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.
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 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??
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.
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.
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.
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
?
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 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.
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
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
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 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.
\
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.
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.
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
Bravery, Kindness, Clarity, Honesty, Compassion, Generosity
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
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.
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
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
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!!!
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
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
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 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!
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
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.