Slashdot's Meta Moderation

So its ready for testing on The Meta Moderation Page. Essentially eligible users are presented with 10 comments the moderation done to them. They are then asked to rate the moderation as Fair, or Unfair. Click the link below to read more comments on this addition to our moderation system. There have been a few minor tweaks to the system since I last mentioned it.

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:

1. Simply creating dummy accounts won't work.... the accounts need to be older to be eligible anyway.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Comments

I'll say it if no one else will..

[witten]

Am I the only one who sees all of this moderation stuff as incredibly silly and ultimately futile? Rob's getting himself into a never-ending arms race with the trolls. He adds moderation functionality to slashdot. The trolls fight back. He adds restrictions on who can moderate what, and when. The trolls don't give up. He adds karma points and moderation of moderation. My educated guess, based on slashdot's track record, is that the trolls keep it up.

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.

Microsoft Sucks!

[um... 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.

You're doing this all wrong.

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

Hardcoded separation of levels is only going to lead to confusion and ugly code. Instead, why not do this:

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?

• Spell checking
• Link checking
• Anti-/. Effect Mirroring
• Basic uptime issues
• Non-retroactive signature changes

---
Put Hemos through English 101!
"An armed society is a polite society" -- Robert Heinlein

Re:I must have missed something, but...

[expunged]

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

Karma qualities?

[homunq]

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.

Moderator controls always visible...

[weave]

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.

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.