Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot's Meta Moderation
The most confusing issue in M2 is context. We don't have enough of it. The comment is seen without its parent comment and its replies. Hell, we don't even see the story it was written in reply to. We don't know what the score was when the moderator moderated. All of these things are issues that I'll fiddle with resolving as I have time to tweak them around. When in doubt, feel free to leave the button alone and simply not moderate. I've found that usually its pretty easy to flag "Fair/Unfair" on half the comments, but sometimes I need more context: Then the parent link is helpful to see where the comment was coming from. When in doubt, leave it alone. I've found that only a handful of moderation is ever really unfair (maybe 2 or 3 out of my 10).
Some details on the system:
First is some limits. Certain circumstances will cause your M2 to be disregarded. This is to prevent abuses. I'm not going to release the specifics as that would defeat the purpose, but essentially, if you vote to heavily in either direction (like say if you vote that all 10 moderations were "Unfair") your M2 may be discarded.
Second is the addition of a karma bonus for meta moderating. There is a sliding scale of karma that might be "earned" for meta moderating. It won't be enough to ever earn you "the bonus point", but its something. Since you aren't eligible for M2 if you have negative karma, this can't be used to dig you out of the hole. Most of the stuff in place is designed to make abuse difficult.
Third is the finalized restrictions on M2 eligibility:
- Registered/Logged in User
- Non Negative Karma
- Hasn't M2 moderated yet today
- Account is in the older 75% of all Slashdot accounts (filters out the newbies)
These are basically the same restrictions as the normal moderator access, except that M2 is once a day, and moderation tries to pick from people who read an "Average" amount of Slashdot a day (weeding out occasional readers and obsessive overreaders)
Finally is an interesting idea that has been proposed a few times that I just wanted to throw out for discussion. As it stands, you only see the moderator controls when you have moderator points to use. What if the moderator controls were always visible, but when you submitted the form, they were only counted if you had moderator points. Oh, and you wouldn't know if you had points.
On one hand, people would burn out on moderating fairly rapidly (the randomness in the existing system means people tend to use their points) but on the other hand, only the diligent would actually be relevant. The only question is would the people obsessive enough to do it be honest moderators, or guys trying to push around their own agendas.
Side notes I've been adding a few bits to the FAQ trying to address a few of the, well, FAQs. So read the the guidelines FAQ for answers to exciting questions like "Why don't you give my points back if I post into a discussion I moderated" and "I think I should have longer than 3 days before my points expire". I've also got a few new things in the "Ideas" space that I'm currently mulling over.
Update: 09/07 04:19 by CT :Answering the old questions:
- Simply creating dummy accounts won't work.... the accounts need to be older to be eligible anyway.
- Duplicates are OK. You're M2ing an individual act of moderation- it just so happens that you got 2 moderations upon the same comment. (this is very likely in cases where comments are moderated in rapid succession which often happens on new/extremely bad comments.
- I'll probably link it from the left hand menu. Else from the top of the comments. Maybe right on the homepage "You haven't MetaModerated Today". I'll worry about that later.
This has been happening on the last several articles. What gives?
I don't like where this is headed. Right now Rob is the only meta meta moderator. But it can't be long before he gets lazy and implements a meta meta moderation system. Then meta meta meta moderation. And then meta meta meta meta moderation. Eventually there will be an infinite number of levels of moderation, and then Rob will become the GOD OF MODERATION.
I love it when they put crack in my wheaties!
Moderators who get their moderations countermanded more than x% of the time should cause them to lose their moderator status (and karma).
I seem to be a permanent moderator, so perhaps this wouldn't affect me much, but I think this is a really terrible idea. Like weave, many of us are busy, and if we're going to take the time to read all the comments on a page and moderate them, we should know they'll count for something. Otherwise, it's just a waste of time. If you're going to ask us to score comments, *please* don't throw 90% of those scores on the floor. Otherwise, a lot of good peoplw won't waste their time on it.
One other feature, which might already be implemented: (I haven't tried this anon post feature yet.) can I track posts I've made anonamously from my user page? That would be really cool.
I filled out the meta moderation thing, so now what? I don't really get the point of this, can someone please explain, in english? also, how many posts do you have to do before you can be a moderator, ive posted like 60 comments in the past 2 weeks, lots of them got moderated up, 1 got a -1 (why? i dont know!), but I have not yet been able to moderate, I have also had an account for like 6 months, so I am not new.
::cries::)
(I posted as AC because im shamed i dont understand this M2 stuff
No, I agree this is a bad idea and Rob shouldn't do it. I get 5 points about every 3 weeks or so, and there's no way I would submit moderating when there is 5% chance that I'm actually doing anything. I think I'd turn it off.
Reminds me of G.E.B....
This is why we have a function called "open in new window"
The previous comment makes excellent suggestions for ensuring that the moderators moderate only the content not the authors' identities. It'd be similar to the double-blind review process used for assessing some scientific literature in which the reviewers' identities and the authors' identities are hidden from each other as much as possible during the review process. May I suggest the previous comment deserves a higher moderation score than 1?
shut up faggot
I have read several posts which suggest that moderators not be able to see either previous moderations on a message or the current message score.
Seeing the current message score is very important to a moderator for several reasons.
The first is that one of our priorities as moderators is to look for moderation abuses. Does that message with score 5 really deserve a 5? Is that message with score -1 Flamebait really deserving of such a low score? Half of what I do as a moderator is adjust scores like this.
The other stems from the fact that we only have 5 points to play with. If I see a message which already has a score it deserves, especially if that score is 5 or -1, I don't want to waste one of my precious moderation points on it. I'd rather spend it on a message which needs the point, a newer message, perhaps.
But, also we have a open sourced constitution, that anyone can borrow from or modify to create their own monarchy, democracy, or whatever they see fit to do. Note: this constitution is currently not available quite yet, but you know, you can't have everything :)
:)
Anonymous as I was the one marking your comment as funny, now you wouldn't want that undone would you
Then if you post stupid stuff 10 times and then see the light and post brilliant stuff after that, your Karma will continue to spiral downward unless the moderators forcibly yank you back up to neutral.
We techies (myself included) seem to be forever searching for the perfect system that will automagically handle every possible problem, preferably without any operator intervention. But that way lies madness (or at least, feature bloat!).
Overall, I'm pretty well satisfied with my Slashdot experience; the problems I have with it are not bad enough to warrant radical, time-consuming, or extensive efforts to build systems to solve them.
Although it might be nice to say that Slashdot runs itself (W.C. Fields voice: "...without a human hand at the controls..."), there will always be the occasional case (such as the responses to the Stevens article) where Rob has to step in and make editorial decisions. And I, for one, am willing to trust him to make the right ones.
It's always possible that nobody who was given moderation points got to that response when they still had any...
(In case it says AC, I'm still myself...)
>but if there are
400 comments on a story, how effective can 400 moderators be?
(sorry for the bad quoting...) The gang of 400
still receive 1 moderator point (each) for each
100th comment posted (by all users) on Slashdot. In addition, you have the `random' (ie. now-and-then) moderators. So, JUST by the gang of 400, each comments can be moderated FOUR times! (And for your question on the `voting' issue, perhaps I need to be more precise: The moderators should not determine what's right (which they would do with your `Agree' choice). They should determine who has the most to say (and who trolls), regardless of their opinion.)
/* Steinar */
I agree about anonimity being good, might it make sense to have all comments anonymous at all times.
/. some days).
Don't know how that sort of thing works, but it seems to me not giving people kudos just for posting might help a little.
There's probably an exception when responding to a reply to your own original comment, and replying to responses to your own reply etc., but most of the time people really only need the comments, not the name of the commentator.
Basically, I can see problems with this, but think it may be worth it anyway.
Personally, I'm AC because I don't trust the net not to pick cookies up for spamming (there may well be 10 servers between me and
I like trolls dammit. I find them very entertianing. I find Slashdot very entertaining. More FUD, more lies, warp muh mind! One man's troll is another man's snicker. Skip all these oh so "insightful" posters. These holier than thou pious pompus asses. Christ but I hate that type of person with a vengance. I wanna go hang out with my own madcapped brethren! I donno I been reading this thread for quite a while now and haven't seen anyone with this point of view yet. Trolls online stand up and be counted! Is Slashdot taking itself oh so seriously? What the hell are you writing here the Magna Carta? I come here for interesting little tidbits of information. Stuff that often interests me. Honestly though this whole moderation scheme is getting rather boring to read about. Slashdot on Slashdot type of thing. Take a lesson from Usenet, they tried to police themselves. Then eventually threw in the towel. Or just be doomed to repeat history. Hmmm Usenet.... nah I'll just go to the binaries section like usual and download pr0n heh
AC says burn your slashdot login
I believe IQ's point was that there is a very real threat from *paid* astroturfer's who have IMHO quite obviosly tried to distort and even hijack the dialog on slashdot WRT a number of subjects, specifically promoting a pro-MS bias in a number of cases. I do not see anywhere in his post an indication that he is opposed to a diversity of views per se, but rather the deliberate skewing of content here and elsewhere being performed by paid propogandists.
/. to continue to be a worthwhile site.
I believe his point is correct. This is a pro open source site, and it is inappropriate for marketers of one of the largest and most powerful organizations opposed to the open source / free software movement to be attempting to use it for their own neferious purposes. To attempt to contain that sort of behavior, through moderation and rebuttal, is a good and positive step if we want
Moderators are for moderating content not authors' identities, right? As recently as Slashdot's article in May 1999 on the new terms of use at Deja.com, AC posts with excellent content were being moderated up to score 5 (my own AC post in that article was scored 5). Since late Spring, however, perhaps due to the unpleasant anti-AC bias widely expressed lately on Slashdot, there have been no top scored posts by ACs. As an example, this comment in this AskSlashdot article on Linux MIDI gives useful information, is highly relevant to the original poster's question and might deserve a correspondingly high score but so far it has score 0.
Signed, Permanent AC
Personally, if the moderation controls were always visible, but not always active, I wouldn't bother using them. When I do have moderator points I take a bit more time over what I read and ensure I use my points wisely. Making them available all the time would (IMHO) severly reduce their effectiveness.
Although, you might want to adjust the posting interval windows according to the lenght of a comment. Or if you try to post a sufficiently long comment very shortly before your last one, the system may "forgive you" and let you go ahead.
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I guess I will weigh in on this, though the story has already generated tons of comments.
/.'ers and "punish" the first posters and trolls (if they log in, I guess)... It's utility is more as a bonus for good users, I think.
I should admit that I've been a skeptic about moderation and AC-related stuff for a long time, but I've come around to like slashdot the way it is.
I do love the idea of allowing people to post anonymously even though they are logged in (if moderator's post anonymously through this link is their moderation of that story undone??), so that's a definite plus.
I like the term karma for slashdot and think it's a great way to reward the good
I'm not so sure about meta-moderation. Isn't this what moderators should do anyways??? If a moderator see's a comment that's over or under rated they can moderate it down or up. If they see abuse they can fix it by remoderating it (by a point or so anyways). Since there is a relatively small range of scores why worry about it? Just have enough moderators that things get done. If you have too few then there will be abuse and unmoderated comments, too many and you'll get lots of "neutral" comments (up and down by multiple moderators) and lots of over or underrated comments... So just pick out that magic middle (: I know that's harder than it seems, but I think meta-moderation is (as someone alluded to earlier) just an uphill battle against trolls who will always have more time to find ways around your system then you have to fix the system.
Anyways, my humble opinions. Keep up the amazing work Rob & co.
-Scott
Another idea would be to have a mini-moderation forum set aside for arguments over scores and such, but that would probably be overdoing it.
I can do that once every several weeks, but I can't do it all the time, knowing that in all probability I'm doing no good.
PLEASE don't do this.
Moderate me down for being redundant, but if this goes into effect, I'm turning it off.
My Freakin Blog
I vote for the "reaching enlightenment requires leading balanced life" idea.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
I do, however, agree that the meta-moderation idea is a looser. It's overly complicated to use, and based on my experience addresses a problem that does not need (an attempt at) this kind of "drastic" action.
I also think/agree that this is a case of the system taking on a life of its own. Moderation problems? Simple: moderate the moderators. Meta-moderation problems? Also simple: moderate the meta moderators. Not. This is one big step on the way to something similar to a bureaucracy, where every little action needs to be motivated on a paper form (in triplicate) and approved by a comittee that is not aware of anything but that fact that one of those forms was filled out. And probably not even that.
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Linux user since early January 1992.
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Linux user since early January 1992.
Let's not forget that there is life outside Slashdot (yes, even Slashdot readers have jobs, studies, families, and all that funcky stuff), and that we need people who have one to be an active part of the community in order to prevent a case of mental incest. Please do not expect them to spend lots of time on doing quality moderation that is not going to count. Not only because they deserve some respect for their efforts, but also because they won't do it.
Always showing the controls would quickly drive away the good, thoughtfull, moderators and deliver Slashdot into the hands of the "randomly firing loose canons". And sure, meta-moderation might help to address that, but somehow I'm getting a strong feeling that this whole meta-moderation idea is a case of a solution that's looking for a matching problem. Besides, who would still care to meta-moderate after a while?
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
So? Have 'em register! It would be 1 post per user or IP address (if not logged in) per 4 minutes (with smaller time window for good karma and larger for bad karma). Takes care of firewalled users.
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Spammed? Click here for free slack on how to fight it!
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Do we care? If you get more karma, you'll be able to get a smaller window, and be able to post more!
Further, I just happen to carefully regard what I'm planning to say long before I hit the reply link. I'm not always sure my arguments are valid before loading the posting page, so I wait and think it over before clicking that link. Many many times more often than not, I'll pass on the opportunity to post because upon further consideration, I find that I don't have anything really worthy of putting up. But when I do click the link, I'm nearly certain about what I plan to say, and can usually type it up in a minute or two, maximum, unless I'm feeling leisurely.
By that time, your four minutes (or less if your karma is high) would be up and you'll be able to post again. The time would be checked at posting. If you're in the window, you're be notified. And if I read you correctly, you'll take a minute or to actually read the article and think things through, and then write a two-minute post. Or move on.
Lastly, time-based bonuses for longer delays between clicking the post link and actually posting will just ensure that those who can't type get bonus points. Why should anyone get penalized just because they can type over 80 wpm?
It's not measured that way, it's measured between submissions of the posts (aka when you hit that Submit button). Yeah, you (or anyone else) can type 80 wpm. I can do around 30 or so. It doesn't matter since it's measured from when you hit Submit. In common useage (replying once or twice per article) it works well. If you're replying to several people in a few threads of an article, you may have a problem initally until your Karma gets high enough to decrease the wait window.
It's very similar in concept to login and how it delays.
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Spammed? Click here for free slack on how to fight it!
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
However, the posting from a slow connection wouldn't be affected (which is my main concern). Even if you're doing a quick one-liner it'll take a while to get it up to the server. Then pull another comment (takes a while)... yep, everything takes time! WHOOPS! The posting window just went by. You can post again. :)
Remember, the higher the karma, the lower the wait!
(I know, some like to imitate Katz, some just want to say "me too", and I rather have a four-liner or so that takes a minute or two...)
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Spammed? Click here for free slack on how to fight it!
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Moderation notification: The current system is good, since putting up buttons by default for moderation when the user isn't being a moderator is going to put more load on the server, possibly crashing it again (AIEEE!!!!). Not a good idea.
Logged in but Anonymous This is worth it, but can be abused. But then, it's psudo-anomymous, so it has to be handled by users with care. Flamers? Kick 'em off.
Posting restrictions: A good writer would take about five minutes to write up a good post, with nessisary proof backing up the claim. A "Me Too!" post is under one minute. So does a cheapshot flame. I propose a one message per IP/user per 4 minutes time, with adjustments baised on Karma on the time limit (less time to wait for more Karma, more time for less). Do you really care about a subject enough to write a virtual essay, which would be moderated high, or some short statement which really doesn't add more to the topic and stays scored at one or zero? I'd say the most well written ones are ones in which some time is gotten into it, and it shows with the proof used to back it up -- and it takes time to gather that proof. The system is very tuned to how people write!!!
I wonder what my Karma is looking at now... Is there a Slashbox for Karma?
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Spammed? Click here for free slack on how to fight it!
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
It's listed on your "member page" or whatever the page is called when you click on your name in the header.
Karma has been added to the user info page.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
My own guess is that they have at least two and probably around five people in their anti-Linux squad (which had around 30 people in it the last time a Microsoft insider posted the number here) whose sole job is to make the rounds of the pro-Linux sites trying to disrupt them. This would put their anti-Linux efforts onto a similar scale to their past anti-OS/2 efforts along those lines. These jobs are in the marketing department, by the way -- do you seriously doubt that MS has plenty of money to hire marketroids?
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Karma has to do with your previous articles. If you consistently get moderated up by moderators, your articles will appear with a bonus (I get a +1 score). If you consistently get moderated down, your articles start off with a score of 0.
I'm not sure I would like the moderator controls to be always visible. I would like to know when I have moderator status. Whenever the moderator controls pop up, I switch my threshold to -1 and begin to look for abuses. I also tend to read the comments a bit more carefully so I can promote the good stuff.
I think it would be frustrating to go through moderating stuff up and down and not even know if all the work you just did will have any effect. Or am I misunderstanding what CmdrTaco has proposed?
The more you know, the less you understand.
I think it was just a comment that got posted twice (or perhaps more than that), which happens a lot. Might be a real bug though.
-Doug
Witten wrote, in the midst of a very interesting and well-spoken comment:
This War on Trolls is a lot like the War on Drugs. At a certain point, the effort you must expend to eradicate that last 1% of perceived evil is so great, and so harmful to "society," that's it's really not worth it.
I have to agree with this. The coder in me is hugely impressed by the moderation system that Rob has put into place here - it's a fine, slick system, and for me, it works very well. I read with the threshold set to 1, and I really don't see much crap. If a story has hundreds of comments or I don't have time to read too many, I bump it up to 2 and see all sorts of good stuff. This is as it should be. But a campaign of extermination upon trolls? It will fail. Let me tell a story..
Back in the early 90's, before the internet took off for home usage, I used to call this multi-line chat BBS. It was cool, it was fun, a nice friendly open system. A community, if you will. Sure, there were fights, and flamings, and so on - this wasn't alt.cuddle! - but it wasn't too bad.
As it got bigger, some people got a bit concerned about standards. There were kiddies there - maybe there shouldn't be so much swearing in the chat room? So a profanity filter was implemented to kick off people who swore too much. You can guess the reaction - "fuck that!", or, more accurately "fukk that!" or even "f(_)ck that!". Not to mention newbies being slyly logged off by goading them into saying "wristwatch" or "Scunthorpe" 5 times.
As an air of conflict began to develop between some users and the sysops, attitudes got worse. Some people became so vicious in their flaming that they got their accounts deleted. So they created new accounts and reappeared. All of a sudden, this once open system now required new users to register with a name and phone number to be verified by voice before they could get full access - until that happened, they could only browse for 5 minutes or something.
Of course 5 minutes is plenty of time for a barrage of truly offensive flaming, so the next step that had to be taken was to lock unregistered accounts out of the chatroom. Making it all a bit hard for a true new user to check out the BBS and decide whether he wanted to register.
But the troll arms race continued! Sure you couldn't say anything as an unregistered user, but people were still getting the "Blah has logged on" messages. Hmm.. username.. 9 characters.. you can fit a few swear words into that! So they did! And further code had to be added to suppress the usernames of unregistered users from the list of who was online.
I gave up at about this point, but I'm sure the arms race continued.
How does this relate to Slashdot? Well I guess it doesn't really. I've kind of lost my train of thought. I think my point was that you can never lock out unwanted people, just as you can't lock them out of Usenet. All you can do is provide easy means of ignoring them (killfiles on Usenet, moderation and thresholds on Slashdot), and don't feed the trolls! Total war is undesirable because total victory will never be achieved. "The more you tighten your grip, the more trolls will slip through your fingers" ..?
How about if moderators get paid $5 per day like jurors? Also, I bet you could probably sell karma for like $5 per point. To get the bonus, people would have to give you about 125 bucks!
I don't know about anyone else, but if I score enough karma to get the automatic score 2, I'll be auctioning my account on eBay! :-)
But once this article has scrolled to the point where I'm digging for it, where is the M2 link gonna hide.
The way I read it is that if you're eligible for moderation than you can M2 once a day every day do it should be a handy link..
Of course the left bar is probally out since not everyone will be eligible, and we should probally only display it to those who are eligible
Of course I just came up with a wacked idea. How about articles that are only visible to those who are eligible for moderation? (Sounds a little stupid I know)
One problem I noticed if you click on a Parent Link and then go back to the MetaModeration page (let's say by clicking the Back button on your browser.) you get a completely new set of random posts and lose the post you were looking for more information ont. At least a warning of this would be nice.
That or make the links kick of new browsers. I know many people hate this, I usually do, but this is one case where it would be a ok solution.
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?
I'm glad to see this new moderation technique, as I've used my moderation points in the past to moderate posts that I thought were unfairly moderated to 0 or -1 back to 1 or 0 respectfully.
Now on to the bugs. I like many others am getting the SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please! All I was doing was Submitting my changes for today. I really hope that you get it all ironed out as I think this is a great forum for us geeks and I like to see it prosper.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
I think you're taking this whole bru-ha-ha the wrong way (Rob).
/. growing pains I think. I know AC posting isn't in jeopardy, but this latest issue shouldn't be used as an excuse to eliminate AC posting altogether. (though I think the "post anonymously" box isn't a great idea - it just makes it MORE convenient to do a bad thing - if one's tempted).
I don't see this as a collapse or a disaster of the previous moderation. I see it as a fine tuning. I think anyone else who's been around since before moderation came into effect will agree that even with the latest abuses, (someone was bound to exploit them eventually), the moderation system is WAY better than no moderation at all was. Just
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Disregard the comment's score and it's current "tag" (perhaps this should be removed from the page entirely). All you're being asked to evaluate is that one specific moderation.
The point is to say, "Yes, that moderator made a good judgement call by saying this comment was 'Insightful,'" not, "Yes, this comment deserves the score it was given."
It may seem like a small distinction to make, but if you base your meta-moderation on the comment and its score, and not the action of the moderator you're meta-moderating, your vote could affect the moderator's karma when all you want to do is affect the comment itself.
The comment was probably moderated multiple times, and you're being asked to more than one moderation on that comment.
Remember, you're not moderating the *comment* itself, but the moderation that was done to that comment. Try to ignore the comment's score and just answer the question. Was the rating of "insightful" (or whatever) justified?
I'm a bit confused.. Define 'Unfairly Moderated'. Not high enough? To High? Is not high enough any of the individual moderators fault? Or is this merely for things that where moderated down unfairly?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I think that 'appropriate/inappropriate' would be better and more accurate.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
So I left them blank, neither hitting the fair or unfair buttons.
When I posted the MM, I got 4 SQL errors. I think that is the number of moderations I did not judge.
No, you're supposed to only moderate the one moderation, not the total. So for example, suppose I see a post which looks like this:
You Suck (Score: 7, Flamebait)
YOU ALL SUCK.
If I were asked to metamoderate it, I would have to say that it was fair. Why? Because it most certainly IS flamebait.
Now, there are also at least four other moderators who are going to get a BAD metamoderation, because they gave positive points to such a bad article. But punishing them isn't your job, it's the job of whoever gets to metamoderate them.
-Billy
witten seems to be making the assumption that the primary purpose of moderation is to remove trolls from view. Maybe that is what some people find most important about moderation, but I personally feel moderation has been a huge win, not because of how well it does or doesn't deal with trolls, but because people who don't have time to read every reply to an article can still get the stuff a few moderators thought was worthwhile. Back when 100 comments on a story was a rarity, it wasn't such a big deal, but there are several stories every day that top 200 comments now. Without moderation, I'd never even bother reading the comments at all on those stories. And I do take my moderation points seriously when I get them, it's only fair to all the moderators that helped me wade through 400 comments about Microsoft Bob: The Next Generation or what have you.
So do I think meta moderation is overkill? Probably. But moderation as a whole has been great. And if some people see a need for meta moderation, that's fine with me too. I probably won't be using it in it's current form, but to each their own.
Well, I feel guilty as all hell. My Karma is pretty darned negative (for my liking) granted I may have been a smart ass recently, but I thought it was under the guise of AC (plus it was only a couple of times: I promise!) Anyway, are the Karma points tallied by IP address as well? I guess they should be if this is all to work proper.
In fact, the whole moderation thing in general has proven annoying to me for two reasons:
Nevertheless, the problem of Trolls and DOS attacks is serious. I am just not sure that the current moderation approach is working, and Rob seems to be getting deeper and deeper into a over-managed tarpit. But most any other solution would require identifing all posters in one way or another (to prevent DOS and to allow alternate unassigned global moderation or ranking schemes to work) - defeating the intent of AC posting...
Note that I always browse at -1. Every time I have tried to browse at 0 or +1 I always get curious about the 'N comments below your threshold' and click on the link anyway. But the moderation score provides a little extra to the flavor of Slashdot browsing.
--
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
The link on Malda's name (CmdrTaco) in the author field of the story posted is a mailto to his e-mail address, which is malda@slashdot.org
Here are a few of my views:
:/ Anyway, even browsing at a threshold of 2 is pretty pointless on many articles, as many very good posts never make it past 1, no less 3. And very, very rarely is there a 5, when there are comments that certainly deserve it.
1) Moderators need more points, or more people need to be moderators. And I need to learn how to spell
2) Letting everyone see the moderation controls, but only letting them work for those who have points would just cause problems as people try to figure out if they have points, etc...
3) If straight AC posting (not logged in) goes away, there should be a time delay implemented for the creation of new accounts. Perhaps a 2 run-of-slashd delay (24 hour minimum) to prevent trolls from creating an account, hitting the bottom end of the moderation, then creating a new one and repeating.
4) ISP-based karma? This would balance out for the large ISPs, so trolls from AOL wouldn't cause problems for the decent users, etc.. But trolls on small ISPs, where the chance of other users reading slashdot is minimal I guess, wouldn't be able to do much damage and at the same time it'd take care of dynamic IP problems. If the DNS doesn't resolve, or you don't want to deal with the overhead, IP blocks would work just as well. Unfortunatley, if there's 2 trolls and a well-behaved user on one ISP, the trolls ruin it for the well-behaved user. One possible way around this is the karma clears after a few hours, so the well-behaved user can post normally again, and the trolls have probably given up and moved somewhere else.
Blah... How'd I get -10 karma? My posts average out to unmoderated (all 1s except a 0 and a 2, which average out). Oh well...
Ditto on this. Basically it comes down to an old cliche'. Familiarity breeds contempt. If you see something too often, you just ignore it. I for one never notice that I'm a moderator until I see the controls.
Zapman
Regarding the moderation controls always there -- I think that's a bit discouraging, because I've only received moderator access on Slashdot three times, so it's rare that it'll happen, and I wouldn't want to moderate blindly if 1/100 it won't do any good. Of course, that'd most likely weed out abuses, but only leaves the obsessive (good or no?).
I think the moderation system works pretty well, but usually the ones that are already moderated high are the ones that stay there, leaving some other interesting ones at the bottom (or the comment limit goes into effect and discourages moderators from going through all the pages).
All and all, I like it. I'm certain it'll effectively filter out the moderation abuses.
P.S. Sometimes I have problems connecting to Slashdot ("Contacting Host...") which I thought the new server was going to fix. When it's up, it's quick though. Is it just me?
The "middle dot" is for neutral (unsure, don't know, whatever you want to call it), I'm positive. From reading the article again, he says marking everything either way will be "discarded", but not flagged as abuse. Since most are eligible to MM, someone could just easily check unfair for all the moderations.
As I said before, moderation is completely stupid for a site as large as this. A system more like GroupLens is necessary, where the points for articles are tailored to each individual user's historical preferences. Why is slashdot not using this?
Obviously people believe in some kind of "the good is in the middle of the distribution" wisdom. My uncle told me about the painting "The last supper" that it appropriatley represented statistics of society (1 saint and 1 criminal among 13 people) and a colleague told me the story that a former company he worked for always discarded bids at the statistical extremes without evaluation.
(..) to pick from people who read an "Average" amount of Slashdot a day (weeding out occasional readers and obsessive overreaders)
I suspected that the login procedure on Slashdot (and other sites) could be used to generate digital traces of a readers activity. Not unproblematic.
I would be really nice to be able to see who has negatively moderated my posts. My Karma has been dropping, and it would be nice to see who's doing it! If you'd rather not let us know who is negatively moderating us, at least you should let us know what posts are being moderated negatively, so we know what kinds of posts we can expect to be pooped on.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
I agree that the system should allow for differences of opinion. But if a person is consistently having their moderations reversed, then at some point it becomes indicative that they are mis-moderating.
Actually, you could well be right. The recent problems seemed caused more because there weren't enough moderators available (or willing) to deal with the situation, rather than mis-moderation. But I have had comments of mine which I felt were mis-moderated, and it would have been nice to think there was some payback.
I believe the system I proposed is at least no worse than the meta-moderation system. Whether either system can reduce the number of people complaining to CmdrTaco that their comments have been mis-moderated is an open question.
fish and pipes
Instead, I think the system should judge moderators by how often their moderations get overridden by other moderators. Specifically, a moderator should lose karma when a comment they have moderated in one direction is subsequently moderated in the opposite direction. Not a lot each time, because you don't want to allow vendettas or suppress differing opinions, but enough for the system to detect genuine abuses.
For this to work properly, there would need to be more moderation points in circulation. I don't have a problem with it if some comments get up to +10 or +15, in fact, it would help differentiate them.
Somehow I don't think CmdrTaco is gonna drop the M2 system he spent all weekend coding, but I thought it was worthwhile getting my idea out there anyway. :-)
fish and pipes
After all, if one tests for the quality of eggs, you throw out the rocks!
Hmmm....on second thoughts, I'm not sure I'd impliment this practically. A seperate "de-troll" allowance, and if so many moderators (2 or more) use a de-troll point on the article, then the article is blasted to -100?
That wouldn't be bad with the meta moderation to help nail over enthusastic moderators. Though I think someone who is good at de-trolling may not be good at moderating up/down and vice-versa. So maybe removing one privlege shouldn't automatically remove the other.
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)
I find the Unfair/Neutral/Fair options to be quite limited, not to mention misleading. As another poster has already pointed out, are we M2'ing the value the moderator awarded or the category they modified the post by?
My proposal for a better set of buttons would be: Strongly Disagree - Disagree - Disagree Somewhat - Neutral - Agree Somewhat - Agree - Strongly Agree. These can easily be assigned points from -3 to 3. If each of the decisions are being M2'ed by multiple people, then the average of the feedback would be an appropriate reflection on the moderating decision.
My proposal for differentiating between category and points would be, (sorry) to have a presentation of radio buttons for each aspect. I don't like this solution, so am *very* open to alternate solutions.
So, what do you think?
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 whole moderation project seems to become
/. reader who is logged in (no ACs) is able
/. theme as
over regulated. Sound pretty like a control freak
paradise to me.
Time to moderate the moderation?
Why not trusting in the bad taste of the masses?
Every
to moderate. The volume of moderation points
is limited per day. People whose postings were
loved (got points) get more moderation points than
the average.
Postings are not rated by absolute points but
by relative weights. Six groups: best, better,
equal, below, lowest, unrated
Weights are calculated for each
weight = points_received * number_of_postings_for_that_theme / total_points_given_for_that_theme
That's it.
Just my 0.02 moderation points
--
Yeah! With big ol flashing pink neon numbers with funky squigly line radiating out on a puke-green background!
And we could have some funky Caribean kettledrum music playing in the background! How about Copacabana like on the Super Dave show!
Then we could do the ANSI version! You'd telnet to a server somewhere and login with your /. account! Don't forget the ANSI music and annoying flashing!
Wait! We could write an open-source program who's sole purpose would be to login, get your Karma total, and show it to you in lots of funky ways! Whatever you want it to do, just write a plugin or skin or something!
Think about it! Have your Karma appear as a mysterious sighting in the middle of a hirricane! (ala Satan accoring to some tabloid several years ago) Or a massive etching on the side of a cliff face! Or a Magic-Eye picture!
Have it discovered as the answer to life, the universe, and everything!(provided you've gotten it up to 42)
Have it Discovered as a hidden message revealed when playing *insert Beatles tune of choice here* backwards!
The power! the POWER!
I can see the benefits of both systems. I know that I would read with a much more dedicated or critical eye if I had moderation points, and would thus carefully evaluate every message. This increases the quality of the comment evaluations. However, with a free-for-all moderation system, you'd have a chance of taking the true pulse of the Slashdot readership for that topic. Maybe both systems can be combined?
-Always show the moderation controls.
-As in the current system, occasionally bless users with 5 moderator points, and let them know this.
-After a user exhausts all their moderation points, instead of having no influence:
1) they have a random chance of a moderation succeeding, say a 1 out of 20 chance. Don't let them know if they succeed or not.
2) everyone has peon points that count for 1/50 of a full mod point. Don't let users see fractional points
Ballot stuffing could be handled by tying the percentage chance or weight of a vote to the number of times that user has voted that day. Or simply don't allow a user to vote more than once in a topic or for a message.
Man, this could get more complicated than the U.S.'s electoral college system (see Sept 6th entry at www.memepool.com).
Ok, I went to the M2 page, and it said I had bad Karma. How did I get bad Karma? I don't recall getting moderated down, and I barely ever post anyway. I may be confused about how you get bad karma though. Could anyone enlighten me?
Evan Vetere wrote:
My karma just got knocked down two points in the past hour; this indicates to me that I am doing a bad job moderating. News to me - I thought I'd always been sublimely fair and impartial.
That could well have been an old, moderated-up comment of yours trailing off the back end of the system, rather than any effect of meta-moderation on your moderation.
Do you have a
If you always have moderator controls, and you try to moderate, won't that stifle people from posting due to the rule you can only post if you haven't moderated? Gordon
From the info in this article it seems that marking everything unfair flags abuse? Marking everything fair won't count, will it?
After I hit the button, I got a few of the following messages:
SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please!
It did say that 10 comments were M2'd
Bleh!
I am frankly a little worried about what is going on here with moderator moderation all in an attempt to reduce the amount of trolls. I believe that bad posts will happen. Posts that are off-topic, posts that are without value, and even posts that are blatently wrong are all a part of a community like Slashdot. Let us not lose sight of what we want here--an oportunity to express ourselves.
I am a regular Slashdot reader and I followed the huge AC debate and, frankly, I like the results. I believe that most of you do too, judging by the results of a recent Slashdot poll. According to the poll almost three quarters believe that AC posting is, at the very least, barable. Great, we finally have the "AC Problem" under control.
But that is not enough, we need more. Now we attack the people wuo make the occasional offhand comment. (Agreed, some posters consistantly make off hand comments. I believe that they are a small minority.) What is worse is our method of attack--we are limiting (almost punnishing) the moderators! They are the Slashdot readers who are giving the most to try and make the experience of reading Slashdot more enjoyable for all of us! I find this to be a shame.
Please, leave well enough alone before the moderation system becomes so complex and offensive as to drive our best readers, those who have much to offer in their posts, away from Slashdot for good.
Michael C. Tiberio
miket@psu.edu
Imagination is more important than knowledge. --Albert Einstein
This sounds better, if I underatand correctly -- I assume you mean that when the system grants points to someone, it would also assign a subset of current stories in which those points may be used. Would the user be notified, perhaps with a "MODERATE" mark on the Slashdot front page for the selected stories? That would have the effect of evening moderation out among stories of varying popularity, and increase fairness. It would also help moderators with the "so many posts, so few points" dilemma. The problem with moderators thinking "I have to make these points count by finding some really good posts to upgrade." is that a lot of posts that deserve a 2 or 3 never get it.
That brings up an interesting question: I'll admit that I'm pretty interested in my "karma", and want to gain as much as possible, insofar as it's a measure of "acceptance" within the community, or some such warm fuzzy feeling. But is it good for people to become obsessed with this? If people start thinking "I want to get my posts moderated up, so I can become a moderator and gain some POWER; better yet, wait until I break the 20-barrier, so I can get automatic 2's! Then everyone will have to read what I write! <evil cackle>", it will become an ego thing (or more so), which could interfere with the "purity" of the discussions. Moderation already did some of that, I guess, but this would seem to increase it. On the other hand, maybe the effect is good, since it would encourage people to think more and flame less.
See the difference? Worrying about those posts that "deserve" to be upgraded only matters if we care about karma for its own sake, i.e., we consider it a reward, and think the poster should be rewarded for writing something good, even if it's not a story that many people are interested in, or if the story is already a few hours old and nobody's reading it anymore [1]. But if the purpose of moderation is only to provide an aid to readers who want to find the good posts, then it's not such a problem, since in those cases fewer people need the aid anyway.
[1] Seriously, it's amazing how fast the stories go by these days. I guess it's an inevitable result of Slashdot becoming so big, but it makes it a lot harder to participate in the discussions. If all the stories have over 300 comments by the time you get to them, all you can really do is read. If you take the time to write a really thoughtful comment, chances are hardly anyone will still be reading the story by the time you post it. This is often my problem. I'm not sure how your idea would help with this problem, but I think it's an important one.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
For one thing, the "controls for everyone" thing would work a lot better if the points don't expire. Then, you wouldn't have to worry about your points being "wasted" if you don't moderate every day. Also, a problem is what if you moderate two comments on a single page when you only have one point? it would only be counted for (I assume) the first one, but maybe you thought the second was more important to moderate, if you had to choose, and the point would be wasted on the one that you didn't want to moderate as much. When you know exactly how many points you have, you can make more intelligent decisions as to how to make them count.
Then again, I guess the point was to encourage moderators to detach their egos from their moderation, and having no idea whether or not it would actually be counted would sort of have to have that effect.
Dunno: it's interesting, but I don't really like the idea that much. I have to agree that it's better to know when you have points. As Jburkholder said, you should think in a different mode, i.e., evaluating the quality of each post rather than just reading them for content. Ryandav alluded to the same point regarding browsing at -1, though I always do that anyway. Another reason it's really important to know when you're moderating is that you have to know to refrain from posting on a discussion so you can moderate it. It would be a shame to refrain from posting just so you could submit some votes, only to have them ignored.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
I rarely post, as There is nothing new to add most of the time. I have had one time where a post was moderated down, but I think that this case was in fact a case of Moderator abuse, which this problem is supposed to help fix. I guess I can't be part of the fix.
How does one fix karma??????
I really hate to say this, as I hate sounding negative, but I don't see why it's better to have the moderator controls always visible. I, for example, browse most of the time at +2 so I can just read the first 30 good comments or so. If I'm bored later or really interested in a topic i go to -1. If I get moderator access, I need to browse at -1 and see everything. While I enjoy moderating from time to time, I don't want to have to always browse at -1 _just in case I might be mod_... It seems to defeat the purpose: to allow those with limited time or attention span to see a story and read just a few good comments on it. You also begin to make it so that only a few people will participate in the moderating.
Other than the "bonus point" system for certain people, I really think the system here has been working out great. I hope "creeping featurism" doesn't take over it all.
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
If you don't like threads, you could always switch to Flat-mode. I'm not sure if you find it easier to read, but I really don't care which comment is a reply to which -- you usually see it out of the context, and I can reply to it just as easily.
BTW, I disagree with your `new' choices. `Interesting link' is already covered under `Informative', `Enlightened opinion' is covered under `Insightful', `Humor' is covered under `Funny', and `Agreement' should never make it into Slashdot at all. The moderation system shouldn't be a voting system, run by the moderators.
As for more moderator points, I think the system is already churning out enough points just for the `original' gang of 400 to moderate all comments a few times or so. I think it's rather a problem with people not using their points.
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
I'd like to see each post's moderation history, both when reading as a moderator and after burning up all my points, so as to see what all the moderators had to say about a post, not just the most recent one.
What I'd really like is to "get moderator" when I'm not busy with relatives, hurricanes, hardware problems, et cetera, and when the stories are about stuff I'm not interested in enough to want to post about, but know enough about to moderate intelligently. Oh well.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Let's see if I have this correct:
At any given time, some random member of the audience who is in good standing (not a newbie or AC) might get to moderate a small number of comments.
To check that, at any given time, some less random member of the audience might get to moderate the choice of moderators, but suggesting that their moderations were unfair or fair.
Lastly, you have the Web Masters, who can presumably remove a comment if they notice it, assuming they think it's warranted. They can also remove anyone's ability to moderate, or meta-moderate.
The moderators are congress.
The Meta-moderators are the Supreme court.
The Web Masters are the Royalty. I'd say President, but they weren't elected, they got there by deed.
So we have a democratic monarchy, with a currently thoughtful and benevolent King and his court.
Alright, I like it.
If you could figure out a way to have two houses, and have that be useful, it might be a good idea. They would be the folks that have a large number of 4's and 5's assigned to their comments. Perhaps these should be the ones who get extra moderation points, to be used on comments in threads they have not contributed to.
Pin the spig.
You're right in that moderation is an attempt to rid this site of trolls, wherever they may be from. But my point is that, in the long run, it's ultimately a useless fight. CmdrTaco will keep coding in more moderation features and more special cases and more rules and more regulations. And it might even cause a few trolls to be moderated down. But at what cost? What about the rest of the discussion? What about the relevant posts that get mismoderated? Or the dissenting opinions that are slapped down because the vast majority doesn't agree with them? I'm just worried that in our zeal to rid this site of all trolls and flamers, we're ignoring the fact that we may be damaging any chance of rational discussion, which requires dissenting opinions in order to function!
This War on Trolls is a lot like the War on Drugs. At a certain point, the effort you must expend to eradicate that last 1% of perceived evil is so great, and so harmful to "society," that's it's really not worth it.
Having said that, I can't say that I blame Rob. As slashdot's popularity grew, the small community-based discussions turned into a frothing troll-ridden free-for-all. And he saw moderation as his only choice in trying to combat the trolls. However, in the long run, moderation is a losing proposition. Try to squelch the trolls, and they'll be that much more determined to screw with the system. Sure, the casual trolls might give up, but the small percentage of sick people who get off by insulting dead people they don't know.. will be back with a vengeance. And no reasonable amount of moderation will silence them. That is unless you're willing to silence many good, reasonable posts in the process. And that seems to be exactly what you're doing.
Sure, with all these new moderation features, most of the trolls get moderated down, but the price is that many non-troll polls are mismoderated, both up and down. And if the same general group of people are doing moderation and meta moderation and meta meta moderation, whether or not they're trolls, you're going to get the same exact sort of abuses and mismoderations and poor judgement across the board.
So what I'd like people to think about is this: At what point is the cure worse than the disease? When you keep piling up the rules and regulations and meta moderation and percentages and sliding scales and point ratings, what are you really accomplishing, in the long run? (If I want scads of arbitrary rules and magic points, I'll go play Nethack.)
I know this isn't really constructive criticism. However, I'm not intending it as flat-out flamage of moderation, either. I'm merely wondering, is this all really worth it? I don't have a better solution, but this ever-increasing moderation simply doesn't feel right. In fact, it feels futile. And harmful. But hey, I'm just one voice in the crowd.
And now due to the beauty of moderation, this post, which expresses a dissenting opinion, will be moderated right through the floor. And no amount of meta meta meta moderation will change that. Sigh.
Err... isn't this 'security through obscurity', the fallacy that Slashdot readers are so quick to berate Microsoft and others for? And how does this fit in with continuing to release Slash source code?
Surely it shouldn't matter if people know when M2 is being disregarded. And people would be able to agree or disagree with the policy, and make suggestions. Hang on a minute - maybe that's what Rob is afraid of :-(
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Is all this leading up to a new revenue stream for Slashdot? "Get your Official Cmmdr. Taco Meta-Kharma Decoder ring! Only $9.95!"
On more serious notes,
1) I think this is all looking really good, and
2) I don't want to see much more of it.
You can legislate forever, but you're never going to codify every possible violation. Try not to let the jerks force you into too many coding contortions, as you'll probably just wind up creating more loopholes, and make it more complicated for everyone. (Think IRS)
I've done about four posts in the last year, and none of them have ever been moderated up or down. Yet, my karma is -1. Still scratching my head. I hope lurkers' opinions aren't deemed unimportant, as it doesn't look like I'll be metamoderating anytime soon.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
Rob -
I don't like the idea of the moderation controls always being present and only counting if the user has points because:
I propose a better system: relative moderation. Let everyone moderate (within the limits of who is currently allowed to), then using a statistical distribution (or something like that - never really liked sadistics) of the points across all the comments to pick out the best (5s), really good (4s) and so forth comments. I think this might even eliminate the need for M2 moderation (and after all that hard work - sorry).
-"Zow"
How about making any one MM session get all it's posts from one slashdot article. ie: you gon into MM, and 10 posts get picked from *one* article and shown to you.
This would:
o Give you some idea of the relative quality of the posts.
o Mean you only had to check once to see what the article was about
o Make it obvious when a post was off-topic
o Make spotting flamebait and trolls much easier
Another idea would be to do the MM in the actual article-discussion itself.....
I think the meta-moderation is going too far. Multiple moderators should be enough to balance things out. Giving people more moderation points would server to balance more. If I thought a moderation was unfair, and I had moderation points, I'd "counter-moderate" the post.
Dummy moderation controls is probably a bad idea. Only the obsessive will use them. The people who actually care about doing something useful simply won't use the controls if they think they'll probably just be ignored.
Also, I have to say that the "auto moderation" thing is very nasty. Just because someone posted a good comment or two, it doesn't mean all of their comments are good. Let each comment stand on its own. Likewise, there is the ongoing debate about whether AC posts deserve to start at 0 or 1.
How about this:
1. Increase moderation points, and don't make it quite so hard to become a moderator.
2. Remove the auto-moderation thing. All comments start at 1 (even AC posts).
3. Add a "killfile"-like feature where each user can artificially bump-up/down the scores of posts on a per-poster basis. Each person's "killfile" will only affect the scores of posts as they read them. So if you think AC posts deserve to get 1 less than everyone else, you'd put "Anonymous Coward -> -1" in the "killfile". You could even put this in everyone's killfile by default so the behaviour would be identical to what it is now (by default). If this is done, I think the score range should be chnged to -5 to 5 (instead of the current -1 to 5) and the "killfile adjustment" range should be -10 to 10 (so I can bump a -5 to a 5 or vice-versa if I think the poster is deserving of it).
3. From the main page, if the user has moderation privledges, add a "Moderate" link in addition to the "Read More" link. The "Read More" link will be for reading only, no moderation controls. The "Moderate" link will bring one to a special moderation page.
4. The moderation page would have moderation controls of course. It would also not show the scores, and sorting by score wouldn't be an option while moderating. And your killfile wouldn't have any effect in moderation mode either.
5. Finally, I don't think it should show who posted the comment. I really think it should be a meritocracy, and showing people's ID's to the moderators prevents that. I realize that everything having no ID could get confusing (especially in conversations), so I think for each person that posts a comment in a discussion area, there should be a new "fake ID" generated. This fake ID would be used for all of their posts on the moderation page. Fake ID's would not be persistent. In one discussion area my fake ID might be "Hoopy Cow" in another is might be "Green Frood". That way you could still follow conversations in a discussion area, but the identities of the posters would be disconnected from what they are in "Read Mode" and from all other discussion areas. Note also that Anonymous Coward would be treated as another user, so it wouldn't be obvious that AC posts were from AC's. Again, comments would be judged more on content rather than who posted them. Oh, and almost forgot. Signatures wouldn't be shown in moderation mode of course.
I realize that someone could go and open both "read" and "moderate" to find out who made various posts. It would be possible to disable moderation of discussion areas the user has alredy read, but then they could just read as AC, and moderate as themselves. I think that the above suggestions would at least reduce the chance of people moderating based on identity rather than content though. Having the moderation controls shown right there with the poster's identity just makes it too easy to say "hey, I know that guy" and +1, or "oh, I hate him" and -1.
Oh, and some gratuitous other suggestions:
- Make plain-old-text really plain text.
- spell checking!
- link checking!
- better conversion of busted URL's ("relative" URL's should probably be patched up to simply add a leading "http://", as that seems to be the most common error)
- what's with those "parent" links? I can never figure out which one is really the parent when I'm in flat mode.
Giving any eligable moderator 10 M2-points per day to control the other moderators but only 5 M-point per month to do the the actual scoring of the articles is unbalanced to say the least and gives room to much more damaging kinds of abuse.
If the problem is that say 5% of slashdot users are "bad guys", then the solution should be obvious: vote them out of the sky! Shell out more moderator points (about 3 to 5 times the current amount) to allow for finer grained scores (e.g. in a range from -5 to 15) and higher responsiveness to abuse. Don't allow anyone to vote on the same comment twice and you should come up with a fairly robust mod-scheme.
Some additional measures which don't require too much user interaction come to mind:
Note that this amounts essentially to the same effect as the current M2 scheme as it is reasonable to assume that both groups would equally tend to judge the voting of the other side as unfair.
When it was at +5, I had 18 karma points. After it was ticked down to +4, I had +19.
I suppose it is always possible that someone came along, dropped it to +4, then another came along and dropped it to +3 and then yet another came along and boosted it to a +4 again (thus the increase to +19), but it could also be that decreasing a number which is already a 1 or greater still gives the poster positive increases in karma.
One thing I am curious about is whether being ticked down from a positive number to another positive number effects your karma negatively? In other words, do you lose a karma point for going from +2 to +1? My personal opinion is that you should only lose a karma point of you are reduced from any positive number to a 0 or less.
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
Well, I just looked at a meta-moderation page, and I decided that the system is fundamentally screwed up.
For example, say I see a post that's rated as "Overrated" and "Underrated" -- those are contextual decisions based on the article's rating at the time the moderator voted on them. If the moderator has moderated it from 5 to 4 with an "overrated", I might think it fair -- but he might have moderated it from a 1 to a 0, with other moderators later spending points to correct that unfair demotion. How, then, can I rule on whether the "overrated" moderation was fair or not?
Similarly, how the hell can I judge a rating of "redundant" without going and reading the whole fscking thread?
Meta-moderation just looks ripe for misuse, abuse, and erroneous use. I suggest instead that, when moderator access is granted, the moderator also gets two "meta-moderation" points he can use to delete a moderation from a post. That helps check unfair moderation without the problematic context-dropping.
Anyway, I chose not to meta-moderate, since I felt I couldn't fairly judge. And, if this is the arbitrary process I'm going to be subject to, I'm going to stop moderating.
It isn't as bad as it seemed. If people keep their heads and meta-moderate fairly, leaving it at a no-change whenever they don't have the context, it might be useful.
/. orthodoxy.
/. would be better off if this meta-moderation code were assigned to the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky.
I went through and meta-moderated... I think that meta-moderation isn't going to improve anything, since it will be abused exactly the same way as moderation, but at least I got to nail someone who made a blatantly unfair attack on a reasonable post that dared to question
Anyway, I'm not going to uncheck my "willing to moderate" box after all, but I still think
Ok, I haven't been posting as often as I once did... there was a time when I was able to read every thread, on every article that /. could dish. With school, and work, that isn't possible, but how could I possibly have "bad karma?"
/. search for this Karma rating? Over a year ago, I was posting on quite a regular basis. Several posts a day. I can't maintain the same pace that I once did, call it old age... ;/ but I'd like for those posts to be considerd in my karma. At the same time. If I had been a Troll, but then after rediscovering myself in some reform institution, and now frequently contributed to the /. society, I'd like to disreguard my past existance. How far back does this rating level go?
/.er with a negative Karma,
AFAIK, none of my posts have ever been moderated down. Infact, there were time that some of my posts had been marked up. However, when I checked my userpage, I have a karma of -1? Isn't this supposed to be an average? If I've never posted any off topic/color posts, and never recieved a negative moderation? how can I have a negative karma?
Secondly, how far back does
A frequent
Baggio
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
While your post is clearly flamebait, I'll assume you are being sincere in your paranoia.
I urge you to go outside and see the distinction between reality and the fantasy world of conspiracy that x-files might feed you. If you honestly think that Microsoft is paying people to waste time on slashdot (haven for linux zealots) and 'troll' "FUD", I truely feel sorry for you and hope your fantistic view of reality changes.
I am not joking here: I have whipped up a fresh steaming batch of perl that pages me when my karma changes, with the new value and how much it's changed.
Get the gun. Go on. Put me out of my misery.
My karma just got knocked down two points in the past hour; this indicates to me that I am doing a bad job moderating. News to me - I thought I'd always been sublimely fair and impartial.
But - here's the important part - I couldn't tell which of my moderations had been declared bad. Shouldn't there be some indication, maybe privately in users.pl displayed only to the logged in user, of what he is accused of doing wrong?
Of course, this is only worth implementing if meta-moderation proves it's worth keeping. Which I think it isn't. But I'm kinda biased on this, having just lost two karmic points for an unknown reason and I suspect an unfair one... so I won't go any father into this. :)
Why.... that would be me, of course.
Sorry, I REALLY couldn't resist.
Increasing moderator points, and possibly limiting moderation to only one story (?) sound like great ideas. Hiding previous moderation is bad, though, as you cannot tell if something is being over-moderated-- if you give points to only the best (and worst) comments, then the middle range gets lost.
I really would like to see some additional ways of breaking down the data... maybe things like:
interesting link
enlightened opinion
"agreement" (no real content of its own)
humor
...
The problem i have with the current system is the recommendations in posting-- "try to reply to other people['s] comments instead of starting new threads." Reading the threads, and following them is really a pain. I would love to see a more innovative way to present the information...
enough ranting...
I was really just pointing out that additional means of filtering data are nice; the only means you have now is the "score;" the scores don't always accurately reflect the "nature" of the post.
:)
You may be right about people not using their points, but if there are 400 comments on a story, how effective can 400 moderators be? (Possibly adequate... just curious.)
I am confused by your comment, "The moderation system shouldn't be a voting system, run by the moderators." What IS it supposed to be, then?
I think of it as a "classification" system... something to help weed out information so that people that don't have time to read 400 comments on a story can focus on the best information. This is where the humans come in useful
rstewart writes:
"I clicked on the parent link to see the parent of a comment to put things in context. The problem however was when I hit my back button to to say the moderation was fair.
Since it's being generated with a perl script it gave me a new set of 10 moderations making looking at the parent useless since I now had a whole new set of moderations to deal with."
I too have noticed how most CGI scripts re-execute when you go back to the page they generated. It's especially annoying in discussion forums like this, where posting an answer to someone's post can return you to the main page for yet another 147 KB download...
The simple workaround I've settled on is to use my browser's "Open in New Window" function -- that's what I did with *this* posting, I right-clicked the "reply" link, selected "Open in New Window" from the context menu (I use Netscape on Windows NT), and am now writing this in a separate window.
After I'm done, I'll just close this window and the original thread will be there in the original window, which at the moment is hidden under this one (I [almost] always maximize every window; just because Windows can do [or rather, more or less convincingly fake] multitasking doesn't mean *I* can, so why should I waste screen real-estate to see something I'm not using at the moment?).
HTH -- try it!
Christian R. Conrad
MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here
Posting restrictions: A good writer would take about five minutes to write up a good post, with nessisary proof backing up the claim. A "Me Too!" post is under one minute. So does a cheapshot flame. I propose a one message per IP/user per 4 minutes time, with adjustments baised on Karma on the time limit (less time to wait for more Karma, more time for less). Do you really care about a subject enough to write a virtual essay, which would be moderated high, or some short statement which really doesn't add more to the topic and stays scored at one or zero? I'd say the most well written ones are ones in which some time is gotten into it, and it shows with the proof used to back it up -- and it takes time to gather that proof. The system is very tuned to how people write!!!
Now this is just damned silly. Who is to say I'm not a newspaper editor, accustomed to writing and re-writing on the fly, therefore skilled at making useful points in a hurry?
Further, I just happen to carefully regard what I'm planning to say long before I hit the reply link. I'm not always sure my arguments are valid before loading the posting page, so I wait and think it over before clicking that link. Many many times more often than not, I'll pass on the opportunity to post because upon further consideration, I find that I don't have anything really worthy of putting up. But when I do click the link, I'm nearly certain about what I plan to say, and can usually type it up in a minute or two, maximum, unless I'm feeling leisurely.
Lastly, time-based bonuses for longer delays between clicking the post link and actually posting will just ensure that those who can't type get bonus points. Why should anyone get penalized just because they can type over 80 wpm?
Moderation is a job that I take seriously when I get the chance. Even micro-moderation would be something that I take seriously.
When I read slashdot and have to moderate, it becomes a *job*. Mind you, it's a job that I gladly do, but most of the time I just want to read without being judgemental in the extreme.
I think that ultimately what will happen with micro-moderation is that the moderators will be self-selected, rather than elected to a community duty.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
During my practice run at meta-moderation, I saw one moderated comment twice. Trying to check my meta-moderation (meta-meta-moderation) by seeing if I rate the same moderation the same way in both instances? Or just a programming oversight?
--JT
Please, oh please stop confusing me, Rob! If you put the moderator controls on everything I look at, I won't know what to click! Can you Meta-Moderate yourself? If you can't then you could tell if you were a moderator! How about if we don't know if we are Meta-Moderating? How about if moderators get paid $5 per day like jurors? Also, I bet you could probably sell karma for like $5 per point. To get the bonus, people would have to give you about 125 bucks! Then again why not add a double bonus +2? If you post anonymously while logged in and get moderated up, does your karma get effected? Possibly a moderator could figure out who the AC was if this is the case.
Please don't cry when you have to code Hyper-meta-moderation because some day you probably will!
What I really want to see is the ability for me to append to my existing comment without having to reply to myself. I also think that if a person submits a story or has a feature done about one of their projects on slashdot, then they should get like a +3 bonus to their comments in that particular article. It shouldn't boost their Karma though.
I am even more confused now. Time to click on the next button.
~GoRK
Why bother with this hideiously complicated message forum, when most of the useful stuff could be done with a simple news server, with a new group for each story?
A story would be posted, there would be an nntp:// link at the bottom directly to the news server and new group, people could post with their familiar tools and create their own kill-files for dealing with trolls.
You'd also be able to track which messages you've read - threads would be easy to follow, it'd all be much easier.
Why re-invent the wheel?
CJ.
I'm thinking that labeling a moderation "fair" or "unfair" is sort of nebulous. Is labeling a post "insightful" that you would have labeled as "funny" fair or unfair?
I guess I'm also not seeing the problem that meta moderation is supposed to fix. I guess what I have seen has been the troll floods that suck up moderation points, as demonstrated by the fair number of "first post!" or "XXX sux, you luzers!" posts lying around after several someones have made a moderation pass through.
Perhaps moderation points should be allocated on a per story basis, basd on the number of posts under the story? That way, moderators who come into a story that got troll flooded would have more points to moderate down the trolls and still have some to lift the gems above the waves. More posts, more points.
I dunno if the number of moderators are seleteced basedon the number of posts that currently exist, but it seems that we need some sort of mechanism to either draft more moderators or give the existing moderators more firepower. I know that sometimes, when I do get the heady call to be a moderator, I blow all my points on taking out trolls.
If sucky moderation needs to be fought, why not have a system whereby "counter moderation" affects the karma of a moderator? For example, suppose I moderate down a thoughtful, intelligent post that happens to point out a case where Microsoft doesn't quite suck as much as the average Linux proponent would like. Later, two other moderators come by, see I dinged the post not because it was a troll or off topic, but rather because I wanted to censor the opinion of the poster, and moderate the post back up. When the dust clears, the moderation system might note that two moderators thought I made a bad decision, and will therefore be less likely to make me a moderator.
Sure, it's not foolproof, but I think on the whole it would work a bit better than uber moderation. I mean, where does that end? Who will moderate the uber moderators? And who will moderate them? And so on... I'd day, just have a system where things, on the whole, work out so that good moderation is supported and bad moderation is discouraged.
I disagree with you. Historically this site is here supporting Linux & OSS & other interesting technical and scientific bits. Recently - in the last 12 months - this has been overrun with the paid trolls from M$. That is a problem.
A solution, in addition to moderation, is good, informed replies to fight the MS FUD processors. I don't claim to know everything (hell, ANYTHING) about the ins and outs of software design, networking, etc. But if I see a troll, I'll usually skip to the replies to see if there are any good rebuttals.
Jay (=
Take all post scores that each person has had. If they have an average post of 2 or higher(maybe 3 if the number of 2 is too big) and send them an e-mail asking them to moderate. They can moderate everyday, every article, whether they post to a story or not.
./ account for at least 6 months
/. readers, but only the readers that really make any of the comments worth reading
Like here would be the requirements to be asked to moderate:
1. have had a
2. have posted X amount of posts, with an average score of 2 or higher.
3. Have a valid e-mail contact.
This way, only people that would moderate are people that not only participate on a regular basis, but also have something worthwhile to say the majority of the time.
And it's strictly voluntary, people that meet the requirements are just sent an e-mail asking to be one. If they don't want to moderate, they don't have to, and it's not forced on them.
This way, moderation is put into the hands of the
Instead of the '5 points, 3 days' method imposed now, experiment with letting _everyone_ have some moderator influence (except maybe folks with negative Karma). But instead of having one moderator == one +/- to the score, require that in order for a comment to budge from a 1 to a 2, or a 2 to a 3, that it be given maybe 100 positive moderations from distinct people. Of course, the flipside is that a number (maybe 75) of negative moderations bring the comment down.
:^)
Why a lower value for negative moderation? There are really only two steps below the average level of 1 you can go down, and trolls and other weeds should be filtered out ASAP.
Also, to tell whether it's really worth someone's while to score a certain comment, show how many other people have already moderated each comment.
The sheer volume of moderation occuring under this model should cause posts to even out to a deserving value in a small period of time, and the evil marks of troll moderators will be drowned out by those of honest folks (which hopefully comprise a majority of Slashdot readers). And metamoderation will be unnecessary, since if someone doesn't like the way a comment's been marked, they can do something about it.
-Joe
Flamers would quickly disappear, good posts would rise to the top, and it would be more difficult for a "bad" moderator to skew the ratings.
Moo!
Perhaps, it would be better to put in some information like how many posts the poster made in that article and a link that summarizes them so that the meta-moderator won't just mark it as fair or leave it unchecked because they don't want to take the time to look into it?
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
This moderation stuff is getting pretty elaborate. So much for moderation in moderation.
I never meta moderator I didn't like.
No... I really think that moderators should make up their own minds, rather than even having the subtle influence of knowing that someone else already moderated this comment up and that one down to the having of a summary of whatevery one else thinks. This is slashdot, after all... ESPECIALLY if you've gone through the trouble of making an account, you've got a brain... You can think for yourself (at least a little, I hope! :)
It may be a little late, but i was mainly thinking that regular moderators would not be able to see comments as anything besides comments. Regular viewers could see everything associated (poster, score, etc..) Meta moderators, too. Just regular moderators, if they chose to moderate, would have to judge comments on their own merit rather than knowing who said what and what other moderators think
lucas
Now, if that comment was posted because of an article about how Bill Gate's personal wealth had surpassed a trillion dollars, that comment might be moderated as being funny.
If it were posted because Microsoft bought Redhat, then one might call it insightful
If that comment was posted in context of a comparison between IIS and Apache, it could be considered flmebait.
If it were posted in a discussion about Sony's robotic dog, then it'd be a troll...
Basically without having any context to the comment (at least give us a link to the story and the it's parent) this meta-moderation seems rather pointless. We're (or rather Rob is) spinning in circles trying to figure out what to do about trolls... Just like anything else that's bad in life, it'd be hard to be sure to be rid of them without hurting ourselves as well.
How about this:
Moderators get 10 points, rather than 5.
They can choose which discussions they wish to moderate: so long as they're a moderator, they cannot change their comment threshold above -2 (or however low it goes). Also have it not show other people's moderations to the moderators (everything, regardless, would appear as being posted by the Anonymous Coward with a score of 1.
They can click a button at anytime that removes their moderations, shows original posters, other peoples moderations, and lets them comment. Kind of how it works now.
Basically, I think moderators were doing a good job thus far with the tools that have been supplied. What we need is more moderators, and more "un-biased" moderators, with unbiased meaning that they HAVE to view every comment, and not know what other people have said about it.
The comments I was just given are really hard to judge. What consitutes humor? What consitutes being sarcastic or flamebait? What consitutes just a very heated discussion?
One of the main reasons I read the comments on slashdot is learn how other intellegent people view issues and ideas. If I was just looking for facts and figures, I'd go read a magazine. It's the human quality that make slashdot different from any other techinical resource I read.
Speaking of which, I could use some constructive input here.
IMHO.. moderation = censorship, you filter out certain opinions based on what someone believes should be filetered out. filtering out the AC's can filter out some good opinions. What wil be next /.? Only the elitist get to post?please what is this moderation s*** anyway, I have good karma, so don't tell me I have bad karma....
Only 'flamers' flame!
I disagree with you. Historically this site is here supporting Linux & OSS & other interesting technical and scientific bits. Recently - in the last 12 months - this has been overrun with the paid trolls from M$. That is a problem. Moderation is an attempt to rid this site of those (futile) trolls. And I am willing to assist in that worthwhile task.
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
say a comment started with one point, and got moderated up to 5. When you apply your meta-moderated points to it, whose moderation points do they apply to? If the comment has four additional points and you tag it as "unfair," are the unfair-moderation points applied to each moderator by 1/4th?
I was just wondering if there are any people who just go throw and moderate comments (ie they have unlimited points). If not, I think we might need it, cuz lots of good comments when there are suddenly 300 comments on a story 2 hours after its been posted... if it was someone's job to moderate, this could be fixed... and to keep their moderation "fair" they should only be allowed to moderate a comment 1 point either way, so that they wouldn't have too much of an effect, but enough.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
...then I could simply recommend your post be up'ed one instead of replying with a silly one liner post like this one.
There is, go to your slashdot homepage.
Sorry if I seem ungrateful or trollish, but I think this whole meta-moderation is overkill.
I think to find a solution, look at the problem.
We have too many comments with different levels of importance. why? because sometimes people want to just rant and rave, sometimes they want to post some additional info and sometimes they are just ignorant and should be taken out back and shot.
solution: (imho), have at least two categories per article to post in such as:
rant and rave, or information
This way, if its a topic i feel passionate about, i can jump into rant and rave and write up a long schpiel, whereas if I happen to know more about it or think some facts are in dispute, the information side would be the best choice.
And I do agree that spell checking should be a higher priority.
-Zebulun
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.
One problem I found with the M2 system -- I wound up with 2 comments each appearing twice on the same page, so only 8 of the 10 comments were "original". I hate to vote twice on one comment, so I suspect we need to figure out a way to remove duplicates.
On the idea of always having moderation controls available, I think it's a bad idea simply because I don't have enough time to moderate every comment I ever read, only to find out that only 1% of my effort takes effect. If I've got moderator status, I pay more attention, and make sure I'm being fair and unbiased, but if I don't know if I'm moderating or not, it would take me too long to read everything and I'd wind up NEVER moderating. then you'd wind up with either obsessive-compulsives or people with agendas doing all the moderation...
nathaniel
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I had the same issue -- some posts were bumped up to 3 or 4, and contained nothing particularly original or insightful, although they weren't off-topic or flambait, either. I hate to penalize a moderator for pumping up an article, but at the same time I don't think articles that are "1"s should be pumped up to "4"...
nathaniel
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I just tried Meta Moderation, and though you can reasonably guess that certain posts are interesting/informative (or trolls/flamebait) by looking at them, without a link to the actual story it is difficult to truly know the context of the post. I don't think I'll feel comfortable M-Moderating under this system.
Lucas's suggestion of increasing available moderator points makes sense, especially given the recent scourge of trolls that have been wasting moderator points. Much less complicated than Meta Moderation, too, IMO!
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
I think that this all really is a bit much. When the moderations system gets too complicated to explain in about a sentence, something's wrong.
Beyond that, though, this new system has the feeling of a chunk of code that I know could've been written more elegently, with fewer vars, etc, but wasn't for lack of forethought. I appreciate the effort put into all of this, but it would be more worthwhile to have discussion before coding.
I actually liked the wasy moderation was working up until this week. I usually browse on -1 and read down until I lose interest, which works pretty well. Having looked at all these comments, it seemed to me that moderation was working well. Sure, there might be a couple errent comments now and again, but having to scroll an extra inch or two down is hardly a problem.
To some extent, this is like the problem of spam at Dartmouth. Every so often, someone I know gets an unsolicited email and gets very angry about it. Of course, the college blocks like 90% of such emails using ridiculous filtering, which works pretty well. I find it's much easier and more reasonable to simply ignore that monthly unwanted message (maybe forwarding it to the postmaster) than making a big deal about it and railing that spam filtering must be improved.
Think: Diminishing returns.
--Andrew Grossman
grossdog@dartmouth.edu
Moderation is a public service, much like jury duty. Let's not drag everyone into it when we don't have to.
On the other hand, there could be a system whereby you would specify in your preferences to always have moderation buttons on. Then you could moderate even if you have no points, but the moderation wouldn't really do anything for normal users. For real moderators, though, they would see something like:
Non moderators recommend:
-5 off topic
-2 flamebait
+4 funny
Then, using that example, a real moderator might use a point to lower the score of the post. This action would clear out all the recommendations, or at least those that said to move the score in the same direction.
This might also eliminate the need for M2, as it would allow anyone to attract the moderators to articles that have been miss-moderated.
Hmm. Interesting point. Of course, the site was going to get pummelled regardless of the option to have a mirror.
/. just mirrors everything on the site itself and rewrites relative links, it shouldn't be affected. Of course, /. would probably add their own banner on top (it is their bandwidth), but I don't think it'd be difficult to keep the site's original banner(s).
Actually, though, 99% of the time the ad banners are hosted by a server external to the site. If
How about this - /. mirrors the site to the /. server in a non public directory /. It may, however, be pounded into oblivion because of this. Would you mind if I put up a temporary mirror of your page?" /.
1) Joe Slashdot Reader sends in a neato leeto link
2) CmdrTaco (or one of the others) says 'hey, that looks neat, I'm gonna put it up'
3) A script of
4) CmdrTaco emails site author/webmaster and says "Hi, your site is going to be on
5) Story goes on
6) If author gives consent, story is updated and mirrored copy is put online
Sounds good, no?
Here's why I don't like this idea. First, there is the burnout issue. When I'm a moderator, I will make an effort to read and moderate lower-rated posts. If I don't know when I'm "on", then I'll be less likely to read those lower-rated posts. I think what this will do is to cause many good comments to never get moderated up. Second, it's easy enough to see if you're a real moderator -- just vote and see if the rating changes. (Not foolproof, but it has some accuracy.)
Yeah, I know. It has been mentioned before. The *difference* is the moderator's name is not mentioned, maybe a silly tag like 0021321. Only Hemos and CmdrTaco knows which moderator 0021321 is associated to. If we (the readers) see this tag often, we know if this particular guy/girl is on a reign of terror. We also have his/her moderation history but don't know the name. If we don't like him/her we can tell CmdrTaco and Hemos and they can take proper action on the actual user.
Hasdi
I am a bit confused here. None of my posts have ever been moderated down and yet my karma is -5? What exactly did I ever do to get such bad karma? I might just not be hip enough to the slashdot system but im confused, someone clue me in here? I have never berated anyone and I always make sure my comments are not totally biased and all that kind of jazz.
oy vay!
The successor of the well established SlashMod 97(TM) will include many new features including
- MetaMod(TM)
- IntelliKarma(TM)
- ActiveMod(TM)
According to CmdrTaco, Product Manager of SlashMod2000, most portal software is too complicated to use and not friendly to sensible customers.MetaMod gives users the ability to customize and control the quality of the ModeRate(TM)-System, providing a easy to use interface utilizing intelligent Agents.
MetaMod includes a new "SlashMod Setup Assistant" that walks users through the basic steps required to set up accounts, moderate, flame and troll.
With IntelliKarma, SlashMod 2000 is able to take previous actions of the user into account, giving the user appropriate feedback. IntelliKarma improves greatly the ergonomic quality of human - machine interaction. The software also includes a "Step-By-Step Navigation" feature that provides users with clear directions and easy access to the system activities they use most often. To help users plan their posting future, IntelliKarma delivers a "Karma Event Modeler" that evaluates the effect of different scenarios -- such as posting wise, or not at all -- on their overall Karma Strategie.
ActiveMod combines streamlined document creation with powerful Web functionality enabling the user to work more efficiently and communicate his ideas more effectively. ActiveMod includes a comprehensive set of features enabling to customize how they want to interact with SlashMod.
"Slashmod 2000 will give new users the ability to adjust the system to fit their personal needs, dependend on how lighthearted they are", Taco said. "And experienced users will also see clearly the facilites."
SlashMod 2000 is the result of 1 year of research and programming in the field of advanced group dynamics.
"By integrating technologies like IntelliKarma an ActiveMod into SlashMod 2000, we are able to to a great step into the right direction. Improvements to SlashMod address top feature requests from users", said Taco. "We are very excited and really want to get the product in the marketplace".
But SlashMod 2000 will go through extensive beta testing. "We will deliver when our customers tell us it's ready", said Taco. "SlasMod 2000 is the greatest we have ever done, and we want to do it right".
The final version of SlashMod 2000 is expected to be available in late autumn.
I don't really buy this... I think that it's really important that moderators are chosen randomly and given equal say, thus representing a diverse cross-section of Slashdot users (or as diverse as possible).
Just because I think something is funny that other people don't doesn't make me a bad moderator, it just means that it's not as widely funny as I thought. Thus, if I liked it, two others ignored it (and didn't moderate it) and one called it flaimbait, it would be at it's default score (most likely 1 if they were a user), which is the perfect spot for it to be at.
The karma system is a really great addition to this, helping make the default rating make more sense.
-- atomly
There should be the option for moderators to label posts as "Question", for those posts that pose new and interesting questions.
This would compliment "Informative" posts well.
-Snoot
Seriously? I've had GREAT response times since the new hardware went live.. ...
/. effect mirroring".. Okay, I'll bite... how do we pull that one off?! Am I wrong in assuming that some sites are going to get a wee upset with us for mirroring their content? (I know, it's for their benefit, but I'm sure some suit would get in an uproar over it)... Not to mention the space/bandwidth this would take.. (ack, and you think slashdot is slow NOW?! just imagine if it was serving up all the articles as well!)... unless someone sits down and rights some 'distributed proxy array'.. hmmm..
As for "anti
Rob wrote
Finally is an interesting idea that has been proposed a few times that I just wanted to throw out for discussion. As it stands, you only see the
moderator controls when you have moderator points to use. What if the moderator controls were always
visible, but when you submitted the form, they were only counted if you had moderator points. Oh, and you wouldn't know if you had points.
Actually a slight variant of this idea might be worthwhile. Instead of moderating every post, the reader gets to moderate a random subset. This gives
- a baseline reference so that a score of 2 would be of roughly equal quality which can be confirmed by looking at other posts
- subset reduces the amount of hard thinking required and given enough samples, should be an accurate reflection of the total population (any statisticians out there that can confirm?)
- equality and there is greater opportunities for moderation so even those who don't reply, get a chance to shape the conversational flow (a problem with teaching is encouraging the passive listeners who do think deeply but take time and thus miss the discussion window)
- encourage a larger segment of readers to moderate would slow down the early posters and thus spread the discussion time-span out a bit more, thus (hopefully) avoiding quick off-the-cuff bursts and evening out load on the server
The only negative feature I can see is that some thought has to b e given to how the "random" subset needs to be selected as you want adequate coverage of all the posts to give later entries or the marginal AC's a better chance for good ideas to float to the top.
LL
That brings up an interesting question: I'll admit that I'm pretty interested in my "karma", and want to gain as much as possible, insofar as it's a measure of "acceptance" within the community, or some such warm fuzzy feeling. But is it good for people to become obsessed with this?
Depends on how much emotional attachment you have on external peer pressure. I have heard of reports (but seen no formal studies) that females apply a greater value on the social relationships/status with others whereas guys put greater emphasis on the accomplishments they have achieved. Karma (if you ignore the hip connotations) is just a metric that provides feedback on what are the qualities that the
Seriously, it's amazing how fast the stories go by these days. I guess it's an inevitable result of Slashdot becoming so big, but it makes it a lot harder to participate in the discussions. If all the stories have over 300 comments by the time you get to them, all you can really do is read. If you take the time to write a really thoughtful comment, chances are hardly anyone will still be reading the story by the time you post it. This
is often my problem. I'm not sure how your idea would help with this problem, but I think it's an important one.
Again, I think you have to look carefully at the effect that Rob is trying to achieve (at least fgrom my observations). The goal is to gain a representative and comprehensive sample of the opinion-space of
The size of the submissions and the short time span of posts may be a problem if
LL
Ok, I've already got negative Karma from one of the 2 or 3 times I posted in the past so I might as well chime in here:
>...what to do about trolls... Just like anything >else that's bad in life, it'd be hard to be sure >to be rid of them without hurting ourselves as >well.
What you're implying here is that "trolls" are intrinsically bad, and that moderators really know what a troll is. I think that we are guaranteed to hurt ourselves if we try too hard to eliminate the trolls.
If someone says something that the moderators don't like then they become a troll regardless of whether there is any validity to the posting (I think this might be true in my case, but I could be wrong).
I work with kids in a program where we accept that any comment - however stupid or boorish - can be the catalyst that starts a creative train of thought. I just hope we don't miss something really good because of the troll barriers.
'I used to have a really cool sig that went here, but I can't seem it keep it working.'
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Just tried it out, not sure if it worked or not. I got like 7 lines saying SQL Error Email Rob blah blah. But now it says I've already metamoderated today... so I guess it worked?
Seems like a good idea to me. (The whole meta moderation thing). I was surprised I didnt find any "First Post" messages on my list. heh
One thing about First Posters... if you First Post as an AC what good is that? ~ANYONE~ can say they were that AC...
Obviously you don't want anything that's actually turing-complete
True, we'd probably want an upper limit on the time and space resources of the programs. (Traipsing offtopic: Given that it only has finite space resources, is my desktop machine really turing-complete?) There would be other practical concerns too, like the granularity with which programs could query the database of slashdot articles. (Raw text? Keywords?)
However, without a certain amount of problem-specific hacking, people's filter scripts won't have any useful data to work with. Without such primitives as "moderated up", "moderated down", and "adjective:funny", what will your script look for? "Show me all the posts from people that have never replied to posts with the words 'hemos sux' in them"?
A sufficently general scripting language would have the immediate benefit of dramatically simplifying the current preferences page. That page largely has to do with filtering and customization. (Strip sigs, block Jon Katz, block posts with "hemos sux", etc.)
I agree that we'd need a set of primitives -- indeed, a really large set of primitives would probably be a good idea. But much of the debate about moderation comes from things like karma, sorting, granularity, etc. -- not the primitives themselves. These issues would be resolved with a general enough scripting system.
(Maybe it's the crack talking, but such a scripting language might be able to put some moderation administration into user-space as well. Those users who think there should be more points circulating around could voluntarily assign each other "unofficial" moderator points in an alternative [complementary] system.)
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
The only real solution to all of this is a turing-complete filtering/sorting/query language. That's what all of this is expanding into. And writing the most general solution once can be easier than coding up a bunch of idiosyncratic, incomplete solutions. Code a solution to the problem domain, Malda, and solving a specific problem will be (relatively) easy.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
It'd be really neat if there was a page where you could look at what your own Karma was.
Man, this could get more complicated than the U.S.'s electoral college system (see Sept 6th entry at www.memepool.com).
Does anyone else think that this whole thing is getting a bit too complex?
When it comes down to it, Slashdot hasn't fundamentally changed that much since it became big 'n' popular. Sorry to get back to software engineering, but wouldn't it be a good plan to sit down and do a whole new requirements analysis and design for Slashdot, based on how it is used and abused right now?
Rob's done a great job, but I think it's starting to look like a complete concept design might be a good plan. Then we might find that this moderation and meta-moderation system is unnecessary.
(I'm sure this has been said before, so please feel free to moderate me down! =) )
For moderators only, show a history of moderation action for each comment. This could be a 2D chart with history being vertical and different moderation "levels" being horizontal. So if I became a moderator I'd see something like this:
Score: 2
| Insightful +1 |
| Troll -1 | Stupid Moderator -1 |
| Interesting +1 |
(I hope the sense of this comes through the formatting) Each "decision" can be moderated individually. A moderator is allocated a certain number of points, say 10. For a cost of 2 points each then can moderate a "base comment". For a cost of 1 point each they can moderate anything above that level.
On a totally different topic: Why are we spending time on esoteric oddities like meta-moderation when simple features like the below need working on?
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
"An armed society is a polite society" -- Robert Heinlein
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
/. very slow: always (even w/ new servers)
/. temporarily unreachable: once every 3-4 days
/. totally unreachable: once per week
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
"An armed society is a polite society" -- Robert Heinlein
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
For moderators only, show a history of moderation action for each comment. This could be a 2D chart with history being vertical and different moderation "levels" being horizontal. So if I became a moderator I'd see something like this:
Score: 2
| Insightful +1 |
| Troll -1 | Stupid Moderator -1 |
| Interesting +1 |
(I hope the sense of this comes through the formatting) Each "decision" can be moderated individually. A moderator is allocated a certain number of points, say 10. For a cost of 2 points each then can moderate a "base comment". For a cost of 1 point each they can moderate anything above that level.
On a totally different topic: Why are we spending time on esoteric oddities like meta-moderation when simple features like the below need working on?
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
"An armed society is a polite society" -- Robert Heinlein
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
But it's hard to tell sometimes. For example, when meta-moderating today I was presented with a Score: 4, Funny post. And lo, verily, it was funny. But it wasn't 4-funny. 2-funny at the most. So what do I do? M2 down the moderator for saying that a funny post was funny?
Come to think of it, does the system provide us with the status of the post at the time of the moderation, or at the current time? Can I even tell whether the moderator was the first person to mark the post as funny (in which case it's definitely fair) or the last (in which case it's probably unfair).
How bizarre. It's always been my impression that the vast majority of moderators moderate fairly, and the main sins commited are those of omission (good posts, particularly at 0, being ignored). Yet if I'm presented with 10 good pieces of moderation, which doesn't seem at all unlikely to me, my M2 doesn't count for anything.
Worse, I might decide that I want my M2 to count for something, and deliberately mis-M2 a few of the posts to average in order for my comments on the others to count. Not that I'd actually do that, of course, but you can see the temptation is there...
I'd be overwhelmed by apathy and not moderate at all. It would also, to my mind, devalue moderation in general: I wouldn't think so hard about any moderation I did.
Um. I thought moderation currently tried to avoid giving points to obsessive overreaders? Now you're suggesting it awards obsessive overmoderators?
A final comment: this revamp of moderation seems to me to be similar to a very badly written computer program. (And believe me, in the past I've written enough of those to recognise the symptoms
I'd suggest either letting it lie, or sitting down and having a careful and complete redesign. Maybe it wouldn't be as popular among some Slashdot readers, but I can pretty much guarantee that it'll be a better solution.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Man, I hate to do this, but...
Me too!.
I ended up with moderator access for the second time in 5 days today, and I started reading at threshold -1 and with greater care than normal. I was (and remain) careful in the use of those points, and I'd hate to have those controls all the time, but no idea of whether or not it's worth the effort.
However, if the non-point moderation had some sort of cumulative value (e.g. 25 "Interesting" labels = 1 moderator point), then I wouldn't mind so much. So, if 25 people agree that a particular comment = Interesting, it gets moderated up -- or if 1 moderator thinks so, it gets moderated up. (Obviously, I haven't thought this through 100%, but the kernel of the idea shows promise on initial examination.)
There was also another scheme (flagging posts) mentioned a few comments ago which accomplishes the same thing, but only with a moderator's active intercession.
This
When I just M2'ed (yeah, I said it!), I found all comments fairly moderated. I cannot understand why my M2 should be disregarded because of this, although I think that 10 m2's of 'unfair' are pretty unlikely.
I also encountered a duplicate, it asked for the same item (Interesting, IIRC) and I don't see why moderating twice should be OK as CmdrTaco says in the update. Can't you take my M2 vote for all acts of moderation of a kind (here: Interesting) for this comment? It might be more complicated from the programming point of view, but it does make sense.
If available moderator points are not visible to the moderator then what keeps people moderating? Moderating is 'responsible work' in a certain way, and if it can be 'lost work' then the perceived value of moderating decreases. Everybody will just randomly moderate because there is no control over wether a moderation actually makes difference. I think this introduces unnecessery uncertainity and the resulting noise will just degrade the quality of moderation itself - we dont want that, do we?
--Coke
Karma is the sum total of all moderation that's done to you.
So if you post a lot of stuff that's moderated up, you get good karma. After +20, you start to get a bonus point every time you post (posting at +2 instead of +1). If you post a lot of stuff that's moderated down, you get negative karma. After -10, you start to get a negative "bonus" point (posting at 0 instead of +1).
So if you start posting with brilliance your karma can go up, and if you start flaming, your karma will go down.
-nicole
That, and having (insert favorite browser here) generate all those little popup menus tends to slow down /. rendering (and subsequently, reading).
I don't mind doing it from time to time, but if I had to suffer through rendering (I am *NOT* about to switch to IE. Doesn't even install on my "NT Workstation With IE". Nice eh? Everytime I install, it says my IE installation was corrupt, retries installation, and promptly errors out. So I've given up), I'd reconsider even trying to moderate.
It's a little unclear what the consequences for poor moderation are. If it's just bad karma, that's a pretty weak motivator. How will someone even know that they're getting karma-dinged for unfair moderation? And assuming they continue to make good posts, what is to stop them from continuing their reign of poor moderation?
If the goal is to motivate good moderation, you have to put people's "unfair moderation" rating right in their face (on the main page; most people probably never check users.pl). And if the goal is to prevent poor moderation, there should be a threshhold where they never moderate again, no matter how much good karma they get from posts (Say, if "unfair" mods ever exceed "fair" ones by 3 or more...). IMO, you should do both.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
Obviously you don't want anything that's actually turing-complete, because you want to be sure that people's filtering scripts always terminate rather than hanging the server (impossible by definition for turing-complete languages).
It's true, sometimes the best answer to the problem is to go general. However, without a certain amount of problem-specific hacking, people's filter scripts won't have any useful data to work with. Without such primitives as "moderated up", "moderated down", and "adjective:funny", what will your script look for? "Show me all the posts from people that have never replied to posts with the words 'hemos sux' in them"?
So, in light of the "more general" philosophy, let me restate ideas 1 and 2: maintain information on the adjectives people have acquired through past moderation and make that info available as a primitive to the filter scripts.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
True, we'd probably want an upper limit on the time and space resources of the programs...
:)
What do you mean "we", white man?
Since it's Commander Taco that would do all this, I think we should remember that the idea is to make his life easier. If karma et al are *not* the primitives, what are? I gave my example based on full-text search ("Nothing from someone who's replied to 'hemos sux'") to show two things. First, how ultimately useless it would be. Second, how un-indexable and thus computationally explosive that kind of query power would be.
Now, if we could just use distributed.net to turn all slashdot readers' machines into a giant beowulf cluster... then use *that* to do turing-complete searches on the message-space (encrypted searchably, of course, to protect anonymity)...
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
I don't mind reading the stuff that has been explicitly moderated up as "funny". However, there are a few folks who posted a lot of hair-trigger joke responses. That's great; sometimes they score a direct hit. But when they accumulate enough karma to get a default score of 2, all those jokes start to become annoying.
So, what's the solution? More feeping creatures. The question is, which ones feep the least?
-People's karma comes with the adjective that is the "mode" of all their moderation adjectives. Their default-moderation-level posts also acquire this adjective. In your preferences, you can explicitly give a -1 to posts with certain adjectives ("I don't *want* to be amused, dammit!"). Feeps pretty hard, because it requires additions to the already-huge preference screen.
-You can't attain Enlightenment (enough positive karma for a default upgrade) without a mix of adjectives. Someone with 20 "funny" posts wouldn't make it, but someone with 17 "funnies", 2 "interesting", and an "informative" would. Also highly feepish from an implementation POV, but at least pretty transparent to the user.
-Only a certain number of posts a day get your default moderation bonus. If you're posting more than once or twice a day, chances are you're not putting excessive thought/new information into each post. This idea is by far the easiest to implement and the cleanest. It would probably solve the problem, even though it doesn't address it directly.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
My radical 2 cents:
/. reader is decent, a relatively normal distribution should result. After a couple of articles have been tested, certain percentage marks will demarcate categories.(e.g., maybe 0-0.05% is usually flaimbait; 5-10% me toos; and >60% insightful and informative).
Absolute comment values restrict the range of comments, usually placing the dumb first posts and unpopular pro MS comments in the same category as the truly uncivilized comments. My modest proposal to alleviate this problem, along with those of not enough mod points, and points not lasting.
1-Give all logged in users (or the oldest 75% if you wish) the ability to moderate once per comment, either up or down (siskel and ebert style) at all times.
2- tally the net value for each comment (which could run from -1066(c.f Stevens article) to +600(written by Bruce P.) or whatever)
3- Allow readers to set defaults based on percentages rather than absolute intergers. E.g., read the top 50%, the elite 5%, or the whole 100% of comments posted.
Assuming the average
Then you can track the usage rates of moderation, and see that say the average user moderates 10-20 comments a day (for example). So those who moderate 2 standard deviations or more from this mean can easily be identified and investigated to see if they are misusing moderation (and whup ass accordingly).
idk, just some pre-dinner ramblings. grunt grunt food!
Might be just bad luck, but I think you should check for duplicates: I was offered to meta-moderate the same article twice.
I just tried the Meta-Moderation however I noticed a small problem. I clicked on the parent link to see the parent of a comment to put things in context. The problem however was when I hit my back button to to say the moderation was fair.
Since it's being generated with a perl script it gave me a new set of 10 moderations making looking at the parent useless since I now had a whole new set of moderations to deal with.
That would be double-Bucky-moderation. After this expands and explodes, it will eventually reach quadruple-Bucky-moderation. We will never reach quintuple-Bucky-moderation because we don't have enough fingers to do so ;^>
--The basis of all love is respect
Sorry if this has already been brought up - I haven't been reading every comment in the moderation discussions.
/. moderation system though.
The question: does MM create a feedback loop? The people that moderation rewards get to reward the moderators, right? It certainly seems like it's got the potential to be unstable.
What if, instead of MM, we just defined a "bad" moderator to be someone whose use of points is contrary to other moderators'? For example, if one moderator loved an article and many others hated it, then the moderator who loved the article is doing a bad job. I'm not sure how well this would fit into the
So when you have meta moderator access, you're directed to a page like the one linked in the story? Or do you just moderate moderated comments in the regular pages?
-- First post (by a female living in a state that begins with M and does not end in a vowel with a birthday that falls
What if the moderation controls were a Slashbox? Then if you wanted to see them when you log in you can, or you could ignore them. Anyone who was logged in could submit moderation pionts, but they would only be counted if the user had moderater points (which the user wouldn't know if they did or not).
~Caliban
> What you're implying here is that "trolls" are intrinsically bad, and that moderators really know what a troll is.
A troll is an off-topic post/comment designed to generate off-topic responses by being outrageous, idiotic or just plain silly... It's not all that complicated. Trolls are bad in that they direct focus away from the topic at hand. For example, you and some friends are having an in-depth discussion about the merits of the new dev kernel, and someone else you know strolls up and says "Hey I heard that new Windows 2000 can run circles around Linux,AND its more secure! ha-ha!". Now, whether or not what he said is interesting or insightful or WHATEVER, it was off-topic, and directs the focus away from the topic at hand. In a verbal discussion, this may not be such a bad thing, but when something like this is posted in a directed forum, such as Slashdot, it is not only irrelevant, but wastes people's time by making them slog through a bunch of silly off-topic posts, not only the original troll, but the flurry of indignant responses it usually receives. In closing, trolls ARE bad, especially in a focus-oriented forum.
my 2 cents. Hey! There's no cent key. What's up with that? (troll)
doc
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
PS: It was the joke survey on shift key usage...I assume each person's group of metamod comments is random? Or is it the same group of 10 for everyone to metamod?
When I did a meta-moderation there were some comments I might have liked to say "Unfair - add one" and others I would have liked to say "Unfair - subtract one", but no way to indicate that.
I read slashdot with comments set to "3".
Andrew.
To be truely unbiased, you should not know for whom you are moderating. The only way I can see that happening is that when you are in "moderator mode" all comments come up as anonymous, and all you have to go on is the content.
A possible variant for this, for the score side, is that instead of the moderators using a +1/-1 scoring, is that they do not see the original scores, and instead moderate absolutely. If the moderated score is greater than the current score, a +1 is assigned, if less, a -1 is set. If the scores match, then it remains the same, and the moderator doesn't loose a point.
One problem with the above is that some posts could bounce between scores of say 2-3. Maybe in this case the score would be shown for posts that had been moderated at least 4 times, to allow for the average to settle?
As for "placebo" moderating, I think it's a bad idea for several reasons, moderators feel they are wasting time and waste of server resources, being just two.
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
This brings up an other question: should there be a moderation down that doesn't influence the posters karma?
E.g. if a question is allready answered and someone else does it again it kinda needs to be moderated down as 'redundant' so that we don't have to wade through long comments of the same stuff.
But... the poster didn't do it with bad intentions,- was actually trying to help, and now gets bad karma just because someone else hit 'submit' a second earlier.
Breace.
- Spell checking
- Link checking
- Anti-/. Effect Mirroring
- Basic uptime issues
- Non-retroactive signature changes
I also have to say that this whole Karma concept is starting to concern me. I think that a history should be kept, so that one can see why their karma has been dropped/upped. I am currently sitting at a -2 and am thus unable to meta moderate. I have been aNo thanks. This is a discussion forum, not a game. I'd hate to see people's motives for posting diverge from the noble path towards something like "Ooh, I'm only 5 karma points away from beating Sun Tzu!!!"
:)
Besides... Nobody would ever beat ol' Brucey
It's not the burrito (though that does sound good!); it's doing it for me, too.
/were/ interesting, etc, but didn't rate the numerical value that had been given to them, IMHO. Perhaps a change to the system to ask whether the tags *and* the final numbers were fair. Though if it were done with the "history" visible, then the m^2 would rate each moderation step...
As was suggested later down, having a multi-leveled m^2 interface that would allow a m^2 to view the entire history of what had been done to the comment would be more helpful.
Also, am I the only one concerned that you're being asked to rate the "tag" (Interesting, Funny, etc) and not the score? On my test m^2 page, I saw a few comments that
Or maybe I'm trying to make this too complicated, but I think the way it is now, it has too much ambiguity.
I havn't had a +1 at at least 6 weeks, yet my krama (8) is higher than yours (3), which just got a boost in this very comment. Also I has a Amiga bashing comment got knock down. I guess we will never know what witchery chant does it.
CY
I also proposed something similar to another thread. I doubt that meta-moderation will help too much; the same problem is bound to recur again and you're gonna need M3 moderation (this of course, assumes that /. will keep growing at the same rate ;-).
/.er say 5-10 moderation points per day. Then allow us to vote each post up or down only (and only one vote per post per time).
;-(, but it should work for any number of users, and it will eliminate successive review of reviewers.
Instead, I say get rid of moderation as it stands now: go totally peer-review. Give *every* registered, logged-in,
This will mean that posts might get scores of +/- 50 or 500 or 5000 even, so instead of making thresholds absolute, make them proportional (say, show only posts that in the top 5, 10, 30, etc. percentile of points).
That way your SQL will get uglier (and the server will get slower
Just my $.02
I don't see why the trolls still can't create a bunch accounts so they can negatively affect the meta-moderation. If they create accounts now and ignore them for a couple months, all those accounts will be eligible for meta-moderation since it simply requires the default positive karma and a non-recent account. If they have enough accounts, they can lower the karma of the moderators so the moderators can't moderate any longer.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
The recent discussion and possible code changes seem to have been prompted by a particular story (I know I may be a little late here, but I still think it needs to be said): granted, what happened sucked royally BUT the solution isn't necessarily to start adding more levels of complexity to the /. experience. Trolls and first posters detract from the pleasure of reading /. But posts like many of the ones I've seen in this story add to that pleasure: thoughtful responses to a serious issue. Once in a long while, the trolls come out of the woodwork. Once in a very long while, they spray venom whatever reason in an egregiously inappropriate manner. It happens.
Even though a grieving family was (potentially) involved in the incident in question, incidents like it are few and far between, and I'm not sure I see a pressing need for meta-moderation.
Besides, it won't cut down on the trolls, who post (for the most part) as ACs. I've disagreed a few times with moderators, but more often than not they seemed like ill-informed choices rather than biased or otherwise prompted by bad intentions. [note: I say this as the originator of the "Moderators smoking crack again" thread on a recent poll.]
The current system seems to be sufficient for most days, and it's not like the consequences of heavy flamage are dire enough often enough to make it worth the effort.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
Cool!
I'll take two!
Will in Seattle
Hmm. Interesting statement. But, given actual experiences by many people on other News sources such as InfoWorld, pardon me for being skeptical.
...
But that could just be because I'm
Will in Seattle
When I tried a session of meta-moderation, I had two problems.
As to having the (normal) moderation controls visible always, who would actualy use them? With a 1/50 chance that it actually would effect anything, would *you* bother with them?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
What if moderators had two distinct types of points to give out? They could have let's say 10 minus points which map to troll, flamebait, offtopic and etcetera. The only thing these would be good for is smacking trolls. On the other side of the ledger they could have the 5 usual points for moderating people up. I know it sounds bad to give out more down points but think about it. There are generally fewer +3,+4,+5 posts than there are -1 and below. Also, it's been pointed out that the trolls want to use up moderation points with floods of drivel but on the other hand being flooded with Insightfuls isn't happening. If the same AC or his buddies post flamebait three times in a row all they would be doing is sucking up the excess store of points allocated for them. This also effectively increases the benefit of those 5 up points since all five can go straight to enhancing Slashdot's s/n ration. This might even leave more positive points to moderate up the thoughtful ACs that may not be getting the consideration they deserve.
Even better, rank the top 50 or 100 posters in terms of karma (which was suggested deep in an earlier thread).
George
Comment removed based on user account deletion
to completely cure the context problem for M2, put the M2 check-boxes next to every post w/ moderation. then you are able to M2 the posts that you feel most strongly were moderated fairly or unfairly.
possibly, to prevent excessive M2 on a post that was moderated well, you could take the M2 boxes away from posts that have already had M2....or better yet, randomly give posts M2 boxes. then you have the freedom to M2 moderation you feel strongly about, while preventing excessive M2 on one post.
-james
PLEASE don't do this. Whenever I get moderator points, I spend a helluva lot of time reading stuff at -1 and make a real effort to be fair and thorough. If this suggestion was implemented and I just appeared to have access, but didn't know for sure, I just wouldn't bother at all.
I hate to sound snotty, but I am a technical services manager, have a lot of experience in NT and Linux, have a lot to offer, but I do NOT have time to sit around and waste.
If you occasionally want me to moderate, fine. I will, I will take it very seriously, and I will be honored by the privilege.
But please don't jerk me around. It'll get old fast...
Thanks.
The rating listed with the score is only the last rating to be done to that comment. It may have been rated Interesting-Informative-Overrated in that order and so it would say Overrated, but you would could be asked whether the Informative rating was fair.
I had the same comment twice twice ! If that's not a bug then what is..?
--
It has to work - rfc1925
What about the meta-meta-moderators?
...I say figure out a flat, auto-adjusting moderation system...see my post in the past slashdot headline...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
It would be great if there is a feature that would allow registered users to request a comment for moderation. This would filter out a lot of trolls and spam that get into the discussion now and then.
Essentially anybody would be able to submit one RFM for a comment, and the number of RRMs for a comment would be display with it. Exceptionaly bad comments as well as eceptionally good coments gets lots of RFMs from the readers. This way, moderators can identify the comments that need moderation easily. There could even be a slash filter threshold to display comments with high RFMs to make it easy for the moderators. It would save the moderators time and make the job much easier than just browsing hundreds of messages at -1.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
this could replace or be used in addition to [meta]moderation:
"[un]endorsement" buttons for replies - eliminates "i agree" or "i disagree" replies, the parent post would then list "endorsed by [slashdot handles foo, bar, and baz] and [n] ACs, opposed by [etc. etc.]"
anyone could choose to show or hide endorsements, including moderators.
i wouldn't recommend having posts sortable by endorsements.
... some people won't though.
Aren't people that deliberately troll bound to come across as more defensive, and deem all the moderation made about them as unfair, whereas people who don't tend to troll aren't going to always say that moderation is fair, since they'll be more open to criticism?
The 'ignoring people who always say the moderation is unfair' thing might help, but intelligent trolls who've read that will just say one is fair. Then again, it does say that other techniques might be used to ignore people, and that might well address this very point.
Not allowing ACs to meta-moderate might at least push some to register an account. Hopefully.
Well?
Seriously, I think these changes to the moderation system are a good idea, but this is just a simple reminder to at least try to keep it simple...
"Binaries may die but source code lives forever"
-- Unknown
SkyHawk
Andrew Fremantle
Why not add Karma statistics page. E.g. 'Your Karma is higher than Karma of 75% Slashdotters' or 'Top 10 Slashdotters by Karma' or 'Your Karma Rank'.
This would make people try to increase their Karma leading to the better posts and better signal-to-noise ratio.
to have the moderation controls always visible, but I think if people thought there was a large chance that they weren't really moderators it would lead to random clicking which would just mess everyone else up.
What about this? Everyone can 'moderate' all the time, by moderation I mean rank the comment on a 0-5 basis. When slashdot displays the comments it uses collabrative filtering to sort the comments by preferance level.
This means you see posts that other people similar to you liked. Presumably, you would not get the flame posting that noone liked(unless you were the first few people to read it).
Of course the big problems(that I see) with this solution are:
1. You would have to be logged in(and have ranked other comments) to read ranked comments.
2. Ranking burnout, people probably won't want to rank every post they read, but for this to be
succesful, that what would have to happen.
3. Not a 'real' solution to the DOS attacks.
Sorry if this was already suggested, but I didn't have enough time to look at all the posts in the 3 topics and the poll.
Seems that the rating you're asked to judge doesn't match the actual rating given to the message. For instance, a message may be rated 'Off-Topic' in the header, but the question below it will read 'The rating of 'Insightful' is . . . '
Or it could be the double burrito with extra green chile I inhaled at lunch, and I'm just confused.
well I hope this fixes the AC problem, but I still think we need more moderators just because of the volume of posts that /. gets. As /. gets more an more press we can expect a larger number of newbies to post here. And for /.'s sake I hope this doesn't follow the same way that usenet went.
Vidi, vici, veni. (I saw, I conquered, I came)
Now I will admit that I am not that experienced with slashdot as I've only been reading it for about 6 months. However, I think everyone spazzing out over poor moderation is ridiculous. It seems like people would rather receive a high score on a comment than actually find out whats going on in the nerd world ;)
There should be a link or some excerpt of the original story that would allow me know what story the original comment was in response to... and allow me to go look at the article briefly to refresh my memory. I think that this is necessary for accurate meta-moderation. For example... a comment of "wouldn't a Beowulf cluster of those things be cool" comment really isn't that funny on the 4th story about the Sony Playstation II... but asking for a Beowulf cluster in response to the story about the head transplant, that was wickedly funny.
:)
Also, I noticed that I was asked to meta-moderate the same moderation to the same comment. Even if different moderators made the same moderation, it should roll those multiple identical moderations up, and present it to me as a single request for meta-moderation. Once meta-moderated, it could apply the karma to all the moderators who moderated the comment with the same moderation.
P.S. I understood what I was trying to say when I first wrote this... but reading it really confused me. I hope someone with better reading comprehension skills than I can figure it out.
(Score: -1, Thou Hast Lost an Eighth)
After clicking the "parent" link on a particular comment to see what it is refering to, when I hit the back button on my browser all of the comments for evaluation are different! It seems to grab new comments EVERY time the page is loaded.
Besides these "beta" problems, I think this is a good idea, although it might get annoying after a while to "police the police" so to speak.
Keep up the good work!
Ribo
I wear pants.
I have already proposed this on another thread, but I think it's decent enough to try again, because I think this meta-moderation stuff is getting really complex.
/. users the ability to affect the moderation of a post by a very small amount (perhaps .01 point). In cases where the entire community thinks some post is offensive, that post will get moderated way way down (ie trolls), but in cases where the community is split (various flame wars) the moderating should balance itself out.
Why not try something simpler. Allow
Of course, you'll need various limits, but even if each user only got a total of one moderation point a week, that would still be quite alot.
Ok, just my $.04 - I really like the moderation system as it stands, so let's not change it TOO much.
Can your IM do this?
I think moderators are good at putting down
noisy things like 'Fsck BG/LT'or 'First Post'.
However, I was unable to find a comment that
impressed me too much to deserve 3 or 4. IMHO.
Probably, this is a problem of a non-native
speaker, but I used to think 'Insightful' means
something that sheds a light on something previously unkonwn or obscure.
Rather than just saying 'grey could turn into white if you raise RGB to 255 each'
Again, this is just IMHO, no intent to offend anyone.
BTW, some 'random' articles appeared duplicated, that's why I didn't vote. Is this a problem with my Lynx?
KuroiNeko
I just looked at the MetaModerator page and it had one post twice. I'm pretty sure that's not supposed to happen (would the metamoderation of it count twice?).
-kyle
72656B636148206C72655020726568746F6E41207473754A
what is Karma? (in the slashdot context)
how does one's Karma rise and fall?
After all, I usually login to /. when I get to work, and just refresh it occasionally throughout the day. I only log in once, but I'm here for eight hours.
Personally, I think that having the moderation visible to everyone but only applying when you have points will seriously cut down on moderation; why moderate if you don't know you're having an effect?
According to my Slashdot Karma, I'm coming back as a FLATWORM!
No Longer a Menace to Society.
Alexandria Morrigan born 2/22/01 l. 20.5in wt. 7 lbs. 5 oz.
I just tried the Meta Moderation and it gave me this:
SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please!
SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please!
SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please!
SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please!
SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please!
SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please!
SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please!
SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please!
SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please!
SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please!
10 comments have been meta moderated. Thanks for particpating.
Well Rob's email isnt easy to find on this site, so i just post it.
Ben
Isn't there a possible pitfall in all this? Suppose you have A. Random Slashdotter and B. Random Slashdotter both reading a thread. A reads a post that is slightly off-topic, but finds it interesting. B reads the same post, finds it off-topic and doesn't find it interesting.
You're probably ahead of me here. But I'll spell it out. If A is moderating and B meta-moderating, A loses karma because his (valid) view does not coincide with B's. If B moderates and A meta-moderates, the situation is reversed.
Now I'm not sure this is a desirable situation; anyone else have any thoughts?
Savant
sorry about answering a questions alread answered, for some reason the other answers did not load the first time.
great I can alread see the moderators going after that one
Rescently my acct. disapeared and nhaving had it for a while I'm a little upset. I still might not have qualified for Meta-Moderation but what if I had? food for thought.
Please update the posted Slash code.
Let's do as Alan Cox suggested and try posting patches instead of this endless stream of suggestions for Rob. The best candidates could be picked out and tried for a day or two.
Be insightful. If you can't be insightful, be informative.
If you can't be informative, use my name
Note that in this case, moderation popped your response to the fore, not into the background. A determined troller can only be popped to the fore through reasonable or at least entertaining responses. Seems fair to me - if it doesn't to you, well, Rob was good enough to let you choose your threshold.