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 ;)
You post here to voice your opinion, clearly. Moderators are explicitly asked to moderate down only posts that are off topic or flamebait.
A lot of the discussion so far about moderation has been based on the assumption that the reading pleasure of slashdot frequenters is of utmost importance. But perhaps it would be a good idea to reconsider this view. What's the point of devising new rules and methods of discussion just to make it more pleasant? There are plenty of unplaisant things that can be said, that still contribute to the value and the reality of a forum.
IMHO, the moderation system is not intended for the viewing pleasure of the readers but to weed out bad posts and to help stand out the really good ones. If you want the raw and uncut stuff, read at -1. I, for myself, read at +2, just because I don't have the time to dig through hundreds of posts, just to find a few gems.
Moderators are also asked to moderate up comments that they don't agree with, but make a valid point in the discussion (but not posts that say something or other is better or worse and give no reason!).
I would not call the moderation system censorship. But I wouldn't call slashdot a free speech forum either. Whether this sounds pleasing to Rob's ears or not, any system where there is the possibility of automated filtering based on criteria set by third parties,(other than the writer and the reader) any discussion environment where voices can be volumed up or volumed down at the discretion of some judges.. any such system is NOT free.
That is correct. This system is not completely free, and IMHO it is good that way. I would just stop reading /. if had not choice but to read all comments. I prefer to read those few that other people (changing people!) deem worth reading. This approch I'd call a democratic approach, because moderators vote, rather than delete postings. IMHO, this is a improvement from usenet, where the approach is anarchistic and I have to keep my own scorefile or read all the posts and the valid points get drowned out in noise.
Regarding free speech: would you go to town hall and shout "The mayor is a turnip!" and complain about being removed? (Probably he is, but that's another story ;-)) Or would you complain when you are asked the leave the church, because you were talking loudly with your neighbor about the preferences of your ex-lover? IMHO you have every right to say whatever you want, but don't expect everyone to listen, and don't even try to force everyone to listen!
And lack of freedom is never a good sign. Perhaps Rob ought to look towards this direction for some answers as to why the quality of the discussions on slashdot is declining.
No, IMHO that's probably because it starts to become more and more crowded. IMHO, the quality didn't decrease too much, but I browse at +2, so... ;-)
Ironic isn't it..? The majority of people here support free software, yet they cannot handle the more basic concept of free speech.
Yes, they can. They just have chosen not to listen to everyone that happens to say something. Try joining a few large IRC channels and read everything. Or read news, but not just a few groups, and without kill- or scorefile! /. has grown to dimensions where it needs mechanisms to help people sort out the crap. (It doesn't force them to do that!) Usenet was completely free speech, and with the advent of AOL and the likes, it grew into a failure. So, what do you propose as a solution?
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
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
I think what Rob's describing is something like this:
1 - You come to Slashdot as usual.
2 - You're notified that you have "MetaModerator" status.
3 - You then wander around stories as usual.
4 - You see a comment that's been moderated down unfairly (or perhaps given too high a score - some people lately seem to be using two accounts, one for making comments and another with good karma for moderating up their own comments).
5 - You hit a button that indicates whether the comment was fairly or unfairly moderated.
6 - The original moderator's karma goes up or down, and yours goes up a little.
However, Rob's comment could also be taken to indicate that you're given a link to click on which then shows you a list of ten comments that have been moderated (say, within the last day), which you are then asked to score. This seems awfully inflexible and inefficient to me, but then, I'm not the one coding it in Perl...
(Feel free to jump in here, Rob, and tell me if I'm wrong.)
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.
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Reject
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Reject
reject@metaphorcity dot com
I agree that we need more total moderation points. Especially in the longer threads, virtually nothing past the first couple hundred posts seem to get moderated. Now this may just be that moderators don't bother trying with such long topics, but I find those are the ones most in need of moderation. You could bump up the number of points a moderator receives a bit, but obviously too many points may lead to abuse. I would consider increasing the number of active moderators at any given time.
Anubis
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?
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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.
---
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:
----------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------
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