have to scour the threaded comments below for high scoring posts. I understand, though, that this is a fairly large and not-so-easy change.
Rick Wash
rlw6@po.cwru.edu
if you give a voting pool that refreshes when people vote upward, they will vote upward for many replies, just to have votes (human nature is greedy).
however the voting pool by itself is a fine idea, but give a number of votes that is dependant on the overall number of messages in the story, that way :
1) moderators are not short of votes (since more messages means more points)
2) moderators will not vote upward just to get more votes
Besides I think bad to reduce votes when you vote downward. Cops' wages are not reduced when they arrest bad people, so do not reduce moderators votes when they moderate bad articles.
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
if you give every registered account (no more moderators) only a few votes per story (% of the number of messages ? only a small number per day ? ... )
People will not increase by one , but by tenth of points. Meanning 10 people must vote upward for the message to win one rank.
that way you are sure :
1) AC will not unbalance the whole system
2) what can be done by one can be undone by many, so that the overall score stands for not the judgement of a few, but the judgement of many
3) you have a really democratic behaviour
4) you are sure there is no abuse, and therefore noone to be penalised
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
please some moderator reduce the score of my test msg : -1score
;-)
and you reader try to read filter it
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
should be filtered...
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
read the "Neato!" thread & what I proposed & what Mark Evans replied
His point is not totally false, the question is what dictature/tyrany do we want ?
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
did I miss a point ? this is not because I prefer some idea over another that I missed the other ;-)
/. for a few weeks now, and plenty of comments seemed to be very interesting. Ok a common background is pro-Free Soft or at least a seek of alternative. People who do not share that spirit are very few. However, I am not sure pro-Linuxes are the majority, and even though I am wrong, only a minority of them are immature enough to vote for ideas only.
:-) I prefer real democracy (one that never existed on earth) over elitist monarchy, because in fact this is not me who choose these moderators who are supposed to be my representatives
ok I understood the pb with massive filtering (if I did not I would have writen to read to argument of mark which is close to yours)
however, I prefer to be under the tyrany of many rather than being subject to the tyrany of a few
1) besides if I only have 1 tenth of vote for 50 messages in the story, I will choose carefully what I vote for
2) moreover, if the cost increases with current score, it will be harder to reach highest score (read example bellow)
3) last argument : ok some people are immature, but how many are matuire enough ? Im reader
4) Very last argument
ex. : There are 120 messages in the story, it gives me only 2 tenth of votes (0.2 votes). I can vote only 0.1 at a time.
If a message has score 1 and I vote 0.1, its score becomes 1.1, it is considered as score 1 by filters
If a message has score 1.9 and I vote 0.1, its score becomes 2, it is considered as score 2 by filters
But when score goes higher, it becomes more difficult to vote : a message has score 2.9 and I vote 0.1. But that gives not 0.1 but 0.05 to the score, that becomes 1.95, it is considered as score 1 by filters
Score -5 to 1 : 0.1 vote gives + 0.1 score
Score 1 to 2 : 0.1 vote gives + 0.1 score
Score 2 to 3 : 0.1 vote gives + 0.05 score
Score 3 to 4 : 0.1 vote gives + 0.03 score
Score 4 to 5 : 0.1 vote gives + 0.02 score
therefore you need :
10 votes to reach score 2 from score 1
30 votes to reach score 3 from score 1
60 votes to reach score 4 from score 1
110 votes to reach score 5 from score 1
of course that's just an example...
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
1) after replying to a msg, is it necessary to display the msg ? It's too late to change it, and I personnally never read it
;-(
2) therefore I propose that while sending a reply I may choose between displaying the resulting message, or returning to the message I replied to, or to the top of the story, or even to www.slashdot.org
that way you can even reduce the load of the server since I do not have to do Back()
3) another thing... but I forgot it...
4) Ahh ! yes ! even when I filter messages, Is it possible to know how many replies exist in the whole thread ? If I filter score 3 or more & I know there are 100+ score 2 and 500+ score 1 messages in the thread, I may be interested in looking what is inside (but I also want the possibility not to load the whole page, but only the thread at the given temporary score). I mean I filter score 3 messages & I see there are 100+ score 2 messages. Then I click on the button "view thread closer" & I load a new page with only these messages which are one score lower than the current filtering (that is score 2+ messages). Note this does not change my default filtering for other pages...
Was that clear ?
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
Jeremy
Jeremy
"Opinions are like assholes; everyone's got one..."
Personal experience here, but I think you might be right. I was stunned, humbled, and highly complimented when a previous post got moderated up to a '4'. That said, I'm not sure if I will try to be a more prolific in posting comments (no reason to up the noise level if I don't have anything to say), but when I do I hope I can at least maintain a quality worth those plus signs, 'cause that 4 felt darn good.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
- "when they moderate downwards, they lose points...."
- "If they moderate a story upwards, the pool gains points..."
- "Moderators with empty pools can't moderate (for a given story)."
How about limiting the ability of any given moderator to score down a comment to one per story? If my math is right, since most comment lists seem to top out at 200-300 comments, with around (400 moderators x 10 points), there's more than enough coverage, and no one moderator can unduly influence the commentary on a given thread. Could be a bitch for Rob to code though.This would punish a moderator doing part of his job, i.e. nailing the low value first posts, flame baits, etc.
This seems like a positive feedback loop, i.e., all a moderator has to do to gain points (and therefore the ability to do more and more) is mark something up, whether or not the article deserved it. I think the limit of ten or so per day is good enough.
This is already true, isn't it? (Or at least until 100 more comments are posted?)
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
400 is probably a good enough sampling for story moderation to work, but I thought that was what rob and the other story posters were already doing. If the majority of moderators are partial to computing, let's say, physics articles might not get the positive votes to be posted to slashdot. The place for rejected stories sounds good; reject.slashdot.org?
What about making the slashdot site more of a portal, ala amazon.com, with tabs to a physicsdot, biodot; or, more generally, a sciencedot, computersdot, editorialsdot, etc...?
Why does this (and the comment that follows) have a score of two? Did some moderator do this? Did Cmdrtaco increase the score of this response to test some feature? Does CmdrTaco automatically have a score of two?
Regardless, somebody is responsible for annoying me, and that person shall PAY!
Wow! This article about something Estra Special for the moderators has been moderated up to the top of the list!!! Clearly, the moderators thought this would be of interest to us all!!! Not a selfish bone in their bodies, those moderators!!!
"How useful of you. Anyway, I like the new dropdowns at the top of the page. Excellent work."
The first sentence was directed at the first poster. The second was to Rob.
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
A main purpose to moderation is to clean away the crap. This requires demotion, because the default score that people view is 0. There are probably going to some really good posts and a whole lot of bullshit.
DES Khaddafi KGB genetic jihad Uzi Rule Psix Qaddafi cryptographic Peking Mossad Legion of Doom Albanian Serbian Saddam
Collaborative filtering would certainly be ideal. The only drawback I can see is that it might be a HUGE load on the server. How are the current algorithms at doing this with reasonable space and time limits? Is there anyway some of the work could be pushed onto the client side (I'd be willing to sacrifice a few mega-cpu cycles to see things filtered the way I want them). If that's unreasonable (it may well be :(), could we possibly have a system of assigning not just a score to a comment, but also a labeling system of some sort? I haven't thought thru the details, but if instead of moderating a comment down, a moderator could give it a more helpful description of WHY s/he deems it worthless (checkboxes for first post, flame-bait, redundancy, etc). Then if I decide that there's a lot of valuable stuff being labeled redundant, I could choose to view that while having the first posts filtered out. At the same time, it wouldn't be adding much load to the server. Only problem is how to get 400 moderators to agree on labeling (or is it first come first serve, or what?). Just some random thoughts.
Visit me on #weirdness on the Galaxynet.
Uhm, well what exactly is useful about having the jennicam?
/. page...
-lee
...hey I'm not complaining; its on my custom
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
Absolutely. May I suggest it as a poll topic... i.e. how much would you be willing to pay for a @slashdot.org email address?
--
"In Cyberspace, no one can hear you be sarcastic"
One for every post the user has ever posted.
:-)
Another for the average over the last month (or something).
That way, among other things, you could see what posters were getting better (and which were getting worse).
...hmm... methinks this be beginning to sound too much like the dreaded grade-school report card...
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
I like it.
There are some things to watch for: in the same way that features creep [ uh... the visual image that crept [argh!] into my mind is really rather disgusting], scores also tend to creep. People tend to want to "go along with the crowd" or to "scratch her back so she can scratch mine."
This is one reason why the Olympic judging panels throw out the top score and the bottom score except for tie-breaking. (this is typical also in many martial arts contests)
Another possible problem: initial over- or under- scoring. Using another sports analogy: in some arenas, the first few scorings are tossed out. (For example, a couple of contestants do their thing, and the judges score them, but the scores mean nothing because they were just "practice." Those contestants LATER (usually last or close to it) perform again, but this time "for real.").
Also, the idea of "going along with the crowd" might prompt moderators to give a posting a positive response because it already has one.
How to guard against these? Don't know. Probably no way to really do effectively. Don't show the current posting's scores to the moderators? That'd get rid of the last effect. The others? Perhaps discard the first n responses from a moderator? Discard the two worst responses in each direction?
Not easy. Perhaps something to think about, though.
ws23
Also stories are often submitted many times. Do you want to sift through a page with 50 of the same story?
Finally, what about corrections and the like? I'm sure there are a lot of corrections submitted when there is a mistake, such as yesterday when an extra " was added to a URL.
IMO, Rob does a good job of filtering stories as it is. Why would we want to view rejects?
"...Is this world not a call I can screen out" --
This seems unneccesary to me given that we can already filter stories by topic. Moderators are only needed for posts since they can't be pigeonholed as easily as the stories. At least that's how I see it.
I agree that I'd like to read the threaded responses to lower-scoring posts, but to up the score of parent posts doesn't seem quite right. Maybe posts threading to higher scoring posts should be visible regardless of score. Of course, this would most probably let a lot of crap leak though. That's a real pickle...
kmj
kmj
The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.
That might help prevent people (like me) from posting pointless/stupid comments (sorta like this one) for want of
Rob, you gave us an inch. Now we taking our mile.
;)
kmj
kmj
The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.
It would be ideal if a thread could have it's own rating. This could just be an average of all of the ratings in the thread.
/. going to run out of CPU cycles and the site starts slowing down. I like all of the features so far, but I don't like having to wait for them... I think it's important to keep this in perspective...
Let's say you get a comment that is rated at 1 with a couple of great replies that are rated at 4 each, you would get a thread rating of 1+4+4/3 == 3. I'd be more likely to read that thread, and it should be near the top of the sort...
On another note, these new features are great and all, but at what point in time is
- Cees
Here is a suggestion:
How about a summary at the top or bottom of the page telling you how many articles you are missing because you set your viewing level to +3. Maybe you could even tell it something like:
You missed X +2 articles.
You missed X +1 articles.
You missed X articles overall.
I don't know... just a thought. Because I would like to know if I'm missing out on a lot of articles than I can change my level.
One problem with filtering the posts by score is
that, as - if I'm reading the article
correctly - only 20-30 percent of the posts are moderated, many good posts will be missed by somebody who sets their preference to 2 (say). If the average score of a users post is to be kept track of, however, perhaps this should effect the
default score in some way.
One simple way to do this is to round the average to the nearest integer and use this value as the default (or take the leading digit of the average to avoid promotion of an average score of 1.51 to a default score of 2).
But sure, this thing is sweet when it works. =)
Die Die Die!!! No Java On Slashdot!!! Be gone, evil "next-big-thing" spirits!!!
:) Will
There's a difference. I've seen a good working implentmentation of the internet. I have NEVER seen a good java applet on a web page. They just crud things up. Besides, as Rob pointed out a few days out, his Netscape's java is busted, so he doesn't want to use any java regardless. :)
Will
Speaking of the "the guy who wants to read a thousand flame infested offtopic comments while slugging out a good debate in the trenches," I'll bet he would also be interested in the STORIES that don't make the cut. How about making a page on which there are listed all of the submitted stories whidh didn't make the grade. This would keep the main page clean and interesting to the majority but enable your loyal readers to publicize stories that would be of interest to a niche group. To save CPU cycles, you could even turn off comments for those stories, as you so choose. Hows about it?
Will
> o) This comment is well written but wrong!
/. delves into more ideological discussion? For example, the discussion of Falwell vs. Teletubbies brought to the surface a number of ideological differences between slashdot members. Would it be fair so mark another's opinion as 'wrong'? And I don't even want to get INTO the whole KDE vs. gnome religious war. Perhaps if such a system as you suggest was put into place (not likely) a more appropriate method would be to rank the relevence of the comment instead of critiquing its writing style and verity.
> o) This comment is both well written and I agree
with its contents.
If anything is flamebait then this is. Right or wrong may be fine for the number of lines of sourse code that so-and-so has written but what about the times when
Will
Colour would be an excellent visual hint for seeing an article's score. For example, keep the headers neutral comments (0-1) gray, as now. /. green, or a progression of colours: yellow->orange->red.
Down-graded comments (-1) have black headers with dark gray text. Up-graded comments could be a single colour, say
Coloured headers would make it easy to quickly scan through a flat- or nested-mode comment listing and pick out the significant comments.
Kind Regards,
Bruce
Kind Regards,
Kind Regards,
Bruce
There must be many levels of messages. this will help the "10 best comments" on the HOF page. Even the rating will lose, I'd like a better 5-pointer to go before the other 5-pointers.
You have a point but remember that getting a 5 point comment should be very rare. It's not likely that there would be more than just one or two five point comments per article. In order for a comment to rise to the level of 5 points, it must be moderated up at least 4 times.
You also have a point about the negatives. I would like to see the scale go down as far as -2 in order to differentiate between bad and offensive comments.
What about an area where everyon can see what is being suggested as a story for slashdot. No comments, no votes, no nothing except a place to see what people are suggesting be storied. This would provide:
1. a way to avoid wasting one's time sending in stories that are already in the pipeline, and
2. it would ease the burden on slashdot staff of reading a million suggestions for the same thing
just my 2 wooden nickles
With this moderation debate, slashdoters have managed to hit upon and, I believe, contribute to one the most interesting areas of debate about representative democracies: how not to squash minority viewpoints. The reason is this: slashdot has effectively allowed people to elect comments they like in something similar (though *not* identical) to a political election. Part of what is fascinating to me is how the discussion has mirrored the themes and ideas developed in discussions of almost all representative democratic institutions. But, there are some differences, and some novel ideas that I think might teach the political theorists something. I'm not a super scholar or anything, but here goes my summary of the debates:
Standard Voting Theories
The base model in American politics is majority rule. Unfortunately, majority rule voting tends to obscure and overpower minority voices every time. See any black nationalists in the House of Reps? Even though they may represent 1% of the population, they will never gain 1% of the seats, and thus never be heard from.
Disagreement #1: Is this good or bad? It eliminates the doomsday cult members (okay, so some Senators may seem to fall into that category at times, but you get the idea), but it also theoretically knocks out an opposition party that wins 49% of the vote in every state, but gains none of the seats in the House. 49% of the vote = 0% representation. Many people see this as inherently unfair, but many others see this as the 'Merican Way. (I know this is not how slashdot does it, but bear with me...that's coming.) So, this is the first big question: what type of representation of the opinion out there do you want? Just majority or something more representative?
Disagreement #2: If you answered "b", the next question is what kind of representation? Well, this is where things become similar to the slashdot case. Remember the demise of Lani Guinier? She went down hard for discussing these issues in detail. Her argument was this: We learn as kids to take turns on the swing. That's fair, we all get a turn. It's not as if the kids get together and all the Linux kids and all the NT kids vote on whether or not each group gets to ride. Anyway, her suggestion was another way of voting. She says, let's have a truly representational debate in congress. If that means that the "plants are people too" party gets 1% of the seats, so be it. That's diversity at work, and they only get 1%. At least the 49%ers get their 49% instead of 0%.
Okay, so here's where the disagreement comes in. There are a million ways to figure this out. Here we go with the Condorcet Paradox, agenda manipulation, May's Theorem, single peakedness, Downsian equilibrium, Black's Theorem, and the like. They involve many of the issues discussed in slashdot: multiple votes, negative votes, vote pooling, etc. And the debates about whether each voting scheme still silences monority voices goes on.But this isn't exactly what is going on at slashdot...
The slashdot debate is similar and different
Slashdot isn't trying to get a representative selection of viewpoints. There are meta-moderator police (a sort of Supreme Court that yanks out the unconstitutional actors). There is also a cap on scores. And the goal isn't a truly representative vote, but rather a tool to allow people to filter out the junk, and give props to thoughtful ideas. There's no true loser because no one is really censored. The 1% of d00d2 out there can post all they want, but they just stay at zero or get dropped down. The similarity comes in the voting part. The idea that people get a certain number of votes and can distribute them among posts is classic voting theory.
The slashdot contribution
What I think is novel about the slashdot solution is this: people can see whether a post has already been elected or demoted, and thus not waste their vote on that post. This matters because, as elections go on-line (as I think they eventually will), seeing how a vote is going will be a big issue, especially elections where people can vote for more than one candidate and cast more than one vote for a candidate. The novel idea is actually letting people see how votes are distributed in real time and then letting them make a decision based on that configuration. If you realize that your favorite candidate is a clear winner, but your second favorite is a big loser, you can dump all your votes on the second guy. The difference is information sharing in real time and contingent decision making. I think it's a big contribution to the political voting debates of the future.
Anyway, I'll be waiting to see how things pan out.
Postscript: reading sources for voting fools. Akhil Reed Amar, Lottery Voting: A Thought Experiment, 1995 U Chi Legal F 193; Lani Guinier, The Tyranny Of The Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (The Free Press, 1994); Richard H. Pildes, Gimme Five, New Republic 16 (Mar 1, 1993); Pamela S. Karlan, Maps and Misreadings: The Role of Geographic Compactness in Racial Vote Dilution Litigation, 24 Harv CR-CL L Rev 173 (1989).
I like this idea, for those of us(ME!) stuck on dial-up's, downloading the entire chunk of comments which I'll probably skip anyway gets to be frustrating. I also agree the the -1 to +5 scale is a bit small, you could possibly add a decimal(eg. *.1) to it so that 1 moderator wouldn't knock off a comment but 10 out of 400 would.
I don't know if this has already been discussed / rejected / agreed to / implemented (my default score = 2), but it seems to me that the system of letting each moderator just vote a comment up or down will lead to either
(a) a large number of comments at score = MAX or MIN leading to an almost binary good / bad rating, or
(b) a large number of comments with an "incorrect" score caused by 100 moderators who thought the current score was ok (and therefore did not vote it up or down) and passed on, followed by 1 moderator who bumped the score.
One solution would be to have an additional option for moderators that says "I agree with the current score" and have those votes make the score somehow "stickier".
Another solution is to simply ask moderators to rate the comment on a scale of MIN to MAX and average the votes.
-crai
Btw, Eclipse made an excellent suggestion about having a button for flattening a particular thread - exactly what I would use (with threading at the top level).
> If the article is a 4 and you think it's a 3,
..., 100
> you should probably leave it alone, if it's a -1
> and you think its a 4, act.
but if they do that, the following can happen quite often (this is scenario (b) in my earlier post):
1. score of article X is 1
2. moderator 1 sees this, decides this is ok, leaves it at 1, and goes on to other articles
3. ditto for moderators 2, 3, 4,
4. moderator 101 comes along, decides that the score should be 0, and knocks it down
5. now the score of article X is 0, even though only 1 person thought it should be 0, and 100 people thought it should be 1
-crai
I think "Comment Highlight Threshold" needs a "disable" checkbox by it, so I can elect to never have any posts expanded on the top level index page. I have "Comment Spill" set to zero, and I want it to mean zero :-)
Slashdot keeps getting better and better. Anyone who thinks Rob sucks is just plain wrong.
No need to set up pop accounts, anyway...
me@slashdot.org aliases to me@myisp.com
Just for the prestige, of course!
Now, how much would you pay? And Rob could throw in a free set of Ginsu knives...
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
I like it Rob. I think -5 to 5 might be a better range, e.g. let the moderators moderate the "first post!" and "meept!" posts down to -5 with no penalty. Gives you a nice range to play with there.
:)
I've noticed that when I see a +2, +3, etc, that it's usually a good post, so a large part of those 400+ moderators seem to be doing a good job.
I don't have the time to scan through all the noise to read the good stuff, so I am very thankful that you are doing this - WITHOUT censoring anyone.
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
It seems that some people don't like the idea that anonymous coward postings by default are penalized compared to postings by logged in users. I think that this is a fair tradeoff; anyone who wants to wade through the cruft can set their preferences accordingly. On the other hand, someone who comes to /. for the first time and uses the default settings gets a somewhat better impression of the comments sections of articles. First impressions count.
--
Twoflower
All hail to king Taco!
:)
He has out done him self again!!
I have one Idea:
Someone mentioned a moderation of postings. good idea, but I have an expansion. As a reward for the moderators help why not create an area that the moderators can rate stories before they are sent to Rob? This would make sure that the post is on topic with the slashdot community, and at the same time, decrease Robs workload. Where is the reward? Moderators get first crack at the stories. They can hit the sites before the slashdot effect. There should be a time limit though as to how long a story can be left in the moderator "area". This way the rest of the slashdot community will still be able to see it. And possibly a place for rejected stories and reasons for rejections.
One other thing:
Why do moderators need a number? so you can complain? Not.
Later
ClarkBar
There is an option to see highest scored posts first, one for newest posts first, and one for oldest posts first.
:)
You forgot the option to see the lowest scores first!!
DOH!
You're a suburbanite.
Here's an idea:
/. population could provide some feedback to the "official" moderators.
Keep two sets of moderation statisics for each post. One is the system we currently have (with some minor changes as/if required) which uses 400 moderators, or whatever. The other is scored by all non-ACs.
Default filtering option would be based on the "officially" moderated scores, but the (non-AC)
This would be an alternative to listing an identifying moderator number with scored comments.
I like it.
How about "humour", "relevance", "insightfulness" and then some axes like "pro/anti M$", "pro/anti Linux" ... maybe allow the poster some input into the inital values of these (or start them at the average value of the poster's previous comments).
Then I can specify which region of the multi-dimensional space I want to listen to.
On the other hand, we could just sort posters by geekcode :)
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GM/CM>MU d s+: a- C++ UH++++$ P++++ L++ E W++(-) N+ o? K? w--- O M V PS++PE- Y+ PGP>+++ t 5++ X+ R++> tv- b+++ DI+++ D++ G+ e+++ h- r y?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
Reading the comments on ./ is too slow. ./ needs a java thingy that has a tree view in a frame and the articles in another. Or even without java, jus having a frame for the headers and another for the comments will make reading a lot easier. take a look at techweb.com.
I really love the 'nested' mode. The one thing that always slows me down (and bores me) when reading comments is the huge delay everytime the entire page has to be loaded (ie, whenever I click on a link). This delay makes the "threaded" mode completely unusable, for example.
Here are a few suggestions to improve the user experience :
- split the comments into several pages
- I usually find posts which contain an URL very useful, regardless of the contents of the post proper. Why not have, for each story, a repository of the suggested URLs that is easily accessible ? Most of the time I care more for supplemental information than for a bunch of opinions.
Some thoughts on score-averaging:
Here's a really simple and elegant way to age a poster's average score, or "rating" as I'll call it.
As suggested above, wait a week for scores to 'freeze.'
Then, take 80% of the current rating (e.g. 80% of 3.0 = 2.4) and 20% of the most recent score (e.g. 20% of 5.0 = 1.0). Add them up for the new rating (2.4 + 1.0 = 3.4).
This makes a rating that's exponentially weighted towards more recent posts. It's very very easy to code, and it's easy to tweak the weighting of older versus newer posts.
Now, as for what to do with this rating:
There's obviously huge advantages to including the rating in the filters somehow. This would enable readers to see a new post by a thoughtful commenter, which otherwise would languish in 1-point land until a moderator bumped it.
On the other hand, we don't want to rely *only* on the rating -- then we'd lost the value of each individual post, and we'd be denied great posts by new or sometimes flame-baiting commentors.
Options include taking the higher of the rating or the post score, or averaging them, or keeping the two numbers separate, and letting readers filter for either one.
I suggest that again, we use a simple weighted average, say, 40% rating, and 60% the score of the post.
Anyway, just some more thoughts to throw in the mix...
A response:
/.'s overpopulation of type A personalities, any "sure-thing" approach to getting moderatorship is going to create competition and maybe bad feeling. The problem with IRC ops is that you know who they are. In this game moderators are forced to keep quiet, which is kind of cool because they can't get any egoboo (except personally).
The problem I have with your first idea is that moderators should be kept as anonymous as possible (since the best ruler is the invisible one - like the old chinese guy said.) Also, given
With CTaco appointing people for whatever reason there will be no way people can work for moderatorship. Working for this position of power will kill enjoyment and limit posting. Its not what slashdot is about. And its not dictatorship, more like a lottery election.
Has anyone else noticed how the posting has dropped off since this came in? I think people are afraid to post because they will be judged. Its just not as fun to post when you are going to be scored. Limiting how low you can go might bring back the jokes and lame impulsive posts for those who like those things.
The changes are good in my opinion (especially removing the moderator self-boost priviledge, thats interesting). Secret moderators elected by a mixture of lottery and merit, with no ability to lord it over other posters, and only overruled by the iron fist of the commander. Slashdot invents a new form of government!
This is simliar to what I suggested on Mod 1.1 ;) I agree entirely.
Also, it could help pay for SlashDot -> "Featured Product" dept allows companies (for money) to gauge reaction to a product.
Cheers
i may not understand how moderators are chosen but it seems to me as if it is somewhat random. what if someone does not want to be a moderator? perhaps there should be an option in the preferences to specify whether one wants to be possibly chosen as a moderator. I for one do not want that responsibility.
just a thought
-fixe
I just used the mini-prefs to change from Threaded to Nested mode and , the mini-prefs panel vanished. Oops.
Went to the prefs screen, set it back to Threaded from Nested, and the mini-prefs panel is back again.
Another bug... when posting a reply, the 'preview' button doesn't work anymore. Instead of displaying a preview of my reply, it displays a copy of the article I am replying to.
The 'Preview' button on the 'Post Comment' pages no longer gives you a Preview of your comments. It either shows the post you are replying to, or nothing at all if it is a top-level post (like this one.)
> A suggestion I have: put the score of the follow-ups
> next to their links in the threaded mode. That way it's
> easier to tell if there is a decent follow-up to an article.
Less than an hour after this suggestion was made, it is already implemented and rolled out for use. Rob, you rock!
I think it would be great to have the Threaded view for the main comments page, and then the Netsted view for displaying the contents of each thread. Oooohhh, whizzy. Now that would be a nice option to have.
In the last few days, /. is starting to remind me of how it was a year ago. With articles sorted by score, I can actually pull out a few good responses from the hundreds of not so good ones.
A suggestion I have: put the score of the follow-ups next to their links in the threaded mode. That way it's easier to tell if there is a decent follow-up to an article.
The biggest problem I see right now is that sorting by score only sorts on the top article in a thread. There could be a +5 response to a 0 article, but I won't see it if my threshold is set to +1, and I view things threaded. Perhaps a 0 article with a +5 follow-up could be given a higher priority than a 0 article with no follow-ups? Maybe show all of the +5 articles first, then the ones with +5 follow-ups, then the +4 articles, etc?
Keep up the great work Rob!
What I would love to see is a way to 'filter out' the articles I have already read. Maybe each time I click on a link, a small update is added to my cookie, and the next time I connect to that article, all of the follow-ups I already clicked on dissapear.
Or a simpler system, where the last time I clicked on a link for any given article, the time is recorded, and the next time I visit that article, I can hit a button that will hide all of the replies older than the time that is recorded for me. Of course, with that method, articles that I haven't read, but are old, would get hidden as well.
That way I could read a few of the articles, go away, come back later and finish off the ones I haven't read yet.
Much like a USENET newsreader, there needs to be someway to tag the articles I have seen already as 'read', so I don't have to wade through them again.
If you have a steady threashold for becoming a moderator (say get 5 points and you automatically become one), and each moderator has a fixed number of points to allocate a day you'll end up with a snowball effect where you start to get more and more moderators, so more and more posts get marked up leading to more and more people hitting the 5 point threashold and becoming moderators, so there are more points being alloctaed (no. of points allocated = no. of moderators * points per moderator) leading to more people acumulating 5 points and becoming moderators leading to more points being allocated.... etc etc etc
In the end, the majority of people will end up being moderators (not necesarily a bad thing) or you'll have to increase the number of points needed to become a moderator, which will only put of the inevitable.
Ok so a lot of moderators will mark up the same things, but I would only have to persuade 5 (or however many) moderators that my inane ramblings are worth a point to get moderator status, which seeing as they dont all have to be for the same post wouldn't be too hard.
Where you stand depends on where you sit...
Way to go guys. That was fast work.
:^).
:^), the page finishes
:^).
I have the following thoughts and suggestions:
1) I really like the selection criteria form. Now I don't need to reload a pags three
times (e.g. up-one, up-one, flat) to get what I want. My only preference would be
for the criteria to apply to the current page only, leaving my user profile
defaults unchanged. I can understand why, however, it would be faster to implement
it this way, since your current filtering logic is based on the user profile (or
maybe that's the only easy way to do it - I'd have to think about it).
2) Contrary to some of the earlier posters, I like having a limited range for the
scores. If I were to change it at all, it would only be to widen the range
slightly (say -2 to 10) to leave room for the worst (FP), and most excellent posts
(mine
3) I agree with the suggestions made earlier to add some color coding to highlight
the scores. My variation would be to place a colored bar (text-based, no graphics)
beside the score. The length of the bar (in character positions) would indicate
the score, while the color (say green and red), or perhaps an arrow, would
indicate whether it was plus or minus.
4) I am having a fairly serious problem with the mechanism used for moderating. It
really slows down the browser to have it render all those radio buttons. For a 400
message flat display, on my P166 96MB NT (at work
downloading, then Netscape pegs the CPU at 100% for over 2 minutes (I timed it),
while it renders the buttons. On my P400 128MB Linux machine at home, the page
displays faster, but then the scrolling is jerky and slow. This problem could
probably be resolved by adding a "moderate" link beside the "reply-to" link, in
place of the radio buttons. Not only would this speed things up, but it would also
have the advantage that, for a given message, I could open the "moderate" form in
a second window (by right-clicking or dragging the link), and enter my vote
immediately, without ever leaving, or losing my place in the original page.
5) I would also like to repeat my preference for an unlimited vote averaging system,
in place of the current limited-votes, up-one down-one system. The current system
is causing me a lot of stress because, as I am reading, I am constantly thinking
"Is this the one? Is this the message that deserves my vote? Maybe there's a
better message further down. Maybe I need to save my votes for the next story...".
Add to that the fact that when I change a score that was previously moderated, I
am conciously overriding someone else's opinion, rather than simply registering my
own. I've got to tell you, this is really eating into my enjoyment of the Slashdot
experience.
As discussed earlier, it should not be difficult to implement a vote averaging
system within the limitations of your SQL system. Each message would require three
fields: the total votes for that message, the total of the scores entered, and the
resulting average score. Thus, when a moderator submits his vote, the total votes
is incremented, his suggested score is added to the total score, and the new
average is calculated. The display for each message would include its rounded
average score, and also the total number of votes. The total votes would not only
tell a moderator how much effect his vote was going to have, but some readers
might also be interested in seeing which messages generated the most votes.
With a vote averaging system, the number of votes per moderator does not need to
be limited (the averaging limits his power), and each moderator can merrily vote
as his heart desires. I can think of ways to prevent a moderator from voting twice
for the same story, as I'm sure you can, but I would suggest not worrying about
it. It should be easy to weed out the abusers by sorting the moderation log (I
assume there is one) and looking for duplicates (i.e. same story-id, message-id,
and moderator-id). After a few days, the remaining moderators should not need
close supervision.
6) As to how you maintain your list of moderators, I would suggest that you continue
to base it on the scores of your trusted inner circle. That way, Slashdot will
continue to reflect your unique personality(s). If you based it on the incestious
scores of the moderators themselves, eventually you would reach the lowest common
denominator, and Slashdot would become every bit as good as daytime television.
I like what you've done so far. Keep forging ahead.
Note: I tried posting this twice as an AC, and both times failed to get a confirmation screen. It appears to have simple lost my messages (the first time I lost over an hours work - ouch). Looking through the list, I don't see any AC's, so I assume this is a bug. Therefore, say hello to my new secret identity
I didn't put those extra carriage returns in, and they weren't there on the preview screen, so that looks like another new bug. I will bypass the preview screen this time.
The carriage returns appear to be the result of copying the text from the Post Comment form into Notepad (to avoid losing it again due to the AC posting bug), then copying it from Notepad back into the Post Comment form (after my AC post did, in fact, get lost). The carriage returns are exactly where Notepad was breaking the text lines.
The interesting thing is that the extra blank lines do not show up on the Preview page, but they do appear on the Comment Posted, and subsequent Slashdot pages.
I now conclude that this is a bug with the Preview page, and it may have always been there.