Assorted Slashdot Notes

First up, news of the Brain Power job search engine Go search for a job and submit your resume 'cuz supposedly we get some money through this as part of their new Affiliates program. Next, A few new Slashboxes to choose from now: a "Random" box, a "10 Hot Comments" box, as well as Wired & Byte. If you know of cool sites with the my.netscape RDF backend, lemme know. Lastly, Hit the link to read assorted comments on the moderation system, as well as minor changes to it. The first randomly selected jurors have been given access. Currently there's about 20 of them, but when the system gets up to speed, it will be perhaps 100 a day. Here are some changes:

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. 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.
4. 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.

Anyway its running now, but not at full speed. I'm actually running the script manually and watching it for unusual activity. I'll probably commit to to cron soon (but not until i'm sure its not gonna go crazy *grin*)

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.

Comments

My suggestion

[webslacker]

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.

Suggested change to scoring/moderation

[chroma]

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.