Several Slashdot Notes

First up, Jon over at Brain Power has improved the job search engine to allow boolean searching, and parenthesis, so you can search for "c++ and not "visual c++" or "(unix and perl) or linux" to help you on your quest for unemployment. Second is a minor change to the posting system. I'm not quite convinced about the exact numbers, but users are now getting a default score based on their comment posting history. ACs still post at 0 and normal users at 1, but based on your past commenting, your scores can start at anywhere from -1 to 4. I've posted the exact numbers, more details, rationale, as well as assorted other comments on the system below. Ok, your "Alignment" is the sum of all moderation done to all of your comments on Slashdot. A posts initial score does not affect your alignment: only actual moderation. The "Score" of any comment, is your default score, plus or minus a fudge factor based on your alignment, plus or minus any moderator activity.

ACs post at 0. Logged in users post at 1. When you break the following alignments (I played a lot of Tradewars 2002, can ya tell?) your default score will be as follows:

-1 at -30
0 at -10
1 (Normal)
2 at +5
3 at +10
4 at +25

I suggest that this system will encourage posting of good comments. Currently it actually is only affecting about 1% of the comment posters. But extreme comment scores (-1 or 3 or more) tend to draw much more attention from moderators, so they will likely get knocked back towards the median unless they are consistantly high quality. Assuming that moderators are doing a good job anyway.

I've been fiddling with those numbers for the past few days. I've been making them pretty high, but we'll likely need to make them higher as more moderation occurs, but I'll need a few weeks of moderation to determine what those numbers are. Sorry to the people who have been surprised by these changes.

The mass moderation system is actually running now. I'm tweaking numbers, but it'll probably be a few days before any readers actually start getting moderator points. The system is basically what I discussed last week with a few numbers tweaked. We'll have to see how it works.

By far the most controversial change to the moderation is the new restriction against posting & moderating the same discussion. Let me try to defend this decision a bit. First, I think this prevents people from getting to play the judge and the prosecution at the same time. Many people argue that this will discourage moderators from posting comments. That might be true, but since the new moderation system will have more moderators, there will be people available to pick up the slack. Plus, currently the moderators have an abundance of moderator points- the new system will make them much more scarce (they'll expire after 3 days too!) so most of the time, people won't even have an option to moderate. Plus, if someone moderates and then decides to post, they can do that. Sure the moderation is undone, but that isn't the end of the world. The workload is distributed, hopefully (!) other people will pick up the slack.

The most important factor however is that our initial batch of 400 moderators were selected from the comment posters. The new batch will still have that element, but there will be many more lurkers as well- and since these guys don't post, this point is moot for them. I think that these 2 groups will offset each other and give us a good scoring system.

Finally, I added an option to the user preferences to allow users to say "I don't wanna be a moderator". By default all users will be flagged to be moderators. Remember that unused points will simply disappear after 3 days, so if you don't want them, just don't use them. A lot of people suggest that people ought to be required to turn moderation on, but I want to give this a try for now simply because I'm trying to get as large of a body as possible. Realistically, moderation is fairly easy. And since you'll only have a few points every few weeks, it won't be a major problem.

Anyway, I'll have a bit more on the subject soon. I'm sure this is a lot of stuff to talk about for now *grin*.

Comments

Too much of a good thing? Maybe.

[gavinhall]

Posted by Mike@ABC:

I was wondering why my posts were defaulting so high today. I thought they were good posts, but certainly not Pulitzer material. Now I know.

This isn't necessarily a bad system, but I think this should be the last tweak for a while. An allegorical story, if you'll permit me:

I had a friend who wrote his own role-playing system, did the points up and the skills and dice rolls and all that math stuff. It ended up being way too complex to play smoothly. Just finding out who walked away alive from a single battle took all day. The system barely survived one session before all his notes were thrown in to the fire. Literally.

I cannot help but wonder if Slashdot might eventually fall to that same phenomenon, where the bells and whistles not only drown out the static, but the pure sound as well.

That's not to say that CmdrTaco and his crew haven't done a superb job thus far. They have, and I for one am thankful for the great resource they've provided. But perhaps they should let this settle a while and see how things play out before tweaking any further.

And that's all I have to say.

Need post-time control of our initial level.

[Millennium]

The problem with that is that people will abuse it. You wouldn't, but I'm willing to bet that every flamebaiter, first-poster, spammer, l33t @01 h@x0r d00d, and MEEPT! would. They'd moderate their stuff up as high as it could go, and keep moderating it up as necessary.

It's sad that it has to be that way, but there isn't much that can be done about it. People should be rewarded for posting good stuff.

re:Need post-time control of our initial level.

[Bruce Perens]

Yeah, but Bruce -- We want to see your opinions easily.

(laughing out loud) It won't be a problem. I've sure done my best to keep them in your face up until now, haven't I?

If anybody actually reads this...

[Bruce Perens]

Perhaps Bruce Perens shouldn't be posting things that aren't worth the 3 default points?

I reply to a lot of posts, and most of my replies are not +4 material, although they may be important - for example one of my replies today was to a -1 post that displayed some easily-corrected confusion about the GPL. I might have wanted to put my reply at -1 so that only the readers of the original post would have seen it. But I was stuck with using a +4 nuclear warhead to swat a -1 fly.

I hope that makes my quandry more clear.

Thanks

Bruce

Need post-time control of our initial level.

[Bruce Perens]

Yes, that's what I meant. I want to be able to self-moderate down. For example, I sometimes answer a -1, and I might want my answer to be a -1 in that case. And when I'm just making a joke or something I'd make it a 1 rather than a 4.

There is a built-in encouragement to self-moderation. If you do it well, moderators will demote your comments less often and your score will be higher.

Maybe we are really figuring out how to do this sort of online discussion well, after years of people talking about it but not getting anywhere. I'm really intrigued.

Thanks

Bruce

It's a societal thing...

[sinator]

For the record, this is probably going to be the first post I ever make that drops below 1.

Hopefully it shouldn't be any new information for me to say that it's a fine line between including all points of view and succumbing to the line noise that mass voices can create.

However, I subscribe to the belief that the truth doesn't neccessarily have to be phrased in eloquent, multisyllabic aphorisms. The truth is ugly, people, and often the messengers of the truth are despised for their frank talk. We don't want to hear some things. We don't want to hear that some people are stronger, better, faster, smarter than others -- unless, of course, it applies to you :) .

What I fear this moderation alignment will do is remove many people like MEEPT!! -- who, despite his or her incoherency at times, told the truth in ways that irritated people because it was the truth about them.

It's a sad day when I find myself defending MEEPT!!, but there's something to be said about an inherent anti-bluntness bias in slashdot...

Let's take an example. Recently I read a post w/respect to Linux in a Dilbert article. Some killjoy posted his or her frustration about how Dilbert was mocking "The cause" and how Scott Adams was "like a weapons dealer", appeasing both the management and (in his/her words) "us peons".

A couple posts were put in response to it, more or less politely telling the poster to lighten up, that he had a lot of bitterness locked up, etc. All of them were moderated down, because the posters had the audacity to draw a correlation between the tone of a post and probable experiences in the personal or work life of this poster. The truth was ugly, but it's something we can all recognize in a grade school sandbox: the bitter poster had a stunted sense of fun and felt trampled on, and was ruining someone else's fun. I don't particularly believe that everyone's posts have equal merit -- neither does Rob, if we have moderation to begin with --, but I find it grimly amusing that it's easier to bitch about the decline of Slashdot as if it were the fall of the Roman Empire, than it is to take the truth that someone's social skills cast a bias on their statements and add a pompous air to Slashdot.

On the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog, unless you talk a lot about bones.

There gradually is a PC -- Politically Correct, not Personal Computer or Program Counter -- mobocracy when it comes to approval of posts and the like. This leads to a spiraling affect, the articles which please hoi polloi tend to go up in score, and the ugly truths, the insightful posts that no one wants to hear, the laments that only become appreciated after their time are covered by the posturing of killjoys. What kind of moderation is this that only the virulently PC posts, the posts that kiss the ass of our ego, the posts that pat us all on the back because nobody makes mistakes, can get a high score, and the posts that tell people to suck it up and face the facts objectively get shot down? Moderation? Try Extremism.

Other examples include the recent slew of articles about the so-called "Future of Open Source." -- I happen to like these articles very much, but something doesn't seem right. Open Source is all about putting your code where your mouth is; you don't talk, you don't spew, you do. Why the sudden overload of articles on Open Source when there's no need to promote it? There is no need to promote it, people. The sheer fact that Open Source hinges on volunteerism means that no matter how hostile the climate, it's still going to be done. But if someone were to point out that the majority of these so-called essays on the future of open source were made because it's "cool" to be associated with open source, they would be shot down.

"Oh no! Someone dared accuse us of jumping on the bandwagon! Someone spotted us trying to steal a little credit we never had before in our lives! No matter, Open Source is my credo, (as long as it's convenient,) and I'm an individual, just like everyone else!"

The irony of the above paragraph is that a good deal of /.'ers don't understand sarcasm is a very profound way of debugging the ideological operating system.

Here I sit in the face of the mobocracy with the brazenness to call them animals, twisting real ideals into pop culture. How dare I stand up for materialism, and moderation (of behavior, not posts), and the fact that the same criticism told you when you were five still applies if you haven't changed? At least you have to respect me for trying ...

Allowing mass moderation is going to galvanize /. and alienate the silent majority of truly moderate individuals, that make decisions based on facts and utility, not dogma and ideology. "Slashdot: Propaganda for Nerds. Stuff that Enlightens."

-- my $0.05. Keep the change.

Score pool.

[BiGGO]

People with stupid comments, that may have had good ones before, can expolit the system.
(intentionaly or unintentionaly).

I have a good idea.
For every point someone's comment have got,
he will get half a point on the pool.
When he posts a comment,
he can boost it up according to his pool.
If someone wants to say something stupid, like "agreed, blah blah",
he can choose the score for the comment to stay 1.
but, if he had an enlightenment, and has a very good point (and he knows it), he can pull from the pool,
and get attention.

but, if the moderators thinks the comment is bad, they can lower it down, thus lowering the amount of score in his pool to spend at other times.
(and ofcourse, when he posts the comment, he lowers the pool by himself).

negative pools will FORCE users to post at bad score of 0 (no choice for the user).
the user will rely on moderator to give him thumbs-up to normal score and higher his pool.
he will get a score for the act of posting,
if a poster post "this is meant to higher my score" he will get thumbsdown,
and it won't change anything.

however, positive pools cannot be set for such a thing, and may not recieve score in such a way.

also, an extra 1/2 point should be given to a user who got 4 points.
a point for going to 5 points,
and -1 points for getting to -1.
(and the reverse on the opposite direction)


---

This will create chaotic instability

[Doug Merritt]

The 3 day rule throws away most of the inertia in the moderation system, which will cause chaotic instability: moderation will become much more noisy.

Consider that people will lose moderation points semi-randomly: if there's a three day weekend when they're offline, or few interesting stories, etc -- it rewards only extremely recent behavior, yet it's people's long term behavior that you want to reward.

It's also true that, the more capricious and unpredictable a reward system, the less it is perceived as a reward system, and therefore the less it tends to motivate behavior.

(I don't mean "reward" here necessarily in a moral sense, just in a behavior modulation sense.)

Need post-time control of our initial level.

[Bruce Perens]

Rob,

Not everything I write is a 4, and the posting form should have an option if I'd like to self-moderate it to a 1, 2, or 3, rather than wait for a moderator to come along and do it for me.

The way it's set up now, I feel as if I should never post unless it's golden prose :-)

Thanks

Bruce