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Why? Right now 400 people moderate. But when 4000 people moderate, I think it becomes much more important to make people chose: do they want to participate as a moderator, or as a speaker. I don't think its fair to let people do both.
I'm getting closer to implementing the mass moderation system folks, and I figure now is as good of a time as any to address the biggest issue: Who will moderate. Please don't worry about what moderators will do for the moment, lets just talk about who ought to be allowed to contribute as a moderator. We can talk about what moderators will be able to do another day- each of these topics are tricky and confusing unto themselves so lets try to keep them seperate and solve them one at a time.
Here is my proposal for defining an "Eligible Moderator". Note that not anyone who is eligible will be a moderator. It'll be like Jury Duty- this is the group that will be eligible for Jury Duty. And like Jury Duty, nobody will be on Jury Duty 24/7, 365 Days a year, you might only be allowed to moderate a few comments a week. Maybe less. I don't know yet what size "Jury" we need. We'll play with that. But who is eligible? Here is my list:
- You must have a user account. Sorry. I need some way to tell everyone apart. This is required.
- You can't be a newbie. I plan to enforce that by only making the first 2/3rds of User Accounts eligible. So if your user ID is greater than about 21,000 right now, you'll be ineligible. Don't worry, we get lots of new accounts, so this body will grow.
- There will be an option in the user accounts to simply say "I don't want to moderate". By default, everyone will want to be moderators, but you can turn this off.
- You must have a positive alignment. Your alignment is the sum of all moderation done to all of your comments. The last batch of moderators were selected from those with positive alignment. I'm changing that to 'non-negative' to widen the scope. Note that the default score of a comment (right now that is usually 1) has no effect on alignment.
- You must be a relatively active Slashdot Reader. I've got a script that figures out how many time each reader hit Slashdot in the last 48 hours. I'll count the number of articles & comments each user read. I'll throw out any account that was inactive, and the Eligible Pool will be something like the middle 33% of all readers. This will throw out anyone who only loaded a few pages yesterday (this guy isn't interested in moderating anyway) and it will throw out the psycho overactive guys who load Slashdot 1000 times a day (there are a few guys, but mainly this will prevent someone from simply pressing reload a few hundred times to get moderator access). Frankly the narrower that slice is, the less likely automated attempts to gain moderator access will succeed. Plus we can randomize it a bit. Select 1000 random users from the middle third? This will require some tweaking when it goes into place.
I think these requirements will let us a get a cross section of lurkers and posters. Most important, it should prevent evil tricks being used to gain undeserved access. And finally, it requires you to be an active reader and not a newbie.
And as always, anyone who doesn't like it, can simply disable all moderation and enjoy Slashdot in all its uncut splendor. I've even added Links on the homepage to accelerate that process for those who want it.
I'm looking for feedback, but it would really help if we stay on topic here: Just help with ideas about who. Don't worry about what moderators do, or how much they can do: Each of those topics are seperate issues. I've put a lot of time and thought into them too, and I'll hopefully address them in the next few days seperately so we can give them the full attention they deserve.
Bring on the feedback.
I usually resort to reading everything flat,
because even though I set my threshold to
-10 or so, the replies that aren't taken out
for low scores, are only shown as links.
I want to see everything flat that is above
what I set my moderation too. Am I missing something is this possible?
Easy. Log out to post. Or create a separate account for posting, and one for moderating.
-BOredAtWork, who's at work without his cookie.
Hmm... I think there's a problem. If you were
marked down even once, you don't get to moderate? Come on, Rob, we all have grumpy days, and the early days of moderation led to some grevious errors by the moderating parties... The moderators were *wrong* in how they carried out their jobs in many cases -- they didn't yet know how to avoid being censors.
I think you need to do something like an average score... If I posted 200 comments, and only one of those ever got marked down... I think I'm a good user (albeit one who seems to have lost
his cookie and can't remember his password right now ).
moderation is a waste of effort. Really, there have only been about 8 comments moderated to -1 today. That's not too much crap to wade thru... I just keep my settings at -1. And I'm happier, since I don't have to listen to the feelings of the moderators (which VERY OFTEN have been displayed in -ve moderating. period.).
;-) I'm sure there's lots of those out there who, unlike me, would like to moderate, but are in the same AC situation as me... :-( Man I liked it when we could type in our names/emails on messages. That rocked. Bummer...
BTW: What about those of us (like me) who have been using slashdot for a year or so, but have refused to create accounts. Fact is, I've got better things to do than remember ANOTHER account/password combo.
There's always some merit in KISS.
These are the steps I have to take to post using Lynx; the best damn browser in existence:
1) lynx -reload slashdot.org (because of the stupid squid server)
2) when replying, enter name & pw
3) enter message, then submit
4) accept cookie #1
5) accept cookie #2
It's too time consuming (even if it is only 30 seconds each time) to log in when all I want to do is read a few messages.
And I use Lynx because all that glitters is not gold.
I would love to have a super-low alignment. Some people are just destined to be antipaladins. Like me.
My posts are always moderated beyond belief, and they are never hostile or insulting. /. 10 times a day. That's 50 times a week, but I'm only logged in twice. How do you keep track of that? You can't.
One minute, my post can be "x" and the next minute "y" and not even show up.
Now, my main gripe is this: I use Lynx, and the only time I log in is to post a comment. I post maybe once or twice a week, but read
> If you post a comment in a forum, you can no longer moderate.
/.
Uh, there's a bit of a problem here. It seems to me that the
only people likely to *see* a particular article are those
interested in the subject. The very same people that would most
likely want to comment.
Doesn't affect me, as I have no intention of ever having a
account again, but I was struck by the contradiction.
Moderators are not allowed to reveal their status as moderators. This probably prevents moderators from taking part in this particular discussion without using the AC feature.
Since user logins are enforced by cookies, there's no way short of IP tracking, to verify whether a moderator is using this trick. And even that won't work when a would be moderator/AC uses seperate ISPs. If there were, a good many readers of slashdot would be extremely pissed off.
AC postings start a moderated value of 0. That does pose a hurdle for any would be "self-moderator."
I read slashdot for fun.
I was introduced by a colleague who is trying to convert me to Linux, I come from the Atari ST, and going back to a CLI is not on.
I have read bits of Descartes, Mill, Hobbes, so while the ethical stuff discussed on slashdot is important, it's not new to me.
I generally read nested, because it takes less clicks, and often it's a comment I get to later that gets 5 points, while the one I saw first gets 2, or zilch, for the same idea. Having the nesting combined with the time sequence and moderation would be good.
The fun comments aren't necessarily on topic or relevant, and sometimes laughable idiocy is as good as it gets.
Is there any way I can see the -1s without seeing the 0s and 1s? I might well want read 5 to 2 and -1.
I guess this drifted more than a bit, sorry.
rcsteppat (on IGS)
I'm a moderator, so I've set my default read level to -1 to check up on the rest of us. I'd like some way to either move the -1 comments to the bottom, or have 02 comments that I don't see (odds are two moderators will be right) so that I don't have to wade through first posts just to moderate properly.
Anyway, I have a user account so people will know who's posting in the first place. That's the whole point, or at least so I thought.
There was some research recently (okay, within the last few years) about moderating Usenet news groups. The researchers came up with a novel approach that has lots of great advantages:
:b Maybe someone else can dredge up the name or a URL. If not, this overview should provide enough information to get started.
* No censorship, period.
* Totally automatic... no moderators.
* Customized to the reader's preferences.
Sound too good to be true? Well, it was, for Usenet, because it required a centralized database. But it could work really well here on Slashdot. Interested? Read on:
The approach works by having readers rate every comment they read. Over time, a profile of the reader's preferences is created. This profile is used to identify other readers who have the same preferences. Then those readers' votes are used on an individual basis to rank unread comments.
The great thing about this approach is that there's no censorship. If someone thinks "First Comment!" posts are really really funny and ranks them highly, that's all he'll see. Similarly, if someone else thinks "First Comment!" posts are stupid and ranks them low, he'll never see them. Ratings are entirely based on the user's preferences.
There's some issues with implementing a system like this, such as accumulating a sufficient body of votes on new comments, so I suggest looking at the original research paper. Unfortunately, I can't remember what it was called.
Jim
Here we are again. More changes to the comment sections and for moderation rules, all for the worse. Slowly but methodically this is turning into a club where only the elite are welcome. I feel more and more like Groucho Marx, to paraphrase him "I wouldn't belong to a club who'd have me as a member". I will always continue to post my comments anonymously. I will cease to post long before I'd even consider registering as a member of Rob's kewl dudes club.
Slashdot have gone from a so-so site where you could catch up on the days news clips from various parts of the computer industry, to becoming a hot bed of propaganda. As it has entered the limelight and become "famous" all that seems to matter to Rob and the others of the inner enclave is that everyone has got the right opinion.
Unfortunately the site has also gained a reputation of being THE Linux site. Which can only be bad for the reputation of Linux, since it can ill afford to be associated with a site that is slowly becoming more and more fascist. We all know that this is not THE Linux site! Hell, it's not even A Linux site. But the press and the ill informed doesn't realize this.
So why do I dislike the willy nilly censorship of our good friends the moderators - and of course Rob himself. I could mention the Gnulix scandal of yesteryear, when Rob first showed signs of megalomania by mass deleting ALL posts containing that wicked word. That is each and every argument for or against, be it rational or be it stupid - it all went to the great big bit bucket in the sky. A sad day indeed in the annals of Slashdot and probably the first real indication that freedom of speech was just a meaningless expression for Rob. Also there are TONS of interesting comments in the "-1"-category. Some of them might not be all that good or interesting. But quite a few are fun as hell or at least a good read.
Oh, yes, of course it is Rob's site! He can do whatever pleases him - and he frequently does. But he shouldn't proclaim himself and his site as the bastion of free speech as long as it is just a thinly veiled dictatorship were only the opinions of the úbererkewl counts. At this point in time the open source movement can ill afford false prophets who are more interesting in gaining fame for them selves, rather than promoting openness. And it seems to be that Rob would do just about ANYTHING to gain an extra hit a day and perhaps lure another newbie into the cult of Slashdot.
I've written tons of comments that has contained numerous harsh words, foul language, and weird ideas, some were just written to annoy people in the hope of starting a debate. But all of my postings has contained a rock solid kernel of truth - that refuses to pop no matter how heated flames I've got as a response. I'm quite sure that this post, along with all my others, will be relegated to the hell hole of the "-1"-slush pile. And why? Because I don't share the exact same view as Rob and his merry crew of nerd bigots.
There has got to be room for more than one view. Lest we be just the same as the "regular" Joes. If we all of a suddenly have elitenerds and ostracize all those whose opinions are not extra-kosher-superduper-fucking-kewl. Nerds shouldn't harrass each other! If we continue down that road we are helping the Gateses or this world in the quest for global supremacy. Because then this is no longer News for nerds, rather it's a Noose for nerds and they've given us more than enough rope to hang ourselves!
William S B
I've been writing productive comments & reading SlashDot for just shy of a year now. Somewhere near the beginning I created an account, but I haven't used it for ages. I basically just post as AC w/ my name and email address attached. I am creating an account today, but it'll be a number of months before I'm not considered a newbie by "the system".
I strongly suspect I am not alone.
Will those of us w/o an active login account who are avid SlashDot readers be prevented from participating as moderators?
I doubt Rob could handle the number of personal responses necessary to deal with this sort of problem, but perhaps a group of "trusted" individuals could work to ensure that those of us with extenuating circumstances are excluded from assisting w/ SlashDot.
-Seth Nickell (snickell@bigfoot.com)
Wow... and I've got a three-digit UID...
It's sad that people just can't behave themselves in a civilized manner when posting to a public forum. All this programming effort could be better spent on adding new and exciting features to /. instead of babysitting the lusers who seem to have nothing better to do than try to annoy people. Ah well, keep up the good work... the new features are interesting to play with.
-Logged-in Users get a single checkbox on random -posts which is +1. Low alignments, the -inarticulate, lurkers, and MEEPT (assuming MEEPT -is an account) can only
- moderate up.
And then, somebody creates 10000 accounts (possibly via a bot), and checks each one of them to see if they can moderate their own comment. They will. Bang. Five different moderators have to use a point each to get it back to 0. And then he starts again.
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
Been playing MUDs, Rob? :)
If 90% of everything isn't crap, your standards are too high.
The US obviously convinced its self that democracy doesn't work; as shown by extreamly low voter turn out.
Apparently, it doesn't. Californians keep voting for things, and then some judge is dug up, paid off, and told to veto the will of the people.
Californians wanted to teach schoolchildren in English. bzzt, not going to happen. Californians wanted to OK medical marijuana. Pffft, not likely. Californians wanted a cap on how much politicians could beg and scam off of people to finance their campaigns. Ermmm, no, sorry, nice try. Insurance reform, pretty please? Hah! It is to laugh.
What's the freakin' point of getting tens of thousands of signatures, stuffing a bill through the Halls of Democracy, and _finally_ getting the thing on the ballot, if once the damn thing is voted on and passed, it's immediately chucked out, contrary to what the People have drug their asses to the polls and voted for??
That was the best change here recently... the ability to self moderate - or is that censor the available news stories.
Still, since you are going to allow more active moderation, and you have all the filters perhaps this means you can post more stories (and properly categorize them). This way there would be more content that has a chance to appeal to more people.
.
.
. * Did aliens forget to remove your anal probe?
I do not have an account and will likely never create one. I think I have posted twice, several Anonymous Cowards deep in a thread. Reading /. regularly keeps me sounding wise when I am talking to the suits.
I have a feeling this is going to be huge and this moderation method will be copied many times. What a great system.
It increases my guilt though. In addition to using Open Source without contributing, I now get the benefits of the new slashdot without participating in the moderation process. Perhaps you should start selling hair shirts?
Like many others, I feel that it is counterproductive to forbid moderators from participating in discussions under which they have moderated. (stopping to take a breath....) A per thread restriction would make much more sense.
If I were a moderator, I would only be moderating under discussions which I found interesting. The obvious reason is that if a discussion was boring to me I wouldn't be reading it. So the choice would be narrowed to moderating under discussions I find interesting or posting comments under discussions I find interesting. All things being equal, I'd choose to post comments.
That's all fine and well, except that if most other moderators feel the same way then the model breaks down. I have moderated under discussions in which I have participated, I have moderated under discussions in which I have not participated, and I have skipped moderating under discussions in which I have participated. (stopping for another breath....)
The point is, I find participating and moderating to be mutually exclusive. It appears that this move is guaranteeing us that we will always lose either good comments or good moderation.
Take it for what it is worth.
1) I only read stories I am interested in. If I am interested in them, I will post. If I post, I can't moderate. Odds are, if I post, and later learn something in another post that proves me wrong, or has the oppisite point of view written well, and is relevent, I would WANT to give it a +1, but no longer can. I think moderating posts in that story is a GOOD thing. I can deal with not moderating things in the same thread, but force me to choose to read or post to the whole story feels like I have to have one hand broken if I like the story too much. Makes me wanna screem if I post something, then 10 minutes later I see someone posts something good (who agrees OR disagrees with me) and they are buried at the bottom of the story with 20 "This site is already 'slashdotted'" or "Wow, Cool-First Post" crap above it.
2) what's with the middle 2/3 junk? If the moderator guidlines make sure the moderator isn't abusing thier privilage, what's wrong if they only load slashdot once every other day and read just what they like, OR, read through every single story 10 times a day?
Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Slashdot is getting to the point of confusion. I read the comments and see them everywhere. Its not clear which are replies and which are "new" posts. For new people coming to Slashdot this could cause even greater confusion. I've been reading for about 1 1/2 years now and I'm used to how comments work and have kept up-to-date on Slashdot features. But login accounts, moderation, thresholds are getting to be almost web site "bloat". There is a thing in the coding world known as "feature bloat". I'd rather not see that happen here.
Rob, I know you are trying to make Slashdot a better site, but I believe more features can only do harm at this point. I suggest higher quality news and less reposted news. After all, Slashdot is a news site.. its focus should be on news.
I'd just like to voice my enjoyment of the recent moderation practices. I've found that I typically agree with the moderators as to what is a good read and what isn't. Perhaps I don't read as many comments as I once did, but I do have time to read more articles and some of the best comments on thoes articels. I'm happier and am looking forward to this next round of changes.
My user ID is 72. Does that mean I can call :)
myself a hardcore, long-time Slashdot reader?
I actually didn't start reading Slashdot until
it started to get popular, but happened to be
pretty bored at work when Rob implemented user
accounts so I got one of the first. But it
feels good to know that in 50 years, after we've
achieved World Domination(tm), I'll be able to
tell my grandchildren "I had user ID #72!"
One thing that doesn't seem to have been addressed is whether people's threshholds will be taken into account. Presumably, for someone to be an effective moderator, they need to be open to all of the posts (not just those with positive values, etc); otherwise, you have people moderating only those items which have already been moderated. Perhaps a person's default threshhold should be taken into account in the selection process. If a person does use a higher threshhold, this should not necessarily eliminate them, but if they are selected as a potential moderator, then they have lower their threshhold.
I have mixed feelings about this- it does seem silly to not be able to moderate a topic that one is interested in. But at the same time this would keep someone from pushing his own agenda in both posts and in moderation. If you are a poster, post! If you are a moderator, moderate!
Assumedly, thiough, one could post as an AC and still moderate the thread. If this expanded moderation system hits prime time I think that AC's will be more usefull and important not less. That is to say, if you have something slightly caustic or unpopular to say you can say it as an AC and not worry about having your good name "tarnished" (your account downgraded) by an abusive moderator, and thus not be worthy of moderation.
2^5
I wonder if it wouldn't be better to establish a smaller group (500-1000) of moderators who knew that abuses would be more noticeable and that they were accountable for the way they used the privilege, rather than a larger group who felt less restricted or weren't as clear on what should and shouldn't be moderated up or down?
It seems to me that the latter would invite "piling on" in some cases, while the former would encourage more judicious moderation.
Maybe judgments of appropriateness should be separated from ratings based on popularity. For example, allow all users to score posts they like but allow only moderators to down posts that are "bad."
slashdot broke my sig
Is that (350) I see on my users.pl my UID? How nice if it is :) Okay, so I fit that criterion. Now, what I wonder is:
Rob says that they'll pick from a middle group of slashdot readers, trying to filter out psychoes. Do I count as a psycho because I read half or so of the stories but slashdot _IS_ my home page in Netscape?
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
The idea of moderation is to separate relevant postings from white noise. It is not about censorship and preferring certain political views.
Your idea is orthogonal to the current system and may be implemented additionally. Rob?
You listed the moderation changes in detail, but what are the other changes? :)
:)
Maybe my reading comprehension skills need work or something
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Anyway, it just occurred to me that perhaps these problems have existed and been discussed in the past by academics. There has been talk in these forums about "democracy" but I think the term is used without really understanding what it means. There are a lot of other political systems which might be more applicable to /., particularly in light of what Rob has suggested.
There are alternative political systems (such as anarchy, anarcho-syndicalism, and other left-wing systems) which are actually formal systems of government (i.e. control), with sets of rules for management of a community. Now, I am only suggesting that CmdrTaco could find some resources on the 'net (e.g. by Noam Chomsky) which might give him (and us) some more ideas for this moderation thing. I don't personaly know much about these systems, but I do know they exist and are proposed by some brilliant minds as solutions to some of our social problems. Perhaps they can be applied here first ;)
Even rational talk about non-US political systems on /. is generally flame bait, and I'm trying to avoid that. All I'm saying is that there are lots of community systems already in existence IRL, and that maybe we could learn from them as well.
[snif snif] Hey, I smell a catch 22 here. Maybe you should only actively post until you become a moderator....
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
One other effect I haven't seen mentioned, which I think is important. The way Rob is talking about setting this up will discourage people from moderating in threads where they're emotionally involved; they'll want to post instead. This can only have a positive effect on objectivity.
my impression was that comments and moderation for a particular article would not be permitted, though the word "forum" makes it open to interpretation - hence ambiguous.
I see people posting as ACs who mention they are moderators. How is this done? Does a moderator log out, post their comment and log back in? Or are all moderator comments automatically ACs?
-Enry
#630, but not a moderator. So there.
Posted by Mike@ABC:
I can't help but wonder if the moderation vs. posting scheme will work. If a moderator has something really cool to say, but has to choose between that and supporting someone else's comments (or blasting a idiot comment down to -1), I think we'd lose out on some good perspectives.
As for the number of moderators, well, 4000 seems like a lot. Maybe I'm wrong, but the bigger the pool, the bigger the chances for someone to abuse the privilege.
Rob indicated that he selects moderators somewhat at random...therefore, if you don't see moderator options, he obviously didn't select you...and he said that people seeking moderator privileges in slashdot would be treated the same way as people seeking ops privileges in IRC: the privileges would be forbidden...
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
since AC's are scored at 0 by default and users are scored at one by default, all logging out, posting, and moderating up would do (effectively) is post an AC at normal user status (and let a moderator moderate and post). However, there are some impractical features to this type of ploy:
1. Moderators get 1 point per 100 posts...assuming an average of 1000 posts per day (probably low), that means 10 moderator points. This is an awful waste of moderation points given that it neither advances the anonymous moderator's post into the (apparently common) score 2+ threshhold, nor leave them points for moderating. If an AM moderates five of his posts (not uncommon for people to have five posts in a topic), he doesn't have many points to play with. Perhaps one way to avoid this would be to observe moderators who log in and out frequently (since some are bound to try being AM's) and stripping their privileges, but I have a feeling that the sheer waste of moderation points will discourage most moderators from taking the AM approach.
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
In the last presidential election, you had a choice to vote for three people. Who those three people were was decided by an oligarchy, not a democracy. You don't get to choose who the president is, you only get to choose the best out of three candidates. If it was a true democracy, you'd get to nominate your own candidate. Of course, then the entire government would spend 4 years counting votes, there would usually be three or four candidates with the same amount of votes, and the winner would only have a few thousand votes at the most. What's my point? You decide
... candidacy, as a politician cannot run again for office if the vote of "none of the above" is in the majority.
You can nominate whoever you want. You can even vote for none of the above, which is the best way to curb a candidate's
The problem though has nothing to do with the popular vote at all though. It does, however, have to do with the electoral vote, something that has chased us even down to Mr. Clinton's first election. (George Bush had beaten him in the popular vote, but the electoral college overrides)
We need to vote for politicians who are willing
to abolish the electoral college and let teh citizens think for themselves
-Erik-
Hmm.... I like "post as moderator." The moderator can chime in with his/her views, yet the post is clearly labeled as "this is a moderator."
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
I just went back and re-read the proposals on who will be eligible, after reading through the comments. I think the jury-duty idea is smack on - it sounds almost random to me. Using the selection process seems logical to me as well. I dunno if it'll work, but it sounds okay. One thing I'd like to know right now, though, is how many times I've hit and read through /. a day - I would venture that I'm not eligible due to obsessive hitting :). I have no idea how long I've been reading /. either. Rob, can you email me this info?
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
Slashdot sure has gotten a lot more complicated since this all started... Personally, I like the added functionality and the increased speed. However...
:)
Moderators? Alignment? A random 1000 users from the middle third? This is starting to sound less like even USENET and more like AD&D.
"Hi, I'm pb (1020), Neutral Good Slashdot User. I'd like to be Chaotic Evil, but people liked too many of my posts, I should troll more."
I think Rob has some good ideas on how to make this work, and I'm glad it's not my problem. I see his point with not commenting and moderating at the same time, it seems a little strict, but I can't think of many better ways to do it. The thing is, I comment on what I know about, and I'd want to moderate on the same topics. Maybe just not being able to moderate in a thread that you've posted in would be better, either way this doesn't sound easy, though.
Good luck, guys, and keep up the good work.
...I just want to cast 'Wish', and create some new boxes on the side.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
With moderation clued people will want to post. Other clued people will reply. And as a moderator, you are more important because your responsible for higlighting the best
This only makes sense if moderating skills and writing skills were opposit skills. They aren't. In fact, they are probably complimentary skills. How can you trust the judgement of a moderator and not respect his opinion.
Those of us us who have time to wade through the more numerous lower scored posts will have the time and patience to read ALL posts to be able to moderate ALL posts effectively.
User tracking is not *that* difficult. There are records being kept about who posted what article (even if it's just to show the "by XXX" line), and what score the article got. Since all the articles are already in an SQL database, there would be *no* problem at all to do some statistics about them. (If I'd know about the table format, I'd probably be able to find some SQL statement that does just that, and I'm not that good as a database programmer!)
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
I guess it is unlikely that Rob will scrap the moderator system now having put so much work into it, but I still think he should.
--
Now that slashdot is counting how many times people visit this site, shouldn't it have a privacy policy stating what information is gathered, and what it is used for?
jamus
Ok, I don't have this clear in my head quite yet, but I just thought about it..
What if users had a 'pool' of points that they could use to up/down ratings on messages. Perhaps based on the average rating of their own messages or something..
I'd also limit it to only allowing each person to down a message by one point. This way it requires MORE then 1 person to bring a message down to nill..
I'd also say that only 'experienced' users have this ability, by causing it to only affect a certain 'percentage' of accounts, like, 10,000 accounts, 50% have ability, first 5,000 user accounts..
This brings moderation to a 'group' level, and basically allows everyone a 'vote' on message levels..
An example would be this. A very technical reader often has his posts raised to like 4 or so. He has the ability to affect '8' posts, but he alone can't bring a post down to -7, that'd require 8 people thinking it stunk. An average user, with posts around 1 or 2, could affect 2-4 posts. Perhaps a step system, where some formula that comes from the ether shows how many 'points' you have access to..
Comments?
Suggestions?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
>Of course, there needs to be some type of
> control on this, so people just don't score
> their friends high to get them to be
> moderators...hmmm...
That's what's nice about the new system. The 'highest rated' people don't automatically become 'the most eligible'. They have to be active, and with a positive level..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Well, my intent was to point out how moderators should be selected, but you are right that I didn't express that very clearly. Contrary to what Rob says, I think that who would be a good moderator is related to what they can do.
The point I tried to make was that even a "gang of 400" is effectively the same as "everyone votes", because the chances that group of people that large is very far from the norm is very small. Even if you work to make a group of 400 different, it will be hard to move it that much from the norm. You could create a "litmus test" and move the norm on one particular subject, but chances are you would still be close to the norm on other subjects.
My other point is that having everyone vote (or effectively everyone) leads to a Tyranny of the Majority and that can stifle well reasoned, but unpopular views. One way to counteract this is to give each moderator the ability to use up most of their voting power on one post.
So, I think Rob should either have a "small" group of moderators, say 50-100, which are carefully selected to promote diversity and contrary views, or he should use a much larger group (effectively everyone) and have options that promote contrary views.
But I certainly want there to be a large enough pool of moderators that those minority opinions are well sampled.
According to my statistics book, the "sampling theory" says that any group that is larger than around 30 or so is going to be OK if you only have a one dimensional distribution. Slashdot would need a larger number because of the diversity of topics and the different ways to "judge" an article, but unless you have less than a hundred or so moderators, you are going to almost certainly have someone in that group that will agree with a particular article.
Look at how the US constitution is structured:
The people who wrote up the US constitution also were afraid of the Tyranny of the Majority and did several things to counteract it.
First, they made a representational government rather than a purely democratic government. It is much easier for someone with a well reasoned, but unpopular idea to convince a few other representatives that the idea is good than it is to convince the entire population.
Secondly, they created the Bill of Rights and an independent judiciary. Again, it is easier to convince a small jury or a judge of a well reasoned, but unpopular point of view than it is to convince everyone.
Neither of these are perfect in practice, and they don't strike me as being useful for slashdot. Do you really want campaigns to elect moderators or have a grievance system that lets people who think a moderator is biased against them the chance to over rule a moderators vote? Personally, I don't think that /. is important enough to put that much effort into it.
This leads me back to either having a "few (50-100), specially select moderators", or something like the ability for moderators to use up most of their voting power to promote an unpopular opinion. Other ideas are most welcome.
P.S. While I disagree with some of your post, I very much enjoyed reading it. It made me think. This is why I read and post to slashdot.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
In another post about the Tyranny of the Majority I argue that it isn't necessary to have everyone who reads /. to be a moderator because even 400 moderators is, statistically speaking, going to be a very close approximation of the whole population.
I think that allowing everyone to vote is more of a political decision than a practical decision. I would prefer if every non-AC could vote, but only if the problems with keeping diversity of opinions and preventing self-selection can be worked out. Otherwise, I think we would be better off with fewer moderators. There is also the point with fewer moderators, abuses are easier to track and fix.
If their posts have been well-received, their moderation carries weight. If their previous moderations have agreed with other highly-ranked moderators, their moderation carries weight. If they are CmdrTaco, their moderation carries weight. (emphasis mine)
This will lead to a very self-selecting group. The more you agree with the folks in power, the more power you are likely to get. I think this is A Bad Thing. It works well for google because you are trying to find self-selecting groups.
[...] if they're anonymous, [...] their moderation carries less weight.
I can't see any meaningful way that AC's can have a vote. If you let all AC's vote, then anyone who wants to really change a score can just go in and keep boosting the score as an AC. If you let the AC's only vote once, then most of the time AC's wont get to vote.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
Ok, so /. is already Linux-centric. Chances are the current group of moderators tends to think that linux==good, everything else==bad. In order for you to become a moderator, you have to match the current moderators, so you have to tow the party line. Even if you start off with only a mild bias, this self=selecting process is going to make things much worse over time.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
I think this reasonable in that it makes a "Jury Memeber" (JM) think about whether they want to post to participate or moderate. JMs, as you said, won't have that many opportunities to moderate since their point allocation will be low.
The REAL drawback is that the best moderators for a particular subject are the best clued. Now we have the ones we most want posting and moderating deciding which to do.
OTOH, limiting the points sufficiently may overcome this, the same way it overcomes the "Tyranny of the Majority" by preventing emotional votes. You don't have enough votes to be flippant with them, you have to save them for when they count. Also, I gather marking up is more important than squelching, and the moderator system is geared to that by the -1..5 system.
All in all it sounds OK to me. Especially the backing out of moderation if you just HAVE to post. That lets you moderate first and participate if no one else gets to your point.
--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)
There are lots of good ideas here but the opinion that seems to stand out is to not exclude moderators from discussions in which they are inclined to participate. I cannot comment on how well or how poorly the current model works from a mderator's point of view, but it seems that the way to prevent human failure is to either limit or over-ride the human.
The idea proposed above about excluding a moderator only from threads in which he or she posts seems good, but who knows how it will work out. Will it cause moderation to become too much of a chore? I know it would for me. I want to post. I want to mod. Aaack, this is a good thread and I must choose...
Are there any other ways that the human failures could be reliably eliminated?
Implementing the mass-mod system seems like a good start. It may turn out that restrictions on mod/post activity will be unnecessary because even if a mod pushes a post that conflicts with his down, another will pump it up. If there are enough mods, the poster will be lost in the noise.
The only requirement here would be that enough mods read at the raw-and-uncut -1 level.
I think that we should try these ideas out. Don't just pick one or a certain set and run. Give them all a spin. We are breaking new ground here. Let's find out what works.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Instead of letting a moderator choose between moderating or posting, make the decision for him/her.
That is, have a unique (pseudo)randomly selected jury of about 50-100 moderators for each story. If selected for jury duty for that story, you would then have it displayed on your custom front page with some indication that you are a moderator in this forum (regardless of topic/author filtering).
Once selected, you would then be expected to "fulfil your civic duty" and moderate posts in that forum, without the option of posting. Naturally you would still have the option of choosing whether or not to be in the pool of jurors from the outset. If the juror pool were sufficiently large and each jury were sufficiently small, the incidence of being ineligible to post in a particular forum would be quite small, and, IMHO, an acceptable price to pay.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
I was under the impression that moderators had an extra option on the Comments page? I think I match the qualifications listed, but I don't see anything.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Well, I am not that particularly interested in actually moderating, it would probably require little more time and effort then I am willing to put into it. I must have misunderstood his post.
I thought he was automatically giving it to people with the qualifications he had listed.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
The main problem I see with who? is that there is not a 1:1 mapping between accounts and people. I can create one account for every email address I can muster. If I am a sysadmin at a medium size installation, generating email addresses is trivial. Heuristics like "the first 2/3ds of all accounts" seem good, and may work, but are not as air-tight as they might be.
In general my rule is "accounts can gain, but not lose". If I can gain and lose, I'll just create two accounts. With one I'll do everything that will result in gain, and with the other I'll do everything that will result in loss. You can try to monkey around this, but it always boils down to the infinite-account posessor winning.
In tandem with that rule is "only trusted folks can grant gain." You can't be on both sides of the fence. You can't be a gain haver and a gain giver. Simple rules like "you can't give gain to yourself" are easily defeated by two-account holders. Complex rules like "n people must agree give you gain for you to have it" are defeated by n+1 account holders. A good way of granting and ensuring trust was developed in PGP, and in fact that self same technology can be used here...
OK. I'm going to leave it at that. Vague and brief.
That's not exactly true. Getting marked down once isn't going to automatically negate you as a moderator, it just means that you must have been marked up at least once to balance it out.
Shawn Asmussen
Couple of point here...
Anarchy doesn't scale.
You can always find an uncensored place to post your opinions. Try Usenet.
Second, who the hell cares about being cool? What matters is content.
I think this sounds very sensible. We'll have to ;) /.
see if it works in practice
One suggestion: you may have made the criteria
a little too narrow. I think the closer you come
to letting everyone moderate, the more the
moderation will reflect the views of the
community.
Or maybe I'm missing the point? Maybe the idea is
to let the "wise elders" run everything. I think
this approach would have its own benefits, too.
I agree that moderators are most qualified to moderate the topics they might also be inclined to post in. I wouldn't be surprised if limiting moderators from posting on topics they've moderated (or visa-versa) results in most of the best comments comming from ACs.
Here's a few ideas that haven't been mentioned yet:
You could give every user (including ACs) the ability to vote on a comment, resulting in each comment having a score. The score wouldn't affect which comments people see, it would just provide an approval rating of the comment (yea, nay, abstain) as a percentage.
(Example: Approval rating 19%)
The present moderation system, or some improvement on it, could co-exist with this system.
The existing moderation works for me, and I would hate to see drastic changes in it too soon. I generally agree with how the moderators have scored the articles. I can see where some more subtle improvements are in order, though.
In other (non-US) countries, there is a much higher voter turn outs, voters make efforts to educate themselves with the issues and vote smartly. It appears that this isn't a hard and fast rule but is rather based upon the culture.
The US obviously convinced its self that democracy doesn't work; as shown by extreamly low voter turn out.
Before I sign off, I'd like to add that I think that excessive calls for votes, or voting for every little detail, would probably fail outright. If not from burn out, then from eventual apathy as many topics would appear unimportant.
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)
As one poster pointed out, we're playing with statistics here, anyway. We cannot hope for perfect moderation, anyway. And as SlashDot becomes bigger, then we will need moderator-moderators (meta-moderators) to watch and remove improper moderators.
Slashdot is only as good as it's contributors, anyway. So I think that everyone should have a nearly equal chance to be picked as a moderator for a month. I wouldn't eliminate people from the running for appearing useless, even the "I'm first" posters.
You never know, the guy who was driving everone nuts with inane comments might gain some respect for the job of the moderators and the importance of being useful, and contribute in ways we can't dream of.
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)
Despite the likely popularity of the Scouts among geeks (near-zero, I'm hypothesizing), they have some very intelligent organizational methods. One that strikes me as very applicable here is a meritocracy within the Scouts called the Order of the Arrow.
What's interesting about the OA (for purposes of this discussion) is the method of selection. Only those people who are not in the organization may vote for new members to be elected.
Personally, I think this is a very powerful idea. I have seen it in practice, and it works quite well. It really helps to reduce cliquishness and arrogance. New members are popular with NON-members, which usually means they're pretty good folks. This tends to reduce the feedback loops inherent in a society selecting members to be part of the same society.
I'm not sure how this would be implemented here, and I'd be interested in further comments. Does this seem as sensible to other heads as it does to mine? Can a voting system for moderators be implemented?
One idea that comes to mind is a 'Vote for This Person As Moderator' link next to each post, usable only by non-moderators. I would also presume that new accounts wouldn't be able to vote for some period of time, perhaps 3 months.
The OA also had one additional requirement: that candidates needed to be in Scouts for some period of time before being eligible. I don't remember the details. For this forum, I'm guessing that an account would need to be at least 6 months old before being eligible, possibly with exceptions made for highly senior people in Open Source who just got around to signing up for an account.
Any thoughts on this? I'm not very happy with the thought of automated moderator selection. It just seems like a process that automation can't properly do. It also seems prone to the feedback loop, because of the requirement for a positive moderation factor to be eligible.
All http requests are logged. If you are unaware of this then you need to get whacked pretty hard by the clue stick. If you are concerned about your privacy vis a vis Slashdot then join the great masses of Anonymous Cowards (something I do frequently for just such purposes.)
I think you answered your own question... Rob has given fairly good reasons for the rules he wants to implement. If people don't log in, there is nothing he can do about it. He can only do so much.
Do you know how Google gets such wonderfully relevant answers to your searches? First they rate each page in their database individually, according to number of matches, phrase matches, etc. Then they rate each page on the number of highly rated pages that link to it. That way, if there are a bunch of pages that appear to be about the GIMP, and most of them point to www.gimp.org, then www.gimp.org is assumed to be a mother load of GIMP resources.
As the people running Google admit, this is a rather circular definition, but it really does work.
What does this have to do with slashdot moderation? Well, a similar system might be used to rate moderators. I won't suggest implementation specifics, but the basic idea is that if you moderate the same way as a lot of good moderators do, then you too are a good moderator.
This system could no doubt fail in many ways, with disasterous consequences, but if it doesn't, I think it could turn out to be the best system. It's certainly worth thinking about.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
A major point that Rob touched upon was the participation of lurkers. Lurkers make up a large majority of the readers of /. With the current
method of selecting only those who have had positive scores does succeed in getting a more qualified number of moderators, this leaves lurkers who often time are just as compentent and interested in the quality of comments.
Some people might argue
"If you care about the signal to noise ratio why don't you post?"
Thats just the thing most lurkers don't post because either they feel that any post they make will either be rehash of a previous comment or just plain useless. Everyone hates to read a comment and then half a page down see another comment with the same sentiment as the one above.
emad
one of the many lurkers
Famous Last Words:
"The Constitution admittedly has a few defects and blemishes, but it still seems a hell of a lot better than the system we have now."
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
Then try to convince Rob it's so important he should post a story about it. You'll slashdot eBay's servers and get a thousand bids. Offering to split the loot may help persuade.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
Perhaps documentation and configuration would be easier if there were more eyes on the source?
When's the newest code going to be available?
>God, I hate having to log out every time I want to post on one of these.
:-)
You mean you don't have two computers in front of you?
I'm really hoping the Internet will change more than just the software community.
Because there's a chance it might, and that's good news.
Ben
In my opinion, I think it will be better to make "Not willing to Moderate" the default. If someone who does not have the energy or willingness to change a simple preferences option will probably not have the energy to actually do any moderation. Being a moderator is all well and good, but if you never use the power it is pretty pointless. If you have to set "Willing to Moderate," it is much much more likely you want to moderate, and will do so.
Although I am slightly worried about moderation as a whole (I always worry about systems which have the potential to silence people) I agree that some sort of moderation is needed. I think Rob is doing the right thing overall, and I will reserve judgement about specific plans until I see them work (or fail to work).
--Nick
Or?
They might still post *some* messages as ACs (and eventually give them +), and some messages as yourself. Eventually just `fillers' like `Me too', as long as it doesn't get moderated away.
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
Before I begin, let me warn people that I'm going to drift slightly off topic here. Sorry in advance...
Rob knows what individual readers actually read. This is largely by looking at the user preferences, and the reading patterns associated with the user. For instance, he may note that I have all articles listed, but only read some of them in full, and only read the comments in even less.
Given that Rob is also able to ask us (the login people) to fill in a quick questionaire about what we do, and why we read Slashdot, he could gain even more demographics. These are useful in terms of advertising, too, of course, which in turn means more money for both Rob, BSI, and Slashdot, too - so Rob can put more into the development of Slashdot.
Now, in my out-dated experience (I used to run a Telnet BBS back when they were in fashion), the best moderators for any given thread are those that are experienced in the field, but maintain a high readership of everything, nonetheless. This rules me out of being a moderator, by default - I don't read enough of the comments, I imagine.
Obviously, people who make the more interesting comments make more stringent moderators, too, but enough's been said on this subject already.
On another note, I'm agreeably surprised that moderation is working as well as it is - certainly the posts that are moderated up seem to be well worth reading. None of my drivel's getting moderated up that high, which is also good. I'm slightly concerned that perhaps the moderators - or me - are missing some other good posts, but since I haven't gone looking, and haven't found much in the way of evidence to suggest this, it's hard to say.
Rob:
I'm thinking of a system which allows various moderation groups. The idea is that you create a cluster analysis system which attempts to find trends ( ie groups ) of moderators who tend to rate things in particular ways. (I'd aim for like 4 groups total ) Provide some means for us, the readers, to use these groups to provide a more customized view of what we like. For example even though their may be some very well written and rated comments if the "hyper-GNU-heads" ( a theoretical group ) are the only ones who like it, I may choose not to read it. I realize that this will have the effect fracturing the slashdot readership, but it provides even more interactivity, and it allows users to userstand the various viewpoints better.
Me too!
What UI changes?
Other than that if I log on in Lynx, I cannot see that I have successfully logged on unless I try to reply to a message. This is confusing. Also could have effects on how moderators are chosen, if it's going to be based on how often/how many articles we read while logged on. Only people who suffer through the load time for images and tables are worthy potential moderators?
As long as you are keeping track of people (which isn't always a bad thing) you may as well say 'moderators can post on articles that they moderate as long as their average score is above X' That way moderators who post good comments, and moderate are allowed to do both, and those who do it, and get moderated down to a low score for posting stupid comments can't. You figure you've already got the data,just give it a whack, play with the threshold and see if it works.
-Dan
--The reason it didn't happen, is because it would have worked
I'm not clear on the intended purpose of limited periods for moderator eligibility (aka Jury Duty). Are some people moderating too much? Then i'd just reduce the rate at which people accumulate moderator points. It feels like an impediment to action to have to check my "On Jury Duty" status when i note a bad/good comment.
Or is this an effort to spread responsibility around to a larger group, so that more people can participate as moderators? I can see the value of that. It may help prevent an Us vs. Them feeling among
So far i'm quite impressed with the moderation as it stands. "Many hands on the tiller make light work." (Mao, I think)
Just don't post the "how often i read Slashdot" info. That's the last thing i want my VP of Engineering to know!
mahlen
We may not return the affection of those who like us, but we always respect their good judgement.
In the last presidential election, you had a choice to vote for three people. Who those three people were was decided by an oligarchy, not a democracy. You don't get to choose who the president is, you only get to choose the best out of three candidates. If it was a true democracy, you'd get to nominate your own candidate. Of course, then the entire government would spend 4 years counting votes, there would usually be three or four candidates with the same amount of votes, and the winner would only have a few thousand votes at the most. What's my point? You decide.
---
When I was your age I had to visit /. on a 1200 baud data coupler on noisy lines on a dumb terminal with a broken picture tube... butt nekked in the winter. (hehe, 'nuf of that, I was just inspired)
/. and the page was the page. comments were comments. if you didnt like the comments, tough... dont read them.
:) Coding is fun... and I believe (no matter how wrong I really am) that this simple fact is the basis of many of the changes we see here on /. I'm not saying that these new features arent really damn cool. I really like the ability to configure the /boxes. It all just started to get over the top to me when the moderation came in.
... and missing.
It was kinda nice just coming over to
But if we went back to this kinda page... what would rob and the other code junkies end up doing?
I guess it just comes down to the fact that if I didnt like/didnt agree with a comment... I just ignored it. Twas nice and simple.
---------------------------------------
The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
I've been reading
So here is my take on the restriction of moderators. Restricting moderators from moderating forums to which they post is a bad idea. The reasons are simple. Moderation is all about weeding out the insipid, ill-informed, and ill-concieved posts, and drawing attention to the well-informed and interesting posts. A moderator who is interested in a certain subject would almost certainly be better informed about it, and therefore better qualified to moderate comments about it. But if a moderator is especially interested in a subject, they would also be more likely to post about it.
The net effect would therefore be to discourage moderators from moderating topics on which they are well informed.
If enough moderators are out there moderating, healthy diversity in opinion would counteract moderators trying to promote their own opinions.
On the whole, I like Rob's scheme, not as much for the details as for the amount of effort that is being put into it. Rob's attitude is quite reminiscent of really good BBS sysops of a bygone era--and it's a hard thing to find on the new world of the Web.
That having been said, even though the current proposal is mostly neutral on the topic, some of the comments that have been posted seem to be fairly strongly anti-lurker. The assumption is that unless you are an active contributor of posts to forums, you aren't moderator material. I submit that in many cases lurkers would make better moderators than active posters. While it's true that a lot of lurkers are such simply because they aren't that interested in the site, those aren't the droids we're looking for.
Given the other criteria (long-time users who read articles frequently), lurkers within this group are simply those whose "is this worthwhile" filters are set to "high." Most lurkers within this group, I suspect, would be quite willing to post, if they thought they had something interesting or different to contribute--but most of the time, the obvious responses have already been done to death, and there really isn't that much more to say. The person who can recognize this condition and choose not to post as a result is displaying a quality that can only be seen as desirable in a moderator.
Consider the extreme version of the moderator/contributor choice: You can choose to be a moderator, but only if you give up posting ability on all of slashdot! As a thought experiment, let's assume the problem of posting-as-AC has been solved somehow. Someone willing to make this choice would have demonstrated their objectivity in a way that's hard to ignore. It would be hard to find reasons not to trust this sort of moderator. Yes, they might well have chosen to become a moderator because they feel it's a better (or more powerful) way to express their own opinions, but what of it? Why would anyone contribute to Slashdot, either as moderator, poster, or even Supreme Taco, if not as a vehicle for expressing their opinions? There's no possible way to get totally non-opinionated moderators, because totally non-opinionated people would have little or no reason to participate. But of the available population, lurkers are probably as close as you're going to get.
-Graham
I've though about this too. Here are some additional enhancements.
Allow me to indicate how much I trust each moderation group by choosing a scaling factor (from 0 to 1), moderation by members within a group will be scaled by this factor.
Allow moderators to moderate articles on the front page. Allow me to set a threshold for the front page.
So being in Australia I could give a lot of trust to an Australian moderator group and hence see more articles (and comments) about the region I live in.
Put another way, if only a small number are actually selected for jury duty at any given time, either these chosen few will effectively be gagged for the duration, or less moderation will take place.
- Sam Ruby
Will the reading method affect the "hit count"?
Reading a topic in threaded mode makes more hits than using flat or nested mode which download the whole lot in one "hit".
Here in the UK (and I am sure other places) the telecom charging regime discourages multiple frequent page hits. There is a minimum charge for each connection, so it pays to connect infrequently and download as much as possible during each connection. I will often download a topic and take a few hours to read the comments (not continuously).
- Ability to moderate comments
- Ability to delete comments
- Ability to add/delete stories
- Ability to trash entire webserver
Obviously only Rob should have all of these powers. However, their are thousands of people who could/should potentially have the first one. So I'd like a better idea of what kinds of powers there are for moderators, and what kind of abuse-prevention devices would be in place, before I think about who should be granted moderation privs.That's it! Thanks. A quick search and I found the creators homepage:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm
Just in case anyone else was interested and even lazier than me!
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
Don't all these new rules remind anyone of that game about making rules? I just spent half an hour searching the net and can't seem to find it. All I remember was it was a hacker game that revolved around making rules and making rules about how to make rules.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
I'm not sure if this has been proposed already, but I was thinking that a sum of the moderated comments displayed with the abstract on the main page might be useful. It would give a _rough_ idea to someone what the quality of the article's comments were. To improve this tally, it might be better to only include the sum of the moderated comments (that way all the +1 scores of logged in people don't affect it, but if a +1 gets moderated to a 0, then it would lower the total). If you don't think it would add too much additional clutter on the main page, it might be a nice feature.
BTW, I like the department headings.
However, you have a good point regarding the role of minority opinion. I certainly don't want to read only the comments that 50% of slashdotters agree with, since I would much rather read both sides of an arguement.
However, I think the best way to assure this is in how the moderation is exactly accomplished, as you hinted in your discussion of "one person, one vote." There are certainly better and worse ways of implementing this, but that is a question for another day (at least according to Rob). But I certainly want there to be a large enough pool of moderators that those minority opinions are well sampled. Otherwise there will be no possible scheme to allow their voice to have an effect on the moderation.
--Artemisia
I agree with you when you say that this system deprives the moderators, but I think that is a choice they are going to have to make if there interested in moderation. I also think that rob might be trying to pool a larger moderation source so that at least a couple people can moderate every single article. And, how can you tell number of comments read when there all displayed in flattened mode?
Not a bad idea if you ask me.
Kent
Poopdick.
is the name of the game. I don't have any urls handy, but search for "nomic"
Nomic Slashdot would be an interesting idea, but on second thought I don't think it would be better for the complexity involved.
Perhaps I felt different as a Newbie, but I didn't feel that rushing into anything (informed or not) was the proper method of making myself useful. I lurk ... alot. This is my second post ... ever. After reading /. for a long long time, I'm starting to see the Usenet inside start to become more apparent. I don't like it. Perhaps the key to truly removing those who don't care from the moderator group is to make moderation OFF the default setting. /. society's influnce on people should be the rules that govern how moderators act, not a list of guidelines. Written rules from no one in particular are easier to ignore and abuse than the words of a felow ./er.
;)
I don't know really either. But I disagree that new users should be activly encouraged to post. The
Hrm, maybe if I read my own stuff I'de realize I shouldn't post anymore. Hehe.
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Does anyone want to buy the "ir" account?? #104 .. 0 visits. I'm serious.. $25.00
Sounds good, Rob. I imagine that you've wrestled with the "Moderate vs. Participate" aspect of this one for a while; while I'm not firmly convinced that I agree with you, I'll give it a ride for a while.
/. It's become a vital resource for me (and thousands of others, I'm sure =) in fishing the information out of the data stream.
ObSuckup: Thanks for all the work you do on
You fellows are just jealous.
;)
I'll be auctioning my userid on eBay and see how much I can get for it.
AC #13443
most people who read this site have at least two email address they could use. sure i can beat the system no matter what rob does. to that end why not just try and crack /.? i agree that there is a potential for abuse, but i dont know of any way to uniquely identify an induhvidual in cyberspace. your n+1 argument works even with pgp keys. it comes down to trusting the people who are moderators. 4k is a large number and as someone suggested before, 400 probably represents a good cross-section of readers anyways. lets come up with some good ways to find a few good men^H^H^H people to moderate and spend more time ensuring that they moderate well. ie, they _do_ represent varied opinions, they are active, and basically arent abusing the system. i dont see any advantages to haveing 4k+ of moderators if we can get 400 or maybe even 1000 who want to spend a little bit of time moderating. im afraid that no amount of automation can detect the misuse of identities. my hope is that /. moderators will have the integrity to follow the rules. lets put the emphasis on choosing good moderators, not on how to prevent an abusive moderator from abusing the system.
An idea that I've had that may or may not be worthwhile in respect to the 'relevancy' of posts is this: What about making a seperate section of the site called 'the furnace' or some such, where people can simply post comments as they like about whatever happens to be on thier mind at the time. Of course, there already are places for this, namely IRC and Usenet, but I wonder if it would be logical to have a free reign area on this site, such as I've mentioned, since the flamer/first poster/me too-er would be looking at this site specifically when they had the urge/idea to post, but knew that what they had to say might be ignored/demoted by the mediators, they might see the uninhibited talk area as a place friendly to thier voice. Not to mention, sometimes people might come up with an idea related to Slashdot or what have you, but have no real place to post it for a variety of reasons. (they don't like/know of any newsgroups where it would be correct to post, they specifically want input from the SlashDot community, they feel uncomfortable sending email to one of the main page posters, or feel that the flood of email such people receive will drown out what they have to say, or they just want to have a good old flame war about how Star Trek (TNG) is much more interesting than Star Wars *cough*, etc etc). Anyways, just a random thought from a random person.
--
I don't know exactly how the user tracking is done on /. I would assume through normal use of httpd logs, and parsing scripts. Probably cookies as well since I see persistance in logins.
As others have said, this happens at all web sites that keep transaction logs. A statement of personal data collection and usage policies may be a good idea, one might already exist. I am not currently pressed enough to find out.
As for the "do not track me" button, I would guess that it would be possible with a mod to the webserver, but why?
This should only be a concern if you are worried either about the integrity of the site you are visiting(/. in this case), or if you are doing things you don't want people to know about.
If this is the case, then don't log in as a user, since it is an even tighter tie yo your identity than the IP address of the machine you are comming from(also logged) and the document you requested.
Oh and what about all those cookies?
If you feel the need to be that paranoid, be my guest, but it is your decision where to draw the line between convience and security. This relates directly to any discussion of security and privacy, $$/convience:security/privacy level where do you decide that this is enough? When you are totally secure/private or when the ammount of work involved in maintaing your security/privacy makes the security/privacy not worth it because you can't get any work done?
It was not my intent to imply that new users should be activly encouraged to post. Or that a set of rules should be enacted to govern the moderators.
My plea for newbie education is aimed more at improving the community. Guide lines for posts, places to go for more information. It is always "your" option to release the guide lines and wander off into uncharted territory. Sometime this is the only way to do things.
I am not saying that as a newbie, post or not post. What I am saying is post in an educated manner, one that will hopefully not start a flame war(unless that is your goal).
As for rules for moderators, some level of controll must be present, first to keep people from abusing the system(as much as possible), second, because some for of direction at least gives moderators an idea of what to do. You will never be able to force a moderator to do something they do not want to do, they will either stop moderating, or be removed.
This idea sounds good in theory, but this is still a self-selecting group (people _will_ pick who they know), which unfortunately discourages diversity.
You wrote:
> Also, I believe that no automated process should be used to decide moderation.
The ways to avoid a self selcting group as I see them is:
(1) a fixed carefully selected set of moderators, so any bias doesn't get worse - unsustainable,
(2) no moderater - we've already seen what that does,
(3) everyone can moderate - I think that this could be made to work,
(4) some automatic process, _not_ requiring someone to have been moderated up.
IMO, only 3 and 4 can work.
Rob has chosen a variant of 4, and apart from thinking the moderate vs. post restriction is too strict, he is doing a really good job.
Getting this right is a _very_ hard problem, so Rob is being something of a pioneer in this. Let's try this out and see if it works.
Roy Ward.
Being tracked? Nothing wrong with it. There's a couple differences between being tracked by Slashdot and being tracked by Microsoft. First, being tracked by Slashdot means that you get benefits, such as being able to customize out lamers. Of course, if your name is First Post, this is not a good thing. Secondly, the info stays confidential. Can you spell GUID? I can't speak for everyone else, but when you believe in God, you get used to the idea that someone's watching you 24/7 and rather enjoy it. In the case of Slashdot, as long as Rob or Hemos don't sell our emails to getrichquick.com, I'm cool with it.
"The most significant change involves moderators posting comments and moderating within the same discussion. This is no longer possible. If you post a comment in a forum, you can no longer moderate. More so, if you moderate, and then post a comment, all of your moderation will be undone."
/. is really all about for many of us. There are people who want to make this site better, and I for one think we should reward them, not punish.
Give people some credit. This would hurt the most active members of the slashdot cummunity. Emphasis on the word cummunity, because that's what
Just a note, I totally agree on the not allowing moderating and posting in the same article issue... makes me glad I'm not a moderator. ;) By thread sounds good to me, that way someone(obviously not you, but some less scrupulous moderator) can't just down moderate all dissenting replies, but they *can* still moderate the rest of the comments.
Excluding the bottom 1/6th makes sense(even though I might well fall in it) because moderation after the majority of readers have already read the article is useless... you want people who keep up with things enough to make sure stuff gets moderated promptly.
Excluding the top 1/6th seems motivated purely by avoiding abuse... I think this may be misguided, and the abuse should be prevent elsewhere in the system. Just make sure that reloading more frequently doesn't increase your moderation abilities. You might still filter out the top 1 or 2% just to make sure those who put excessive load on /.(probably via some script, designed to keep their apparant reading frequency high enough to moderate even if they aren't paying attention?) are penalized in some way... adding a message in big letters at the top of the article that says "STOP RELOADING SO OFTEN!" would be better though. :)
--LeBleu
If you're reading this you're part of the mass hallucination that is Kevin the Blue.
I think the whole moderate vs. comment thing is a pretty good idea. Yes, there are disadvantages to it, but there is also a good reason to implement it. If a person has a strong enough of an opinion on a particular topic that they will take the time to write a comment about it, it is likely that that person, if they were an abuser, would moderate comments that they agree with up, and comments they disagree with down. This would eliminate that from happening.However, if the topic is fairly new to you, and you want to learn more about it by reading the comments (I've done this), you are likely going to be more objective in your moderation, marking up the worthwhile comments.
Yes, this obviously doesn't apply to non-abusers who moderate objectively, but in any large-group situation you will find a small group of people who force restrictions to be put on the whole group.
I agree....voluntary moderation should be proactive right from the start.
I drink to make other people more interesting
- Everyone gets moderation controls on every comment (except their own and replies to same).
- Even tho everyone gets the controls, they don't always actually affect the alignment on a comment. (it might be good to conceal whether the 'moderation' had an affect by either having a user's own ratings always, or never work for them)
- Moderator status is determined by a combination of posting alignment and a 'moderator rating' (see below)
- If you're not a moderator, then you are a metamoderator. When a MM(metamod) disagrees w/ an M's rating, the M's moderator rating falls a little bit, reducing their power as a moderator and eventually removing their moderator status. By the same token, an agreement of MM's raises the moderator rating (MR)
- Posting alignment should affect the power of a metamoderator (along w/ any previous moderator rating) ie, a mindless flamer shouldn't have a great effect on anything (they should be able to say what they want, but the whole point of this system is to let the rest of us (presumtuous of me eh?
;) ignore them if desired. - MRs should decay over time, to allow a failed moderator a second chance (after a period of time commensurate w/ the depth of failure
I could go on, but igottago..-- THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK -- --
Yeah, I lurked for a while too, but /. 1000 times a day too, But I just want to see what Jenni is up to.
I have no proof -- therefore I am newbie, hear me roar. I usually load
;)
Hail to the Sun God! He is the Fun God! Ra! Ra! Ra!
As long as coding has been mentioned (and democracy in a different thread), why not a mixed system of the Jury and the Masses. I can understand the need to draw the line between moderating a list and commenting in it. At the same time, being there is the power of SQL behind the system, why not include a bit of moderation by the masses.
There have been a couple of times I have read through 100 comments on a topic of interest where I got bogged down in minor flames which went on for 20+ comments. It would have been nice to be able to vote for removal of off-topic pointless ramble. If after 200 readers, a post reaches a vote of 50%+ for removal, then it gets cleared (that is 200 non-anonymoose readers and votes).
Just my 2 cents.
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
Don't worry:
/. is not tracking your reading habits, it is tracking ywwg's habits.
/.'s user database, you can delete your user and become a 'named' AC by becoming a different user totally unrelated to your real self. As long as your username does not connect with yourself, you have your privacy.
/. to be responsable with their database, and inherent in this trust would be the trust that they would not cross-index their database with anyone else's to come up with a useful profile. (In an MS-esque way) It seems to me that /.'s gathering of data is in no way a threat to privacy because the data is used purely internally. Never-the-less, I think there should also be an "I don't want /. collecting data on me" button in preferences. Perhaps this could be keyed to the "I don't want to be a moderator" button because it seems one is used strictly for determining eligibility for the other.
Granted that you may be interested in your privacy but may also have entered personal information into
You have stated that you trust
If this is truly an issue for you (or others) simply remain an AC and accept the -1 relative priority. You'll just have to write better comments to be heard. -12345678910
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Well if you don't want moderators posting in forums that they are moderating, how about maybe having a seperate page for each story in which ONLY moderators can post to. That way the moderators can still put in their two-cents worth, but it won't really affect the rest of the comments.
-----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
I think it's a grand idea to have people rotate
through tours of duty doing moderation.
I only read the +2 or better articles, to save
time. (It's either better than the norm, or
at worst just a random sample.) So if I get a
day to moderate, I'll be selecting from the +2
sample, and mostly whacking things that are a
waste of time for my fellow +2 readers, and
promoting the things that are worth it
for the +3 readers.
It would be good to have a proper sample of
readers by their filtering status so that some
people who are picky always get a chance to be
even more picky.
Ed
(who has never yet been moderated in a positive
direction on slashdot, not for lack of trying
so far)
http://egroups.com/list/vacuum
As I see it, the Google method would have many advantages which would also eliminate some of the other relevant issues.
Let everybody be moderators all the time with no restriction on moderation! A single moderator's opinion will not count for much anyway, unless he has very good alignment (in which case it would probably be fair moderation).
Having everybody effectively being moderators would also eliminate some of the ego/anonymity issues. Moderators could even discuss issues of moderation openly (except maybe moderation of specific stories/threads/comments?).
Some would-be "Mee too" posters could perhaps also be satisfied if given a lurker's 2p worth of moderation power. Of course, masses of not-so-impartial 2p votes could obscure moderation, but couldn't that be dealt with by ignoring low-alignment moderation for comments that get lots of both ups and downs?
I think the sheer nature of a Google-like moderation system would make impartiality a non-issue as it should be!
A variant of this system could also be applied to any subset of current moderators, if not all were to become moderators always.
For those who don't know the system used in Google, in Slashdot terms it could translate to this:
"A posting has a high score if
- Moderators with high alignment moderated it up
- Lots of moderators with high alignment moderated it up
This definition seems circular, and it is. Nonetheless, it yields a well-defined notion of importance that makes finding high quality sites easy." [moderted from http://www.google.com/why_use.html]I think the changes you've been making to Slashdot are great but please be sure the front page doesn't come out in all bold. It's harder to read.
Woo.. I'm 19919.. hehehe.. But it would suck if I was removed.. I think I have put in alot of input to this site to make people think about the stuff that is posoted and to think about about my point of view on deals..
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
I think i'm plent eligable!!! Check me out!!!
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
That'll be GroupLens.
Its non-trivial to stop moderators posting and moderating the same forum - they could just do what you did and post as a Coward.
Hey - that means that any moderator can quite easily write anything they want and moderate their own writing up, even in the existing system. Unless Rob's thought of this already.
Of course, they dont get the recognition for the post, which is a big part of it, but on the other hand they do get people reading their point of view, which is also a big part.
So, will it weed out us obsessive /. addicts, seeking only a middle ground of recreational /. users? Or is this only to weed out automated attempts at grabbing moderator status?
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
A few issues that come to mind:
Newbie: it is a little bit discriminatory to eliminate users simply based on the age of their account. I don't think that how old/new to slashdot you are really has ANY influence on the quality of the moderation/posting. I'd like to mantion my case - for instance - I have been reading slashdot for ages, but I only recently signed up for an account. Partially due to the descrimination against "Anonymous Cowards". I think you will be missing a lot of great people (and I am not neccessarily saying I am one of them).
Can't post and moderate: another problem. I read the subjects that interest me. And I cannot moderate what I don't read. Therefore I cannot be a moderator AND a slashdot participant. Read a few messages in here, seems a lot of people agree.
Non-negative alignment: let's face it, most posts don't get moderated at all. And it only takes one negative moderation from an overzealous moderator would didn't understand what moderation is about to be out of the pool. Bummer. Problem.
The way I see it, Rob should pick one of three options:
1. Dismiss the moderation system (seems unlikely at this point, although I personally would not be against it)
2. Leave like it is now (don't like it now, but probably better than what is being proposed now)
3. Let EVERYONE logged in moderate (my favorite: I'll explain)
I think that statistically you probably will have the best moderation if everyone is free to moderate. Right now, you have a select few. That's a problem because you have kind of a "ruling class", and quite frankly I question the judgement of those people. So, now you want to expand the pool a bit. Fine, but it's essentially the same thing, although I may trust the score a little bit more. If everyone could moderate, I would definetely trust the score, because it essentially would be representative of everyone's opinion.
Issues with everyone being a moderator: well, there might be abuse. So what? you can deal with this and revoke priviledge for people abusing it. I think the advantages would outweight by far the dissadvantages. At least you wouldn't have to read these postings from would-be-ACs, just because they cannot say what they think while logged in (due to the "you can't reveal you're a moderator rule").
I agree with your comment here. I started reading slashdot a long time ago but I never bothered to set up an accout (once it was an option). Instead, it was the customizations that lead me to register.
Other than that, everything else in the system looks like a good idea.
-Emilio
I'm not addicted, I can quit any time I want!
:)
I think that the 2/3 will give a very nice mix of addicts, recreational users (never thought it would be used in that context!) and even some relative newbies (i.e. people such as myself who've been around for a while, but only just signed up).
The great thing is that it's pseudo-random, so it could be anyone. And with a "jury duty" system being used, we won't have people letting the power get to their heads (or if they do, the power won't be there for too long).
Power corrupts, absolute power corupts absolutely. Wonder how moderating affects this?
Computer geek for hire. Reasonable rates. Email me.
Indeed. I have lurked on /. for at least two years now. If Rob does check IPs he'll see that I spend about and hour (mininum) on ./ per day 5-6 days per week.
I never saw a need for an account until Rob began putting in all these new cool features. Now I have 2 accounts, one here at work and one at home (ruach@home).
However, I apparently will not qualify as a moderator due to the newness of my account. I do not post often (third or fourth post right here, first as a non-AC). Yet I have seen a few things that I would have moderated if I had the chance.
Back to the subject (sorry, rambling mode off (hopefully)) I wonder if there are a lot of non-posting, formerly non-account lurkers who, while perfectly qualified to moderate, will get left out.
Anyway, no big deal, but something to think about when implimenting "the system."
You mentioned that you will not be letting newbies moderate, so I am probly excluded for a long time now, but i see several problems.
-i don't know how it works, but if i follow a link and then come back, have i just increased my chances of being one of those psycho's who load the page 100 times a day? well i am probly in that groop any way, i get board between classes, and come here just hoping for an interesting new story to have appeared to give me something fun to do. i don't think this should make me ineligible to ever moderate at some point.
-i don't post very often at all, but it seems that the best moderator for a given section would also have a lot to add to that section, a lot of people have said this i know, but you should not make the ban of post or moderate but not both so definative/absolute.
-obviously you need some criterea, but these two seem particularly stringent, excluding valuable contrabutions and or making moderation a chore that people will want to avoid.
Ok, this may be slightly off topic, but I wanna mention it now while I'm thinking on in.
You may want to limit how many times a moderator can alter someones score. Reason: Someone may just not like someone and keep lowering there score or raise the score of their friends.
Although I suppose with 4000 moderators and 75000 readers it would take a lot of storage space to keep track of it. But it is something to think about.
The point of ./ moderation in to highlight the thought provoking, interesting and knowledgable posts, while hiding the flame bait, asinine, and grossly off-topic from normal view. So really, there shouldn't be much disagreement on what's good moderation.
Set up moderation such that the moderator sets a target score for a post, which nudges the post towards the target. If the post ends up two or more points _either_way_ off the target, the moderator loses a "Moderator Point," and if s/he loses enough s/he's not a moderator any more. Perhaps even give more weight to the suggestions of moderators who moderate well.
The moderators who moderate objectively will be kept and those who moderate subjectively will lost.
Anyone participating in forums, whether posting or just lurking, should assume that their visit is being recorded and analyzed in some fashion. Doesn't mean anything untoward will occur. Does mean that the ACs aren't as anonymous as they might assume.
I have to agree with several of the folks here that not allowing moderators to moderate and comment within the same topic is probably not for the best. It would be too limiting to the moderators, and might reduce the number of people willing to moderate. I know I only read the topics that interest me, and respond to threads that I find intelligent. If I was a moderator who had been excercising my franchise, and knew that adding my 2 cents to one thread would negate any voting I had done in other threads in the same topic I would think twice before responding. I don't believe that's what you have in mind.
I think it would make more sense to allow/disallow moderation at the thread level. That way moderators can speak up on issues that concern them in one thread without eliminating their ability to do the job they were asked to do in other threads.
Or am I asking for the impossible?
BTW, I'm not a moderator, and with a UID in the nosebleed section, I don't anticipate becoming one anytime soon.
-- "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - R.A.H.
true, if agreement with others is the only criteria for the moderator ranking. But other criteria can and should apply. Eg whether people (or rob, or a group of selected visionaries) consider your comments pertinent or your news items interesting (see my post in the first google thread above).
"If someone makes a habit of posting as AC so that they can moderate as well then they will loose their moderator status because they haven't been posting."
So far as I can tell, it's only proposed that you have to be an active reader, not an active poster too.
I would agree with this, and in fact add, that perhaps there are a lot of people out there who read a lot more than they post, and as such they would make really good moderators, since they wouldn't be forced to choose between posting for an article or moderating it. In fact, there are probably quite a few lurkers without accounts who would make great moderators, so maybe you could have some sort of system that allows frequent readers to moderate.
Right. That would be me. I've been reading /. for about 2 years now. But never felt the need to create an account until yesterday. Ah well.
Why is cutting off at 2/3 wrong? Because it really only tells how long someone has been around here. Not how valuable a resource they are or how pertinent their opinions.
I'd highly suggest that moderation be given to ALL users whose total posting scores are in the top 50%.
Murphy's law - "Anything that can go wrong, will." (Actually, this is Finagle's law, which in itself shows that Finagle
Many moderators above stated that they enjoyed posting far too much to make the new system viable for them. Would this create a problem of moderators have other "bogus" accounts? They would moderate with one, then post with the other.
Now I think most of the moderators would play fair, but this could be problematic. Rob could solve this problem with some sort of IP tracking, but the offender could simply state that his roommate/sibiling/whoever also reads Slashdot from their same computer, not that they're shafting the system.
Ideas?
I like the idea of a "Post as AC button" this would be nice for situations like this where I want to reveal I'm a moderator. Perhaps "Post as Moderator" would be better. The moderator account could have the moderator ID# and moderation history. This would make biases clear without silencing the moderators, who are presumably among the better posters by the way they are chosen.
I don't agree that moderators should be limited from posting on fora they moderate. Per thread might be OK, although I must admit I don't see the point. If a post is valid, it is valid whether or not a moderator posts it. Since moderators can't moderate their own posts (a good idea), and can't reveal that they are moderators, a moderator's post should be treated no different from any other. Any more draconian measures will only encourage the workarounds that others have mentioned.
More on topic: a jury system is fine with me. I'm glad to be a moderator, but feel no particular right to be one. I personally feel that anyone that has had a positive alignment over the past 7 days should be eligible to moderate. To mix things up, alignment points made while moderating would count only as half. The moderators would be chosen every day as a weighted random drawing based on alignment. This would create the kind of limited meritocracy we are looking for.
Ah the good old days.
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
Pants are Optional
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Segregating moderation/judgement from participation is a standard (and good) measure used to enforce objectivity. This is the reason they screen jurors for trials, etc.
Im going to talk about jury selection for a moment-- please pardon the digression. It really does relate to /.
The court room inquisition of jurrors is called "voir dire" and we are made to think that it is a legitimate attempt to form an "impartial jury." This is not so.
The only purpose is to stack the jury with bias- to build the desired bias into the jury so that the jury can be controled by the court.
The Supreme Court has often commented upon this: "Tendencies, no matter how slight, toward the selection of jurors by any method other than a process which will insure a trial by a representative group are undermining...weakening the...jury...and should be strongly resisted." (Glasser V US, 315 US 60) Fairness "necessarily contemplates an impartial jury drawn from a cross section of the community; jurors shall be selected...without systematic and intentional exclusion" of any "stratum of society." (Thiel V So.Pac., 328 US 217, 1946).
How does this relate to /.? Good question. The moderation system, as it exists now, works. Quite well in my opinion and, judging from the posts I've read, many people agree and want to keep it like it is. It works because there are a (relatvely) small number of moderators and Rob is able to keep them in line.
But Rob (understandably) does not want to have to keep a close eye on the moderators- especially when a new group is chosen. The obvious solution to this is to make the pool of moderators larger. But this attempt will be in vain if the moderators are chosen based on how they have been moderated in the past or even on how long they have read slashdot. When a large group is used it is essential that they form a cross-section of the population. If not, factions become more exagerated not less.
This is not to say that Rob and Co. should not reserve the right to stop abusers from moderating. To stretch the jury analogy even further- felons can't serve jury duty.
Maybe my ideas are misguided or are too big of a step for this old webpage to take. Please let me know. As I said I think the current system is working well. But if we increase the size of pool of moderators we need to make sure that the moderators are chosen fairly.
2^5
Weren't the original moderators selected because their postings were consistently high quality? I see that that's still a requirement for the new system...
It seems to me that placing restrictions on posting for a set of people who were chosen originally because their postings were high quality would defeat the entire purpose of having moderators, which would be to get high-quality postings...
Wouldn't the "post or moderate" concept work better if moderators were simply restricted from moderating replies to their comments, rather than all comments?
This makes far more sense than Rob's initial idea. You should not discourage people who are good enough to be moderators from providing posts worth moderating (up).
The moderation/posting restriction is only a hinderance.
There is nothing to stop a moderator from logging out, posting as an anonymous coward, and then moderating up their own (anonymous) post. Sure it's a bit harder and takes longer, but that is about the only thing it will do.
The one group of people I'd like to see somehow represented in the moderators group would be lurkers. I don't know how you'd select them, but I'm thinking if you can find really old accounts, which haven't posted a thing, but which visit the site regularly.
I'd also like to say I think the idea that you either post or moderate is a great idea. This prevents moderators from monoplizing the conversation. The only catch is this: if I'm a moderator, why wouldn't I just create a 2nd account for posting?
sigs are a waste of space
At least, that's how the traditional wisdom goes. But I don't agree. I just have the weird feeling, and I am more and more certain that we live in interesting times, and something really extraordinary will grow out this whole "thing".
I guess, the silent software revolution around Linux, Open Source, Slashdot, Communities (not the way the current "media" buzzwords for it) are just the innocent seeds of something really-really better. Even "Open Source" was an interesting, but failed and tried method in the eyes of outside observers a few months ago. (I mean, it's alive since a very long time, and Gates has "proved" that the other way is better, eh?).
I'd tell don't be afraid to try old things, if they sound right, and their failure is not fully reasonable. This is a new world we are building.
"Ten years from now, they could do it in a few seconds." -- The Racketeer of the Hellfire Club, 1993, Phrack 42
My problem with this idea is that being a good writer doesn't necessarily mean you would be a good moderator, or vice versa. The same is true for good programmers != good documentors, etc.
How can you easily judge the quality of a moderator? Seriously, I don't know. Suggestions are welcome.
How do you tell the difference between someone who is trying to promote a "contrary view" and someone who is promoting crap? If someone posts an article before they meant to, and then repost the completed article, should a moderator lower the score of the incomplete one? What might be considered "off topic", or "redundant" to one moderator might not viewed differently by most other people.
The problem of selecting "good moderators" strikes me as a very hard problem, and one I don't have any good ideas of how to solve.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
Yes, that is all the moderator, like anyone else, has to do is log out to be an AC. It is also all that a moderator will have to do to be able to post to a story that they have moderated. This doesn't make sense to me.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
Although I'm guity of posting too much, I do agree that it is a very serious problem.
IMHO, I think that when calculating your "alignment", you should have a small penalty for every article you post and for every byte you post. People who post lots of long articles and occasionally get a score of 2 or 3 are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
And I'll tell you why. Because he's relatively detached. We occasionally see him post something when it directly involves him, and he's rarely defensive... He has the best global view of making everyone happy.
This is somewhat marginally analogous to time I spent as a wizard on a MUD. The absolute worst wizards were the ones that still played the mud with a different character. They were too involved with the game to see that making areas loaded with easy experience and powerful weapons ultimately made for a less enjoyable game.
Of course, there were the wizards that never played the game, and had no real concept of what was going on from the player's perspective. Those wizards were not so good, either, but they were better than the overinvolved ones.
Anyway, yeah.
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
Why not run a poll to see what the community thinks of the current system? Personally, I like things the way they are now.
The 400 moderator system seems to be doing well. The real issue is rotating that batch of 400. Trying to up the number would be an interesting experiment, but seems a little unnecesary. It would raise the administrative overhead (both in terms of CPU time, and Rob time). IMHO, it would not add that much to the experience.
I've noticed that setting my threshold at 2 is just about ideal. Off topic posts have not been a problem. Neither have inaccurate, or well intended but not-so-useful posts. Maybe a few good posts may get passed by, but if that is a real concern for you, don't use moderation.
--------------
Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else.
--
I think moderation is a good thing, and that (as several others have stated herein) who is more important that what is done.
Also, I believe that no automated process should be used to decide moderation.
Now let me expound. The problem with automatic moderator selection is that the algorithims used must eventually become public -- whether Rob publishes them or someone figures them out. Because of this, there will always be those who gain moderator access by deviant means. To weed those out, there would need to be moderation of the moderators, and I doubt anyone wants to invest the kind of time needed to implement that - least of all Rob.
What I suggest is to use an existing moderation model, and slightly modify it to fit the /. purpose. My personal suggestion is to use the IRC model - but make it a bit less haphazard.
Consider the following: We all trust Rob to be the "ubermoderator", since he does own /. anyhow... So why not have Rob pick a handful of trusted /. users to be "operators"? These "ops" would be allowed to moderate comments, as well as manage who will become moderators.
Each "op" would likely have his/her own ideas about whom would moderate well, and therefore could add to the diversity. To elimate the "my freinds are all welcome" syndrome, perhaps two ops would need to agree to create a moderator.
Also, perhaps moderators could appoint "helpers" to assist them in moderation. To keep the balance of power in check, a skewed scoring system could be used (i.e. ops can knock an article up/down by 5 pts, mods by 3 and helpers by 1), and mods could be held responsible for the actions of their helpers. In this way, if a helper is misbehaving, the moderator who appointed him would have incentive to remove him/her - even if (s)he may be a friend - to protect his/her own moderator status.
I know this is much more complex than I have made it seem - and I welcome those who wish to point out the flaws in this theory.
And, of course, I welcome e-mail from anyone who would like to discuss it more in-depth than should be done in this forum -- but please take a moment to reply to this comment in some way: I'd really like to know how the /. community views this idea, as I am thinking about it for a site I am developing as well.
Long live the Free Mind!
Posted by the Proteus
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Would it be worth a try to let readers nominate moderators? That way, when I notice a poster whose comments are really cogent, I can mark that person as a potential moderator.
Of course, this posits that good comments come from people with the balance and judgment to moderate well. I think that's true as a first approximation.
How to use this input, however? Count up the number of times a particular poster gets nominated, and the highest numbers get moderator privileges? (`Nomination' is really voting.) Alternatively, if the count goes over some threshold, have a human look at that person's posts and decide yea or nay. (`Nomination' is just that, with other criteria for acceptance.)
I suggest giving the first mechanism a try, because there are some folks whose judgment I respect, and would like to see have some input based on their abilities rather than pure numerology. (<nose color="brown">Not that the numerology isn't a damned good shot at automating a tough call.</nose>)
Maybe nominations can come only from readers in domains other than the nominee's? Perhaps only from the older 2/3 of the population? (Both of these to prevent someone from registering an bunch of IDs and performing auto-nomination.)
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
I think the 'post or moderate' choice will tend to reduce the effective moderation. It will create a situation in which each person needs to decide if they want to participate or judge, but with a limited amount of time available to each person, and only the people who participate allowed to moderate I see the whole thing becoming very cyclic.
Whilst I think Rob is heading in the right general direction I can see a few problems.
I have to agree with those who say moderators should be able to moderate and post to the same news story.
I only read those stories which interest me (maybe 1 in 3) and these tend to be ones in which I already have an opinion or in which I have some expertise, otherwise I wouldn't be interested in it in the first place. Hence my moderations *and* my comments should be considered acceptable for that particular story.
Secondly, when I read postings, I've taken Rob's advice and set my threshold to +3 and listing in descending order of score. This has reduced my reading time dramatically and is overall a Good Thing.
The trouble is, if I'm made a moderator, then I will only see comments which have already passed a first phase of moderating. Now, considering I'm only reading a few choice postings anyway, I don't mind if I get an extra tab next to each so I can go +1 or -1, but there's no way I'm going to take time to read AC postings.
I imagine a lot of lurker, experienced users like myself will feel the same. If we're added to the ranks of moderators, we will only be moderating the "quality" posts, hence +5 is too low for an upper limit.
cheers
Michael Snoswell
pithy comment
You know, Rob, I knew you were dedicated to slashdot and that it took up a lot of your time, but this kind of stuff, with moderation access schemes this complex, is really first rate stuff. Even though I enjoy moderation, it is excellent to know that I can switch it off with a click and look at slashdot in all of the comments in their, ahem, "glory".
/.!!)
Still using MSQL, maybe it's because I don't do SQL much that I have no idea how you did all of this.
Keep in mind, Rob, that the kind of stuff you're implementing right now is the kind of stuff people get paid wheelbarrows full of dollars for. (But don't let that convince you to take a job elsewhere and desert
I honestly don't care if I become a moderator, but I don't think it would be that bad...kinda cool.
One possibility would be to also have the moderators stick to a certain quota of grading too, although I don't know how feasible that would be - depending on the articles, to make moderators stick to a relatively standard value, for example, if you're a moderator, and the sum of all of your moderation is -1200, something's wrong. Likewise, if you have a value of 5000 points assigned to the various articles you've moderated, that's not good either..
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
All though I don't know if Rob would approve, you can always do exactly what you're doing now, which is, post as an anonymous coward and still be able to moderate the discussion. I think the main thing was that he didn't want people to abuse the priveledge of moderation because of the fact that so many people aren't very objective in general, and aren't necessarily going to be objective in posting and moderating. (Not saying anything about you, just in general)
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Segregating moderation/judgement from participation is a standard (and good) measure used to enforce objectivity. This is the reason they screen jurors for trials, etc.
/. could benefit from impartial moderators. This is, in my opinion, a great way of enforcing this.
The idea is that the best moderators are those who do not have particularly strong views on the subject. The best people to moderate the GNU/Linux vs. Linux discussions, for example, are those who don't really care, either way - they are more likely to be fair and impartial.
For the same reason sports have impartial referees,
Granted, it doesn't stop the lurkers with strong opinions from moderating subjectively, but it's a good start.
Keep up the great work, rob!
-dave
-- "Machines have no conscience" - Queensryche
It's interesting to see how moderators moderate moderation comments :)
Seems they are busier then usual. Very opinionated when it comes to moderating, I guess.
I believe I'll have to re-read all of Rob's points on how moderation works, how they get their points, etc... but what about this?
/., they lose it. This would prevent the moderators from posting a comment for a given article as an AC and then moderating it up (since they'd only be able to moderate their own comment to a 1 which they could do if they were logged in anyways). Having only ONE point to offer for moderation would make sure that these moderators use their point very wisely.
Let moderators post AND moderate any article.
But... for each single article that is read by a moderator, they are given only 1 (one) moderation point, which they can use to promote or demote only a single post within the comments relating to that article. Once they have moderated any post (within a given article) up or down one point, that's it. They have no more moderation power over any other posts within the same article. And if they don't use that single moderation point while the article is available on the front page of
I really do think that if a moderator is allowed only to moderate OR post, there will be less quality posts, and the moderators will be forced into silence when we could also be getting feedback from them.
Just my $.02.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
How will the move to 4k moderators affect the enforcement of the moderator rules already in place? In particular, the rule of secrecy, that a moderator cannot reveal herself to be a moderator, strikes me as agonizing to enforce with 400 moderators, and nearly impossible with 10 times that many. (perhaps an e-mail address to report alleged moderation violations?)
/.ers began competing for high alignments, it would probably have a substantial positive effect on the intellectual level of the comments. If nothing else, folks who consistently get moderated down might shut up. On the other hand, this would have no effect on ACs, and might cause people to post any random B.S. if they thought they could get it moderated up even a point.
Two suggestions: First of all, I'm starting to have a little difficulty keeping track of all the changes to the system. Is there any page or FAQ or something which thoroughly explains the moderation system as it currently stands, and if not, could there be one?
Secondly, would it be possible for the user-info page to report the user's 'alignment'? I know I, for one, would be curious to know my alignment, (although I post so seldom that I could probably work it out by hand). This might even have a beneficial effect on the community. Ratings of this sort have a way of stimulating the competitive spirit, and if
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" -Salvor Hardin
Direct Democracy never works with large groups. Never, ever works. We -need- a smaller representative body to moderate for the whole - I for one do not trust the slashdot reader base to moderate my articles properly or fairly.
Then again, I don't trust the American people to vote for a good president who'll act fairly and not make our country look like a bunch of raving fools. I guess I'm way off base. [evil grin]
Ok, let me see if I understand how this works. Once you're selected through [insert process here] you are in a pool of aproximatly 1000 moderators. If you are in this pool, occasionally you will be called upon to moderate some subset of the articles available in a similar fashion to the way things are currently moderated. But, if you are randomly selected to moderate an article, you aren't allowed to post comments about that article? If you're chosen to moderate an article, do you have the choice of not moderating and commenting? If not, it might deprive the /. community of valueable comments these people might make. If you are allowed to choose to moderate, I'd think it would discourage people from moderating subjects they were interested in (and might make good judgements about what to moderate). If you're not allowing people to moderate their own comments, I don't see the harm in them moderating the thread they're reading (dispite the possibility of people moderating down comments against them or their position). Anyway, I'm sure the modeation system will settle out into something that works well.
BTW, how does your script check to see how many comments people read when they're in flattened mode?
You shouldn't look at it as restricting participation as a consequence of moderations, but vice versa. Once a person becomes involved in a debate, expecting objective moderation from them is unrealistic. This is recognized by most rules of order.
from first posts to me too!s to a damn good article that i think deserves better than a 0 or 1, i wade through it all in all its "glory." these are the people who need to be moderators. if you have your threshold set anything above 0 then you are allowing the moderators to point out the better articles to you. not to say that i dont set my threshold higher on articles that im not as particularly intresetd in, esp on the gnu/linux vs linux wars/holy wars. mostly tho i read through every post in a thread that im interested in. quite a few times i've said to myself "gee, glad i've got my threshold set low otherwise i would have missed this comment."
these are the types of qualities that make for good moderators.
(no, im not trying to nominate myself not boost my ego. But _if i was a moderator_ those are the values that i would expect to uphold)
I think there are a lot of people out there who've been around for a while but have only recently relented and made an account.
I don't think it's fair to call them newbies just because they didn't sign up earlier.
Instead use the 2/3 cutoff to stop people from creating new accounts specifically to abuse the system.
There are, however, only so many hours in the day. I'd prefer not to spend my free time reading about Amigas, because I have no interest in them. I might as well read a crochet magazine.
Other than on a purely literary and common sense basis do I know the difference between a good Amiga--or crochet--post and crap.
I does make a "sort of" sense, and I'm not sure it isn't actually the best way to handle mass moderation. But since I don't have time to read about Amigas and Palm Pilots, I'll likely be checking the "No Jury Duty" box.
There seems to be quite a but of "Oh NO! We can't have Censorship!" going about, and quite a bit of arguement about what exactly constitutes censorship.
Well, It doesn't matter - there is, in truth, no real difference between the two. I've worked for quite a bit at a small semi-pro science fiction magazine, and a good editor's job is mostly censorship! Anyone who decides what will and what will not be seen is almost by definition a censor, and would only be called an editor if their views and tastes and background where coincidentally exactly the same as yours.
This is simply because they would select different articles than you would, and by hidding things from you that you would normally be willing (even eager?) to see they are acting in the capacity of censors!
So, what can be done about this? The only permanent solution is to give each user a view customized to their perferances, prejudices, and interests. (Admit it, we all have them!) Fortunatly, this isn't impossible in the modern age of computers. Simply (sarcasm) have each user rate as many comments as they like on a scale of one to ten, and store each user's reactions. Use an AI system similar to the movie recomendation making one to customize each users views.
After all, Rob's got all this CPU time just going to waste, doesn't he?
It seems to be a law of the net that as readership of a public forum goes up, the SNR goes down. This is simply for the same reason that superbowl commercial time commands millions of dollars a minute. So, in order to keep slashdot readable, there will have to be some form of editorship to keep the SNR at a reasonable level. I commend Rob for seeing the inevitablity of this, and for the valiant efforts to come up with a solution that is both workable and fairly fair.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Now here are some suggestions...
1. Restricting a moderator from posting in a topic they want to take part of, and vice versa, is a double edged sword. Sure if they post, they already have an agenda which may indicate a biased slant on other posters they moderate, but here are two arguments against that...
2. Moderators should receive Peer-Review at intervals during their "career" here at
I have my threshold at 2, which was great in the begining where some really nice posts showed up but now I'm seeing more, and more, replies like "Who is this Linus guy?" being scored a 2.
Perhaps this could also be helped if there was a grading scale like.
Score/Represents
-1 Raw, off-topic, flaming-flamingo slug-fests
0 One liner comments, not much meat to 'em (AC Default)
1 Light on content, but interesting (Registered Users Default)
Raises an interesting question or point
3 Like 2 but well done
4 Wow, great insight...this could be another article
5 Are you sure you're not RMS or ESR?
...although I might be straying a bit off topic, this will probably be an issue in the future: How to police the moderators?
Just my 2
Anyway, I have a user account so people will know who's posting in the first place. That's the whole point, or at least so I thought.
:-)
Agreed. I like people to know "who" I am. My nick, SeanNi, is the same one I use every single time. Anyone who wants can click on my "User Info" link and look at other posts I have made. They can then form their own opinions about whether or not I am worth reading, and they know (or have a better handle on) my biases when they do read my posts.
Better parsing and interpretation makes for better dissemination of useful content. (not to mention more convoluted verbiage
If I was unable to post and moderate at the same time, I would probably end up creating a second account, such as "SeanNi2 (same as SeanNi)" or some such thing and posting that way. I would definitely not want to do that, though. It feels much too much like "cheating".
But it is a moot point, since as I have mentioned elsewhere, the way things currently stand, I do not want to be a moderator.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
I had no idea users' behavior was tracked so specifically on slashdot. I know you guys have no intention of using the information in evil, microsoft-like ways, but I would have appreciated a warning along the lines of: "once you become a user your actions on slashdot will be monitored and will affect your eligibility for moderator-ship."
Internet people seem to be extremely privacy-conscious, and yet slashdot is tracking their reading habits.
what do people think?
1. Another slap in the face for us cookiephobic conshies. I can't be alone in associating cookies with ASP and all things Microsoft - maybe it's the way you can't turn them off in IE3. It's a freedom thing. Anyway the cookie crumbs'll be all over your smug face when M$ patent them à la CSS/doorknobs. Would it kill you to propagate that smidgeon of state in a munged URL? Pre-cookie browsers? It's not as though - judging by your workrate of late - you're afraid of a good hard hack. It's possible to be a model Slashdotter - a 24/7 unanonymous lurker - without actually being logged in.
:-) - and self-regulating.
2. Personally, I like the "What did you think of this article?" radiobuttons ("Not worth reading","Worth reading","Very worth reading") on JavaWorld. If every comment had one of these you'd soon sort the clueful from the Kiplings. People would only vote for the ones they rated or hated because it's such a pain in the Gates to interrupt your clickstream. As for the number of moderators - why arbitrarily limit it? As someone posted earlier, it's much easier to let everyone have moderation power equal to their running approval rating. What is it ESR says about egoboo and geek credits? Words made flesh - or rather code: the more votes you receive the more you can spend. Simple to implement - well, simple for me to say at any rate
3. Geek du jour, jwz, once posted a defence of some earlier eroded liberty - was it the noble right to anonymity? - where he basically said: if you assume people are gonna abuse the system they will. Treat people like original sinners and they'll crack open a few misdemeanours just so as not to let you down. Too many precautions against the dark side and you start to squeeze the force.
4. Props for what you've done so far. It's good. It's getting better. One in the eye for those who thought Signal v Noise would end in a penalty shootout.
Make all moderation actions public knowledge. What I mean is that any reader should not only be able to read scores and filter by scores, but be able to read a list of which moderators performed which actions.
The reader should have the option to keep a "Moderation Killfile". If a particular moderator is being unfair in his moderation actions or if the reader doesn't like that particular moderator, the reader could put that moderator in his killfile (with the obligatory *PLONK* sound), and Slashdot would ignore that moderator's actions when peforming the moderation processing for that user.
For that matter, Slashdot could have Usenet style killfile capabilities in general for those who like to use that sort of thing.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
I'm not sure why you would want to adopt a "jury duty" model for slashdot moderatorship. Why not just let long-term members decide if they want to moderate a story or not. Once they moderate a post, they can't participate and vice versa. All other restrictions apply as well. I guess this could be gotten around (people could set up two accounts), but that seems like more work than fun.
Maybe I don't understand the idea, but it does seem too limited to me. Or maybe I'm just annoyed that I waited so long to set up my account.
Like someone way above mentioned, I've been reading /. for months, but only recently bothered to make an account because of all the neato customizations you had. I'm somewhere in the 24ks as far as user numbers go. So that might not be the best solution for weeding out newbies, but I suppose you need to figure out somewhere to make a cut.
I'd like to voice my vote for moderators not being able to moderate the thread they're posting to, not the entire article.
Yep, you can log right out and be an AC..
I wonder, with rob's idea that if a moderator has moderated and then posts all moderation done by that moderator is 'undone'.. what is to stop that moderator from moderating then logging out, posting as an AC, OR logging into his/her spare account to do their posting.. does he have some kind of way to prevent this?
I agree. And it's part of a bigger problem too. The problem is that Rob wants to give good articles higher scores, but he doesn't trust /.ers to do it right. So he's tweaking, which is the wrong thing to do.
Essentially, what Rob is doing is statistics. He wants a lot of data (moderators), and wants good results. But with statistics you have to use the data you get. The only thing you worry about is errors in collecting data. In this case, thats making sure that people don't moderate on more than one account. But that should be it.
There should be no other rules. Let everyone moderate, and on any forum. Otherwise, Rob is acting as some kind of Russian-like intelligencia, believing he always knows best.
Of course, you don't have to just average the scores. that might not work. Instead you could perhaps use some kind of collaborative data techniques.
--Last Exit To Babylon
I work in electronic commerce (yes yes I know ....)
/.) but on e-commerce. Every morning, I do the rounds on all the e-commerce sites to pick the most interesting articles. I have since become a highly highly valued resource for the people I work for because I am so well informed.
...... )
Recently, I set up a specialised portal (like a really really simplified
The more I read, the more my "opinion" becomes less subjective.
Hence I dont think that the big readers should be cut out.
Isn't possible to null the "cheaters" by simply upping the moderator threashold so that if you DO post a 100 times then you have to have posted a 100 intelligent comments. (in which case you aint a cheater, just obsessive
I think letting the big readers moderate is more important then letting 0+ posters moderate.
is there maybe an other option to achieve this?
IMHO: Every reader should be able to moderate/cast a vote on any item at any time subject to appropriate weighting.
:)
If their posts have been well-received, their moderation carries weight. If their previous moderations have agreed with other highly-ranked moderators, their moderation carries weight. If they are CmdrTaco, their moderation carries weight.
If they're new, if their posts have been downgraded, if they're anonymous, if they're participating in the discussion, their moderation carries less weight.
PS offtopic, but to wrap up and simplify this whole enterprise: 1. make news items and comments the same, and 2. allow very highly-ranked moderators to post news items.
(Then you just tweak the weighting/ranking criteria to keep the subject matter and style of the whole thing focussed the way you want: ie the slashdot that we know and love
My personal preference would be for moderators to be choosen by some kind of emergent criteria. That is, for example, a strong positive score on all posted comments. Of course, there needs to be some type of control on this, so people just don't score their friends high to get them to be moderators...
Why not use the method used by Google to rate web pages? That is, your ranking is based not only on the rankings that other people give your posts, but also on the rankings of the people who have ranked your post.
It seems to work extremely well for Google, and it would seem to be very applicable to this case as well.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again...
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
"I wouldn't want to see those with a proven track record forced to choose between moderation and input except where it makes sense."
I'm a moderator, and I personally find it really annoying that the threads I like best and mark up, I can't annotate or add something to -- I have to log out and post as an AC, then hope that another moderator marks me up (well, I could do it myself but that would be cheating).
I think that CT's proposal is good in theory. In practice, I don't think it will work and I'd rather stick with the current one.
But hey, I only got picked a week ago. I can't say I haven't been corrupted by power, because I _know_ I get a thrill out of LARTing first posters, but picking from a random pool of 400 posters of quality guarantees at least minimal quality, and prevents me burning out from reading tons of 0 and -1 articles and trying to figure out which if any really deserve anything one way or the other.
On the other hand, it basically destroys accountability. If one of the 400 is being bad, CT can squelch him and replace him with a known good one. Change the pool every two weeks, and CT will have to do that EVERY time, and doing it with people who are inexperienced at moderation.
I personally went nuts on the first day trying to figure out whether DaBuzz was being an offensive prick arguing about Katz, or if he genuinely had a point. I eventually gave him the benefit of the doubt and moderated him back to 0, only to get him kicked back to -1. Meanwhile an AC had mentioned the same point and gotten a 2. I could have saved myself the agony if I'd known better.
I suppose it comes down to personal choice, but I would rather have an informed judge than a random jury. But that's just my view.
If people asked to become moderators, were expected to read and apply guidelines in order to stay moderators, and were occasionally reviewed to make sure they were in fact applying guidelines... the whole site would probably be more interesting in the long run.
If the guidelines are important, it will become more difficult to maintain them as more people become moderators -- no matter what sort of algorithm is applied. Think about the difference between the suggested model with thousands of moderators -- and a site with 30 moderators, all of whom are directed and good at what they do.
As it is, the algorithm is (apparently) going to now exclude moderators from operating on the stories that appeal to them the most, and anonymity prevents them from peer review and/or personal reward. This worries me. I wonder if it will inevitably end in CmdrTaco posting a lot of desperate pleas for moderators to apply the guidelines well and correctly. (Such appeals have already been necessary with hundreds of moderators, and it will only get worse.)
And I suspect that moderators will disregard requests to not simply promote messages they agree with -- and with thousands of them online it will be impossible to police them. If only 10% go that way, with no fear of reprisal, a number that is expected in other online forums (see Usenet), it will cause a lot of problems.
Lastly, as more and more minds are applied to review of anything, there is a homogenization effect that occurs -- through averaging. Extreme views, though they may be pointed, useful, interesting and important, are more likely to be moderated into average scores. Consider the difference between messages that earn half "A" and half "F" scores (resulting in a "C" grade) and messages that earn all "B" scores. Are the "B" messages more useful? They represent a certain type of message: non-offensive, lightly interesting, but *boring* in the long run... homogenized.
Frankly, the changes all sound pretty good to me -- _especially_ the exclusivity between moderating a forum and posting to it.
Why? Because some people post too goddamn much.
I've been reading Slashdot for a while now (I'm definitely below that 21,000 mark), and while the 'First post'-ers and the trolls are annoying, the thing that makes it unreadable is the shear repetition of the same tired opinions.
The average forum at Slashdot gets (if you're lucky) maybe five truly different opinions -- each rehashed by about 20 different people who either haven't read the previous comments, or just don't care that they're repeating the same things that have been said before.
We're not talking about poorly written opinions by 3l33t d000dz here. These are well-written posts. They just add absolutely nothing new to the discussion. They're the 500-word equivalent of a "Me Too!".
Take a look at the profiles of most of these posters and what do you see? A long list of recent posts. Did most of these posts add anything worthwhile to the discussion? No. Did some of them? Most definitely.
At this point, I'm all for anything that will give a person a reason to pause and think before they decide to fire off another post to Slashdot. If you _really_ have something worthwhile to say, well, go ahead and post. But if not, please just sit back and moderate. You'll be providing the readers of Slashdot a far greater service.
JRaven
Yet you've said that, ideally, moderation shouldn't be about agreement, it should just be about accenting worthwhile comments.
So I think that particular change goes against your intended goal.
I understand that this is an intricate business to figure out, and will likely undergo changes for a long time.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
It makes a sort of sense to me... it just means that if you are a moderator you should read articles you *aren't* interested in. This would make you the most objective person possible.
Moderation is a service we are volunteering for on Slashdot. That may mean we have to do things we don't like... including reading articles we have no interest in.
This is shaping up well. Coupla quick ones:
I think it'd be smarter to actually make people visit their user account and hit the switch to become eligible. Signup should require -some- action on part of the user. It'd make them feel more like they've got a stake in this - they weren't just given Mod status, they asked for it.
Isn't this a bit overdoing it? It's the avid readers you -want- to participate in the moderation. Throw out the top 5% or 10% maybe, but I bet a lot of that top slice constitutes your major comment-posting / discussion-following userbase.
(Heck, I'm probably one of those top 10%. :)
I don't like the idea of the moderator not being able to moderate and post at the same time. Granted some twink could abuse it, but hey! There are going to be others here as well moderating the moderator!
So, instead of preventing a post by a moderator in a conference if he has "moderated" someone simple flag his message as from a moderator who has done some "moderation" with in the conference.
IOW - Let him post his ideas (we would lose too many good ones - or worse no moderation).
Should he/she have done some "work" in the same thread them flag his message as (active moderation within this discussion).
Perhaps highlight changes made by moderators and the moderator that is visible ONLY to other moderators. Basically if the message is still visible mark it in a special color and attach the moderators name to it (again - only visible to other moderators)
This allows policing of the police.
.
. * Did aliens forget to remove your anal probe?
The literary quality here has droped to the point of bathroom stalls. With moderation clued people will want to post. Other clued people will reply. And as a moderator, you are more important because your responsible for higlighting the best
Look at computer books, even technicial computer books. Proably 50% of them are crap, and thats only the published ones. Proably 95% of compputer books writen suck, and only the top 90% are published. Look at ORA books. There always the best. They solocit good authors, and they publish good independents. If Im looking for a book, and know nothing on the topic, and there is a ORA book, then I buy the ORA book. In effect they moderate out all the crap, and guarentee ony good stuff.
I do not agree with the "no moderating of forums you post in" aspect of the change.
If forced to chose between posting and moderating,
I think I would chose posting(since I personally tend to lurk this is not as much of an issue).
If the majority of moderators(that posted), decided that they wanted to post, although the quality of the posts would be good(on average), I'm not sure that I would ever see them. I currently read at a moderated score of >= 2. With the moderators posting instead of moderating, or vice versa, I think the quality of both the posts, and the moderation will suffer.
Admittedly, the number of people who are/will be moderators, all don't post(thankfully?), so my aregument is on the weak side.
I must say in defense that doesn't it make sense to have people who are involved with a particular discussion have access to moderate it? Allowing them to take the cream of the crop as it were, and raise it's level for those people who are only interested in the best.
In reading the other comments thus far, I believe that a compromise allowing people to both post and moderate in the same forum, with the exclusion of
a thread they are involved in.
This also brings up the idea, of allowing moderators to moderate within a thread they are posting in, but only above the level of their post(thus allowing them to raise the score of a previous post and respond to a previous post as well, but not allowing them to supress responses to their own post).
Shawn
Gang of 400 and any further posters with abnormally high alignments get a single checkbox on random posts which is -1. High alignments can only moderate down.
Logged-in Users get a single checkbox on random posts which is +1. Low alignments, the inarticulate, lurkers, and MEEPT (assuming MEEPT is an account) can only moderate up.
Random is treated as a percentage of the alignment, meaning high alignments would cause a larger number of posts to be accessible. This would also be pseudo-random from the user ID number, meaning that reloading the page would not change the distribution of accessible posts.
Scores would not be displayed, and would be restricted to -1 to 3. A poster's own posts are always shown to that poster, regardless of score. It'd be OK to post and moderate at the same time. The result would be emergent with the following likely results:
Simple, effective, self-correcting in lots of ways- I'd like to see CmdrTaco try this. It would decouple moderation from intent to affect outcomes- it'd become a more broadly based thing in which the desired demographics could be controlled from Taco Central by tweeking the autocalibrating threshold value and the pseudorandom weightings
Why the hell would you block moderators from moderating forums they are interested in enough to post to?
/.
This just turns the whole moderating thing into a big chore that prevents you from getting involved in the discussion.
Right now, when I moderate, it's just something I do as I go down through a thread. I read the article, then go through the comments to see if anyone else had anything interesting to say. 90 percent of them don't, but the 10 percent who do get a boost, until I get to the bottom and decide if I have anything to add.
The new system means you have to decide whether to participate in the discussion or help weed out the crap/add to the good. That's annoying.
Nevertheless, Rob, I think might sort of work when you get 4k people doing the moderating.
And I really like the random draft model you are considering. That is a concept that I have thought society as a whole should entertain: randomly drafting people to do unpleasant tasks that no one wants but which need to be done.
Overall though, there was no need to #make# moderating an unpleasant task. It was kind of fun when you could just hum along and do it without worrying about the consequences to your own freedom on
Whatever.
It's fun watching this stuff evolve anyway.
____________________
-A temporary Coward-
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Wouldn't the "post or moderate" concept work better if moderators were simply restricted from moderating replies to their comments, rather than all comments? If a user is considered worthy of moderator status based upon the overall value of his comments, shouldn't slashdot encourage his input as well as his moderation, limiting moderation only when he might be most inclined to abuse it to subvert dissenting opinions?
I wouldn't want to see those with a proven track record forced to choose between moderation and input except where it makes sense.
slashdot broke my sig
I think it is very important promote contrary views. I think it is very important not to become a self selecting group, where only certain views are tolerated.
Statistically speaking, even a sample of 400 people taken at random is going to be indistinguishable from the entire population. So, having 400 or 4,000 or 40,000 moderators makes very little difference, because they all effectively represent the entire population of slashdot. OK, so Rob isn't selecting people at random, but it is not clear to me that the typical moderator is much different than the typical /. user either before or after this new way of selecting moderators.
One of the methods that has come out of studies on the voting process is that giving each person more than one vote, and let them distribute those votes any way they like, promotes diversity. This is contrary to the "one person, one vote" view that is so ingrained in the American thought process, but it doesn't give anyone more power, it just gives minorities a chance to target their vote to their own views. This lets the 49%, or 15%, or whatever a much better chance of getting 49% or 15% of the final voice, instead of nearly 0% that typically comes out of a democratic process.
I also don't want an elite few deciding which articles are most interesting, but with the number of people reading /., 400 isn't "a few", at least when compared with most elected offices.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
I'm not saying this is deliberate, but that moderators are human and are not given extensive training to understand their own motivations for their actions.
So, I'd like to suggest the following:
That a moderator be allowed to either post or moderate on thread level. If a someone posts on a thread then that person cannot moderate on any subthread posts or on any posts at the level of the parent post.
This would help keep things in balance, eliminate some potential conflict of interests, and not ban these people entirely from discussions they are interested in or knowledgeable. Note also, this can still block out a person's ability to moderate for an entire article if they post at the root or child of root level!
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)
Moderation is solely intended to improve the signal-to-noise ratio
The whole reason Rob's put this system in place is so that readers (me, you, and everyone else on here) can choose the "quality" of the news and information they read on here.
Everyone is free to pick whatever filter settings suit their needs. I'm usually busy, read
Most of the posts on here seem to worry about security (preventing people not selected as moderators from becoming moderators). I'm not sure how applicable this is. This worst thing that I can imagine happening in this case is that they post something useless and inflamatory and then bump up the score of it Well, with 400 or 4000 (or whatever) moderators, aren't the odds high that someone else will come along and say "this is just flamebait" and dock its score back to the appropriate level?
Lots of the scenarios on here are really fears that are more applicable to *posting* abuses not *moderating* abuses. I think the only way to abuse this system of moderating is to be fickle or biased. And few of the proposed ideas for selecting moderators would have any effect at preventing that.
I think the only requirements for anyone to moderate, should be something like:
1. Agree to be impartial. (You may think Macs suck, but if someone posts something insightful about them, you give it the props it deserves and bump up its score)
2. Agree to always score things against the single measuring stick of signal vs. noise.
I think that anyone adhering to those two tenets would do a fine job moderating. And if we're worried about keeping those people honest, the idea of a "score balance" that alerts anytime someone skews significantly to some + or - threshold would identify those people.
By having a large number of moderators who all agree to the above, it's sure to dilute the effect that any one or few malicious "fake moderators" might have on the system.
Remember the only point of moderation is to rate articles on an "importance/insightful/useful" scale so that readers can filter based on their scores. Getting into details like "moderate vs. post" detracts from this purpose. Let's keep it simple.
I welcome any comments for or against these ideas...
mooman (Who just wants any system for quickly keeping up with current techie news without all the flamewars)
In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
The goal though is to not need to filter on that level of post, and instead filter on the quality of the posts.(read further if you would like my opnion on what to do about that).
Slight diversion of topic follows:
I see where you are comming from, but we were all newbies once, trying to . Excluding newbies is not the answer, some times it really feels good to flame the living crap out of someone, or berate them for their ignorance.
Yes, /. is cool, it has lots of usefull information, You can say to your friends, hey did you read that article on /. today(Woo Hoo instant proof of your imminent geekdom).
If you were a newbie, and you were comming to /. looking for new information, trying to not be a newbie any more only to find out that because you are a newbie you cannot get away from being a newbie(that would suck, think about the potential loss we could suffer).
The answer has been and always will be user education. At times I hate to admit it, talking about lusers and coworkers(cow-orkers) making your job painfully hard because they are stupid.
With rare exeption, a good program of education and available resources(and a willingness to learn) will take the worst person you have to deal with and at least make them tollerable.
In summary:
Don't alienate newbies, we were all newbies once.
You don't have to hand hold newbies, just point them in the direction of the information they need and be available to answer questions.
User education is the key to a happier existance(OK, a ST1550 makes a good LART and brings a smile to my face, but that goes against the point of this post)
Conclusion:
The answer instead of creating nerds. geeks. BOFH./. may be an educational page. Like hey here are some general guide lines, this is good this is bad, whatever.
I post to friggin' often.
I only really read those threads that I'm interested in, and because I'm interested in them I usually post a comment or a follow-up someplace.
Not letting moderators moderate in particular threads that they either started or in which they participate isn't a bad idea, but not letting them moderate in whole forums seems kind of counterproductive. You want people who are active to be moderators, but you don't want them to be active and moderate....
As a long time /. reader (well, ok just over a year and a half, but that is a long time for me to keep hitting the same site), here are my simple ideas.
Moderation is needed. I have seen this site grow quite a bit over the last year, and that is good. But the singal to noise ratio has gone up alot, Malda is doing the right thing by setting up moderation.
I also belive that who moderaters may be more important then what they can do. Considering the fact that most people just use the defualts, moderators will set the tone for the whole site.
The question is, who do we want setting that tone? Who do we trust? And what do we want that tone to be?
For instance, as Linux has gone mainstream over the last year, and Slashdot right along with it, the "unwashed masses" have decended with a vengence. These are the people that use Linux not for its merits, but because it is cool. And part of the "coolness" is coming to the Geek sites and belonging. These are the people that cause the most noise, they are the ones that the "old timers" get annoyed with the most.
Now, God love the newbies, some day they may very well teach everyone a thing or two. But they have to grow up. They are quick to flame, and quicker to post without understanding the topic.
Now, I have always thought that Slashdot has reflected the nerd computer user communtiy, not Linux or Open Source or whatever. And it has done a good job doing it. But as the community changes to embrace the onslaught of newbies, and slashdot changes with it, where do the hardcore users go?
I think the plan that Taco has layed out is a good one for letting slashdot reflect the reader base. What my idea is, whynot have a geek.slashdot.org, or nerd.slashdot.org or whatever for the old time readers. Those of use that would come here before it was hip. Those of us that want a place to dicuss topics with other like minded people, not newbies doing their best to be accepted.
How that would be done, I have no idea. Whats to stop the newbies from russing in there so they can say they are hardcore? I dunno. I just know what I would like to see, not how to get there.
Now this may very well be a stupid idea, and I am open to that suggestion. But anyways, I have babbled enough now..
Elwood
Your argument is good in theory, but not in practice.
:-)
When picking, for example, a juror for a trial, the "pickers" (whoever they are; sorry, I don't know the American judicial system that well) are fairly certain that they know what will and will not be relevant in the trial. For example, if there is a trial of a murderer, they can be fairly sure (at least well above 50%) that the proceedings will not involve methods of apple picking. Therefore they can choose jurors who are not knowledgeable about the murder, and therefore impartial. They don't have to worry about how much knowledge the juror does or does not have about the methods of apple picking.
Unfortunately, the same does not apply to Slashdot forums. As anyone who's read them very much knows, the chances of a forum in response to an article on ESR of going off into some completely unexpected direction (for example, methods of apple picking, to belabour a point) are quite good.
Within any one forum, the threads can become quite splintered and evolve into many sub-discussions. Moderating one of these should have no effect on whether or not you can post to another.
I definitely agree with the post you responded to that moderator/poster limitations should apply by thread, not forum. I am a fairly active poster on Slashdot; usually posting in the region of 50-60 posts per week, sometimes more, sometimes less. Often, these posts are quick, off-the-cuff comments that could be omitted without much consequence. However, every now and then I post something that I put a fair amount of thought into, and honestly believe is "worth" posting. This one, for example.
At the same time, I often see a post that consists entirely of "Rob is a flaming communist asshole!" or some such drivel. I would definitely like the ability to moderate those ones down into oblivion. (Can you tell that I'm not currently a moderator?
Anyway, I honestly can't see why or how this should be affected by the fact that I posted something else in the same forum.
There is also the other side of the coin; moderating comments upward. There are two issues here: partiality and knowledge. While I agree that a moderator should be impartial to the comments they moderate, that does not mean they should not be knowledgeable. I don't have time to go through every article on the Slashdot main page. How do I decide which ones to read through? Obviously, the ones that interest me. And as a general rule, those subjects that interest me are usually the ones that I know most about. Partial or not, I think it makes sense that a moderator should have some knowledge, or understanding of the topic they are moderating comments on. Perhaps not in terms of demoting the "Rob is a flaming communist asshole!"-type comments, but certainly in promoting the ones that have good technical content.
But it is these same subjects, the ones about which I have the most knowledge, that I would be the most interested, and qualified, to post on. Slashdot tends to deal with very technical discussions, not a "simple" guilty-or-innocent decision. (Yes, I know it's not that simple, but still does not require the same level of technical knowledge to discuss the issue; where it does, people are brought in to explain the terms, etc. for the laymen.)
Keep in mind another area where technical knowledge is useful. Nomination selection for the Academy Awards. The voters are picked from other directors, actors, technicians and the like. They all work in the film industry. And while they will all vote on the movies, actors and so on from all categories, this is not true of the initial selection. When picking the '5 selected movies' in any category (ie: the 5 options for 'Best Picture'), the academy members are only allowed to have a say in the selections for their own discipline. In other words, a director only has a say in choosing the 5 films that will be up for "Best Director". Why? Simple. Because of the technical knowledge of the field which is necessary, and which non-directors simply don't have.
I happen to think that this is directly translatable to moderation of Slashdot forums.
But most tantamount, please don't restrict the abilities of moderators simply for the sake of restricting their abilities. I can think of no good reason to do this, especially when dealing with an area that is so integral to Slashdot, the posting of comments.
I know that if this is the situation that remains, I for one would have no interst in becoming a moderator. I am, for the time being, setting my preference to "I don't want to be a moderator". And yes, I meet all the criteria for being one.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
One thing I didn't see in Rob's suggestions: it seems only logical to have some balance between restriction and privledge for moderators. So, given the way the system is (or was), the need to choose between moderation and participation makes sense. Given the way the system is going to be (or is), it seems too restrictive. If everybody (or most everybody) is potentially eligible to moderate, restricting participation as a consequence of moderations seems excessive.
As far as choosing moderators: I think the current system (the Gang of 400) has been working just fine. Don't inadvertently take us backwards by attempting to over-democratize the process -- that way lies chaos!
My personal preference would be for moderators to be choosen by some kind of emergent criteria. That is, for example, a strong positive score on all posted comments. Of course, there needs to be some type of control on this, so people just don't score their friends high to get them to be moderators...hmmm...
Must think more...
john.
GeneHack {--(bioinfo*linux*opinion)