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

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.