Slashdot Mirror
Assorted Slashdot Notes
- I changed the default scoring around a bit. The range was -1 to 4 (out of -1 to 5), but I've changed it to 0..2. This still gives a certain amount of "Bonus" but much less. I'm considering alternative systems now to reward consistantly good posters.
- About 5000-6000 people are eligible for moderator access on any given day. This means they have a low account number, a non-negative total alignment, they are "willing" according to their user preferences, and they are "typical" readers (the middle 50% of comment readers according to the number of comments & article pages they've loaded- again, this weeds out idle accounts and obsessive over-readers alike. It finds the "average" reader. Hopefully).
- The system checks up on itself every time 100 comments are posted. You need to be eligible for 2-300 of these intervals (20-30,000 comments, or about 10-15 days) to become a moderator. Those intervals don't need to be consecutive, it simply means that people will gain access roughly approximately equal to the amount of Slashdot they read. The goal is that a regular reader will moderate perhaps for a couple days out of each month.
- I changed the cutoff on eligible accounts from the oldest 2/3rds to the oldest 4/5ths. Since the stuff above makes it very difficult to get moderator access, and requires regular reading, I think we can be somewhat less anal about this point.
So far the feedback has been pretty positive. The most controversial item is the "No Moderating & Posting in the Same Discussion", but as I point out above, since moderating will only happen for a few days a month, it shouldn't be that big of a deal, so I'm going to leave it this way for a while and we'll see how it works.
I've scaled back the number of points given to the 400 moderators. They now are getting approximately the same number of points they would get if they were always selected as moderators according to the new system. When the new system gets up to full speed, we'll decide what to do. Initially I want to keep them around to keep an eye on things because they've (as a whole) proven that they can do a great job (pats on everyone's back) but in a few weeks we'll see how the new system is working and perhaps eliminate them in the name of fairness.
Conclusion: we've got to put a lot of trust in each other to make this thing work... I've got these crazy butterflies in my stomach about this. But I'm a control freak. And I think that I've got the right amount of checks & balances to prevent abuses, as well as let everyone participate. If it doesn't work, we can easily back up to the current system, or try something new, but if nothing else, its a really fun experiment.
I was thinking along those lines myself. The whole moderation thing strikes me a bit as jury duty, but without the negative connotations we often associate with jury duty (never been called so I don't know). The similarity is that we are called upon to contribute some of our time to be impartial for the good of the society/community. I figure if/when I am called upon to moderate I will read articles at the -1 threshold for the few days during which I am a moderator.
This forces me to see all kinds of noise, of course, but since it is only a few days a month according to CT, I am willing to tolerate it given the possibility that some gems have been overlooked or irresponsibly downgraded. I would encourage anyone who is a moderator to do the same.
Perhaps, actually, it would be appropriate to force the issue, i.e. set things up so that thresholds are unavailable while moderating. Maybe even the number of comments on articles should be hidden from moderators on the front page so that they are not scared off by posts with a slew of comments (not that flamebait articles are hard to spot...).
It's interesting but I've noticed that I've started to only look at the articles with +100 comments because it doesn't seem that the posts with any less than that get any moderation. That way, I can scan all the really good comments (or at least those that by default fall out) and skip much of the rest. Of course, that begs the question of how they became moderated, but that's a whole other post.
I think that people that have earned the right to moderate should be able to moderate their heart out. It seems that most of the moderators are the cream of the crop as it is and they are in it as part of the community. In my perfect world, moderator status should be something that should be earned, and not something that is thrust on an unsuspecting user. That way, people would be less likely to abuse their power if they knew it took time of really good posting and thoughtful feedback to get to that point.
It kind of reminds me about how people play Ultima Online. It takes time to get that really good character with lots of fame and good karma. That's why people that are at that level don't go out and PK. It would ruin their rep. They are part of the community and try to help out others. The same sort of thing applies to moderators.
Gordon
Can't we all just get along?
There are many who belive you do an act for the sake of an act not for fame. Many famouse quotes in history are anonymous. Why? mostly because it was less important people know who wrote the message then it was that people heard the message itself. It's the content not the name that matters in the end. Though something can be said for having name recognition. But the main problem with name recognition is that when a person has faith in you they stop lisetning to you. they follow you blindly and do not think for them selves. The icon becomes more then the man or the idea. When this happens egos inflate and people start holy crusades.
"We want to take over the world, but we don't want to do it tomorrow, it's OK if it's next week"-- Linus Torvalds
Webslacker is right. These amendments to the moderation scheme, I suspect, will prove to have nearly eliminated moderation. There's no reason not to have a wide range for possible scores. With a wide range, scores will follow a happy standard distribution, and people can pick how many posts they want to read.
Also, the auto-moderation for good posters, I suspect, is discouraging human moderation. Many a time a person with a high base score posts a, while germane, quite inane or simply unexciting post that has been granted a high score based on previous exciting posts. You can already do searches based on author. Why not extend those capabilities instead of munging the moderation scheme?
I'd like the quantitative results on how much moderation there's been. What time had the greatest percentage of moderated posts? If it's now, then I'll concede that the recent changes haven't discouraged moderation. However, by reducing the range of the moderation, it's becoming nigh useless. Why not reduce the range to 0..1?
--
Make mine methylphenidate.
I really did like the system of -1 to 4, though I do agree that it was too easy to get into level 3... Took me one day of careful insiteful(not inciteful) comments to get to level 2, and the next day got me to level 3...
Positive feedback loop.
Moderators would see +2 or +3 first, and spend all their moderation points on them, barring those that spent killing the first post comments.
It did however lead to really good comments and such, because if people wanted to be heard about the common noise level, they took care to make really good comments... and it also discouraged poor comments because you knew less people would see it if it were lower...
This probably hurt ACs a lot, actually, and thus the change.
I like how clear and clean the forums became however, and an idea occurred to me; have a daily decay rate; the more you post, the lower your alignment gets... IE, it costs you a point for each post you make, so if you consistently make good powerful comments, your alignment will stabilize to some positive value. If you make very few, very powerful comments or very many very powerful comments, the result would be the same. Likewise, if you make a few good posts, and a bunch not so good, you won't start getting bumped into the high alignment range.
Another feature could be gradual decay of your alignment related to how often you post/visit Slashdot. This would not hurt consistenly good posters because they would be getting their points replenished daily by moderators anyhow, and still allow a person to fade back to anonymity if they didn't say anything for a while...
Two methods to deal with the positive feedback cycle...
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Does this explain why some people have lost their former alignment values?
I'm curious if this has to do with the problem of moderators noticing most only highly ranked people... and thus moderating only the most visible, leaving all the 1's to stay at 1's, boosting 2's quickly into 3's, and forcing down all the bad first comments into -1's?
One way to solve this is to reset the rankings periodically; good posters should quickly recover their previous ranks... And it also allows new posters to rise along with the older crew.
Or perhaps it just became harder to go higher in alignment?
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
The most elegant thing I ever saw was when the number of comments had spilled over the limit and only the subjects were displayed. My regular threshold is -1, so I could easily get to all comments. The really cool, elegant part was that the comments with a score of 3 (there's another treshold value that controls this) or higher were displayed in full - not just the subject. So I could see the scope of the entire discussion, I could go in and look at any comment, and every high-scoring comment was immediately visible.
It would be nice to be able to switch between to that mode (all subjects + good comments in full) at will without having to reconfigure. Mr. Malda, if you get all these configurable filters set up, we may find that we like two or three viewing modes, depending on the length of the article or its subject or our mood - how about some way to quickly switch between them without having to go the preferences page?
they are "typical" readers (the middle 50% of comment readers according to the number of comments & article pages they've loaded- again, this weeds out idle accounts and obsessive over-readers alike. It finds the "average" reader. Hopefully).
... there is nothing more inspiring than an AC post with a score of 3+ ... it removes all sense of "celebrity" or reputation or whatever (things that make for abuse))
there are still a couple of things that really worry me on this moderator business.
is the aim of moderating the comments to highlight the opinion of the "typical reader" or to highlight intelligent comments worthy of extra attention?
there is a big big difference. this is why leaders in a community are so important, they supposedly "understand" things better, and are hence given more responsibilty of influence.
On that recent Nt4 vs Linux story for example, the "typical 50%" will flame Microsoft and offer explanations for the test results. the community leader will be more level headed and suggest maybe (as did one gentleman) that the whole issue be explored seriously, and that should there be sign of even a minor flaw, then it should be looked at seriously and attacked immediately.
that's what i want to read, I know what the "typical 50%" thinks already.
..... then again the 50% is an important voice, just as long as it does not drown the "leaders", there is a very fine balance to be achieved here I think.
(PS i believe in the power of anonymous leaders
I understad that the people who read a huge number of posts may be using bots just so they can be eligible to be a mod. But, I think that being in the top 25% is not bad. Perhaps the top 5 percent or so should be blocked. Those are the ones with the bots.
... how mean people are there there? ie what are my chances of moderatoring? cause i (and most larkers [sp?]) would love to moderatate, cause i dont have time in the day ( i DO werk and all ) to read messages but some times i see a good comment... well, anyway how many /. accouts are there? ( i have read /. for some time just an account did do anything for me till now... )
nmarshall
#include STD_DISCLAMER.H
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
I've found that since the moderators have been given less points to moderate with, there've been a lot of good comments (or at least Score:1) that haven't been scored at all and consequently don't show up on my radar when I set my threshold to 1. I could set my threshold to 0, but then I'd be subjecting myself to a greater noise/signal ratio.
IOW, I liked it better when almost all comments were scored.
I think that the new scoring system is working out very well, almost too well in fact. For some high-traffic discussions I'll turn up the threshold up to 2 or even 3 to weed out the worthless comments.
However, this has the undesirable effect of hiding many worthy comments. If a moderator were to set the same threshold, he or she would never see the lower-rated postings, and these postings could never be promoted to a higher score!
As a possible solution, I'd like to see a random sampling of the lower-rated articles appear alongside the more popular ones. So in a topic with 100 comments, I would see all 20 articles rated "2" or better, plus 5 or so articles from the -1..1 range.
David Brin suggested this method for filtering in the novel Earth.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw