Slashdot Forum Updates

I've made several major and minor changes again over the last few days. Mainly again regarding moderation, but also you ought to see a few minor UI improvements on the homepage and the comments as well. I like 'em. Hope you do to. Click the link to read some comments on updates to the moderation system (especially important for moderators- you guys have lost some power, so read why :) and more importantly, read my suggested requirements to be eligible for 'Jury Duty'. 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.

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:

1. You must have a user account. Sorry. I need some way to tell everyone apart. This is required.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

Comments

Trusting in moderation

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Have FEWER moderators, not MORE!

[Tony Shepps]

It appeals to the hacker mindset to come up with some sort of algorithm to pick and maintain moderators. But now we're dealing with human beings; and as meat becomes part of the algorithm, it becomes harder to predict its nature.

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.

A Wee Rant

[JRaven]

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

Conflict of interest?

[Doug Merritt]

If someone has to choose between commenting and moderating, that forces a conflict of interest. If they choose moderating, then it will encourage them to give positive points to comments they agree with, as a way of voicing their opinion.

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.

So much for that

[Orion]

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.

Comments and Suggestions

[Evan Vetere]

This is shaping up well. Coupla quick ones:

3. 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.

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.

[I] 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).

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%. :)

On issues of moderation.

[cholko]

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.

.

So much for that

[T-Ranger]

Your missing the point... With a sufficiant user base, there is likely someone with the same point of view as you. And with good moderation, the desier to post will return.

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.

Posting VS. Moderation a vote for compromise

[lalartu]

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

From one of the Gang of 400

[Anonymous Coward]

How about this?

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:

• moderators get to use scores to ignore annoying posters, but can penalize something given a high score improperly
• posters can use scores as they wish, and vote for what they like, and also trawl at -1 to watch for moderator abuses if that concerns them
• such moderator abuses are likely to happen less with moderators permitted to read at their preferred filtering levels
• poster abuses, such as rampant very high scores, are less likely when it's pseudorandomly accessible, and also less likely when posters cannot penalize posts without moderator status. The lower top limit is to deal with an expected tendency for high scores to just keep getting higher and higher as high-alignment filterers begin seeing them.
• those of high alignment are no longer asked to read at -1 to watch for abuses, which is wearying and causes huge unwieldy pages :)
• people will be more bored with their power when they do not have the ability to suppress opinions they do not like.
• moderators will be less vindictive with their moderating of unpopular opinions when they are encouraged to read at a filtering level that suits their sensibilities. You can't moderate what you can't see, and with the 400 assigned specifically to penalizing and noise-reducing duties, not to playing watchdog, moderators will be allowed to set higher filtering thresholds.
• as this is developed, a larger percentage of moderators can be established. There will be a cutoff point at which things even out, probably at an alignment somewhat, but not radically, above 1.
• this might be dynamically variable as a function of average alignment, automatically compensating for floods of highscoring by shifting the moderator cutoff point to a lower alignment and creating more -1 moderators.
• everyone would be allowed to talk about moderating, with the understanding that running about boasting about downscoring things is just begging for being shunned and disliked. Rather than the high-alignment mods being the source of all power, their public admission of that status would mean one thing only- that they got to censor posts, and for that reason they would have to be ready to justify their decisions or risk being 'silenced' themselves in an orgy of metamoderation... that would lower all participants below the threshold for moderation and permit them only positive votes, with increasingly less influence as their alignment fell.
• Diabolically clever, no?

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 :)

Bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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-
------------------------

Bad idea (a "middle ground" approach?)

[davie]

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.

Tyranny of the majority

[wayne]

Personally, I am very concerned about the "tyranny of the majority." That is, if you have a democratic process where everyone gets one vote, then 51% of the people can easily silence the other 49%.

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.

That won't work: Problem with Moderate xor Post

[docwhat]

If a person is forced to choose to moderate or post exclusively, the I would fear that someone would moderate with the goal of making their feelings on the subject clear.

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!

Why We're Moderating.

[mooman]

We are having vigorous debate about the implementation of moderation systems, but I think before we consider any of them, each needs to be held up to the singular purpose of moderation:

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 /. from the office, and want to just keep up with news headlines related to the technology fields I'm in. Slashdot, prior to the moderation, was not very conducive to quickly getting *facts*. Now, we have this great chance to optimize some schema to fix this.

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)

Moderation VS. newbie segragation WAS:My thoughts.

[lalartu]

Moderation will/should raise the signal to noise ratio. Use the filters. This should keep the "Me too posts, and the "fist post KNEEP" posts from bothering you.

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.

So much for that

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I'm a moderator and I qualify for "jury duty", but I doubt I'll moderate a comment and have it stick ever again. Here's why:

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....

My thoughts.

[Elwood]

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..

...In Which I Discuss Moderators who Post

[SeanNi]

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

An initial thought

[genehckr]

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.