Slashdot Mirror
More Moderation Madness
Karma
By far the most popular topic is karma. When it was just called "Points" nobody really cared, but now that I changed the name to "Karma" everyone has input on it. Must have a few MUDers out there.
Since I intend to start using karma in a few other places, I added a field to display it on your user preferences page. I might add it to the comments display, but I'm holding on that for now since it will
just clutter things up.
Default Comment Scores
For many moons now, users with high or low karma were given either a +1 (k:25) or -1 (k:-10) on their comments. Yesterday I added an additional -1 (k:-20) that I have since removed. Many people argued reasonably against it, so its gone.
In addition, I added a much requested feature to allow posters to optionally pass on the +1 bonus when they post. Many people who have earned the bonus point occasionally wanted to say something that they didn't feel deserved the bonus. I guess thats fair.
Anonymous Posting w/o Logging Out
Due to popular demand, I've added an option to allow logged in users to post anonymously. If you use this option, you are every bit as anonymous as you would be if you had logged out, except if
you have a +1 bonus, your comment will still get it.
At some point I may eliminate the old AC posting in favor of this one, if only to eliminate a certain amount of knee-jerk posting, but I'm not convinced on this one. I really believe that people should be able to post anonymously, and this system while it still allows that, it would require a login. Its just a hoop- the comment is every bit as anonymous, but I suspect I'll take some flame for making people jump through the hoop. Then again, the flamers are probably a large part of the problem ;) Anyway, I'm not sold on the idea, so I'll probably leave it as is.
Meta Moderation
So who moderates the moderators? Every day comments are mailed to me with a note saying 'this comment was unfairly moderated'. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're wrong. But regardless, it seems like the community should be able to regulate this itself. So I've implemented MetaModeration.
I'm debugging it now, and it should be online within the next few days, but I want to post the concept for evaluation:
Basically, anyone who is eligible to moderate is eligible to MetaModerate [M2]. (Registered users with non-negative karma who have had accounts for "awhile" (the definition of which is likely to change but right now is probably a month or so)).
An M2 gets 10 comments, and the moderation done to them. They are then asked to decide if the moderation was fair or unfair. The opinion of the M2 affects the original moderators karma. In otherwords, if you moderate good, you get better karma, you moderate bad, you lose the ability to moderate in the future. As a side bonus, users will get some karma (on a sliding scale so it won't be much) for being an M2.
Its just a thin layer of accountability, but if everyone plays fair, it'll work. (Just please don't start asking for M3 or M4 moderation or I'll start crying).
Some other stuff
So I labored on my labor day (and Andover even has it officially listed as a holiday!) Thanks for all the feedback (good and bad!) in the last few days, please keep it up. I'm sorry we can't implement all the suggestions, but of course some of them aren't feasible, and some are just silly. But as a whole, I think we're getting better. (Or at least my TODO list is getting shorter ;)
But seriously, the best abstract way to handle this problem is to implement moderation acts as comments themselves (ones that aren't normally displayed) and let the response mechanism handle the recursion problem. ("Hey, calling that 'insightful' is flamebait!") I don't know whether that'd be practical as comments are currently implemented; I gather slash hasn't been released in a long time.
I like this idea a lot. In fact, I like it enough that this is my first post ever to /. after several months of being a devoted reader!
:) So it's not reasonable to expect it from the moderators either.
/. readership, make sure there is nothing "wrong" (due to some kind of bug/loophole) to the readers' moderation, and commit the moderation.
I know I can personally not go through every posted comment of every thread, at least not until Andover pays me to do that
This proposal is democracy at its best, as I see it: we, the readers, moderate the posts we read for the benefit of other readers; well-meaning moderators simply validate our will.
Taken to the extreme, this could mean that the moderators' main role could be to check out postings that were moderated up or down by the
If some reasonable precautions are taken (such as the IP address of someone making the post cannot also moderate a post up or down; and that each IP address can only moderate once) then I think this ought to work...
BTW, I'm sure one of the more MUD-enlightened could write up a great parody of slashdot with moderators having a +5 attack and trolls having -3 armor classes, and what were those magic point thingies...
-Another Anonymous Coward
We put the AC in . . . . Slashdot needs a 'C' in it.
Shut down your browser, then open the cookie file and delete every cookie you don't want (leave the Slashdot cookie). Copy this file to "cookies.ok", and make a script that overwrites "cookies" with "cookies.ok" when you start your browser.
By Anonymous Coward #41221. This is nice! Now if ACs can accept cookies and so have semi-permanent anonymous accounts, you could trace individuals over time (if you are slashdot addicted and have a very good memory for figures :-) ). On the other hand, that would be nearly equivalent to the amount of info available about most logged in people. Maybe a 'save cookie' box on the reply form for AC's? (Part-time Coward whose cookies crumble at the termination of each lynx session.)
I liked reading the very first Slashdot (the original). You seem to have gone into a feature frenzy. Keep it simple.
The problem you have is you're attacking the problem with ignorance. You have to find out why you have posters that post such childish things. What you are doing is just making hacks (or road blocks) to avoid and stop posters.
Just get on with the thing I am here for (as many others are): THE NEWS! Or is this just a playground site containing no news? Maybe that's the problem. The only thing happening here is KDE vs. GNOME flame wars, distro wars, and other childish crap. The atmosphere created by Slashdot is reflected by it's posters.
FYI, you can make a post as a registered user without using cookies, just type in your Nick (aka username) and Passwd in the boxes so labeled, and voila.
/. was when I had to change the totally inhuman password I was initially emailed.
I've found the only time I really needed to use cookies in
It didn't work! Is this a bug, or a feature?
Just testing to see if this anonymous without loging out thing really works.
Too often, something gets branded as 'flamebait' when an attempt to start a dialogue is posted. The whole notion that it is wrong to post an idea in order to induce discussion, even discussion from those who strongly disagree with you, is dangerous. Unless it's good for us to all turn into happy consensual little pods.
But of course this is Slashdot, afterall. (there should be a menu of five or six canned sigs that ACs can select for their comments, and the preceeding should be one of them.)
Yes, the AC posts are almost always the most interesting to read.
The comments from people who do their little balancing act to keep their ratings high are predictable to the point of tedium.
There should be a menu option to block comments rated above a certain number. I seldom wish to read the fawning comments of the +2 and above crowd. Bruce Perens, and ESR, for example.
Make it possible for AC readers to block out reading comments with a +2 or higher rating.
I am grateful for the feature that cuts off the rather long-winded posts (like the above). Like a nice hook that somebody offstage can use to yank the tedious off the lectern.
.) could be blocked from even being downloaded.
It would also be nice if a cookie-based feature for ACs could be set so that all future comments from people like this (good golly, it's another +5, informative from that dood. .
Since cookies can be deposited and read by the site without anything needing to be permanently saved account-wise at the Slashdot side, most settings (including the oh-so-clever signature, and also the ability to block having to view sigs) should be saveable in a cookie.
I say cookies for everyone. Not just the little boys who got "plays well with others" notes on their report card.
I wanna Me Too this post because I have done exactly that in the past (and in fact am doing so right now, though I may be a tad paranoid this time).
No, I don't work for MS or Apple, but I do work for a "Big Technology Company" and am privy to a lot of the inside information in our company.
I especially remember posting information during the Melissa Virus scare, and at a few other times that I simply wouldn't have posted if I had to sign my name to it. I've also occasionally posted some of our company's future plans that were supposedly "secret" but relevant to the discussion.
Normally I have an account. Every now and then, I find it essential to post without using it.
What if more than one gets root? They can moderate each other's root-level moderation, thus being at a "higher" level and the "same" level simultaneously. Similar situations are conceivable, though a bit more complex, at non-root levels. As for the multiplying metas: someone writes something that they sincerely believe, but the rest of the world thinks is flamebait. They get moderated down. They appeal to metamoderators, who uphold the original system. They think that they are not being treated unfairly, and if only there were M3, they would get a fair hearing. They whine, they plead, and eventually M3 comes along...and upholds the decision of M2 and M1. So now the iconoclast thinks that M4 would give a fair hearing... Of course, there's also the case of those who are being deliberately provocative, and use M* as a way to fan their own flames. But, as far as we are concerned, the two are the same: a recursive demand for remoderation of an upheld result, ending in a demand for even higher levels so those levels can be used (to the same result, although the demand states that the new level will be different). So, Rob, when's the self-tagging version - M(st)3K - coming out? ;)
Well there are still a few of the "gang of 400" around which are permanently[*] moderators. When you use up all your points, it looks just like you aren't a moderator, until more points show up.
Strangly, it now easy for moderators to post as AC's and still moderate in the same discussion. I won't, but then, I didn't moderate stuff "close" to my posts before either.
[*] "permanent" until you screw up and tell people you are one of the gang of 400, or Rob changes his mind, or maybe when you get meta-moderated out.
P.S. I just hit "preview", and I see my .sig even though I'm supposed to be posting anonymously. Strange. Better log out for this one. :->
Someone having high Karma does us no good unless they are contributing. Leave it the way it is, where the rest of us only know that someone has high Karma when they contribute.
Ask yourself a question. Do you really give a toss that some gimboid doesnt like your arguement and has downgraded your comment to flambait? Does it matter to you so much? If so, you need to get out more. Brad
I used three of my precious moderation points on several good comments in this discussion. Today I found one comment I had to make ("No Karma Stats -- Karma should only be visible from contributors").
I used the new AC checkbox, and my comment was posted anonymously. But my moderation was retracted.
I bet this AC issue beats playing SimCity.
/. becomes no fun and pisses people. If too lax, then /. loses value and pisses people.
It's not easy to balance it right. If too strict, then
The whole shebang can be viewed as an organic discrete automata too. Rob plays the god and sets the rules (karma). The moderators and metamoderators and AC cowards plays each other out. If the rules are not set right, the population bomb or desert. (anyone played game of life?)
Careful, Rob CmdrTaco!
xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
In other words (and I don't have much appreciation for slashdot these days, but I'm saying this only to be fair), it would be for slashdot's own good to never take the IP-logging route, *especially* if it involves the possibility of that power being abused by "moderators" revealing users' IP addresses. The ACLU would have a field day, and so would I, when I drive away in a nice new corvette...
With previous AC coward, I agree. The first thing I do is switch to -1 and nest format, when I read comments.
/. cowards, I find.
The AC coward posts are oft more funny and educated than
(btw, 241th post?)
xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
Rob [and the gang]
Great site. Sincere hard work sincerely appreciated. Read it every day and learn a ton.
But what's with the moderation? To me, it seems that the "problem" is the few unpleasant individuals that "act their shoe size, not their age". Just ignore them! We change channel when there's bad stuff on TV. That stuff still gets broadcast, but we don't have to participate in it. In seeking to address this "problem", I think we're losing sight of the real issue.
It's a monster created by the whole *concept* of moderation and the 'points' system. We see the same old people day after day desperately craving the sacred goal of a "5" or the satisfaction of starting a flame war. It's people seeking attention! And the whole moderator/points system is the ultimate response/reward feedback loop that keeps it going!
I say get rid of points altogether and make us ALL AC's. That keeps the whole ego thing at bay, and will kill the feedback loop.
My 2 cents.
Loveya
> I think there should be many more moderators
> with many more points.
At one point, there were a gargantuan number of moderator points floating around (CmdrTaco inadverently put triple the intended points out there). It was kind of weird -- there were lots of fives and lots of -1's, and little in between. I think what is really desirable is to have one or two fives, no more. This is to make it easier to set one's prefs without having to deal with a silly amount of granularity.
> And with a larger scale to vote on it...
Originally there were no limits. This made it hard for users to set prefs. Someone wanting to see the cream-of-the-crop didn't know what upper limit to set, and someone wanting to see absolutely everything didn't know how low to set their prefs. (For example, MEEPT's posts were getting scores of, like, -10, which really sucked for those of us who liked MEEPT.)
This is the real reason for the moderation system, I speculate. It has nothing to do with fairness, and everything to do with making the reader's experience nicer.
this post comes in anonymously for the sake of being symbolic. i just wanted to thank rob for being so damned level headed about this whole thing. nothing makes me happier than seeing people trying their hardest to do The Right Thing.
the first amendment and thousands of your fans thank you.
Sure, I don't know how many people would go for it, but what if even the Anonymous folk such as myself (though I may get an account someday) could self-moderate... down? Give yourself an extra -1, you know?
:-P )
Honestly, I don't know why exactly someone would do it... but options are always nice, right???
hm... well, just a thought.
Oh, and BTW... First Post! (no silly!, *my* first post ever...
Well, it's supposed to be anonymous. So I doubt it. --- Just call me... Sir Spank-o-tron
Yeah, for instance, I wonder who posted this?
guess there was an incentive to moderate it up.
Which doesn't necessarily make any more sense, but one can't argue that they participate in the forum and so they should accept its tacit rules (or leave), since they don't.
They do, however, take up a life in the public eye, which one might argue carries with it similar conditions. If you REALLY don't want people saying anything bad about you, you should have chosen to be born in a backwoods Arkansas shack with parents who'll keep your existence secret, then kill them and set up booby-traps.
More seriously, people are not "entitled" to anything - but there's nothing to stop them from demanding it, and even getting it.
Which sort of goes back to "auto-moderation". If you see that the rating of a story is @-100, you know that it might not be worth looking at the comments.
;) (like that MS linux hoax).
"Stories" are posts just like any other...in fact, if the rating of stories actually had an effect on the Karma of the poster (as in actual posts), maybe Rob/Whoever would be less inclined to post bad stuff!
I think there is room for both a value-based and category-based scoring. "auto-moderation" would take care of the value-based scoring. If people wanted to check a category they could too. Your preferences may then have something like this:
Posts > 3 points, which are "Insightful"
which acts as a mask/filter on the posts. The thing is, it must be easy to do. If it is hard to moderate, nobody will. That's why I sort of like the auto-moderation concept, and optional categories.
Perhaps this is because there are few posts that deserve a -1, yet so many posts that aren't trolls get it. Case in hand: Sunday, the discussion about 1m satellite imagery. The story came from the NY Times. All posts suggesting "free" accounts were moderated down to -1 (Although one got out from the gutter, eventually). These were very on topic. So people ask not to be -1ed because, well, you moderators are seeming to do it for no reason when people see crap like that happens.
:-)
So don't -1 me...
Other than the fact that they don't want to draw attention to what must seem to be an annoying little gnat, it seems like Microsoft could take down Slashdot or it's members for a LOT of eggagerated defamatory remarks that get the nod regularly on Slashdot. This isn't Usenet, after all. The owners of a private forum should be held liable for it's content. Granting permission to anonymous posters that allows vile slander is the electronic equivalent of running a tavern and not controlling obnoxious/violent patrons.
Finite levels? Serious? Take a lenght. Divide it in half. Divide the result in half again. You'll never come to an end until you hit the diameter of a subatomic particle. That's high enough to be considered 'infinite'. You hit a physical limit, but if you're using a theorical model in which it doesn't exist, you'll never hit it.
Yes, the moderators should try reading from bottom to top whenever moderating, and setting their settings to a chronological order. This is what I usually do.
Also, I just wanted to say, I liked someone else's idea of (only for mass violations from one single IP address) banning an entire /24 IP block, identifying the IP address and UID of the violator to anybody who tries to get to Slashdot from that range, telling them, "Sorry, somebody in your subnet has broken the rules. The violator was at so-and-so IP address. Have your network administrator find out who they are, and make them stop doing what they're doing."
That sounds like a cool method of grass-roots DOS. If you want to get your University's labs banned from Slashdot, spam the IP block into oblivion.
The idea that 'complaining to a sysadmin' is going to get the sysadmin to do anything but ask the complainer why s/he spends so much time reading Slashdot is laughable.
Slashdot continues down the slippery slope toward mediocrity as more and more weight gets put into administration and rank. If all you want to read is me-too and feelgood comments, this is definitely the place to be. If you're looking for a place where the choir not only sings nice tunes, but cheers and cheers and cheers when you preach the Good News (tm) about Linux and Open Source, this is the place to come. Like a self-help support group.
I don't think Midnight Coder meant to post IP addresses with the AC postings, but for the server to keep track of IP addresses of AC's and use them to tag the postings. The first AC to post would be 'Anonymous Coward #1' but then if that same person posts again in the same thread, it would show up as #1 again, instead, thereby keeping the actual person anonymous, but allowing people to keep track of how many posts one AC has, on a specific topic.
Anonymous coward thanks as well. Mija Cat
And the moderation is given out sparingly, so as not to cause a flood of moderation. Think of it as preventing a situation of more chiefs than indians. Moderation points seem to be given out more often when there is heavy activity in stories and the need to seperate the cream and let it rise to the top is more crucial. Consider it your duty to moderate. Its much less painful than jury duty and some posters really feel good about getting noticed when a moderator feels its important.
Then again, I have had a few posts knocked down. The moderation seems very fair and sometimes I get the clue that I post like a dumbass. I'm glad moderators are responsible and have the ability to rate what is good and what is bad. All in all, it makes reading comments quick and very enjoyable.
Yes and no. I can make a totally anonymous post without going through anonymizer.com: I walk into a public library, grab a computer connected to the internet, go straight to slashdot.org, make my post, logout and leave. At least around here, public libraries let anyone use a free computer without any registration. So the only way they can track me down is if they take and keep my picture as I use the computer - but that's getting really paranoid.
Whee, making use of the anonymous post facilities.. :-)
It just shows up. I wish that you got a mail or something..I've really only used the points one time that I was a moderator, mainly because I often didn't know about them or didn't have time when I actually found out. I think it would be nice if they lasted longer, although I can see the potential for abuse there..
if it wasnt for the cookies id have an account. /.
I will not settup a browser just for
and it is to big a hassle to change it all the time.
what we need is an open source windows/*nix
util that just allows cookies from certain sites.
Then destroy them on close. This would prevent abuses.
I was hoping that the 5 series browsers would have this feature no luck so far,,, not a coward just hate cookies
If something doesn't tickle my fancy real hard, I'd knock it down. I've seen several comments (and I tend to agree) that a technical article with several highest-rated posts which are simply humor is....unsatisfying, somehow. Not that wit doesn't have its place but it's not always at the top of the heap (even if the heap is Slashdot) <g>.
I've started doing that.
You can also sort by score and read in reverse score order. Makes it easier to find unfairly down-moderated posts or unmoderated (0/1) posts.
The one thing neither of these methods do is address the issue of finding redundant posts -- I'll often down-moderate a post which makes the same point (or nearly the same point) as several above it, just for redundancy. Just because there is a forum and you've got the opportunity to say something doesn't mean you gotta.
BTW, you can also thank me for the up-moderation <g>
I don't see the value there. No matter how many people posted those messages, either they're all wrong or they're all right. Identity is a crutch, only useful if ideas aren't judged on merit.
is not!
That's exactly what I do as well. I browse at -1 even.
:-)*
I, too, would much rather see a lot of 2's rather than a couple of 5's. I keep getting the feeling that great stuff is getting ignored by many moderators. The lack of sufficient moderation points lately caused me to set it up so that scores of 2 and above are always displayed...
I wish more moderators thought like us
Hey, I can try out this "Post Anonymously" option now. Remember, we aren't supposed to be talking about our moderator access as ourselves...
Surely if you're really defamed you've got a right to compensation from someone, and if records aren't kept, /. would be (and should be)
responsible?
puh-lease give moderators more points..we cant mark as many bad posts down or as many good posts up as we wish..more points would cure that.
P.S. dont remove anonymous posting! not everyone wants to login and post.
My biggest reason for posting anonymously is that, once in a while, I want to say something without it publically being associated with the company I work for ---either because said affiliation might alter the reception which greets my post, or because I might say something with which the company might not wish to be associated.
... because it's a consideration, not anything else.
I don't actually _care_ if it's traceable. I just don't want it to be easy
Can we get each message tagged with who moderates what and in what way ? Also a history of moderators moderations would be nice. FC ? :)
This is getting a bit silly!
I think this is a great site. Every time I log in I learn something new about almost every aspect of my life. Whether it is how good of a human I am or how poor a programmer I am, I always learn something.
/. And I am proud to say that I have been reading your ideas since the days of Chips and Dips(or what ever /. was before it was /.) Keep up the good work.
Rob, You have always had great vision for what you wanted to do with
I've been looking all over my Preferences page and I can't figure out where my Karma score is displayed, nor have I seen any options to display it elsewhere. Where am I supposed to be looking?
And in the future, it might be a good idea to put that in a more prominent spot in the User Prefs page, since many users will probably want to check their Karma pretty often.
I am not excactly sure who gets moderator status/points, but it seems it is kind of limited. I think it would be a good idea if all registered users (with non-negative karma) had the ability to moderate all comments, and then the moderations for a comment would be averaged. Then people would quickly react to, and correct, unfairly moderated comments, while "well-rated" comments would be left alone. This would make comments be rated at a right level very soon after posting. TN
Sometimes when I moderate, the order that the stories appear (when sorted by score) is an influence. Moderation points are not absolute values, but realtive to the other posts in the story. I don't know if every single action is defendable outside of the context of a story.
As far as I am concerned, the moderation system is simply a method of shaping social behavior to conform to the slashdot clique. If you place any value in the point system (status symbol system) and strive to gain more points (status), then you are allowing the small clique of moderators to control your expression. I find this undesirable, I always set my threshold to -1 to negate the status symbol system. I urge everyone to do the same.
On the new karma point sytem, what is karma? Karma is an abstract idea used to control social behavior, now I understand why it suits this moderation system so well. The clique mentality with the moderation is fine, it is only natural. Although, you should understand there are people who do not want to be a part of this. If you want them to leave, then by all means continue.
---
---
If your IP is good enough to identify you, and slashdot keeps a history of every post together with the originating IP, then as correctly pointed out by several comments on this thread, the same objection I raise is raisable right now.
For "anonymous" posting to be really anonymous, slashdot may noy keep a permanent record of IP addresses for each post.
Note this does not mean slashdot can't keep a temporary record of IPs. That is, I think the best solution would be for slashdot to keep the IP for each post in recent stories (maybe front page, maybe a bit beyond front page). This could be used to defend the system from abuse-- if some IP is posting too many stories too fast which all are getting downmoderated, slashdot may block the IP group from posting temporarily (say, 18 hours). But when the story goes stale, you get rid of IP info, and anonymity is guaranteed (you still may keep a list of troublemaking IPs).
---
Well, if they moderate posts to appease the majority of meta-mod's, then surely they are also appeasing the majority of /. readers? After all, the mods are selected from the readers, and I thought that was the point of moderation. To remove the crap that the majority of people dont care to read. If they are getting rid of that, then whatever their personal opinion they are doing a good job at moderation. /. readers who meta-mod would work to stop unpopular opinions from being stifiled.
Besides, I think its bad form to let personal opinion get in the way whilst moderating and I think (or at least hope) that the majority of
Nick
Nick
One nasty side-effect this will have for me, and doubtlessly many others, is the irrational need to get super high, (might I say Perens-ian) karma, by posting useful, informative and/or intelligent posts. That is definitely not a bad thing.
Of course, it can go the other way, for those who will pride themselves on having -188 karma points. This is not a good thing.
This is going to be a wild and crazy ride!
My Freakin Blog
I don't think unlimited points would be the answer, maybe more points. Besides it would be interesting to see if alot of moderators "hang themselves." I think it would be interesting to see how it plays out either way.
This seems to be a rapidly increasing problem. I've only noticed it over the past month or so, but many comments are now being moderated down because the moderator disagrees with the ideas expressed in the post. See this post from today. Not mine; just a post I happened to see. Was it off topic? Certainly no more than its parent post, which was not moderated.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
- I think giving moderators unlimited (-1) ability is a Bad Ideatm. It would invite abuse very quickly by removing the incentive for positive marking versus negative marking. This should be obvious without much thought.
- My understanding was that it would start with Score:0, but that it would still get the Score:+1 if you have good Karma. Personally, I think this is a good idea. If you have the ability to log on, then posting anonymously holds less credibility and less accountability than posting regularly. As Rob Malda would prefer us to post under our normal accounts as often as possible, I should expect him to discourage anonymous coward posting as often as possible, very much as he does now.
I just want to add that Slashdot has so far been organized wonderfully. Its popularity reflects this to the extreme.Now if only the Malda would implement the Slashdot Mirroring Service like was suggested for the Rusty-Case article.
He lready stated that the anonymous button would be exactly like you wheren't logged in at all, so no, otherwise, it wouldn't be anonymous..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Whenever I get the opportunity to moderate I try *not* to moderate posts which are already +2 or greater, since I figure every other moderator will do that. I read articles "highest scores first" and if something *really* grabs me and it's already high, I"ll bump it. Otherwise I save my points for the 0s and 1s.
Only on two occassions have I knocked down users. I figure they'll sit at the bottom anyway.
As far as getting hit for being redundant, well, I think that is A Good Thing. You should read most of the stuff before you post. If what you want to say (or close to it) has already been said, then you keep quiet. This isn't talk.bizarre where "upping the volume" is considered k3wl.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
1. Make moderation points last longer, or maybe not even expire.
I'd like to see them last a few days longer, but I see the wisdom in the current system. If your points never expire, you might not use them for "unimportant" threads, instead waiting for a thread you really care about. If you know you only have a few days to use them, you may end up doing (desired) moderation sooner rather than later.
I see things that deserve to be moderated up or down and I can't.
I imagine we all do. It'd be nice to have a way to show support for a post we really like, but I think we can rely on later moderators to apply points appropriately.
#2. Someone else mentioned... divide the score of a post into each category... it seems like a good idea to me.
Agreed. This is a *really* good idea.
#4. Dynamically generate the moderators. I'm not sure how it's done now, but as slashdot grows the number of moderators it will need grows too.
Essentially, Slash creates a number of moderators semi-proportional to the number of comments posted. It's explained more further here.
One other comment regarding IP Banning... Instead of a simple ban, I think it would be more in keeping with the way Slash is going with all other filtering stuff and make it toggleable. That is, the user can choose to filter out all posts from any IP that has posted more than X items to a given thread that day. I suspect this would be pretty heavy on the server, but maybe there's a clever and efficient way to implement it.
I think that this sort of thing is a good idea, but there are some important issues:
1. What about people connecting through IPMasq/Proxies, or using dynamic IPs? I connect to the net through my uni (forced proxy, and a dynamic IP to the outside world anyway), and this means that one idiot could cause everyone's posts for a period of time (maybe just the time the article stays on the front page, but that's a lot of time for a dialup dynamic IP address).
What about displaying the ip address in the form 1.2.3.xxx? Maybe (although this would probably load the server), when a moderator tries to "SuperTroll", this would be disallowed if the reverse DNS lookup contains "cache","proxy", or something similar. This could possibly be abused though.
2. People may decide to do stupid DoS attacks against the displayed IP, which may affect lots of other people.
Maybe there should be an option "Ignore -1 posts from this IP", which would still have the problems in 1, but stop people doing DoS attacks.
2. There's still the potential for abuse. If something like this was done, then setting "SuperTroll" should require _all 5_ of the moderator points to be used, and require two moderators. The person who uses this option won't know if they're the first or second moderator to set this, and so would have to be really sure that they want this.
Just some thoughts.
What you need is something more like GroupLens. This works as follows: Each person indicates, for each message read, whether or not he liked that message. These markings have no direct impact on the general public.
However, if you decide to use the feature, your markings are compared with others. The markings of people that have made selections similar to you in the past are given the most weight. Therefore, the articles that are given the most points are tailored to your specific preferences.
This is a far better solution. No more of this points madness; if people are not truthfully marking articles, it hurts nobody but themselves.
Why is slashdot not using this type of system?
Any solution to this problem?
I am not sure if it is too much, if I could delete it myself but how about allowing me to flag it for deletion by some moderator - so two folks are involved?
1: Should we allow AC to raise that flag? (I think not.)
2: Now we have another set of points to keep track of, and we might want to figure out how well each persons suggestions are recieved. 3: Do we give/take karma based on the response to the suggestion that a post be moderated? (give fractional karma for each flag you raise which is acted upon, take fractional karma if the post still hasn't been moderated a week later.)
I believe (get me if I'm wrong) Rob has reduced the number of moderators from when he originally introduced it. He's said before that he feels that moderation should be a rare thing and only a few comments to an article should ever be moderated in either direction.
I didn't agree initially, but now I do. I try to read everything at least down to 2, and I think this means you get all the intelligent comments, not just the ones lucky enough to make it up to 5.
Of course, there are still a few rare ones that make it up to 5, and some of them don't really deserve it. IMHO moderators should focus on looking for diamonds in the rough rather than further moderating up 3's and 4's.
Perhaps moderating up an article should get harder (requires more points) the higher it starts, so it would cost a moderator a lot of points (or alternatively take several moderators) to bring a 4 up to a 5, but only one to take a 1 to a 2.
The way *I'd* implement it, the M2 would be presented with *both* moderation activities and be able to score *both*. Same goes for the second example. Remember, it will most likely be on a sliding scale (say, from -5 to strongly agree) so each of the moderators will get the appropriate response. They'll be accountable only for their actions, not for another's.
Droit devant soi on ne peut pas aller bien loin...
Droit devant soi on ne peut pas aller bien loin...
Straight ahead of him, nobody can go very far... -- Le P
Thank you so much for tweaking the auto-points for good karma. I like to initially read /. stories with a threshold of '2', and it was getting sort of tedious dealing with the generally safe postings of the anointed on the occasions when they weren't really contributing anything new. Initially it turned me off to the good karma bump altogether, but this seems like a good compromise: it'll reward /.'s best contributors and hopefully make reading with a '2' threshold a little more interesting.
I hope you move ahead with making anonymous posting a privilege of registered membership. If it deters even a few people from just spouting off because they happened by and have no more ties to Slashdot than that it's displayed on their browser at the moment, it's a good thing. There is clearly still room for abuse by registered users hiding behind momentary anonymity, but if an extra hoop has to be jumped through to gain that privilege in the first place, maybe it will help curb the "drive-by flamings."
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Michael Hall
mph.puddingbowl.org
I was just thinking the same thing! The only MM points that will be used are negative ones. If you agree with someone, it's not going to stand out to you very much -- whereas if you disagree with someone's moderation decision, *whammo*, there goes a negative point.
Wow, this is JUST the kind of cheese that might bring a few ppl I know to get accounts despite their not readin /. all that often ;`)
This whole comment - moderation thing is getting really intense .
Maybe we should think of it as a protocol ; it's a slashdot - to - real world interface.
There are comments that make a difference ( well thought out, informative, provocative even ) and there are those that are merely noise ( "I disagree!" " Screw you!" "Me too!" "First Post!")
Just as a network protocol sometimes has to drop packets ( lessening speed / efficiency ), Slashdot has to regulate itself or be swamped with noise / "corrupt packets". Even the mechanism for checking is itself checked.
Thanks to Rob for working to make Slashdot a place where people can actually LEARN and DISCUSS ISSUES that MATTER. ( Blatant suck-up! )
The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
Random thread sorting probably won't work. A whole lot of people probably like the fact that comments are more or less chronologically ordered.
What makes sense in a discussion near the end of it, may seem off topic as all hell if read earlier.
just a thought.
scottwimer
-- Beer. It's what's for breakfast.
the silent majority of slashdot readers
Silent? Hardly. Such silence would be golden.
Nuke 'em I say.
Give 'Gold' accounts to Linux, ESR, etc. which are automatically put at the top of the heap, no questions asked. Registered users who consitently score 'Intelligent' and 'Informative' can get 'Silver' status and be next on the heap.
Let everyone else duke it out. After nuking AC, of course!
**>>BELCH
Re your sig, death is an engineering problem, and so is sleep. I dare say that nanotech will address both.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
That just undid a whole bunch of moderation in this thread. Argh. I thought you could post in a thread after your moderation points were used up. Oh well...
IAAL,BIANLY
God, I don't envy your position. I'm very impressed by all the changes you've made. Great features. BTW, I saw the article in Time Digital today about Slashdot. Nice to see you get recognition like that. Keep up the great work!
-David Ziegler
-dziegler@hotmail.com
-David Ziegler
-
Yes, I have been carrying out some moderating tasks once in a while here for many months.
It is just that right now I can't find the "moderate" bar for me to moderate any of the messages.
I do not believe my "karma" is bad, since I have never done any "bad" posting. But anyway, that is besides the point.
The point at hand is if you want us to moderate, you do have to provide us the means to do our job.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Umm .. Slashdot already has your IP address, so
they can already try to get that. With your
e-mail address or your IP, either way they need
to go to your ISP to get your name and address.
Oh. Dammit, Slashdot is too hard, I'm going back to FidoNet. :-)
Thanks,
Ross
I know Rob joked about doing M3 and M4, but I think that with these most recent changes, the game of one-upsmanship(sp?) will only get worse. Here are some alternatives as I see them:
/24 IP block, identifying the IP address and UID of the violator to anybody who tries to get to Slashdot from that range, telling them, "Sorry, somebody in your subnet has broken the rules. The violator was at so-and-so IP address. Have your network administrator find out who they are, and make them stop doing what they're doing."
Part of the problem with DoS-type troll posts, like yesterday's, is that even if you are browsing the article at +2, you'll still see '1 reply beneath your threshold' even for -1 posts. This makes sense if you're reading at +3, and there's a score of 2, 1, or even 0, but think about it: very infrequently is a valid post moderated to -1.
There is so little abuse of this, why not just make it so that if somebody gets moderated down to -1, you don't see it, even as a '1 reply below your threshold'. If you cruise at -1 (which, really, only good moderators and info-gluttons really do), you'll see everything, but that way, even if I'm reading at 0, there is no way I'll see a -1 post that is devoid of merit, but I still could see an 0 Score AC post that could potentially be very worth my while.
That way, we don't have to worry about confusing "meta moderation" or any such other silliness. If moderator abuse is really such an issue, just tighten the moderator guidelines.
BTW, I'm not a big fan of +1 AC posting. I think that +1 AC, along with banning all ACs altogether, will only cause people to start creating junk accounts, posting once, and then abandoning their account, which nobody really wants.
Also, I just wanted to say, I liked someone else's idea of (only for mass violations from one single IP address) banning an entire
I like these ideas simply because they are easily enforceable without modifying the way Slashdot currently is presented to the user (Which is pretty damn well, thank you Mr. Malda!).
What do you guys think?
ACs could choose whether or not to identify themselves as the same person in a thread, which would help them and the registered users.
The other thing is that if people can now forgo their karma bonus to prevent their silly posts from getting too high a score, maybe they should be allowed to moderate their own posts down as much as they like (so that moderators don't blow their own points on doing this)
Re: the subject of anonymity and anonymous web proxies, Eric Green said:
Actually, I'd not be entirely sure that overseas redirectors are immune from court ordered log files, either. (I'm thinking specifically of what happened to the anon.penet.fi pseudonymous redirector service--more on that below). In countries with no extradition treaty with the US or Canada, it might be harder, but not impossible. And it's not just Alphabet Agencies one has to worry about, either; private corporations, or religious groups, or basically anyone who is a) pissy enough and b) big enough can potentially either force a relay to shut down or force them to give up records.
To whit--anon.penet.fi, which for several years offered a VERY useful anonymous-remailer and Usenet posting service, was compromised and forced to shut down NOT because of the NSA or other Alphabet Agencies (and there were enough folks on anon.penet.fi posting stuff that they well could have gotten in, if only there were a way around Finland's extradition laws) but because of a court order obtained by the Church of $cientology. Apparently someone on anon.penet.fi had taken to posting the Super-Sekrit Scriptures that one has to pay upwards of three hundred thousand dollars US and a long time in $cientologist "auditing sessions" to get (spoiler for the kind readers-- ALL of your problems, from the fact that one's signifigant other is Mr. Hand to one being angry at abusive parents to major depression to sciatica, are the fault of you still having Issues from having been thrown in Mt. Kilahuea around 74 million years ago by an evil alien named Xenu--yes, they charge folks US$300,000 for a rehash of good old fundy "deliverance ministry" [aka "the devil tries to tempt you all the time and any doubts you have are due to demons oppressing you so you need to pray them out"]; replace "demons" with "engrams from your past life on Teegeeack" and it's the same darn thing). The clams were NONE too happy about it, obtained a court order for anon.penet.fi to turn over its records Right Now Or Else, and thus anon.penet.fi died.)
The only reason records were kept in the first place was to trace accounts of people who misused the accounts to flood newsgroups or spam from them. Most modern anon remailers do tracking by requiring you to have PGP and use it to encrypt and decrypt your mail to the server, or they are "one-way" servers that use only one address for relaying and strip identifying info out. Some of these keep logs by IP, but not by address, again so they can filter out those abusing the service.
Most anonymous relay proxies work much the same way as the second type of anon-remailer--they may or may not keep logs of connecting IPs, and strip out identifying info (such as IP address, cookie info, etc.). Those that do keep logs of IPs do it for preventing abuse.
However, again, someone who is Just Determined Enough and Just Big Enough and Just Pissed Off Enough to find where you're posting from--such as a multinational or something like the Co$--can probably get court orders for the identifying info if the site has it. The only safe form of relay to use in such an instance would be a relay that did not log information, period; even then, if possible, it'd be much safer to daisy-chain proxies if at all possible (just as many people daisy-chain an email using multiple anonymous remailers--in fact, applications exist like Private Idaho that automate the entire process nicely for you).
Also, just in case it's not obvious, I'm just talking on NORMAL folks. All bets are off as far as Alphabet Agencies go, or if businesses and Alphabet Agencies work together (for instance, how it's been alleged ECHLEON is used for business espionage as well as the regular kind). Then again, it's also likely that Alphabet Agencies have ways of finding you if you've pissed them off enough that don't involve the Internet or tracing traffic at all; I'm not going to go more into THAT, because frankly I'd rather not end up in the category I just talked about. :)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
> If in the future, people are required to give a /. would have an email
> handle or an email address to post
> "anonymously", their identity could be
> compromised, since
> address that might be possible to use to track
> down the person.
More importantly, you always (already) give out your IP address. With the proper court orders, the ISP will tell the authorities, who you are.
(except possibly when you're browsing from a university terminal room).
Roger.
If you weren't a coward, and posted w/a user, then we would be able to go somewhere w/this... But of course, just like the rest of the fags that play quake, hide behind fake names... Come out and show yourself...
Problem here is that it isn't causing you any clutter. A couple extra lines isn't going to kill you. If you really don't like it, don't read it.
With all these new features such as moderation, bonus points for high scorers, karma, etc.. how long is it before we see a highly rated Slashdot acct for sale on eBay? :]
_ _____________
_______________________________________________
--
driph
Since you already have an account, you can always set your prefs to filter out "Slashdot.org" stories.
---
If someone posts a comment and checks the "Post Anonymously" box, does their Karma increase or decrease if their comment is moderated up or down?
---
E.g.: If I think that user #5431 (just a random number) has opinions I don't care to see ever, I can add them to be ignore list, and never have to see them ever.
Every one's freedom remains intact, regular reader's experiences are improved. Posters are encourage to be consistent in order to be heard when they do have good opinions.
... and today's pet project has
Rob, your explanation of meta-moderation was a bit odd. Maybe that's because you've been ceaselessly laboring all labor-day... What do you mean by "A [MetaModerator] gets 10 comments..." - ten chances to moderate another moderator?
And - if I post anonymously, and that post gets cranked up three or four points by the moderators, I don't get credit for those points, do I? In order to do so, the system would have to remember (albeit invisibly) who posted that comment, therefore making it "non-anonymous".
Thanks a ton for the continued improvements.
If you post below your default +1, the current moderators can pump it up again... giving you even more karma. :) Then again, if someone is consitently a good poster, why shouldnt they have that mind-numbingly awesome karma, eh?
Go look at Bruce Perens. And, as the script kiddies say, phear.
I'm sorry, I just got this image of that Karate Champ video game stuck in my head. Anonymous Coward fires off a flame, moderator marks it down, AC doubles over. Referee raises a paddle on the side of the moderator and says in a deep voice:
"Half point"
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I think you're on to something there!
Now for my next thought... I wonder if it would be a Good Idea or a Bad Idea for certain stories to have moderation points. For example, Jon Katz essays tend to generate large numbers of posts. What if everyone who had moderator access had an extra point, just to use in moderating posts attached to that particular story?
It's just a thought I had last night while trying to fall asleep. Now I'm at work, trying *not* to fall asleep.
--
QDMerge 0.21!
how to invest, a novice's guide
I like the ID idea, but not the IP address idea. It's easy enough to do an nslookup on an IP address and figure things out.
One problem, though, is that some of us who sometimes post behind firewalls all have the same IP address.
--
QDMerge 0.21!
how to invest, a novice's guide
I'm sure it'd be possible to give browsers a unique cookie just for the article. It's how logging in is handled, right?
Never messed with them myself - but it's been ages since I've updated my own web page, so...
Personally, I think that these changes (created im sure with good intentions), are bound to just complicate things. I didn't really see a problem with the old system, but I'll give the changes a shot.
----------
"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
I like your "Hey moderator" idea, but with a small twist. Also have it float up towards the top of the list (for the current moderators only), so it makes it easier for them to pick up or smack down your post. Which ever is more apropriate.
There are times I worry for Commander Taco. He must have the most demanding customers, with an annoying tendancy for wanting feature creep.
Haakon of the Shadows.
how about moderation points only that can only be
used for comments at a certain level. eg. one
time you get 5 points that can be used on +1
comments. next time 5 for +3 etc. or maybe
2 for -1 - 1, 2 for 2 - 3, 2 for 4 - 5
that would hopefully encourage a moderator to go
look for comments that currently have lower
scores.
Maybe make it not display the sig?
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
Hmm. My karma is -2 and I've hardly ever posted. It says that my last post had a score of 0. I thought everyone started with a 0 karma. Shouldn't a negative karma go back to 0 after awhile? Isn't there a way to redeem oneself?
Yeah, I feel your pain. :-) I'm at -7 -- time to make a new account!
Looks like it didn't work, since you had to be moderated down to a 0.
bp
i would agree, i spend my time scanning through the AC's in to find the on that got moderated up to a +1 while trying to screen out all those users with the 'bounus point'. maybe its time to do away with the bonus point. shouldnt all comments be judged on their content and not by who posted them? yes AC's tend to flame more, but im sure a 'AC filter' could easily be installed for those with sensitive ears.
/. will reap the benefits.
another advantage to doing away with the bonus point would be that moderators can clearly see what has been moderated and what hasnt. if you are scanning for that gem of an article that might have gotten looked over, it will be much easier to look through all the '0''s' rather than trying to distinguish if its an AC at 0 or a user at 1, but what if they turned off their bonus point?!?! what a conundrum for moderators.
i agree with a lot of other posts here, the system should be made simple yet effective. we're getting there, and a lot of good input from intelligent people who have put a lot of thought into a subject they care deeply about, i think
vive la slashdot
Sorry, but I believe the current code checks to see if "username == 'Bruce Perens'". If false, then the "Interesting," "Funny," etc. (if different than who it's currently tagged), will still be tagged on to your post, but the score will remain the same. Hope this helps. :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Don't make Rob Cry :-)
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Oh, and just one more thought: Links /. remember your posting. Then, along with all postings, and add-link button should appear, which you could hit to go back to your posting-editation, with the link pasted... OK, perheaps it could be done in some better way I can not figure out right now, but an easy linking scheme is needed (Some people just pastes the URL with the cdi-links, without an <A Href="">, so you have to copy/paste the links! Blah!).
Why not make it easy to link from one post to another. Without having to copy the URL. Just add a link from where you are writing a post, to the main page that adds a special parameter to the querry that makes
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
The basic problem with this is that AC is then no longer really anonymous. Somebody (or a federal government agency) who gets offended can show up on Rob's doorstep with a court order and pry the information out of Slashdot. The only way to really have anonymity is to keep no trace of the origin.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Does anyone else *NOT* feel quilty about -1 ing posts that say "go ahead and moderate this down you slashdot robots"???
---------------------------
"I'm not gonna say anything inspirational, I'm just gonna fucking swear a lot"
---------------------------
Kinda ironic too, seeing as how testing the function being discussed got me moderated down as offtopic, which in turn knocked down my "karma" level from a 2-level to 1-level score posting.
Ah well, such is life...
--The more you know, the less you know.
If all the people who think JonKatz doesn't belong on /. were to find his comments and mark them as Flamebait, he wouldn't be able to post anymore. (Yeah, I know it wouldn't work, but it was my attempt at being slighly humorous. Hey, I've got more Karma than Rob! :))
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
& 4$ 7H3 31337 d00dz $4Y: ph33r.
I'm sure I could do better if I had some high-ASCII characters handy. :)
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
When moderating, the comment display should be automatically (and temporarily!) modified to do several things: force -1 viewing, Ignore Karma, eliminate short/long thresholds, and randomize the display order of the top-level replies. This way, moderators see a relatively random selection of all posts, and they moderate posts relative to the normal, pre-Karma baseline (1 for accounts, 0 for ACs). Of course, this now means that non-moderators might now see posts at 7(!), but I don't think that's a life-threatening problem.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
My idea is that any level of moderation is potentially abused, but that the higher your Karma, the less likely you are to abuse it. Let's say there were 10000 logins with nonnegative Karma who were willing to moderate. Find the median Karma or those users. If it's 5, that's the minimum Karma for the next level of moderation. Find the median of those (say, 15) and make it the minimum Karma for the next level of moderation. Keep going until you have a group of under 1000 or so. When you are randomly selected as a moderator, you are given a level of moderation randomly chosen from among the levels for which you qualify. Thus, you aren't very likely to get fourth-level moderation (and subsequently run out of brain space) unless you have very high Karma and you're willing to moderate. Of course, you should also be able to specify the highest level for which you are willing to moderate.
OK, maybe it's not such a good idea.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Moderation is not the end of the world. Moderation, in this case, is just editing for fitness of a web-based community online newspaper. As another example, moderation of net newsgroups has been around for quite some time, and is needed to order to keep the signal-to-noise ratio at least high enough to gain useful information from the forum. Such is also needed with a public website such as slashDot.
I don't question the need for moderation. What I do question are the standards by which articles are rated. I have watched with some amusement as one of my posts during this period of moderation angst has gone both up and down. Moderation will only mean something to slashDot participants (posters and readers) when it is carried out consistently and rationally. And saying that it should be obvious how to rank is not obvious, at least not to me. Only by consistently applying rational, fair rating rules can slashDot achieve credibility with this system, and from there, credibility in its editorial content (after all, this is just one huge op-ed site).
And if it wasn't being paranoid to think they'd do that - then someone with great resources is already out to get you! DOH! :)
I don't really post very often, but I've always wondered how you know when you get those 3 days to moderate. Do you get email about it? Or does it show up as an option suddenly when you're reading comments?
Just curious, any replies would be appreciated.
Joseph?
I have seen plenty of anonymous posts that had to have been from people inside the industry.
I wanna Me Too this point cause its important. Some of the best stuff is from ACs and they should be able to both speak out and protect themselves.
Just another perl hacker in Bangkok
Thanks for at least considering my idea (I'm sure others posted this, so its probably not solely my idea) of requiring anon posters to login. The anonymous post checkbox goes a long way in this direction.
But I still think ACs should login and have an account. This at least will provide some accountability and remove some knee-jerk posts or other loser flamebait posts. Despite the number of "please don't remove AC posts) this does NOT in anyway remove AC posts. It just makes it harder for the type of "hit-and-run" flamebaits and trolls that are really the root of the problem.
The system could keep karma points and make them at least have to create a new account in order to continue their hit-and-run spree if they get significant negative karma.
Again, just my $0.02
My journal has hot
Rob, when are you releasing the source?
could people not send you patches if you had
a CVS tree?
just curious...
=derek
OK so we have several guys A, B C, etc... Guy A posts a comment of some value which the Moderator (Guy B) thinks should be read be the entire world. They moderate the comment and make it higher. Guys C,D,E, etc.. basically just have a nasty grudge on B or else they just plain simply hate guy B. They moderate B so that he looses his moderating abilities, and then moderate amougst their friends to raise their "status" and permanently keep their moderation abilities. The answer is SIMPLY allow EITHER Meta Moderation OR Moderation BUT don't allow every moderator to be a Meta Moderator or the above situation will occur. There is absolutely nothing to be gained if a Meta Moderator without Moderation abilities tries something, or vice versa. Why? because system abusing [Meta] Moderators will be complained about in time to fix it. ANOTHER IDEA: Meta Moderators moderate Moderators and Moderators moderate Meta Moderators. If someone can't be both a moderator and a Meta Moderator, this would work nicely. This is a "wheels within wheels" type situation which (if you've heard GIS 4 recently) Rob should understand very well :) You might not read this becasue a moderation conspiracy will make this comment -10000000 because those guys don't like me :)
http://www.jonmasters.org/
The last time I read an explanation of this that was posted by Malda, it said the number of unused moderations points is always constant. Once a moderator spends a point, a new point is given to another moderator. So in theory, no points are ever "wasted" (except from that moderator's perspective -- J. Random Moderator probably wants to save up h{is|er} points for exceptional posts). If all moderators were to spend their points fast and furiously, in theory more points would end up being used. (But then, I could be totally misunderstanding things. Perhaps in the year 2525 when Rob releases the source code again, we'll find out for sure.)
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
This is interesting -- it sounds like MetaModeration, in practice, will only give negative feedback. MetaModerators exist to keep evil moderators in line; thus mm's will likely spend their time searching for badly-moderated posts. I'd be surprised if any moderators end up with positive moderation karma. (And BTW, Rob does mean that there will be a seperate "moderation" karma, right? If MetaModeration affects regular karma, I think a lot of people will opt out of moderation.)
In a way, moderators regulate other moderators already. If a post is marked down unfairly, other moderators will come along and mark it back up. (This assumes that there are an adequate number of moderator points floating around, which IMHO is not currently the case.) This is already a form of "meta-moderation".
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
well personally I hope you get the 10 comments picked randomly all at once. These comments should also not have the name of the commentor displayed. This way you can be as unbaised as possible.
How about, we have the option to moderate with or without our name? There are probably some people, maybe even a lot of people who would be willing to stick there names on some moderation. For those that don't want to, we could give them 'weaker' moderation like +-.5 or somthing.
:)
eh, just a thought
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
That's a good idea, to hide the username. while it woudln't be imposible to figure out who actualy posted it, it would probably stop people from deciding aganst people they didn't like. (like people who don't like my spelling :P)
:)
btw, if you do moderate up what I'm replying to, moderate me up to, I need some karma
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
In a way, moderators regulate other moderators already. If a post is marked down unfairly, other moderators will come along and mark it back up.
The problem with this is that moderators have a certain number of 'points' (witch are based somewhat on karma, I believe). If a moderator has to 'unmodreate' then moderation points are wasted. Ones that could be used to mark up good posts or kill bad ones.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'm sure there would be some sort of ability to 'skip' it, or somthing. It wouldn't take that much time, and you can probably opt-out if you want. (like the current moderation system)
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I think there needs to be a distinction between soft and hard anonymity. This new system by witch users can optionally have there usernames and sigs removed from there posts is what I would call 'soft' anonymity. Other slashdot regulars don't know who you are, but anyone with access to the slashdot system does. In general this would mean Rob, and anyone he entrusts the system to (Hemos? Nate?).
:)
The thing is, however, that others can probably get to it as well. The US government could supena, or get warrant the records. Or, anyone who could hack into slashdot. While your average neighborhood 31337 $cr1pt k1ddy would probably never be able to do it, do you think the NSA couldn't? I believe that someone has slashdot before. (Not sure about this though)
If a whistle blower for some corp. wanted to post anonymously, the corporation could ether supena Andover for the information, or hire a 'real' hacker to breakin. Andover may be a great company to work for, but do you think they would stand up in court to defend an AC? Do you think that slashdot secure enough to trust your job?
My solution to this is what I call 'hard' moderation. Once you post, all information connecting you to the post is removed from the system, completely. Database fields, IP logs, everything. A hacker would have to catch you, amongst all the traffic to and from slashdot in order to find your identity, and there would be nothing for lawyers to get.
Obviously the potential for abuse could be great with a system like this. 'i hate stevens' type people would be able to post without any sort of accountability (witch is what all this work of Rob's is trying to create here). Perhaps if it became a problem (IE most of the abuse comes from hard ACs) we could make it difficult to post as such. (IE, requiring that it passes through a moderator before it appears on the page)
While the CIA stuff was interesting, that organization clearly doesn't really care about security. A post in that same thread mentioned that the most period company that the poster had ever worked with was Archer Daniels Midland. How far would ADM go to plug a leak? Who knows, but I think that while we are making all these suggestions, Hard anonymity should get thrown in there as well
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
just wondering :)
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I don't that meta-moderators can up or down the actual posts, just critique the actual moderation being done. Although I really don't know
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Then why do you even have an acount?
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I mean, it's not *that* great
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I *think*. perhaps things will be made clearer for us
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
and I had -2 this morning :( even though the only posts I could see that had been moderated had been moderated up. *sigh*
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'm posting, but I don't see this 'magic checkbox' thing.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I think this makes sense.
Anonymous cowards are scored 0 because they might be garbage - only one moderation point is needed to knock the article below the default viewing threshold. If a moderator decides that a coward's article contains something interesting it should be scored 2, as if it were a normal post moderated up by one point.
Any post actively moderated up should be scored higher than a redundant post from a logged in user.
Once the post is at 2 it should probably be treated normally.
+++++
+++++
The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
He should, otherwise his karma would be going up and down with no other explanation than "must have been some of the moderating". Perhaps show a log of meta-moderation to his moderation on his user info page, or something?
I agree that the moderation points should last longer. The previous two times I got moderation it was just in time for the weekend. I didn`t have time to spend them all on Friday, and by Monday they`d expired..
I know it's off topic, but I really like your signature "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit'?"
:-(
It would be a waste of bandwith, but it could be interesting to moderate people's sigs. The way it would work is that I would track down your user account, and some button would allow me to say that your sig if flamebate, funny, insightful, etc. I notice some good posts but with flamebate sigs -- such a system could help discourage such sigs.
I can see where negative sigs drag down your postings, while positive sigs would simply be ranked somewhere as a list of "best-o-slashdot" list.
On the other hand, I find that sigs generally detract from the whole experience
While writing programs it is all to easy to continually attempt to optimise the code far beyond any benefit gained by doing so.
According to my limited knowledge of SLASH, _but_, I believe moderation has fixed your situation.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Anonymous cowards hoping to protect themselves are very trusting or very uninformed. Your login name says nothing about who you are unless you want it to. It's your cookies, IP address, and date/time of posting that are the real indicators. Rob says he doesn't keep logs, but how can one verify this? For someone supported by advertising, the temptation for keeping logs is just to great. Further, if people start saying liable comments, the powers that be might try to force him to keep logs.
:)
To truely post anonymously, use something like http://www.anonymizer.com. If you are extremely paranoid, don't post.
The real reason I see for anonymous cowards is for people who don't want to jump through the hoop of login. Most people are lazy more than they are concerned about their privacy. I've never read any articles on NY Times because they make you register. I used slashdot for almost a year before I registered, but before that I made some informative post as AC - most of which I included my name at the bottom of the post.
-- Virtual Windows Project
What about a "[X] Today I'm dead serious" checkbox in our User Preferences to exclude Funny articles? Sure this filters out one of the best parts of /., but hey you can already filter out Linux and Microsoft articles as well.
--Coke
M2 could have an automatic component as well, additionally to the manual part. If a moderator moderated down an article that finally ended up having 'Score +5, Insightful', then the moderator definitely did something wrong and should lose some karma. (and if karma is below a treshold then lose the ability to moderate as well) Maybe this 'automatic conflict-detection system' could select the 10 M2 articles that go to the M2 moderator? "Good decisions" (eg. moderating up an article from 0 to 1 that finally ends up being +5, Insightful) should increase a moderator's karma.
--Coke
If your points never expire, you might not use them for "unimportant" threads, instead waiting for a thread you really care about.
Except that if you really care about the thread, you're more likely to post there, in which case the moderator points are bunk anyway. (New AC system notwithstanding.) The little moderation I've done has generally been in topics I wasn't that interested in, for that very reason.
--
This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along.
--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
I don't like the idea of banning IP's... I've seen it done before. It's too easy for innocent people to get locked out. If IP blocking must be done, then here are couple ideas
1) First try banning only AC's from the IP. Let people still post from the IP if they are using an account.
2) If the offender doesn't get the point and starts making multiple accounts, restrict posts form new accounts from that IP. That means that instead of getting a message saying "your IP is banned", you might get a message saying "you only have read permission for the first week".
3) As a last resort ban the IP for some period of time.
In addition, I added a much requested feature to allow posters to optionally pass on the +1 bonus when they post. Many people who have earned the bonus point occasionally wanted to say something that they didn't feel deserved the bonus.
:) ) will give a better overall result I think. After all, the current moderators can decide to pump it up again if it is worthy.
Great! I admit, since I've found out I had an addition to my postings, I've not wanted to post as much, for fear of my comments wouldn't be 'worthy' of the honor given me. Giving us the option to remove it (like I am here
Make it so that anonymous cowards don't have a way to turn off the comments from other anonymous cowards.
Under the zero-one-infinity rule, one should either allow no moderation, M1 moderation only, or Mn moderation. Perl will make this easier than C would; it is my understanding that Slashdot's backend is written in Perl. Should be lots of fun!
(Yes, I'm kidding.)
--
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom
Having looked at your 'offending' postings (the ones still marked down), the moderator needs some bad karma, now.
Moderating the moderators seems to be a good idea, as long as it does not go too far in imposing conformity. I *think* we are safe on that front at the moment.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Hey, just so you know, he actually has tried a few different systems. Before I lost internet access at work the system was completely different. I believe it has gone through at least three incarnations since then and that was back in April I think.
and you have my email so bug me there if you want to discuss it Signal11
"Alt-F4 that's for quitting" quoth Dan_Wood
My confusion is that I seem to have a karma of -2, I'm not quite sure what i've done to deserve this, and am not sure how it will relate to my future posts... It appears that the monster that is /. may infact be growing too much, getting too large... I personally don't care what my Karma is, but what does it say about me to other posters/readers.
I don't understand the original explaination either, especially the "10 comment part. Are you showing the 10 mods of the supposedly bad moderators (he can only mod 5 posts is he) or the 10 mod of the M2 moderator.
Anyway, it's an "internal affair" thing.
CY
As far as I can remember, the "old" moderation system's weakness were exposed under 2 occasions. 1) The recent W. Richard Steven accident and 2) The Alan Turnning accident.
The closest to this one is at one post a couple of NT troll yelling stupid one-liners again and again, which is nothing. I have actual experience with the Turnning story because I was moderator at the time. This things can make you really angry because you don't have enough point to shoot down the dickheads.
What I'm suggesting is the new system that designed for the "sudden explosion", how about a emergency detecting script that silently waiting for the "5 percent posts are troll" scenario and quickly react by shutting down the "0" post from the anonymous readers for a couple of hours and distribute addition mod points to current moderators.
cy
I have to wonder how this works at all...
I noticed one of my posts was flagged as flame bait (I didn't mean it that way, but I guess I can see the point). But it was also scored as '+2'?
What does that mean? Is it a bug? Did someone forget their minus sign? Or was it just really insightful flame bait?
--
Clear, Dark Skies
Well, I suppose. Why not tennis rackets instead
Will in Seattle
So, in theory, all the M2s could end up turning Rob into a -10 karmic logon?
Whoa! My head's spinning at the thought.
Will in Seattle
Or was that derision ...
Seriously, though, it should cost HALF as much to moderate down -1 as it does to moderate up +1. That way we can nuke the trolls without running out of points as fast.
AND we should have to moderate AT LEAST ONE POST +1. If we want to use up all our moderation points. This means, for Joe Blow, that he could moderate 8 Trolls down -1 and, if there were NO good posts (unlikely), couldn't use the last point, unless he moderated AT LEAST ONE post up +1 (Insightful).
Will in Seattle
Good point. By promoting the clique, we may be creating the equivalent of the Trenchcoat Gang, who will use extreme measures to take out Slashdot or Rob or whatever.
... if you aren't a slashdotter, why are you posting here?
.
um
..
Nah! Just get a life
;-)
Will in Seattle
Yeah. Stats are good. It would be nice to click on a link on user prefs to see how many are at what karma level. And maybe a Top Ten High Karma list. But no Bottom Ten Low Karma list, or they might try to get more bad karma.
Moderation of one's own posts: Maybe if it's a lousy post, we could change it by clicking an OOPS checkbox - which would turn it into an AC and assign it a -1 but not count against our karma.
Will in Seattle
Maybe Bill G will give high negative karma users stock options?
... and it's a pretty cheap way to reward one's helpers ...
Hey, it could happen
Will in Seattle
Yeah, that's a good idea. Split moderators into Good Cop Moderators (who bestow + points on comments) and Bad Cop Moderators (who thwack the moles with - points). But let people decline the honor. Some are too squeamish to thwack the moles and some are too evil to reward good posts.
But how about two Good Cops for every one Bad Cop?
Will in Seattle
If this explaination is correct, then I like it. Doing it this way would make it so that the metamoderator doesn't have to screw around with going to *find* moderated posts, and it would also tend to get more instances of moderation policed.
So, if this is true, Good Job Rob!
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I also try to moderate upward, but unless something strikes me really strongly, I try to reserve my points for elevating worthy but as-yet still low-ranked posts. Likewise I figure the average reader browses at +2 or thereabouts, so there's no real need to upgrade posts already at 2 or above.
:)
I also made a decision the first time I got points, that I would NOT spend them in downgrading posts. I'm an everyday moderator on ILink (a private discussion network; info: http://bbs.fonix.org) and while part of my job is to keep order, my *real* mission is to encourage intelligent discussion. Focusing on the negative does not accomplish that.
I do wonder how I already managed to get a Karma of 4
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That is weird. I've had my account since the Hellmouth(sp?) thing (when I discovered /.) and it took a while to get to moderate, but lately I've been doing it semi often. Maybe it is broken..
That's not a bad idea at all, I'll have to do that next time I get mod points.
I like that idea. Usually when I moderate, I just skim through the article because it's usually not something I'm interested in (otherwise I would have posted in it, and wouldn't have a chance to moderate in the story). So I would love to have a red flag to alert me to comments that people thought should be moderated up. Just don't let the person who submitted the comment do it, otherwise every post will have a red flag.
Good point. I haven't posted any comments here for a while, and as far as I can remember all the comments I made were either moderated up or not at all, except for the last one, which was moderated down. (for being redundant if I remember correct, heck its hard to not be when there are tons of posts and you dont have time to read every since thread and subthread before posting :-)
But, somehow, my karma is at -1! It almost makes me want to start over and get a new account, because once your moderation drops low enough, how are you ever going to get back up if everyone has filtered out your comments, even if they are good. Especially if you are posting a nested comment such as this one, how many people are actually read it? Marv
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
This is an excellent point. (I was waiting for the next article on moderation to bring it up, but you beat me to it.
A: The poster didn't see the other comments on the subject, because they hadn't appeared on the page yet, or they were posted while he was typing his comment.
B: The poster didn't see the other comments because he reads at a higher threshold.
C: The poster double-posted because of some browser glitch.
None of these have any bearing on the poster's ability to moderate effectively or post productive comments, which is what karma is supposed to measure.
So the solution, if it's at all possible, is to not count "Redundant" against karma. Sinking the comment is perfectly appropriate, but it shouldn't have long-term effects.
MSK
I really hope this isn't what Rob meant... as far as I'm concerned, nobody should be forced to moderate (let alone meta-moderate) a comment without having read the story, the links, and the other comments in the thread that the comment is from.
Now, you could put all this information into one page (ten times!), but it seems to me it would be much simpler to have meta-moderation work on a point system like moderation.
MSK
I'm a little concerned with this "hey, let's track everything by IP" attitude. Not only can people who are dialing into a modem pool change their IP addresses frequently (and easily), but people like me, who are behind a firewall (with several dozen other /. readers) that masquerades all outbound traffic as a single IP, could be punished unfairly.
Just a thought.
Well, I don't think I saw this posted before. Most people seem to go for a system with multiple ways of rating posts. I agree with those who point out that it would make filtering posts more difficult.
My suggestion is very simple: why not have TWO ratings per post? One of them would be the rating system that's currently on use, enforced by moderators.
The other score would be one based on the "popularity" of the post, just like some download sites rate their offerings (i.e. customize.org). Every post would present both the moderated score and the voted score, and you would be able to set up your preferences so as to display:
Moderated: 2 and up
Voted: 3 and up
or whatever combination of the two you liked.
How to vote? Well, each post could include a check-box or a drop-down box, or something to the effect. Readers could check each post as they read them, and there would be a submit button at the very end of the page.
This way, readers could vote for as many posts as they wanted, whithout having to submit their vote for every single one. Also, only those readers interested in voting would take the "trouble" to scroll to the end of the page and submit.
And finally, only registered users would be allowed to vote for posts, and of course they could only vote once.
The advantages I see to this system are:
1) You can rely on moderators to initialy rate posts.
2) The moderator system provides a somewhat more imparcial rating system, because the karma system ensures only "responsible" slashdot users get to rate the posts. (Ok, so far these are advantages of the current system).
3) The voted rating ensures you get to read comments that most people aggree they're good (or bad, it all depends on your kinks
4) The voting system would allow us lame posters, who probably will never get enough points to be moderators, to express out loud our sentiment/adhesion/rejection/whatever towards what we read. It would also (hopefully) help reduce the "I agree/way to go" types.
5)This further reinforces the "peer-review" system we all like slashdot for, and gives you one more benefit to being a registered user.
Just my two cents.
+Raider of the lost BBS
I like slashdot, for the most part, it posts timely, topical news, faster than I get it anywhere else. But I feel I must point out that Slashdot Moderation in it's present and potentially future form is akin to Censorship.
This isn't so bad when there is an article like: "Linux 2.2.x" kernel released, but rather on the more controversial subjects, such as the Kansas School Board. In that case, if a minority voice is not present, a discussion isn't taking place and the result resembles something more like "one hand clapping".
Slashdot Moderators do not moderate the same way an editorial page editor would. Most newspaper editors make sure that minority voices do indeed appear, and that's the problem. If a minority opinion is well voiced, that post has a greater chance of being ignored or marked down by a greater majority of moderators, than the same post voicing the majority opinion.
Will moderating the moderators work? Doubtful. Because you have the same problem. If someone thinks the minority opinion is worth a couple more points, a meta moderator can still punish the moderator for it. Besides who's going to moderate the Meta-Moderators?
Too bad you can't set up a firefly-like system where based upon your preferences and what you've read before, the slashdot engine automatically figures out which comments you will probably be the most interested in, and ranks the comments accordingly.
E.g. I'm not interested in spam or "first poster" articles. But I am interested in what other software developers think are important, but I don't care about which comments might interest Libertarians....etc.
--R
Easiest way to do this would be to give AC's a score of 0.5. Then any upwardly moderated AC post would appear above a non-AC unmoderated post.
Of course rob would have to change the arithmetic of the system...
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
Two suggestions: 1) To help people score down trolls, how about this: if three separate people give -1 to a comment, they don't loose any moderator points. (So an obvious troll message, which was downgraded by three separate individuals, would not count against stored-up moderator points). 2) Since AC's start with a default of Score:0 and non-AC's start with a default of Score:1, how about making users logged in posting anonymously start with Score:1? (Or is this already the case?)
-cf
Especially true for comments later in the page. I always notice that the first ten or so comments -- regardless of how brilliant they are -- usually get scored up somewhat; after about fifty comments, scores above 1 or 2 are very rare. This is bad, because it penalizes those who have something good to say but arrive late in the discussion. Any way to cure this?
-cf
You probably don't realize that this is important to many people, due to the fact that many actually read the comments... Unless, of course, you want Slashdot to go into the shitter like USENET pretty much has.
;) to something as wonderful as Slashdot.. all for the community.
Not to be an asshole, but you seem unappreciative.. Rob's been working like a madman to keep a certain degree of sanity in the comments section, and he really deserves more appreciation and praise for this. I think it's great someone gives their time (and gave their resources, at least before the andover deal
-K
--
Fully agreed. Moderation points should last a little longer but nevertheless you should not be piling them up and then spend them on one single post you like.
As for the 'I don't have any points when I see a post worth uprating' I thought that maybe we could implement a second score where everybody could 'vote' (only if logged in) With the appropriate modifications in the user prefs, you could decide whether you only rely on the traditional moderation system or take into account what other users (without moderation points) voted in the second field. (I guess this would render some major modifications necessary though.)
What do you think?
I'd consider this a valid news story. Just look at how full the message boards are and you'll see there are a lot of people using them. Since these people use the boards they ought to know how the boards work, which means Rob should post the information. The news is the obvious place for news about Slashdot, so that's where it goes.
What about the little guy like me, who never even has a chance for anyone to see his post? Almost the whole first page of comments come from the first 5 minutes of a posted story. Not everyone has time.
There has to be something we can do to allow everyone to get a fair chance to post, and be heard.
One idea i have is that moderators become moderators for one story. They get as many points as they need. But they should have to go through all of the comments before they get to go at it. This way they can succesfully weed out bad comments and heighten good comments without having to worry about which good comment is better that this good comment. (they're both good comments!) Although they'd have to be good moderators.
Another idea is pools. All +5 posts get onto the main "pool" (page). All +4 posts goto the next "pool" (page).
This way the best posts will get through and seen first.
Slashdot login
HIGH karma
Great user preferences
Starting $(Karma points * number of posts within last two weeks)
Every time the moderation system gets more complex, I cringe. However, the best social systems have checks and balances built into them, so this move to instate them is a move in the right direction, methinks. The Knave knoweth not all, but I know that anything which adds accountability to power is a Good Thing. I keep hoping that the moderation system will undergo some simplification down the line; I hope it does so without losing these newly added checks and balances.
How many times has something like the email tax hoax been posted? I read the comments because I know if an article posted is blatantly wrong, someone with direct firsthand knowledge of the subject will point it out. Without comments, Slashdot would just be a random smattering of news from various sources, reputable or non, with no way of verifying stories' authenticity.
"Don't touch the bunny!"
If you feel that you could say something that would cause to to be defamed, then do it anonymously and ignore it.
Either way however, if your take yourself so seriously that you think "you've got a right to compensation from someone" because of a slashdot post, then you should be moderated right off of the forum.
When ever you say something in a public forum you open yourself to all forms of ridicule and criticism, much of which might even be slanderous or "defamitory." By no doing so anonymously it's sort of implied that your taking that risk, and are willing to accept the consequences. Maybe somewhere rob should put that in real terms if people don't get it.
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
Why use half measures?
Surely a level of 2 for historics + mods, and 3 for mods only would be the same (ie: scale from -2 to +10 with +1 steps, instead of -2 to +5 with +0.5 steps)
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The "don't show reply beneath your threshold" thingy is what's called a hard comment limit. It's been in Slashdot for the past few months, silly boy!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I use Internet Junkbuster here. Only slashdot.org (login cookie) and nytimes.com (enough interesting stories came up I got an account there) are allowed to set cookies. Any other cookies are silently denied (although I could send messages back). It also blocks crappy ad banners for things I'll never buy :-)
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
A relatively simple idea: Moderators could get separate points for raising and lowering the score of messages. Say, 2 points for marking things down and 3 for marking up. Or the same thing, but with, as others have suggested, a dynamic number of points depending on how many comments have been posted.
David Mitchell
A threshold of one would then yield what it does now. A threshold of 1.5 would then yield comments from historical contributors and freshly moderated comments. A threshold of 2 would eliminate the historics.
Or the moderation totals could be tabulated separately and historic performers could be eliminated with just one more preferences check-box.
Thanks Rob, for the hard work. (/. poll waiting to happen? Did you work on Labor Day?)
I'm Abram Bender. You're not.
meta - moderation .
meta - meta moderation
meta - meta - meta moderation
meta - meta - meta -meta moderation
. .
Rob's Ultimate Moderation
Rob's Ultimate Moderation, the final word on moderation comes when all the meta moderating is finished. It consits of either your IP being banned and the comment deleted or your comment being posted as an article. Ideally the article/ban choice will be determined by the quality of the comment but in practice it will be a simple perl script powerd by a sudo-random number.
Oh, keep true A.C. posting. Many people post comments/read slashdot very rarley and can't be botherd to register. The banning of true A.C. posting will silence the silent majority of slashdot readers. Anyway those who want to be obnoxious will find ways (Like meta - A.C. posting). Don't censor the masses.
I like this idea. A good implementation for this would be to compute a post's score by a median-like function of its moderation scores:
Each post keeps an array tally of the number of moderation scores it has received between -1 and 5. It is initialized so that its median is the desired value (0 for cowards, 1 for others) and the tally is 1 for every internal value in the array:
coward post's scoreTally[-1..5] = {4,1,1,1,1,1,0};
other post's scoreTally[-1..5] = {2,1,1,1,1,1,0};
When someone assigns a score S to a post, that post's scoreTally[S] += 2. This moves the median exactly one spot toward the S.
If moderating up == a target score of 5 and moderating down == a target score of -1, this implementation is identical to the current system (AFAIK).
If this system is implementated, moderators should probably get extra moderation points, since moderating a post toward a lesser number works against that post getting a large score. Perhaps giving each moderator one point where he must assign a -1, one point where he must assign a 0,
etc., plus a quantity of general purpose moderator points.
-----
Using a median-like function to compute a post's score works better than other simple methods. Taking a mean would not work well because moderators will tend to enter the maximum positive or negative score to maximize their effect. Scoring incrementally would not work well because it is strongly order dependent (later scorers are more important than earlier scorers).
You should probably keep track of the connectivity of moderation to see if there are natural groupings emerging. Sometimes, a group of people can start worshiping each other while making another group nauseous. A sign of this would be consistent conflicts in moderation over certain topics/authors. I'm not saying what you should do about this sort of situation -- but it would be in the best interests of your audience to find out if it is occuring and do something about it.
Seastead this.
Up until now, I haven't had a desire to moderate. (the checkbox on my preferences page was always unchecked) However, in light of recent events and the hard work Rob's put into it, I have decided to give it a try. I feel that the moderation scheme is being refined to the point of perfection, and if I can help give back to this forum, I will.
Thanks, again, Rob.
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
Good point about voting for posts. However, I would be afraid that voting for posts would possibly cause the system to degenerate into a popularity contest ("Oh, Mr. X has posted again. I have to vote positive for him, because he is cool") as opposed to a unbiased system of moderation. Might be workable, but make it to where the readership cannot see the votes, only the user. Or something.
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
"- 15 minute of fame - one random (or semi-random) post per thread to be given score of 5. This is like random breath testing, if you know that your post could be eyeballed by a sizeable fragment of /. readers, would you be encouraged to be more careful in your average writing? Debateable ..."
/. readership would like to see posts that consist of MAE LING MAK, NAKED AND PETRIFIED because this person managed to get his post moderated up on a fluke. While I think it's a good idea (Moddo, like the Lotto, but different :-), good implementation would be difficult at best.
The only problem I can see with this will be the troll who tries to post 10e6 comments per thread in the hopes of having one moderated way up. I don't think that
"- karma seekers - the problem with mass communications is that mediocracy tends to dominate, e.g. newsgroups find inital experts are driven out by the noise. It would be nice if I could permanently donate my karma to the rare gurus that do wander past so that they could be encouraged to post more enlightening information rather than fighting through the history ranks"
Great Idea(tm). I just don't want to have to permanantly donate my karma. But the idea that you could give your karma to a rotating group is excellent. (Let's see, RMS gets my karma Monday and Tuesday, Bruce Perens gets it Thursday and Friday, and ERS gets it Saturday and Sunday. Wednesdays will be either for me or for Alan Cox.)
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
"Every post offers a way to classify it. Every registered reader is allowed to select one of the categories...People will read the articles and comments, classify some of the posts, then click submit before leaving and go on."
/.ers probably remember this one; heck, I think we all posted to it. It contained 1505 comments. To put the responsibility of moderation on everybody is, IMHO, unfair. I know I posted quite a few times and got caught up in the raging debate. It would have sucked for me to try to track down all of the comments to try to moderate them, while still participation in the discussion.
/. started. 'Course he didn't have 80,000+ users and who knows how many lurkers, either.)
Good idea. One little snag, though. This story was posted awhile back. I think all
This is part of the reason why we have moderators in the first point, and also why Rob doesn't let them post. The moderators take out the garbage and find the gems while the rest of the readership dives in headfirst. Without the moderators, again IMHO, the readership would be too busy trying to moderate and post to produce much worthwhile content. (I know, I know, Rob didn't have moderators when
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
IMHO a good point but there is an easy way to prevent this from happening. Actually, when reading the main article I somewhat took this for granted:
Person C, D and E, who dislike B, get the article with the way B moderated it and are asked how they feel about the moderation. They never have to know it was person B doing the moderation.
Say I read an amazing post and moderate it up to +5, then some bozo comes along and moderates it down to -1 flaimbait.. then someone with m2 points see's -1 on it, thinks that's a bad choice--who gets the m2 karma points?
Same deal if I moderate a post up to 4, then someone else comes by and puts it up to 5, then M2 is put upon that post, who gets the M2, me (who used 2-3 mod points) or the last person(who just did 1)?
or perhaps you spread it out evenly on how many points each moderator used..but then my first example the 'good' moderator still gets about 1/2 the bad-points.
fou aje oym asoyf ueyf jaffaq afset su!6j!/\ op 'ua>|7!>| ppn7
Of all the ideas I've read on the subject, the best (that didn't get implemented) was giving the moderators 5 + points and 5 - points. That way the moderator wouldn't have the ability to abuse the negative against someone they disagreed with and the five plus points could do some good to highlight the good comments rather than combating the negative comments.
First I give BIG props to Rob and /. in general for working on this. The meta issue is really interesting mathematically; reminds me of Godel Escher Bach..it's a recursion that seems to never terminate, or terminate at infinity (the Djinn, meta-djin...)...etc.
This is a valid point. Although a long time reader I too didn't 'join' /. until I wrote a feature that was posted here! But it wasn't only laziness on my part...
The thing is, I tend to avoid giving out personal information about myself to anyone I don't know personally, which includes web sites and grocery stores that want demographic information in return for a 'card' that gives me the special deals I used to get from anonymous coupons.
I know that I can simply lie when I fill out the forms, but I refuse to take that easy way out. Which leaves me with a choice of either telling more that I want the world to know or remaining anonymous. Either way I am uncomfortable with the results.
I certainly feel that AC posts are important and that the ability should be kept. It doesn't matter to me whether the poster is lazy, trying to spoof or attempting to hide. I think those are all valid reasons to avoid giving out your identity. What I don't agree with is having an AC post 'inherit' your karma to put the post up a point. All AC posts should be equal and any points, if any, should be awarded on the basis of content - not source.
Jack (who also would put his true name on AC posts)
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
It will be hard to judge the accuracy of a
moderation at times, as the comment to which
it pertains will be seen out of context.
Alex.
You can disable permanent *and* session cookies in WinIE5 without a lot of difficulty. I don't think that there's as much flexibility built into IE4, but you could get close to it.
It also helps if you download IE PowerTweaks for IE5, plus the MS and AltaVista powertoys for IE4+. Digital Blasphemy also has some handy hooks into the Merriam-Webster online Dictionary and Thesaurus (US Eng.). You don't need them to do this, but it's much faster and more pleasant to browse if you do.
You can spend about fifteen minutes tweaking it -- pretty simple stuff. Use Windows IE for a while sometime, as horrible as it might sound to some of you, and try to say that IE isn't better than Navigator 4.x at anything. No, it's not perfect, but better. We'll see how Mozilla does, but it's just been taking a year and a half now...
--
E2 IN2 IE?
I think we're all glad you decided against "skipping this article all together" and posted. Thank you.
/.'er is very reasonable, but many of the comments at a score of 1 or lower aren't. In order to find the gems by ACs and members who haven't yet been moderated up, I think we need more of the community searching.
Couple of suggestions. Perhaps to make meta-moderating easier, moderators should give a short (any moderator who appears to be a troll. I think with that extra information, it would be much easier for a meta-moderator to make a value judgement regarding other's moderation.
WRT moderation around here being a fickle thing, I think that the more people you have moderating, the better. I think that the average
Also, maybe posting guide lines or code of conduct would help? I see a lot of personal attacks, which is the weakest argument anyone can make, but not enough of them are moderated down to 0 or -1 where they should be. Maybe we are taking for granted common courtesy? Putting it into HTML and then augmenting the moderator mechanism to better enforce it couldn't hurt.
I agree that a high karma should be a prized status. Giving priviledges and recognition (via your stats idea) to those who take the time to post intelligent and well-written posts seems like a great idea. Any changes to moderating should favor those with higher karma, although not too much. Especially with meta-moderation to keep moderation in check, karma is a pretty good system.
Anyway, thanks again for the original post. Like Columbine, it is important not to react to the event, but to act on the underlying causes.
n8
So, if my reply to you in our little "conversation" here (in the sense that you make some comments on my post and expect some answers or elaboration on them) does not get moderated to score 2, you will never read it.
So you're telling me that you're not willing to hear me out unless a good few people give you reassurance that it is worth reading. Under those circumstances, do you expect me to spend my precious time and provide you with a well-thought reply to your - interesting - article?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to spark some silly flame or something. I'm just trying to give you a start point (perhaps, my startpoint) for some thought on how filtering (even when it is not forced to the recipient beyond their will) constitutes significant problems in the process of a communication, and consequently in the value that people place on that communication, thus critically affecting the quality of the resulting idea exchange.
And let me come now to what you said about shouting "the mayor is a turnip".. I don't need to shout "the mayor is a turnip" to prove to myself that I am free to do so. In fact, the only thing that I need is to feel that I am free to do so. The knowledge that if it becomes a necessity to shout about the mayor, I may do so.. and my fellow citizens will hear me (they may later decide they don't agree with me, but that's irrelevant) - this knowledge is what makes personal political freedom the most valuable asset of our civilization.
Suppose I decide that you are a turnip. (again, don't get me wrong.. just for the sake of the hypothetical argument) What's the point of shouting about it when you're likely not going to hear me and come back to me with the feedback that I need. (every complaint is an indirect request for feedback) And on your side.. how do you feel about the fact that some other people will decide whether or not you'll have the chance to know about and participate into a conversation on the topic of whether or not and how exactly you are a turnip...?
I hope that some good moderator here will do me tha favour to score this at +2, so you will end up reading it. If you do, I hope this gave you some things to think about.
-- say with me: i'm a monkey child
I guess we all owe Rob a hardy: "Rob, you rock!"
Thanks Rob.
You'll eat it and you'll like it.
Wow, that was an impressive reply...I'm still wondering why more people don't talk about this!
:)
Anyway, a couple more thoughts:
1. As far as interface is concerned, it might be efficient to just have a few check boxes or radio buttons on each comment to allow a user to rate all desired articles on a page at once (they'd still have to hit some other kind of button to submit all the ratings, I guess).
2. A small bit of uncertainty is good, to keep people from getting totally locked into only being aware of certain kinds of messages.
3. It would definitely be interesting to see a statistical analysis of the different "classes" of filters which end up developing due to collection of filtering data. Perhaps there could be a academic study examining the correlations between the real individuals & the "filter" specs which were created?
4. The rating could be performed on handles and/or messages (including Anonymous Cowards!). It would be interesting to see if the generated filters would divide the handles into "people who are interested in serious discussions" and "people who just want to be a pain-in-the-ass"
I'm sure this subject is ripe for a long, really detailed discussion. Aside from yourself, most of the people on the board don't seem too interested in talking about it though.
I also get the impression that CmdrTaco has invested so many resources into the moderation system that a major implementation change like this is not likely to be pursued.
I wonder if there would be a way to define a collaborative filtering system like this that could use the existing moderation infrastructure?
More rating-data allows for better and more dependable filtering.
Karma is a very nice way to give users feedback about what they are doing.
Just give EVERYBODY (even AC's) two drop-down boxes:
And maybe, just for fun, a drop-down box with a few fast statistics about the post.The rest is some (very) smart programming (and maybe a heavy server).
Goals:
Troll protect criteria: Hey, all you kick-ass programmers, give slashdot the best open source rating/karma system and some good filter-scripts, maybe a bias-vector/formula for selection (and one for ordering) of posts (f.e. x*informative + y*long, funny, controversial, new,Of course, Rob must do a lot of work first to make this happen. But yes, I think it's very worthwile for Slashdot (and all the sites that will adopt the system!).
Especially in the longer threads, virtually nothing past the first couple hundred posts seem to get moderated.
Maybe if moderators are required to look at articles with the top-level threads in random order, this could be solved...
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What about the concept of story moderation? i.e, moderating the quality of news stories, not just their comments. It seems like a lot of the bitching about whether stories suck could be eliminated. This would also give the story posters a better feel for what the community is interested in. It takes the whole "by the community, not by Rob" thing a step further.
Really? That's strange. I have been reading/posting to Slashdot since late 1997/early 1998, have a high Karma, read what I think would be an average amount, but have never moderated. Once, I had moderator status, but then Slashdot crashed, and when it came back up, my points were gone.
Hmmm....I wonder if my account is broken somehow.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
It's not necessarily that noone bothers to read that far, but that after a few screenfuls, there is frequently nothing new. It makes very little since to upwardly moderate a post that has the same content as an earlier post that has already been upwardly moderated.
Also, I know that I'm usually only skimming after the first few screenfuls; I may miss something interesting, but I only have so much time . . .
hawk
I fear that would lead to moderation by revenge. "He moderated my post down. He's obviously a jerk, lets see if I can find a message from him who deserves to be moderated down."
Or the opposite. "He moderated my post up. Obviviously a person of good taste, lets see if I can find a good message from him so I can return the favour.".
This is, of course, assuming that slashdot logs IPs for anonymous posts, but from previous talk about temporarily banning posting from abusive IPs, it seems that it does.
1. Not quite. As I understand it, the karma is simply the sum of all moderation done to your comments. If you keep posting comments that never get touched (up or down), your karma will remain constant. If you post a comment that gets bumped up a point, your karma increases by a point.
2. I agree with this, actually, though I find that I'm adding the +1 bonus to about half of the comments I post. *shrug*
3. I disagree with the concept of a waiting period *entirely*. I think rather quickly, and can easily make 2 or 3 posts inside of a half an hour that, IMO, are as well-thought-out as I can make them. A waiting period would not be likely to change my posting habits except to discourage me from posting. I'd post one comment, and in that half hour, I would probably get bored and go browse another web site entirely.
One possible scenario I see is this:
An AC posts something *legitimately* anonymously (so as to not be held accountable) that says some incriminating things about company X.
Company X has a few employees and friends that happen to have moderator abilities on Slashdot. Those moderators "pretend" the comment is a trollish comment, knock it down, and expose the AC's IP address. The AC's hostname turns out to be, say, pc152.sales.companyx.com.
Ruh roh.
If we could eliminate this possibility, though (perhaps by involving SEVERAL moderators in the decision), it just might work, though if people started realizing their IP address was being recorded in this fashion, and it *was* possible for it to be exposed, true anonymity would be lost and we'd lose some potentially valuable postings and posters.
I mentioned in an earlier thread that it would be nice to have a means for determining the validity/authenticity of a particular article.
Perhaps a scale that included items like "validated first-hand", "validated by web presence", "unsubstantiated rumor", etc.
If nothing else, a "rumor" flag would be pretty nifty.
I basically thought the whole meta-moderation thing was a bit of overkill. Really, the moderators *should* be watching out for improperly moderated comments. Sure, it sucks to have to 'waste' a moderation point fixing somebody else's unfair moderation, but that's what moderators are here for.
Meta-moderation just seems like an extra level of needless complexity. Perhaps we simply need more moderators to help keep things in check. Perhaps we just need to stress the fact that moderators are supposed to be watching out for badly moderated comments in addition to new comments that are over/underrated. (This includes the necessity that a moderator be reading *all* comments, not just those scored at 0 or 1 or better.)
2) Eliminate Anonymous Cowardice... This sounds extreme..
Agreed. Since AC is used for a few different purposes, might it make sense to somehow provide a few additional tagnames people could choose from? There are *tons* of AC posts, it'd be nice to at least attempt to differentiate a bit...
3) Combat moderator overload by making more moderators
The problem here is that average posts may get marked higher than they should.
I think we're a tad on the lean side for moderators. Allowing a few more may help. One of the point of points I think is to put some gradiation into the posts, so that the reader is able to match the number of posts to how much time he has. So even if some average posts get marked a tad higher than others, this may be okay. This way maybe instead of having 200 +1 comments, 10 +2 comments, and 1 +3 comment, we'd have 150 +1, 50 +2, and 11 +3.
1) Make the score system secondary to classification system.
I *love* this idea! Definitely gets my vote! Extending your idea... Posters could choose to give an initial label their post themselves if they wish - "off topic", "joke", etc. Moderators might change it later, but it'd help key the filters a bit (and might help posters avoid getting moderated down for something that was intentially off topic or a joke.)
2) Personalize the scoring system for each reader.
Some have said this would be too complicated, but as long as there are reasonable defaults in the user settings, I think this could be good. Although I'm not sure I would bother with setting points for particular authors, and the point subtraction for AC's is built in (or do you mean to provide an override?) But being able to add/subtract from certain types of posts is very good.
Hmm... Some people might actually want to see the flame bait and trolls preferentially over the "normal" posts... I guess this could turn Slashdot into one of those old two-sided books that had one story when read one way, but turned upside down there's another story in it. That'd be... odd. Interesting and cool, but odd... -1 Interesting, -1 Insightful, +1 troll, +1 off topic... Probably it'd just encourage bad behavior.
In addition, I added a much requested feature to allow posters to optionally pass on the +1 bonus when they post.
Be aware of a potential loophole here. If one wishes to up their karma, they could write a reply that they know will be good, and artifically de-flate it by passing on the +1 - thus being more assured of getting moderated up.
Now, I'm not sure if this is abusive, or if it is a "payment mechanism" to lure would-be abusers into writing good comments. ;-) I *think* that it is only abusive if there is a scarcity of moderator points... I think that simply increasing the pool of available moderator points would compensate for this behavior.
Yes, I'm probably stuck in game designer mode, and this may not even matter since all you get out of more points is this +1 anyway, but hey, points is points. (Btw, I think this new system could *really* make things a lot better. Good work!)
Some other posts mentioned displaying a percentage like "10 % funny, 40 % flamebait, 50 % troll" next to the actual moderation score. That way we don't get an abstract value (from -1 to 5) but a more detailed (meta)info about the moderated post. I think that's a great idea.
People are individuals. Each individual has a different definition of humor, trolling, insight, etc. What is a good comment for one is a bad one for somebody else. All comments are rated by a minority of moderators for all of the audience. We're all here, so why would we need representatives to preselect what is good or bad, why not have us choose on our own? Sure, moderation is optional (just change threshold), but recent events have shown that it's not as reliable as it should be!
How about an alternative: Every post offers a way to classify it. Every registered reader is allowed to select one of the categories. It's possible to change a selection once it was submitted, so changing votes is okay, but per account you can only vote once per posting. People will read the articles and comments, classify some of the posts, then click submit before leaving and go on. The page displays the total votes and percentages next to the posts so readers always see its classification. Since every reader can vote, even quiet lurkers are helping here (probably the majority - those who read most should be able to affect it as well as those who write there), things should be fair and balanced (if the majority is immature jerks, Slashdot is lost anyway, our whole community would be damned). Abuse wouldn't be such a problem since the reasonable classifications would outweigh the bogus ones.
There's one drawback: It's not as easy to set a threshold - it can get very complex. To solve this problem, people's preferences should let them set up point values for each category. For example: humor +1, insight +2, flamebait -3, and so on. Then some mathematical formula calculates the final score for each comment which is compared to your threshold. People who don't log in will get a default template or something. That way every registered user can customize Slashdot to their liking, valueing each category the way they want, for themselves.
The only problem is how to calculate such a per-user-rating and apply it to the pages. That's a lot of processing that should be done client-side which would only be possible by using a Java frontend or something similar. Perhaps it's not possible or usable for Slashdot at our current technology level? But it sure would be the best way! Maybe there's a way if enough people think about it...
The side effect would be to make moderators obsolete since there won't be any objective scores but only subjective presentation customized to each reader. Putting all registered users back on the same level, no elite, and Coward-ship is a self-selected status. No ego surfing (or posting / moderating) anymore.
-- Eavy (: Linux Is Not UniX
I can see how karma-as-status could be useful, but I'm worried that people might start acting to increase their karma rather than to improve discussion.
For example, moderating posts the way that they think that the meta-moderators would like, rather than the way they themselves feel.
This could lead to opinions that differ from the norm being stifled.
Some comments on slshdot annoy me, but that's the price to pay for free speech.
Karma strikes me as a good idea... but maybe we could take it further and have accounts 'die' after a preset time and get 'reborn' according to their karma.
There could be a sliding scale for such transmigrations, with high-karma posters getting cool priviliges or better html tags and first-posting trolls getting reborn as MEEPT or Bill_Gates.
Just a thought.
:-)
-- Stu
their actions when sent before meta-moderators. A Meta-moderator may disagree with a moderators actions, but that doesn't necessarily mean that action was done maliciously.
I suspect meta-moderators will be every bit as susceptible to abuse of power as regular moderators are. Who watches the watchers who are watching the watchmen?
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
I think all of these ideas are potentially good, but they all have one thing in common: they are all too complicated. Slashdot moderation should be simple and to the point. A percentage system, for example just about quadruples the complexity of the system.
:-) I totally agree that the "previous proposals" you identified are not the best solutions by a long shot.
I do agree, however, with your point #3, (you said 2 twice, everybody makes typos) it would be cool if you could customize Slashdot to a very fine-grained level. But that would be best done with some sort of scripting language (SlashScript?) or something similar that would give you total control over infrequently-selected options. Otherwise, adding 20-30 more User Preferences options is only going to make it more diffucult for newbies, or those who have trouble navigating large amounts of data all at once (such as myself). "My Slashdot" is hard enough as it is.
Good ideas, though, I just don't think we should use them.
I think that a lot of the trouble could be avoided if authors showed more discretion in what they posted. IMHO, Slashdot shouldn't be posting rumors unless there's a high degree of truth to them. Why would the Prix Arxs Electronica jury be announcing that MS was making a Linux distro? Slashdot had no business posting that. Maybe there could even be a seperate section for rumors.
don't you think it's time for something new?
--
Why not assign an ID to each on anonymous coward on a per story basis? That way it would make it clearer when someone is abusing the system and spamming a story.
Also it would make having coversations with ACs easier. Assign each AC a unique ID the first time the post to a story and kept that ID for the remainder of the story (use the ip address). It would allow people to be anonymous but identifiable.
> I used the new AC checkbox, and my comment was posted anonymously. But my moderation was retracted.
Sounds like "working as designed" to me. Whether anonymous or not, you could steer the discussion toward your own points by moderating up anything in the same vein (or if you're a real prima donna, down). Personally, I think you should be able to post to an article, say, 24 hours after you moderated on it without retracting the moderations. And with the M2's now, maybe even less of an interval would be necessary.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Personally, I like real information... to be able to get to the heart of a topic quickly enough; humor is fun, and animates the discussion... but sometimes takes too much away from the real content. Other such things (ie flamebait) should also be identified, and filtered at will...
It is fairly easy to filter stories, but comments cannot be filtered in the same manner. The problem is that the preferences become too complex, and that you have to check your options frequently to discover new features.
Personally, I think that the system works, as long as at a threshold of 1, you get a "full" discussion, at 2, you get only the "good" comments, and at 3 you get an executive summary. But the current moderation system breaks down when valuable information is nested... too much of the "good stuff" can be three levels down or so-too hard to scan, and too easily missed with a high threshold. But, if it is that deep, it is somehow "off topic..."
Rob-If you really want to improve the system, you might look at less linear ways of presenting the data. The ideas of having different scoring mechanisms is a start (type of comment, type of information, quality...). I don't have any fantastic thoughts on how to do it right now, but whenever there are 400 comments on a subject, filtering alone isn't going to do enough to control the data... no matter how much moderation is done.
Ultimately, if
In a way, moderators regulate other moderators already. If a post is marked down unfairly, other moderators will come along and mark it back up. (This assumes that there are an adequate number of moderator points floating around, which IMHO is not currently the case.) This is already a form of "meta-moderation".
/. community.
/. in a hurry.
I agree; I think there should be many more moderators with many more points. And a five point scale is hardly enough to get a good "community vote" on what is a good post or not. That's what we really need, a concensus opinion from the most informed, most interested participants of the
If I were to moderate and see a good, but not great post with a 3, I wouldn't "plus one" it, but let someone else if they felt it was worth it. But if I saw a post scored 15 of 25, I might feel it needs a little adjustment up or down. And with a larger scale to vote on it, I wouldn't feel bad about moderating a moderately good post downward, as long as I wasn't penalizing someone.
There are a lot of posts that are redundant as well, but aren't bad in a way that deserves moderating downward if they result in the poster having karma taken away because they aren't unique enough to please whoever has moderation duties at the time. That's nearly as bad a trouble as flamers when it comes to trying to read
I'd take a whole forum of comments deemed worthy by a large group of informed participants over the choices of a few "chosen elites" any time.
All things considered, I think that things are going pretty well, so far.
One thing to keep in mind... Try _NOT_ to make it bloated. I personally like the system as is, but if more functionality is to be integrated into the current moderation, I suggest it be implemented in the user preferences section, and make sure theres a simple brainless fix to view postings. I'm saying this because recently I went to themes.org where they added a ton of functionality, and it drove me nuts trying to figure out how to exploit it. It drove me to the point where I didn't even want to deal. This is just my opinnion.
The reader-style of a moderator must be different from the style of a non-moderator; a moderator should typically browse at -1, while, as a typical non-moderator, you browse at 0, or even 1. While moderator access is given by random, it would be good to le people configure two browse levels, one for when they have moderator access, and one for when they don't.
/. would perheaps become the Average Stupid /., but not more than it is today... Or, you could give those moderated high (those with high karma), moderator access (Say, one point per 10 recieved points). That /. will probably become a elitistic /., but not more elitistic than today's. So, what is the reason for randomness? But perheaps, there is no reason for it, just that you don't see any reason for non-randomness? But there certainly is a reason for non-randomness: A person, or at least I, want continuity, to be able to predict the load of information to be read today. In addition, when a moderator doesn't have any points left, but sees a very good, new, posting, he or she should be able to collect some more points (by writing some good things), to be able to moderate up that good posting later... Or, at least, that last is a good idea, though, only i sketch...
/. and other such things. An alternative would be a fixed topic that is allways there, to which people can post anything at any time, and from which old, non-moderated postings are eaten by a garbage-collector.
In addition to this idea, that is just a feature-idea *featurist*, I have a wuestion; What is the reason for the totally random grant of moderator access? Either, you could let everyone have access (Give us one point for each, let's say, 10 of written comments). That
To answer the problem; why not give people "restricted moderator access"; i.e. let them moderate down in a thread, but not higher up? That would allow good postings deep down in the tree to pop up to the top. Another solution, that is not that fair, is to double moderator points given to a posting deep down in the tree (Have a factor that increases the moderator points given deeper down, say points_recieved = points_given + 0.5 * thread_depth).
This might be a bit off-topic, but anyway, I've thought a lot of it, so I'l put it here... It would be nice to have a type of articles that are posted by average users, and not reviewed by Rob or anyone else. Of course they should be filterable! That would allow general comments on
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Before people start running enthusiastically towards the cliff dropoff, I'd suggest some thought about what are the desired objectives (besides the obvious troll of "I deserves x karma because my writing is so scintillating")
/.ers. I would like to offer a few minor variations to the ideas he has suggested:
/. readers, would you be encouraged to be more careful in your average writing? Debateable ...
Some personal observations
Fact - you get moderation points the more you post
Positive feedback loop - more people naturally post
Negative Feedback - threads get rather lengthy
Fact - more messages mean less time spent scanning through low-scores
Negative feedback loop - interesting messages can get ignored in the noise
Positive feedback - people set higher quality barriers
Fact - moderation is applied equally to all posts
Negative feedback loop - early posts are more likely to be well read/received and later ones ignored (think Fibonnacci series and integrate the total number of moderated posts)
I think we should congratulate Rob on trying to satisfy the largest common subset of
- self moderation - give people the chance to nominate their posts as funny/troll/comment etc. This will (hopefully) reduce the load on the moderators
- give other readers more control over their filter, have the initial coarse numbering scheme, then finer control like (ignore trolls 2, add +1 to person X, add it 50% people consider it funny)
- 15 minute of fame - one random (or semi-random) post per thread to be given score of 5. This is like random breath testing, if you know that your post could be eyeballed by a sizeable fragment of
- karma seekers - the problem with mass communications is that mediocracy tends to dominate, e.g. newsgroups find inital experts are driven out by the noise. It would be nice if I could permanently donate my karma to the rare gurus that do wander past so that they could be encouraged to post more enlightening information rather than fighting through the history ranks
As noted in a thread, long long ago, SlashDot is more like a cocktail party than newspaper so if Rob can find good mechanisms for finding and amplifying interesting thoughts, we should all applaud him.
Regards,
LL
1) If I just click "post anonymously" instead of logging out, and my post gets moderated down, does my karma go down? That's the whole point of posting anonymously -- to be able to say potentially contreversial things without reprimand (beyond flames).
2) To this end, could the "no score +1 bonus" allow one to decrease one's score to 0 or even -1? Sometimes posts are offtopic but still valid, and so should be posted but pre-moderated down.
3) (This is a little offtopic, but at least regards improving slashdot.) Remember how Alan Cox said that (paraphrased) "the problem with slashdot is that everyone tries to get 'First Post' instead of 'First Patch'"? Well, why not post bug tracking info on slashdot? Registered users could filter it out. All Rob would have to do would be to give story-posting privs to list maintainers. Then we'd start getting the slashdot effect on bugs.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Another philosophical point is that you are striving to create a system that maintains dynamic equilibrium. The system you are programming isn't silicon but grey matter. You are balancing all our (the readers) conflicting e-motional responses in order to balance the system just right. I find it fascinating how simple decisions (like if you were to remove Anonymous Coward) have unpredictable effects that unbalance the system.
In any case, here are my suggestions:
think we're a tad on the lean side for moderators. Allowing a few more may help. One of the point of points I think is to put some gradiation into the posts, so that the reader is able to
:))
match the number of posts to how much time he has. So even if some average posts get marked a tad higher than others, this may be okay. This way maybe instead of having 200 +1
comments, 10 +2 comments, and 1 +3 comment, we'd have 150 +1, 50 +2, and 11 +3.
I like this one the best. Under each story have five links (as opposed to the two now) with the number of comments. The first is the full monty, flame wars and everything and each one over corresponds with a certain higher score i.e...
(246 comments, 235, 200, 50)
Allowing for quickly getting the cream and ignoring the crap (until you want to swim in it
+&x
Unless the moderation system has changed since the last time I used it, you can bump the score up or down. How about being able to instead choose what you think the score should be? That way, a post doesn't accidentally get moderated from 1 up to 5 by four people who really just thought it was a 2. As a bonus, only one of the four moderators' points would be spent on the article.
I'm not sure how often this happens, but I know I've seen posts in the past that had a score of 5 that I thought were a 2 or 3 at best. I also know I've moderated something up from a 1 only to see it show up as a 4 when I reload after moderating.
Anyway, just my thoughts...
Here's what I would do:
Implement an "Anonymous Citizen" creation screen that allows you to associate a new pseudonym with a password (without giving any details about who you are). Since only you know the password, only you can post with that pseudonym. This differs from the current /. login in that even /. doesn't know the email address of an Anonymous Citizen.
Next, try to limit the ability of people to create too many pseudonyms. One way might be to log a count of pseudonyms created per IP and not allow this to grow too large. A better idea (IMO) would be to only allow a pseudonym to be created by a registered user, and limit the number of pseudonyms created per user to something like 1 per month (note that /. would not be keeping track of what pseudonym(s) were created, just a count).
Finally, eliminate normal ACs and flag pseudoym users as the new Anonymous Citizens. ACs would still be treated differently than registered users, but a good AC could have enough karma to start their posting scored as a 1 or a 2, for instance.
I think that the benefits of this system would be many. What do you think?
..wayne..
Out of curiousity, what opinions do people have about all the posts moderated up to 3/4/5 for being funny?
While I have a sense of humour, I read comments to see feedback on the article, not the top 10 things about whatever. (As good as a few of the lists have been)
I think that the issue is that users with the +1 only need to be moderated up once to break into what I call the "stellar" comment levels. (Higher than 2). Only a minority of the comments which hit 4 for "funny" are (subjective) deserving of it. Maybe my issue is that people should start their humour posts without the +1.
Also, a question. Does anyone know if moderation on anonymous posts (from logged on users) counts on their karma?
It shouldn't, IMO.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
isn't the quick & easy solution to this to give people karma when they moderate? that way, if you moderate 5 comments correctly you get, say 5 karma points. if a meta-moderator doesn't agree with your moderation he/she moderates it, and 2 points are subtracted, giving you a 3 point total gain. that way, if you do things right you'll only gain karma from the moderation, while if you don't there'll be less karma for you.
as far as I could read there's only one big karma bowl, not two.
the difference between the meta-moderation and the regular one is that this one has a specific amount of point set off to mark those comments that were moderated incorrectly. it would also be possible to increase the regular amount of moderation points, but that would be a pseudo-meta-moderation in my opinion, since you're no longer specifically going for the incorrectly moderated comments.
It's not as any of them will really restrict someone who really wants to troll or flame or whatever, but I'm at -6 and I've never posted a comment that was meant to be flamebait, nor trolling, and i'm not quite sure if any were redundant or not...
But that's another thing.. I don't know how you think its fair for people to be marked down for redundancy. Lord knows that a person can't read most posts in /., and usually I don't read more than about 10-15. If there are lotsa things further down in the comments that says the same thing(which is likely when you hit about 200-300 comments) and I don't see it, I get my post moderated down and more bad karma...
And its only very rarely that any posts ever get moderated up, really...
Maybe you should implement something to lessen bad karma over time. Ya know, if the people aren't screwing up, they're evidently doing something right and deserve to get their karma up.
The Daemon
Shouldn't ALL moderation be Meta-moderation? I sort of proposed this a while back. For instance, who moderates the Meta-moderators, or the meta-moderator-moderators? Everybody should have some Karma which they can add/subtract from a post. The Karma the moderator gains or loses when moderating is given by a weighted sum of the amount against and towards the direction he/she moderated. For instance, if 2 of 4 moderators post one way, and the others the other way, nobody gains points...they all break even. If a 5th poster then posts one way, everybody in that group will gain some fractional amount of Karma. The more people that post their way, the higher the post's rating in their direction is and the more Karma they gain. This should be the baseline. Of course, excellent posts in the minority should still get "bonuses" or "informative/insightful" ratings, which is person-specific, but totally outside the automatic Karma adjustment. We don't just want to reward people for going with the herd.
;)
Side effects of this are that if you post to a moderated down thread, you automatically incur a karma penalty...so those off the wall, or trollish threads will die sooner. Also, if AC is now considered just one person, AC's Karma will fluctuate according to the behavior of ACs...if ACs see their posts being automatically skewed downwards because other ACs are spamming, etc., they will be more inclined to get a real account, or post better posts. There must be a lower limit though (as I suspect there is), because any AC would then be able to screw over all other ACs by spamming, flaming, etc. Those are the risks of being an AC I guess...
I'm for "Auto-moderation"
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Personally, I don't think meta-moderation is necessary. Of course, in some specific cases something will be moderated negatively that shouldn't have been, but in general, I have seen these comments go up again within a few hours. Moderators here do a great job, and although the moderation is not perfect, it makes reading Slashdot all the more enjoyable.
What is the importance of karma? Why go bonkers about it and worry about being negatively moderated, etc? Karma is only an indicator of your moderation history. By having high karma, you are known to post intelligent comments on Slashdot, and it is safe to assume your comments will not be flames or trolls. That's all there is to karma, and I hope it doesn't become a mark of status on Slashdot. As a matter of fact, I would suggest no one but you can see your karma score.
Other than that, I will always read comments with scores of 0, because you never know when an AC will have something insightful to say. Also, comments at -1 are worth a glance, because it's possible that the poster posted a controversial opinion but still has something to bring to the debate. However, in general, such comments are rarely rated down, a sign that Slashdot moderators are, on the whole, insightful and helpful. -1 comments turn out generally to be posts to the effect of '1st p0st d00d!!' or '1inux sux m1rc0s0ft rulz!!!!'
So keep moderation as it is; to me, it's way ahead of anything else done on other forums, and there's no need to feel it is imperfect. Kudos to Rob and the gang.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
This could get interesting.
It's tortoises all the way down, CmdrTaco. Want some recursive moderation code?
Zax
-- We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms.
Don't feel too bad there Rob. I've been working all day (labor day) too. Thanks for all the great work.
;)
Maybe someone could describe this MetaModeration to me a bit better? I don't think I quite understand it.
And I really do like the 'Post Anonymously' checkbox - maybe I'll implement something like that for my own site
72656B636148206C72655020726568746F6E41207473754A
You could make it part of each user's and put it on their User Info page. In addition to SoAndSo has posted X comments, you could add SoAndSo has doled out X amount of Karma on X comments and show the comments the moderator has moderated.
I haven't seen this suggestion yet - would there be a way to use the concept of collaborative filtering?
:). Then the system would compare that data against what other people had liked or disliked, and then prioritize/score other articles that it thought you might like based on the correlations with other users (like the "What's Related" or Alexis service).
/., and it may end up "Balkanizing" all the comments (you'd tend to only see those Web pages which you agree with).
For instance, everyone who had a handle could pick which articles they liked or disliked (or maybe by authors
Dunno what the precise algorithm is. It might be too much additional load on
I thought it might be a slightly different approach than the pure moderation system.
Maybe I understood his explanation because I've been coding ceaselessly all Labour day, but here goes my attempt at translation:
"A [MetaModerator] gets 10 comments..."
An M2 logs in and is presented with a page which contains 10 moderated comments (and hopefully the article which they're commenting on) as well as further descriptors explaining what type of action was performed on them. The M2 then decides whether each decision was a good one, a neutral one, a silly, or even bad/spiteful/baseless/you-name-it one, and so indicates through some form provided for that purpose which is most likely right after the comment.
The program then attaches these decisions to a description of the moderators' behaviours. If you get a lot of good decision marks, your Moderation Karma increases. If you get a bunch of bad decision marks, it decreases, and you will eventually lose the ability to moderate if I understand correctly.
Hope that explained it, and Rob, I hope that's pretty much on the mark :)
Droit devant soi on ne peut pas aller bien loin...
Droit devant soi on ne peut pas aller bien loin...
Straight ahead of him, nobody can go very far... -- Le P
Well, Slashdot isn't just a news and facts site. First off, not everything posted in the articles is correct, and often, they raise more questions. The comment forum does exactly what its name implies: adds a community to /.. And often, the questions which are raised by these articles in the comments are also answered (albeit sometimes conflictingly) in that same forum. The comments forum, thus, is also a valuable place for learning more "news and facts".
Of course, adding this societal impact to /. does mean that we get all that comes along with a society. That means nonsense, back-biting, trolling, name-calling, as well as the brilliant contributions mentioned earlier, not to mention interjections of much needed (and appreciated) humour. And that means, unless we want this society to fall into anarchical chaos (which I'm sure some wouldn't mind or would even enjoy), we need to create some form of moderation.
We all who read /. regularly are members of this community, be it occasional or hard-core. Anything affecting this community (in this case, moderation) affects us. Thus, /. moderation is a valid topic for /. news.
Droit devant soi on ne peut pas aller bien loin...
Droit devant soi on ne peut pas aller bien loin...
Straight ahead of him, nobody can go very far... -- Le P
that those with good karma be the only ones allowed to m2 moderate? Or, alternately, those who have done a significant quantity of posting? I think meta moderation will be significantly more time/patience consuming to do right, and those who are willing to read and post quality stuff might be substantially more likely to take the time to do a good job with meta-moderation. Just my two cents-
luge
(who is busy picturing Rob rubbing his meta-lamp to summon the GOR, Gor Over Rob...)
IAAL,BIANLY
I missed the night the Stevens story appeared, so I missed the whole ugly stupidity surrounding the posts from the AC with an attitude.
Normally, I leave the filtering on to NOT show the moderated posts under 0, but for that article, I went back and changed it to see what all the hoopla was about.
Needless to say, I was reminded of the time I spent a few minutes in an AOL chat room where I was instantly assaulted by a legion of 14 year old kids who just learned the same words as the AC in the Stevens article.
I started thinking of what can be done about these faceless, unaccountable children and came up with a rather extreme idea. What if these AC's could be revealed by IP?
Here's the idea.
1- Rob could add the ability to log IP addresses per comment. This normally would just sit in an unused database field.
2- Inform users in the "post comments" section that extreme stupidity and trollish comments could result in a moderator choosing to reveal their IP address.
3- When someone is in Moderation Mode, they would have the ability to choose something like "Super Troll" which would reveal the IP address of the person who posted the nasty comments.
4- Using "Super Troll" would use up 2 or all 3 moderation points. This would prevent people from just revealing IP addresses all over the place.
5- Perhaps, in the case of the Stevens article, if more then one moderator tags the AC as a Super Troll in more then one comment, then all the AC's comments in the article get the IP revealed. Which would then be referred to as Mega Troll.
Super Troll and Mega Troll would make AC's accountable and trackable. Perhaps the AC in the Stevens article would have not been such an ass if he knew he could become not so anonymous?
Many web based chat rooms have turned to posting IP addresses after the chat rooms became filled with stupidity. The process seems to work ok.
Just an idea.
My studio - www.graylands.ca
Here are my thoughts on /. moderation and what some of the good/bad ideas I've seen from other people are.
/dev/null. Then when I don't have the points, I see things that deserve to be moderated up or down and I can't. I think giving the moderators points and letting them keep them but putting a roof on the number of moderation points they can have (5? 8? 10?) would allow people to moderate what they think is worthy but stop the tyranny of a bad moderator.
#1. Make moderation points last longer, or maybe not even expire. In the couple times I've had moderation points I only saw a couple things that I thought were worthy of them, and all the rest of the points ended up in
#2. Someone else mentioned that maybe instead of an averaged score it would be a good idea to divide the score of a post into each category and comments could have something like 50% flamebait, 30% troll, 20% funny. I never thought of this before, but it seems like a good idea to me. It would be more accurate, but on the other hand make filtering the bad posts more difficult.
#3. The idea of allowing users to log in and then post anonymously also sounds great to me and requiring people to do this to post anonymously sounds even better. I oppose completely eliminating anonymous posting because there ARE quality anonymous posts and it's a necessary evil. But still, if you make the anonymous users jump through hoopes to do it it'll stop the knee-jerk ACs while those who actually have something worthwhile to say but need to be anonymous for fear of their job or the like will still be able too.
#4. Dynamically generate the moderators. I'm not sure how it's done now, but as slashdot grows the number of moderators it will need grows too. If the number of moderator points given out is based on the number of comments posted in the last (insert time period here) instead of static, it would make keeping the code up to date a hell of a lot easier.
All in all, I don't mind the moderating system as it is but think the above would help improve it, in particular #1.
--
Reject
--
Reject
reject@metaphorcity dot com
Often times a story that is posted is not necessarily the whole news and the whole facts. Making the comments an integral part of Slashdot enables things that seem fishy to be judged by a wide range of people. For an example (though perhaps not the best one), look at the story about a Microsoft Linux today and how quickly it was named as a hoax by some people who did a little investigating. This was a bit too easy, because it was just an update on the already-linked news story, but you get the idea.
I'd say "just ignore the comments", but I recently got into a discussion here with people who insisted that you should just "ignore" the bad comments by setting your threshold high and I insisted that we should complain and get rid of non-registered anonymous posting. But I think the "just ignore it" idea more aptly applies here, since you can very easily ignore all of the comments if you want. Separating the good comments from the bad is a bit more difficult.
I may be waaay off on this but this karma thing may have a lot of power. Face it, people are concious of any type of status and a high karma at slashdot may well be a strong inducement for people to start being constructive. You could even egg this on by posting a page showing the top 50 like a lot of arcade games.
That said, I would also like to suggest an experiment giving moderators either unlimited points or unlimited points to some threshold of karma. The meta moderation will allow the jerks to hang themselves big time and the heros to stand out.
The attributes "Insightful", "Funny", "Interesting" and even "Flamebait" are rather subjective terms are they not. Surely what we are looking for most as readers of
So how about this for an idea - personally generated scores. Let everyone be a moderator (so long as they are logged in) for as many articles as they like (or don't like). Instead of giving absolute points to articles, give relative points generated on a per-user basis - basically, if I haven't read (or therefore moderated) an article, it will show up with a score that reflects the opinions of other people who have moderated similarly to me in the past.
That way, if somebody likes reading inflammatory drivel, articles that fit their tastes will show up with a high score for them because other people who like it will have marked those articles "up". Conversely, if somebody prefers reasonable, well balanced discussion, they are likely to find it marked as such by people with similar moderating habits to them. There are flaws with this type of system I'm sure, but it sounds plausible to me.
I'm also surprised that this has only been brought up twice. Because I don't think it's been getting enough press, and because I like explaining things, I'll go through it in more detail.
Any registered user would be able to assign a rating, on some arbitrary scale, to any comment, on the criterion "I would like to see more like this." The system would track correlations between users across comments and use these to generate a prediction of the rating of each comment by each user. The ratings are, of course, used to sort and filter messages for display.
This addresses several design concerns:
Several posters have voiced the concern that (say) some people will like "Funny" posts where others will dislike them. They have suggested several solutions, for example that there be an option in Preferences to set any given qualifier to be treated as a bonus or a penalty, or that ratings be explicitly multidimensional. The proposed system would handle such things implicitly. Also, it would give a basis for specialized rating that's fundamentally connected (if in a way that's a bit inflexible) to empirical evidence, rather than one that relies on a fixed set of somewhat arbitrarily-chosen and somewhat nonorthogonal qualifiers ("Informative", "Interesting", "Insightful").
In this design, abuse is fairly difficult. It is only possible to get "power" by granting ratings highly correlated to those of a given target audience. You can only use this power to try to knock down so many comments from that audience's sight before the engine decides your ratings are no longer correlated to those of that audience and you lose your power. Also, the system has a lot of inertia; it should take a large concerted effort to knock out any given comment.
Moderation points are restricted in the existing design because of the potential for abuse; as we see above, that's much less of a concern here. The proposed design also provides (to a certain extent) natural incentives to rate under-rated comments. A user who sees an incorrect rating for a given comment may stand directly to benefit by rating it himself, since it's possible that the engine doesn't yet know about him that he doesn't like that kind of comment. Of course, after the system has had some time to learn about the user, this explanation becomes implausible, and the alternative explanation -- that not enough people have bothered to assign a rating to this comment -- comes to the fore. In this case the user's only incentive to assign a corrected rating is his abstracted "public" self-interest.
In the existing design, certain controversial comments get large amounts of moderation points burned on them in either direction. This represents a waste of moderation effort. In the proposed design, the engine should be able to make a guess as to which user will be on which side of a controversy and show a different rating to each. This should limit the amount of wasted moderation effort.
In the current design, ratings are discrete and very granular. In the proposed design, ratings are continuous. (They also can exist over an arbitrary user-chosen range, since they're predicted to match the user's also-arbitrary ratings.)
A concern described for example here. With respect to the collaborative filter itself, every user is his own most powerful moderator; a concentration of "moderating power" within some viewpoint opposing that of the user is (to that user) merely irrelevant. (An exception would be the concerted knocking-out described above.) Of course, selection would still be possible in forces acting outside the filter, such as administration or top-level article-posting, but that's not necessarily a problem.
Some of the concerns that arise in this design:
While collaborative filtering has been an interest of mine for a while, I haven't actually looked at the literature on the subject (d'oh!), so I don't know how hard it would be to put together. It certainly wouldn't be trivial.
Again, I'm similarly clueless. I know there's linear algebra and sparse matrices involved, but that's about it. After all the prerequisite number-crunching is done, though, I can guess that the incremental cost of predicting a single rating for display shouldn't be more than about ten or a hundred numeric operations (depending on how much simplicity is chosen for the model that the number-crunching generates).
All the other proposed designs are fairly straightforward, and it's relatively easy to understand their workings and what might go wrong with them. This design is not simple. Understanding of its inner workings requires some technical knowledge, and it may have some hidden pitfalls that aren't obvious without study.
The proposed design requires gathering a significant amount of information from each user.
As described in the parent message. A related problem is that this design would cause an expansion of the discussion load on Slashdot because off-topic discussions would no longer be discouraged to the people interested in them.
A few concerns can be addressed by extending the proposal somewhat:
Clearly, the anonymous reader will need some kind of rating system. One option would be to perform principal-components analysis (that's what it's called, right?) on the entire body of ratings, and then use the strongest correlation as the one presented to the anonymous user as a representation of the interests of the Slashdot majority. Another option would be to take the top (say) five dimensions that come out of the analysis, investigate and hand-label them (#1: popular vs. unpopular; #2: funny vs. serious; etc.), and have the anonymous user assign a numeric weight to each, retained as a cookie.
Perhaps some days (or for some discussions) users will be interested in funny comments, and in other cases in serious comments. It might be a good idea to grant users some plural number of ratings categories, such that they can choose one or another (or mix among them, or even among the predefined ratings discussed above) for the purpose at hand. (Perhaps if a user hit the limit of a fixed number of categories, they could "retire" old ones they don't want anymore, to be removed from the engine's model (or whatever it is that happens to old ratings).)
It would probably be a good idea to give the engine some automatic ratings categories -- for example, some for authorship, to specify a rating of (say) 1 if a given person wrote the message in question and a no-rating if they didn't. This would give the engine more information to draw from, and in the example would permit it to associate authors with the ratings their comments get.
Some posters have stated that self-rating ("Off-topic", demoting oneself to 1, etc.) might be a helpful option. The proposed design makes self-rating impossible -- one can only give a single rating to any given comment, including one's own, and that rating may get drowned out by everything else that the system knows about the comment (its size, its writer's prior record, etc.). It's possible that this could be prevented by granting the writer the option of telling the system how much he wants the comment to be associated with him, such that his record doesn't reflect on the rating of his less-valued comments and vice versa. While this helps, it's only one-dimensional, so it doesn't help in case the author wants to flag the message 'funny' or something. Another option would be simply for the author to flag his message manually in the subject line, although then the flags might get propagated to replies' subjects and look weird. Of course, the whole thing isn't *that* much of a problem, since misrated messages are supposed to be self-correcting in the first place.
The drop-down list that currently selects the rating threshold has to give discrete options. The proposed design gives continuous-valued predictions, so it would probably need an input box or something, with maybe a list box to show what percentiles correspond to what ratings.
And finally, here are some strictly optional... um, options.
It's my sporadically-educated guess that the math that you have to use for this job inherently involves tracking of uncertainties -- if only because the sparse matrices need some way to distinguish between "rated as zero" and "unrated". It might be nice to include options in the user interface to make use of this uncertainty directly. For example, one could tell the engine to sort comments at the 95th percentile of their possible range, so as to highlight comments with a high uncertainty (i.e. not-yet-rated ones) for reading and rating; or at the 1st percentile, so as to only show the comments that the engine *knows* are good. At the very least, the engine should display its uncertainty level along with its predicted rating.
...perhaps a given user's determined preferences could be used to influence the choice of ads?
Somewhat related: I've noticed that when an AC's posting gets moderated up once, it gets a score of 1 (e.g. Score:1, Insightful), whereas a non-AC's posting gets moderated up once to a score of 2 (e.g. Score:2 Insightful).
Now, it seems to me that an "Insightful" post should have a score of at least 2 no matter what the source. So if a moderator marks an AC's post as Insightful or Informative, it should jump immediately from 0 to 2. I realize this can get complicated really quickly, for instance, if an AC posting with score 2 gets marked DOWN, does it go back to 0 or 1?
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Unfortunately, Slashdot regresses at times. It grows a square jaw and furry, burrowed eye-sockets. It loses stature and walks in a hunched over lurch. In these times, it can not articulate its thoughts and resorts to grunting and pointing. And each time, even though it manages to return to its typically evolved state, a lot of us worry just a little that it may get stuck in that regressed period one of these days.
Many of us saw Slashdot regressing again this weekend. The entire Stevens article was appalling. What should have been a brief chance for people to thank the man and talk about his achievements and contributions became a free-for-all where civility evaporated from most of the posting souls and floated into the ether.
I would never have imagined that the people who frequent Slashdot would ever have conducted themselves so astonishingly and with such a lapse of sympathy. I thought that most of us were professionals. Professionals would not walk into the office and, upon the news of a co-worker's death, start bad-mouthing them and standing on their operating system / programming language / philosophical soap-box.
That article seemed to be the Columbine of Slashdot. The call to action, if you will. Now everyone at Slashdot seems to be frantically looking for a solution to allow us to moderate ourselves when we can't conduct ourselves in a tolerable manner on an individual basis. (I can only imagine what the people at Andover.net must have been thinking of this whole drama.)
But moderation alone is not the answer. We're familiar with the cliché that "absolute power corrupts, absolutely", but whatever degree of power is given to a person can be equally corrupted to that same degree. There are always going to be people who will use their small chance to have power to get a laugh or wreak a little havoc. Even something as simple as ticking the score of a post up and down on Slashdot can't be trusted to some people.
After reading the Moderator FAQ the last time I wielded moderator privileges, I was of the understanding that the pool of posters was plucked from the group of Slashdoters who were in the median range. That is, they made the average number of posts, visited Slashdot the average number of times and did not have a history of heavily negatively-moderated posts of their own.
Which means that the people who abused that chance were the same people who had been treated fairly in the past by having their posts moderated appropriately.
So the answer Rob has devised is to moderate the moderators. This strikes me as a parallel to fixing a government problem with another government program (making government larger).
I actually agree with this idea, though. The average Slashdot reader is probably a rather agreeable sort who isn't going to misuse his or her points. So when the occasional misuse occurs, the chances that one of the other moderators will correct the misuse is pretty high.
A typical scenario that I've seen is the following, which occurred to me (I'm using myself as an example, but I have seen others have the same experience):
Out of four or five posts I made in the last 24 hours, two of them were marked as flamebait -- without cause, I feel. Yet, two of the other posts were moderated to a +2 and a +3. None of the posts were written with the intent to disrupt, inflame, anger, disturb, insult or offend anyone. All were intended to share one person's view-point and eventually, disappear into the Chasm of Old Slashdot Posts.
One of my posts seemed to be moderated strictly out of bias or maliciousness. While the post had been ticked to flamebait, it simultaneously drew a half-dozen emails from fellow Slashdotter's who agreed with what I said and thanked me for voicing it. A couple even went so far as to say that they intended to make a donation to W. Stevens' favorite charity (which was discussed in an earlier post) after reading my comments.
My comments were not particularly insightful. In fact, most of my comments are not particularly insightful or funny, even when moderated with such notation. But being moderated down as a result of a moderator's misuse of the system is aggravating and frustrating. Especially when it reduces a post that, at least, had some heart and thought put into it to the same section of Slashdot as the "I'm jizzing in my pants" and "first post" comments.
I hope that when people receive their moderator-moderating points, they do not just skip them to move on to moderating un-moderated articles, but take the time to browse the previously moderated ones, too.
I also hope that there is a way to allot karma to moderators. Those who use their moderation points wisely could, perhaps, get an extra point or two. Those who squander them and are constantly over-moderated by other moderators who come along and clean their mess should lose a couple karma points (in the very obvious and malicious instances).
Moderation seems to be a very fickle thing around here. Sometimes it lifts a hum-drum comment far above the level most would agree it belongs at and other times it kicks a well-deserving comment under the rug to be ignored.
Nobody knows the absolute and correct answer to the whole problem, but unless moderation is done wisely, fairly and reliably, a lot of people are going to be discouraged from participating.
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
I have one reason I want to keep anonymous posting around. It's the fact that we can get insiders from wherever (Microsoft, Red Hat, Apple, ect.) to post without implicating themselves. While the usual grain of salt applies with most AC's, I have seen plenty of anonymous posts that had to have been from people inside the industry. That kind of information can't be had any other way. Allowing AC's can keep us in the know.
Makes you wonder how many high and mighty people in the tech world are AC's here....
The way I understand your implementation of karma, every post I make influences my karma and goes into the number to be averaged. This means that every post I make has to be awesome. A large number of responses to other people's posts w/ questions or clarifications aren't likely to be moderated up, so when I do post my "awesome" comment, the effect of the moderation applied to it is watered down by all of the unremarkable comments I made. I think that only moderated comments should count towards karma.
I think that the opposite approach should be taken. The default post wouldn't have the bonus, with a check box to enable it. I see a lot of lame comments at a 2 or 3.
You mentioned in the moderation FAQ that you were thinking of implementing a waiting period inbetween posts. I think this is an excellent idea. Imposing a half-hour or hour waiting period between posts would be fine. It would force
This is where I want the biggest change. The current moderation system penalizes well thought out comments. The sooner you post, the more likely your chance of being moderated up. Later posts have little chance of being moderated, because most moderators have moved on to newer articles. For example, I posted to the Berkeley removes advertising clause article. I researched copyright law and posted a article related to the many posts on GPLing BSDL code. However, because I posted on Saturday, two days later, there is no chance of my comment being moderated.
And what about the commments that are a few layers into a thread? What about the comments tacked onto the end of a thread? The point is, there are a lot of comments slipping through the moderation cracks. I think that you need a radical change to the moderation system.
Here's my proposal. I realize that it is probably extremely difficult to integrate any of this into your system, but maybe some of the ideas can be adapted to fit in.
Instead of giving moderators points, give them articles. You use the current system for selecting moderators, except you do a check everytime someone accesses an article. So when Joe Schmoe tryies accessing the "Microsoft's new evil plan..." article, his chances of being a moderator are checked. If he isn't selected, he goes onto view the page normally. If he is, however, he is taken to the moderator version of the page and given, say, 5 comments to moderate. The page looks like the standard version. The article at the top, comments below, but inbetween is the listing of his articles to moderate, listed similiar to the way your articles are listed in your user page. As I mentioned, the rest of the comments are below it, but the catch is nothing (including the 5 to moderate) has a score displayed. Now, Joe's job is to read those 5 (or 3 or whatever) comments (and any of the other comments) and give those five a score. Once he does that and submits it (or he clicks the "Decline" button), he is taken to the standard version of the page and he is free to post comments.
Couple more things.
This way, one comment doesn't get moderated 50 times, and hopefully all comments get moderated at least once. If the threshold for moderator is set high enough, every comment should get moderated multiple times, with the final score being the average of those moderations, possibly weighted by the moderator's karma.
This is done in the scripting, so you don't have two moderators moderating all of the same articles.
In fact, you could not display any comments until you get 20 (or 10 or whatever), which would cut down on those annoying posters who try to get first post (like it's a race or something). Or, perhaps you have something like a moderation acceleration curve, where the chance to moderate is modified by the number of posts.
So long as comments from any thread they have responded to are banned, there is no reason they shouldn't be able to. It isn't very likely that they would remember what score articles have gotten if they had been there before, and they would most likely get newer articles that they hadn't seen yet. This way, the more traffic a discussion gets, the more moderation.
Everybody starts at 3, and the better moderators increase in the number of articles they moderate, up to their maximum. Also, perhaps people with a default bonus can only be moderated by people with an equal or greater default bonus. This prevents trolls from getting a large number of articles to mark down, or getting a chance to mark down people who may be over their head. : )
Many
These are just some ideas. I have tons more, if you're interested. I realize implementing any of these may be impractical, but maybe they'll trigger something that is. I think that encouraging more moderation is only a good thing, and by increasing the moderation threshold so that every comment gets moderated multiple times, you'll increase the usefulness of the moderation system.
Thanks,
n8
If in the future, people are required to give a handle or an email address to post "anonymously", their identity could be compromised, since /. would have an email address that might be possible to use to track down the person.
Not that I don't trust Rob and Co. with my privacy-- they have proved time and time again to be reliable. But such a record of the source of "anonymous" postings might even be exploited against their will.
Case in point: some guy X posts something "anonymously" in slashdot that offends some powerful company. Company considers the post to be difamatory, and demands slashdot give the email address of the poster. Slashdot refuses; the company sues slashdot for their posting records.
Even if the suit is unsuccessful, it wouldn't definitely be nice for /. to get harrassed.
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I mentioned this in another thread, but bottom-line "Anonymous Posting Is Golden" evidence can be found at the following URLs, posted during the NSA Backdoor discussions:
3 /0940241&cid=13 3 /0940241&cid=79
http://www.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/09/0
http://www.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/09/0
Read these to understand why AC posts are excellent to have around.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
i've noticed that sometimes you see real gems maybe three or four levels of replies deep in a conversation.. i mean, stuff that is within the context of that particular thread, but still brings up a point that everyone ought to see.
The thing where it always displays the full text of posts score:4 or higher is nice, but the problem is the moderators usually don't bother reading messages nested that deep. so they just scroll by without even knowing that message is there, and it stays at score:1.
maybe you ought to set up some kind of flagging system, something where everyone, even non-moderators can say "this derserves moderating up".. and even though it wouldn't count in points, a little red icon invisible to non-moderators would appear next to the posting's listing in the parent threads. so that the moderators would know it's worth looking at.
I dunno how well this would work-- seems pretty easy to abuse. You'd have to set it up so people couldn't flag their own posts.. might be worth thinking about though.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
*I also posted this in the slashdot poll*
... so we should think of ways to make it better.
The Steven's piece has pointed out several weaknesses in Slashdot moderation. If Slashdot moderation were ideal all you would have to do is set your threshold to 1 and you wouldn't have to worry about this. This is not an ideal system
Here are some of the previous proposals:
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1) Make it easier to score thing negative.
The current moderation system can be overloaded by spam like attacks. This is useful because you want moderation pts spent on finding good posts, not weeding out bad ones. But how do you make sure this is not abused? or that valid but possibly inflammatory comments are not marked down? Both things will happen.
2) Eliminate Anonymous Cowardice...
This sounds extreme.. even if we do something simple like requiring a mail address to post I think many good comments from knowledgeable
sources will not be made.
3) Combat moderator overload by making more moderators
The problem here is that average posts may get marked higher than they should.
Here goes what I propose as a solution.
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1) Make the score system secondary to classification system. Let moderators classify posts as "Funny", "Informative", or "Flamebait" without spending pts. This way a post might show up as 30%flamebait but 70% funny. This make fair moderation a non-issue because every moderator gets a say about every post. Add a second category to measure the quality of the post as "Must Read", "Good Read", or "Average" this might cost points to moderate or simply be an average of what all the moderators think.
2) Instead of having moderators make only 5 moderations take a look at post volume on that subject. Discussion threads with a very high number of posts need more moderation than normal. Detect this and let moderators make multiple changes cheaply in these threads.
2) Personalize the scoring system for each reader. Already in preferences there are ways to add pts to long posts or subtract from short. This would be an extension to let the reader decide what kind of posts show up. Here goes a list of possible features.
1) each feature listed here may be turned on or off in preferences
2) add/subtract pts to posts from certain authors.
3) subtract pts from all AC's
4) add/subtract from certain types of posts -i.e. humor +1 flamebait -1.
Be insightful. If you can't be insightful, be informative.
If you can't be informative, use my name