Slashdot Mirror
Moderation Ideas
First Some Comments on M2 and Karma As a whole it seems to be working pretty well. Some people are really irritated, other people like it, and some people simply are fretting over their karma way to much. Let me just remind everyone that Karma isn't that important. You should expect to see some karma come and go since your activity is subject to both M1 and M2 moderation. As an aside, M2 moderation will not push you out of the -10...10 range (in other words, being a bad moderator will never cause you to get the Comment Penalty). The only thing karma affects is eligibility for moderation participation.
I really wish I didn't feel obligated to display peoples' karma on their user info page. It tends to be a distraction. It's not supposed to be an integer determining anyone's value as a human being, it merely functions as a sort of 'Risk Factor' for moderation related activities. High Karma means you are a low risk, negative karma means you shouldn't be given tons of moderator points and turned loose on the world ;)
"The Problem" As I see it, the major problem on Slashdot is bad people gaining moderator points. The M2 system is one way to counteract that: An unfair moderator is (theoretically) weeded out. They are still free to post and participate as always, but they can no longer moderate if their karma drops below 0.
"The Assumption" I'm an optimist. I assume that there are more good people than bad people in the discussion groups. I assume that the good people will participate, and help weed out the bad ones. I also assume that eventually there will be world peace and harmony amongst all races and creeds and religions and genders. I'm young and an idealist here, gimme a break ;) As a whole, I think this is true: I've Meta Moderated many times, and I rarely find that more than 20% of moderation is bad. Many moderations are questionable, but rarely do I read one and think "What a moron". But they are there, and I want to try to make it happen less.
"The Solution" On an abstract level, the solution is to restrict the amount of power that any single user has within the system. Certain restrictions are in place already: moderators occasionally get 5 points, they and they lose them after 3 days, can't post and moderate the same discussion etc. Each of limits is designed to reduce the risk that any given person can screw with the system.
Each of these limits suck for a good moderator. This is given: the naughty people force rules to exist for the good people. If those 84 year old blue haired ladies who drive on the yellow line at 20MPH with their left turn signal on weren't around, maybe we wouldn't have speed limits either (Note: I also tend to drive 5-10 MPH under the speed limit and regularly forget to turn off my blinker, so I am part of the problem ;)
"The Idea" The idea is inspired by M2 moderations removing of the ability to choose what you M2 moderate. (This is flawed of course because you can reload and get 10 new comments but I'll fix that eventually). It also is a pain because you have no context for many of the comments. By not choosing which comments you can moderate, the risk of doing something inappropriate is greatly reduced: eg, when Mr. Bad Moderator gets 5 points he waits until GNOME article appears and then moderates all the pro-KDE comments down.
The solution is to reduce the probability that Mr. Bad Moderator can moderate a comment that pushes his agenda. This is what the point limits and the time limits are designed to accomplish today, and what this idea is designed to accomplish should we decide to implement them.
So here are the ideas:
- Put 5x (Numbers are Variables here: Don't complain about them!) as many moderators into the system.
- When you have moderator access, only display moderate controls on say 20% of the comments.
- Increase the percentage of moderatable comments based on karma.
It makes sense: negative karma users would never moderate, and more karma would give you more choice in your moderation. It would cripple good moderators because they might see a bad comment but be helpless to moderate it, However since there are 5x more moderators, the odds are someone else will get it. Side benefits include more people given "a shot" at moderating and more people will be allowed to contribute. If the M2 stuff works, the bad moderators will lose karma and no longer be allowed to moderate, and the better moderators will be given a larger percentage of all comments to moderate.
Another Sort of unrelated idea:
- Integrate M2 into the comments display tree: this solves the context problem that the existing metamod page has. Simply randomly select the occasional moderated comment for M2 moderation. Plus its much more "Real Time" and becomes less of a secondary chore. Plus it allows more people to participate since M2 moderation has much less restrictions on it. The downside is that this might be a pretty serious performance hit. I haven't really thought through it yet, but its an interesting thought. Comments on it?
... there's an easy solution to all of this moderation stuff. Don't do it. I never saw the need for any of it in the first place... but then I liked /. before the "I can't be trusted to read things other people haven't approved" crowd took over.
Oh well, all the tinkering helps keep Rob employed, and it is your job now, right?
But don't listen to me, I'm just an AC... don't forget to moderate me out of existence now ya hear?
- Read Slashdot daily for an hour or so
- Post a comment or two (or three) a day
- Have a karma of 37
So, I'm not sure how some people are moderating every other week or so. I've been here for over a year and a half, too, so it's not the "new user" thing.WAY to complex.. I liked /. better when there were not entire articles devoted on how moderation and user ratings go.. To much like TV. Moderation as a whole is a good Idea, but ratings boil down to one persons opinon on another's opinon. Thus saying that one persons opinon is more valued than anothers. Not to mention its WAY to complex.. I dont even know what M2 moderation is.. I never will I dont want to know.
I'm not crazy about M2. My karma has dropped about 20 points entirely as a result of metamoderation. now I realize there are more important things to worry about than karma, but at this rate I'll lose moderation priviledges in a week and start getting a -1 penalty on my comments in two weeks. The result is I'll just not moderate as much as I would otherwise.
I think the idea of giving moderators the right to only moderate a randomly selected sample of comments is a bad one. Moderators should be taking extra time to read lots of comments in a given thread and moderating those that are exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. If we only have the option of moderating 20% of the comments, we'll have to do 5 times as much reading as we otherwise would to do the same quality of moderation. People will *still* moderate on the basis of holy wars, they'll just have to be less picky about which ones they do it on.
Out of curiosity: what is the average of all M2 moderations? I suspect it is strongly negative, which would mean that there is a penalty imposed on those who do a lot of moderating. Since I'm a permanent moderator, that means that I am going to end up with 0 karma in practically no time, which isn't much incentive for me to do any moderation.
So please don't do the 20% moderation thing, and please tone down M2. Either ditch it entirely, require M2'ers to moderate as many up as down, or do something statistical to avoid punishing people for doing moderation.
My only worry is that majority of people here will go into a single minded group think mode. While it is great to have the best non biased moderators, will creating say 5 times more bad ones while hampering the good ones be worth it?
:-)
In any case thank you all for the resource and effort you have put in.
docGui (All I want is roaming cookies
Geez, how many times does Rob need to suggest that you turn these features off if you don't like them before it actually registers with you censorship whiners?
Moderation points / likelyhood SHOULD be based on overall Karma rating. High Karma means you give more to the community, and have more of a right to shape it. Not only that, but you're probrably a little smarter then the cowards.
M2 has actually hampered my moderation activity, since M2'ers have been rating me down a *lot*. If I do much more moderation, I'll end up with negative karma, and that would suck. I don't think my moderation has been particularly unfair, and I have no way of knowing what was moderated.
Allow higher Karma posters to automagically post at at a Score of '2' IF THEY CHOOSE. Shouldn't ALWAYS be 2, only when they think it's needed. The ratio of self-ups should be checked, and possibly taken away if Self Moderating on to many posts..
All of this is already in place. you're obviously not a moderator. High-karma folks (>25) get an optional +1 bonus, and moderators can't moderate on the same article as they post on.
.. the trolling of some pedophile. In the comments on the survey of what kind of milk ppl drink, I ended up reading a couple of this shit. I believe I've encountered more but I'd rather not think about them.
I used some of my moderator points to rate some messages overrated before meta-moderation arrived. My karma dropped from when M2 came in until I stopped doing it and none of those drops had do to any of my own posts being moderated down. I'm concerned that M2 is not doing the job. To paraphrase an old saying "who meta-moderates the meta-moderators?"
Frankly, I'm less inclined to moderate now than I ever was before.
login seems to be broken.
Solution: Use collaborative filtering. Just allow all registered users to rate each comment (it doesn't matter what the range is, but the more gradiation the better). Then, allow user x to view comments that recieve high scores by people who rated other comments similarly to the way user x did. To see this kind of thing in action, visit Moviecritic.
Users could still opt to view comments according to their average score, but my guess is that /. readers would rather read comments that they would likely score a 3 or higher, no matter what anyone else thinks of them.
In other words, /. is a community but groupthink should not be an ideal!!!!
I decided the rating was fair.
I don't know who moderated it, of course, but based on your entire post for that topic, it seemed fair.
I've lost some karma myself from people deciding I posted something offtopic or flamebait, so it's not like you're the first person to feel that way, but we all learn to deal with it.
I mailed Rob a while back to ask about this, after a similar situation happened when I was moderating. Here was his reply:
I should point out that this was a while back, and so it may not be his opinion now.
sorry, i nabbed the idea of segfault but dont you think this is getting a little complicated?
how recursive can this get?
(i can see the need for 3 sql servers and 10 http servers soon...)
I like the idea about making every news article on Slashdot self-referential.
We need more posts about all the various aspects of Slashdot.
And we need to start making only Anonymous Cowards into moderators.
Don't be marking this down for being off topic.
It's not.
I think it's time to begin discussing M3 moderation.
Because it would be cool. Almost the equivalent of a Beowulf cluster of moderators.
Think about that. Is it open source?
M4 moderation is my objective in life. I want to moderate in all things.
Of course that means living a life of moderation.
It only seems boring if you don't think about it long enough.
Eventually when a user has enough Karma, that user should be able to get M5 access.
Think about a Beowulf Cluster of M5 moderators.
It blows me away.
Eventually there will be three Slashdot readers, and they'll be moderating each other up and up and up.
But by then we'll all have Beowulf clusters of machines running the HURD kernel, the NetBSD userland, and Word For Windows 1.0. On Unicycles.
Yes, by all means do away with the wide variety of stories on Slashdot.
It's making it hard for the moderators to be fair.
We will never get to M4 moderation at this rate.
Eliminate all story categories except Allen Cox Linux Kernel stories. Or BSD vs. Linux stories.
Those bring in banner revenue.
No, let's ban non AC posts for two days.
Ban everything.
Put up the Slashdot logo on a static page.
You can also have the word Linux centered on the page if you want.
But no bitmap of Tux.
That would be flamebait.
Forget about it. It's not worth it.
Just make it so Jon Katz is the only person who can post articles or comments.
Period.
Either that or implement M6 moderation so we can have some fun.
"Although nobody likes to believe it about themselves, we probably all agree that there are a lot of other people who are
timid about voicing an unpopular opinion and that there are also many who don't form their opinions independently, but
by looking around to see what everybody else thinks."
Juding by your posts, I think I know what your belifs are hehehehehee.. It's silly to hate.. seriously man..
Maybe we should have another moderation category for "first post". There is a difference between an offtopic post (which might be interesting, but merely unrelated to the topic being discussed), and a first post (which adds no value whatsoever).
Yes. I'm logged in right now, but posting anonymously, just because I thought we were supposed to do that when discussing particular moderation issues.
If that sounds circular, it's because it is! So the rating of comments on slashdot could be based on the rating given by moderators, and by the rating you give to those moderators. And if a moderator X that you like, likes moderator Y, then comments moderated by that moderator (Y) also get boosted for you.
Of course the further you go, the less influence you get. Say you have a factor of 0.9, a maximum rating of 5, then when 5 * 0.9^n This system clearly is an overload for slashdot.
Or Isn't it?
This leads me to a question: why isn't the slashdot comment system simply based on NNTP? Of course, to get the moderation stuff, you would have to add non-standard headers (X-SLASHDOT-MOD: Rob=(5; Insighful), etc), but it would:
So, why no NNTP?
btw, if anyone would moderate this up, I'd really apreaciate it
May I just mention that, as a moderator, I find it annoying when people try to talk about moderation in their posts. I'm referring to things like "I dare you to moderate this post (up|down)," "This is going to be moderated down anyway," "I'm going to be labeled as flamebait because nobody likes me," and "I'm replying to a good post. Moderate it up."
The moderators should be choosing their changes based on the quality of the post, and trying to influence them (ideally) shouldn't affect anything. Such comments are generally off-topic for the article, too. Maybe it's just me, but I think that the moderators should be capable of picking out what's good and what's not all by themselves. (And if they're not so good, M2 will keep them from being moderators for too long.)
On the other hand, this may unfairly penalize someone who makes a habit of looking for comments that have been unfairly moderated down so he can moderate them back up. Furthermore, I can think of situations in which someone might moderate a post in the opposite direction of someone else without necessarily considering his moderation unfair, e.g. if someone made a somewhat obscure joke and one of the moderators just didn't get it.
By putting more moderators or more points in the mix then the base rating of all posts will rise as the perls reach a score of 5 quicker and people search out less deserving posts to use their points on.*
So what do you do then? Raise the maximum level of scores from 5 to 10?
The problems are endless and will increase exponentially as Rob gets closer to his ideal /.
Marty Damn I wish I could remember my password!
* assuming people feel the need to not let their precious moderator points go to waste!
Ok,
/. so that they can make it in past the 50 comment limit. Firewalls and caches don't help either. Nor does the fact that it takes longer to write a well researched comment than a stupid one.
so I like reading comments, but after the first x odd, I get bored. So then I cull the boring comments by upping the threshold to 3 or 4. Fine.
The problem is that moderators feel this way too. Any comment past the (say) first 50 is effectively lost.
Unfortunately, the very people who have insightful comments are likely to also have better things to do all day than reloading
I'm not proposing any fix, just pointing out a percieved problem.
I guess some k-r4d AC posted his five -1 articles from the POP I dialed into. Way to punish me for some 'l33t kiddie long since moved on to the next POP Rob.
Just a question here (and not meant to be flamebait) but do you think that you're continuously losing karma because your moderation practices are at fault?
It's possible, although I don't think so. (Obviously, I'm biased) I would say that at least half of the moderations I've done should be obvious (marking down obvious trolls and marking up obvious gems.) Perhaps I've been a little too aggressive, but I don't think it's been that bad.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind, though. First, I have no way of finding out which moderations got me marked down. So if M2 is simply knocking me down for doing a crappy job, I have no way of going back and changing my ways. Secondly, I think the volume is excessive in any case. Even if I've been doing on balance a crappy job (say 60% unfair and 40% fair), losing 20 points in a week is ridiculous. I may be a special case since I get to moderate a lot more than most people, but it's still excessive. If I had to guess, I'd say I've doled out about 20 moderation points in the last couple of weeks, so that would mean that every moderation a moderator does (if they moderate similarly to me) they will lose one karma point.
I also have talked to at least one other user who had a similar problem, so it's possible we are flukes, but it would be interesting to find out whether the average M2 is up or down, and how much the average moderator's karma has changed (perhaps karma/total moderation point doled out)
>Turn it off. Go to your user preferences and click 'Unwilling' and you won't be
>asked to moderate. Click 'No Scores' and you won't see scores again. Change
>your threshold to -1 and forget that they even exist.
Wouldn't it be easier for non-registered ACs if the defaults were set up this way? That way, if a troll doesn't see his post, then he won't be tempted to continue, unless he actually knows how to change the user preferences. If someone wants to read another's trolling, let them modify their user preferences.
Please moderate this post down for being off topic.
Oh wait! This discussion is about moderation.
Mark it up then.
In any case, use up those moderation points, because it makes you feel powerful.
I moderated once ages ago before I quit using Linux and decided it was more fun to just cause trouble on Slashdot by adding less-than-dogmatic posts. I've thrown away three nicks so far out of boredom with the whole concept of meritocracy.
Last week one of my AC posts got moderated up to 3, and I was trying to make fun of Linux with it (people thought it was funny... oh well) The post about putting black electric tape over your USB ports to make them Linux compatible.
I guess I'm not a very good troll.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Just one thing I've noticed, not saying it is good or bad, is that there is a lot more moderation being done now. The weeks before all these new moderating features took form, setting threshold to level 2 gave me a few selected good articles. Now at level 2 often there are a lot of articles which most of are good. Now I've set threshold to level 3. Great to see there is more work on the moderation field taking place. Lot of progress, this is really going to be a big sucess. Good job Rob!!!
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
I emailed Rob about this, and he said that the top and bottom 20% of readers are thrown out (leaving the middle 60%). The theory here is that the most infrequent 20% of the readers don't really read enough to be able to make informed judgements. Throwing out the top 20% is intended to stop people in that category from writing reload scripts to get themselves into a "reads slashdot more often" category. It's probably still possible to cheat the system somehow, but it makes it more difficult I suppose.
I dislike it as well, as i've been here for over a year and have high karma, but have never, not even once, been given moderator access, since I read slashdot two to three times a day and click the "read more" on nearly all the stories.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Over the last few weeks, watching how the moderation system has worked (including how it's affected my own comments), I have to wonder : How is the moderation value supposed to be interpreted?
What I mean is, if a comment gets a 5 rating, should it be interpreted as being an exceptional comment, or merely a comment 5 people thought was a little better than the usual fare? Right now it seems like the second, but in my view it should be the first.
After all, look at the disproportionate number of comments that manage to get a 5 rating because they're 'Funny'. Sure, they may be amusing, but are they really the best that Slashdot has to offer?
The problem, as I see it, is that we are asked to moderate without knowing the current rating of a comment -- it takes a while to read through and moderate all comments to some articles, by which time the values the comments had when you loaded the page are no longer valid. So if you decide to moderate up some minorly amusing AC's comment as 'Funny', it suddenly ends up a 5, because 4 other people thought the same thing -- even though you might have thought it deserved no better than a 1 to 2.
There's a nice solution to this problem, but it would be a bit more complicated than the current method. A similar problem exists in stock markets -- by the time a buy order you've submitted gets taken care of, the price of a stock could have moved way past what you wanted to spend. So along with your buy, you specify a price range -- if the stock is out of that range when the buy gets cleared, you're not left holding some overpriced stock.
Anyway, here's the idea. Instead of moderating up or down by points, you should be able to specify exactly what rating you think a message should have. Your moderation would count as a vote in favor of any rating up to the one you specify -- past that, it doesn't count.
Thus, if you think a comment deserves a rating of 2, but not better, you could moderate it to 2. If 10 other people do the same thing, the comment would still have a rating of 2 -- as opposed to the current situation, where it would have shot up to 5.
(Mathematically, you pick the highest rating such that the number of votes for that rating exceeds the rating. To get a rating of 1, you just need 1 person to vote in favor of a 1 or better. To get a 2, you need 2 people to vote it a 2 or better. Etc.)
Any thoughts?
JRaven
I think that the current system of assigning moderator points does a good job of distributing the work of moderating. The main idea for a change that I can think of would be to assign moderation points separately for each story (something like, there have been 10 comments, the next eligible moderator to enter the comments section gets a point). I think that this would be a better way of preventing the possible problem of not having any moderators read the comments for an article, but it might not be as good as the current system in avoiding moderator bias.
At least as long as they don't get obnoxious about their high karma. And even that would probably be mostly self-correcting.
In image processing speak what I'm about to explain is basically "alpha trimmed mean".
1. The moderators score an article on a scale of -1 to 5 (or what ever).
2. Slashdot takes the list of scores for an article and sorts them.
3. Slashdot discards the top and bottom 20% (or whatever, aka 'alpha') of the scores from the sorted list. (This is the trimming bit).
4. Slashdot them averages the remaining list of scores and uses the result as the actual score for the article. (statistical mean bit here).
Problem solved. Articles get moderated. Bad moderators have no effect. No meta-moderation is needed. No race conditions either. A few more moderators and moderator points would need to be handed around.
As a bonus, a background process can hunt for bad moderators and eliminate them. It would just have to find moderators that constantly score articles way different from thier peers. (Insert statistically analysis here).
Whatdoyathink?
--
Simon
And what of the lurkers? Just because a person doesn't post doesn't mean they wouldn't make a good moderator.
Actually Rob, how many users are there who haven't posted, but still read regularily?
Well, I've made a grand total of about 8 posts in the last year, and I've gotten moderator status t wice. (Karma is 6, I guess only making useful posts helps).
Well, as long as I'm posting, I might as well make my own observations.
Just a few thoughts. Maybe we should hand out positive karma points for well formatted HTML (Check out my
s!).
-Dave, going back to sleep
Ugh. And let me say that I'd love the ability to fix that angle-P tag that got broken somehow. -dbt
When I am meta moderating, the intuitive thing to do is to glance at the comment, read the first line, and then check fair if the comment has been moderated up for 'interesting' or 'informative'. Sometimes when large amounts of text is being read on subjects that people aren't particularly interestd in, they try to skim. I don't curretly have an answer to this problem. I'm also not too sure this is a bad thing, as everything I've marked as one of the two I's has actually BEEN interesting when I read down further. My intuitions were right.
Is the voting question comments included in meta moderation? I have yet to see one.
The idea of the different reasons for marking up and marking down is interesting. Articles are posted for different reasons. For example, when Stanley Kubrick died, there may have been a funny comment posted about him, and it may have been moderated up for such, but a funny comment is not necessarily the thing people would want to see moderated up to 5. However, it may deserve a 5.
One solution to this problem would be drop down boxes next to all the moderation types for the poster of the news article. The poster would select a priority from 1 to the number of moderation reasons. When the user reads the messages, a '3' that is informative would be read before a '3' that is funny.
This could be prioritized at the user level, but I think it would be more appropriate for the article poster to decide which the priorities should be.
When The Autism Article's comments were read by me, I was dismayed to find a humour post being moderated to the top of the posts, when this was a potentially sensitive and touching issue. (Although there is a place for humour, even there.)
I think that the tweaks done to the moderation system are GREAT!
I personally have become much more sensitive to that urge I get to NOT post a quick smartass comment, because I want my karma to go up. I'm specifically being more careful and thoughtful about what I post. I think a lot of other people are too, and you can see that in the way the quality of comments has improved in the past few days (and the volume generally declined).
I don't think this is the end-all, eventually, someone's going to figure out how to abuse this new system, but for now, it's working great.
"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.
This is brought up relatively frequently, but the problems still stand:
How do you plan on banning these people? Just ban the user account?
What about AC's? Ban them by IP? How will you deal with dynamic IP addresses, HTTP proxies and IP masquerading/NAT?
I noticed that as well.. I wrote it off as being related to the 'server farm' that was supposed to be in operation..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Here's what my feedback would end up being:
;-P
1) MetaModeration is good. Once a day, 10 random comments.
2) Moderation points / likelyhood SHOULD be based on overall Karma rating. High Karma means you give more to the community, and have more of a right to shape it. Not only that, but you're probrably a little smarter then the cowards..
3) Allow higher Karma posters to automagically post at at a Score of '2' IF THEY CHOOSE. Shouldn't ALWAYS be 2, only when they think it's needed. The ratio of self-ups should be checked, and possibly taken away if Self Moderating on to many posts..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
THIS is a VERY good idea, HOWEVER, that means that a moderator has to go in with the intent of Moderating. Personally, when I DO get points, I pick and choose as I'm reading if to moderate of not. If I see an article I KNOW I'm going to comment on, I KNOW I'm not going to moderate, but it's seldon the other way around..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
After thinking about it, I agree with you. You can always switch that little drop down that tells you how to order them, without displaying overall scores and moderation points.. Actually, I REALLY like that idea..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Of course, I don't really know because I've never gotten moderator points. (Of course, I also read WAY too much /.)
Just a thought or two.
--
Erskin
geek.
The reason I (and probably most of us) want to see the karma on our user pages is that we're curious little buggers.
If you're scared folks will give it too much meaning and/or rate others with tit, then why not only show people their own.
--
Erskin
geek.
--
Erskin
geek.
What about doing the karma calculation slightly differently: take the raw score and then divide by the number of posts that person has made recently? (It can of course be scaled appropriately). The point being that if someone posts a thousand items each of which keeps a score of 1, maybe with four that get moderated +1, he wouls have a score of 4 which would be the same as someone who posts only a couple of penetrating comments that are each moderated +2. However, IMHO the person whose posts are consistently good, albeit lower in quantity, ought to get a higher karma score.
axolotl
If you read in nested mode, which is nice over a fast link, but sucks on a slow one, you will reload much less often and thus be out of the top 20%.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I want to be able to edit posts. I think the complete original text should remain, or else there should be an option to see the original post.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
There's another factor in the apparently low moderation of this topic.
You can either post *or* moderate.
Now those who are moderators obviously have first-hand knowledge of the system as it is, and might just have something to say about it. If they feel it is worth saying, they obviously feel it is worth reading, so they choose to post rather than moderate. Hence we have an artificially large number of moderators choosing not to moderate on this topic.
Certainly some moderators will have chosen to post anonymously (originally, you were supposed to), and their comments may have been bumped up from 0 to 1. Without knowing how many comments started at 0 and how many started at 1, it's really impossible to accurately gauge how many comments have been moderated up. But it certainly looks to me as if the number of positive moderations *far* outweighs the number of negative.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Err... sort of... I frankly DONT like the idea of making only SOME comments moderatable. The system works well enough now, and will be better when M2 is a part of the article, but restricting moderators further seems unneccesary. Most of us are big kids now and know what and how to moderate, and the system can fix any evils done by the BAD PEOPLE, by way of the GOOD PEOPLE and their moderation points. To make some comments un-moderatable would hurt the GOOD PEOPLE exactly as much as the BAD PEOPLE, and in the long run won't really do anything.
---
The misuse of "troll" on slashdot has been bothering me too. I'd even go so far as to say that a really good troll ought to get a positive score. Maybe we need "troll (funny)" and "troll (lame)" ratings, the former being a positive. Of course, marking a good troll as a troll defeats the purpose.
It really started to bother me when I moderated a particularly insulting post (no trolling discernible, just name calling) as flamebait, and it came back as a troll since someone else moderated it that way. If a non-troll that I do still think deserves a negative score were to come up in meta-moderation, I would have to think hard about whether to rate it unfair or not.
Maybe I'll just head on back over to alt.religion.kibology one of these days and see how they're doing. That's where you'll find the true trollers, the master baiters as it were.
When I read comments, it does not matter to me so much what the score of a comment is as how it compares to other comments. That is, I sort by score because I know that generally speaking the items which score 5 are going to be better than the ones which score -1 because most slashdot readers are mostly in agreement with me about what is a good comment. The absolute values are meaningless, only the relative score matters.
The other problem is that comments posted as little as an hour after the story first hits are often not moderated up. The moderators have gone on to other stories. Sometimes these comments are the best: they are posted by people who have something to do all day besides read
I think that many of the moderation problems could be fixed by:
That way, if I thought that a given comment was crucially important and it was posted late in the game, I could moderate it up to where people sorting by scores would still see it.
The downside is that there is a higher potential for abuse. However, I think that other moderators would quickly moderate down a story that was too highly rated -- because they could without wasting all their points. In other words, let a bad moderator try to abuse it. It doesn't matter because he will be immediately brought down by the other moderators.
In short, this is a change in philsosophy: instead of trying to limit the power of the individual moderator, give lots of power and trust in averages to make it work.
Your best defense against bad moderation is the random selection of moderators just as you currently have it. Remember, a bad moderator is a temporary problem.
My Opinion
-- Slashdot sucks.
One, the entire moderstion system, including documentation, needs to be documented on the site. Looking through all of the posts here I'm astounded at how many people don't seem to understand the system, and therefore are requesting features which already exist. I think that if the whole system were very thoroughly documented, these debates about how best to implement a moderation system would st least slow down if not stop, because there would be one page where people could go, read up on the system, and understand it.
Second, there are complaints of a "lack of moderation." There's a reason for that, but increasing the number of moderators is not going to help. The problem lies in the fact that you can't post in a thread you've moderated, and vice versa. People who post their insignts to a thread lose the ability to moderate. People who consider moderating back down because they might want to post something. I remember the debates about the idea of "moderate XOR post" before it was implemented, and I agreed with it at the time, but I see now that it just isn't working.
At least in that aspect, we should go back to the idea that you can moderate and post in the same thread, but you cannot moderate your own posts. At least for people with karma over, say, 15 (enough to show a history of good, responsible posting) this would end that problem.
Third: It's already required for a person to send in an e-mail address when registering. Perhaps it would be best if only one account were allowed per e-mail address. Couple this with the idea posted earlier in this thread that a person whose post gets moderated to Flamebait or Troll (this would have to be changed to require a consensus of three moderators in order to change a person's post to Troll status) cannot post anything more until the next day. The result would help to cut down on trolling, since a person cannot simply create another account and continue on. Since there's already a "Post Anonymously" checkbox there isn't a need for more than one account per person anyway. E-mail addresses can't be faked, since the password is sent to the e-mail address given when a person registers (so an account with a faked address is useless since you can't log on).
Finally, the thing about keeping Karma on a person's User Info page: people like to monitor how they're doing. I myself was quite surprised when I looked at my own score. It's a nice thing to see for those of us with high Karma, and if Karma starts to drop it's a good wake-up call. For those with low Karma, there's something to be said for watching one's progress as one claws one's way out of that trap. It's for the best that people can see what their Karma score is; please don't change it.
The quality of moderation is steadily going down hill. The goal of moderation was supposed to be to promote quality, not promote agendas. Sadly more agenda promotion than content promotion has been happening. Over the past short while I've been watching what gets moderated up and what gets moderated down. Well written posts that are go along with popular opinion are being moderated up. Anything that doesn't go along with the popular opinion is either getting no net-moderation or is being moderated downards.
Moderators are letting their personal opinions get in the way of the actual goal of moderation. Meta-moderation excaberates this since the few upward moderations that unpopular views get are being pinged. When the number of people that use moderation as a bludgeon dwarf the number of people that actually moderate quality the threads become very one sided.
Also, how does Karma work (or where can I find that info)? I noticed that my Karma was reduced very abruptly (by 20 some points) and would like to understand why.
The stupid moderations are easy to metamoderate.
But it is difficult for me if I get a comment presented for metamoderation that got an interesting or insightful mod and I can't find it exciting at all.
Such happened with an Amiga posting and a Linux posting this morning. In both cases I decided not to change anything, despite thinking that the posts were just normal level and tried very hard to see the postings not from my personal interests but more how Amiga or Linux users might see them. But I am not sure if this is the right thing.
* clueless * partisan * is this guy for real? * wacko * please go away
No, it doesn't make sense. I hate this idea. When I moderate, it tends to take up a lot of time, browsing at -1, reading all the comments to recognize duplicates, and reading all the replies (I read FLAT not threaded) to catch the gems. But I only do this for news that interests me because I just have a limited amount of time available. With only 20% or so of news stories available, chances are I'd never use my points at all. In the three days given to use your points right now, I usually just get my points used before they expire.
I'm not sure that I completely agree with you, although I certainly empathize. You would still be able to post and moderate as you see fit; you just wouldn't see the moderation that others had done.
Also, the slight inconvenience that it would put on moderators could help to drive home the concept that moderation isn't meant to be a privilege, it's a duty to the community. You're not supposed to be doing it to improve your own standing, you're supposed to do it to make this a nicer place. Adding just a hair of unpleasantness to the role might help people remember that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It seems like ratings are getting very bi-polar around here. Posts that are a little bit better-than-average are spiking out at +5, while ones that are just slightly sub-par are getting -1's. Why? Because moderators are interested in showing how much they agree with the other moderators, in hopes of increasing their karma.
I gave this some thought yesterday while I was mowing my lawn, and I came up with:
That's just my dollar/50. BTW, I've been a moderator a few times recently, so I'm not taking potshots at a different group of people.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Please note that you can turn everything OFF! If you don't like moderation or scores or karma, TURN THEM OFF! You won't even know they're there and it will be just like Slashdot was before all the moderation, at least for you based on your preferences.
Admittedly, 5 moderator points/day helps limit the damage that bad moderators can cause. However, it also limits the benefit that good moderators can bring. I don't think it fundamentally changes anything. It is sort of like a minimizing lens; the overall ratio is the same, but the effect is reduced.
I don't remember why the moderator point limit was implemented. It's possible it may have been done in reaction to abuse that was not being corrected. If that's the case, disregard this idea:
I think what will happen is that yes, there will be some abuse, but that good moderators will correct that abuse, and that the meta-moderation will (after awhile) shut down the abusers.
If that's no good, your idea of 'a chance' to moderate any given comment is a possibility -- I'm thinking a 5% chance per positive karma point. That way, 20 karma means you can moderate any post. Most likely, anyone who has 20 karma is going to have a clue.
I have meta-moderated a few times, and I don't think I have chosen 'unfair' once. In some cases I probably would have chosen differently, but I have not seen ANY examples of grievous boneheadedness. (I don't mark down moderators for making different choices than I would, as long as their choice seems at least faintly reasonable.)
It also seems like the slant on pro-open-source and pro-Linux tends to artificially inflate some posts. I have written posts pointing out limitations of open source (most recently in regard to open docs), and also have written ones in favor of it where I think it really helps. Even though (in my opinion), the open-docs-won't-happen argument was better thought out than most of what I've written, it got no positive moderation at all. Other posts I have put up have gotten a lot of positive moderation, even though they weren't nearly as good, IMO. Maybe I'm too close to the problem, but personally I thought the negative-slant article should have scored higher.
Strikes me as a good idea to remind moderators to be aware of their own biases. I try to correct for mine when I'm moderating. I'm not sure how well I succeed, mind you, but I do try.
right, 10 minutes before, i didn't had this story about moderation and Your Rights Online, but i had the underwater telescope
--
http://www.beroute.tzo.com
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
I know what you mean. I have never been given an oportunity to moderate, and I've been here a long time as well.
What I'd like to know, though, is why I have bad karma. In the past year, I've posted about 4 times recently and 10 or so in a religious debate last spring. My recent coments are all score 1, so I must have been moderated down in the religous debate, which ticks me off a little, because I don't believe I said anything inappropriate. I guess a moderator didn't like what I was saying, which sounds like a reason for the M2 system, but its a little to late to help me.
Although nobody likes to believe it about themselves, we probably all agree that there are a lot of other people who are timid about voicing an unpopular opinion and that there are also many who don't form their opinions independently, but by looking around to see what everybody else thinks.
I think the Karma system probably strengthens such tendencies.
If previous moderation were obscured from moderators, I think we'd get better, more honest, moderation. Perhaps it would be a good idea to obscure the other potential prejudice builder as well: the poster's identity, including whether or not he/she is an AC.
What do you think?
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Let's say that a post that you consider to be worth 3 is at x(maby you should know x maby not). So you select 3 from a menu and then select moderate. The method for getting the rating can be one of many. Maby users should even have a choise of diffirent rating systems. And moderators whould then choose: moderate towards this acording to that rating system. Then again maby that whould just be _too_ much.
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
Yeah. I hate to be elitist about this, but it seems pretty reasonable. I might also suggest that humor points not be counted for karma purposes- while I enjoy reading funny posts, the authors of said posts (which are much more likely than a good, serious post to get a 5) really shouldn't get so much karma credit for it.
Keep up the good work, Rob- someday, people will study your code to see how to make internet conversations that work for large numbers of people. I do believe that this is the first time anyone has seriously tried to make anything like this work- and the quasi-experimentation that you have done will be a source for the next group that tries to apply this technique to more serious fields of endeavour.
IAAL,BIANLY
I like the idea of giving moderators access to only some randomly-selected subset of comments (an appropriate value of "20%"). As I pointed out the other day, moderation tends to be unfairly concentrated on the earlier comments, since these are the ones that more moderators see, and since, even when a moderator reads an old story, he will probably want to use his precious points on a "live" story, rather than "waste" them on something that not as many people will see. The problem is that stories go by, and comments appear, so quickly. I suspect that people actually keep reading stories somewhat longer, after the commenting has died down, so it is actually desirable to have moderation happen symmetrically, aside from the issue of fairness to people who take more time and post thoughtful comments.
I had also thought of assigning moderator access on a story-by-story basis, but I think this is better, since it could also take timing into account, making sure that all parts of a discussion get similar coverage, as well as reducing the possibility of abuse.
Also, "Put 5x
As for "Increase the percentage of moderatable comments based on karma", you could just as well grant more points, or grant points more often, based on high karma. The point is that now karma would affect a moderator's "power" in more than an all-or-nothing way, which is a qualitative difference. I guess having it affect the percentage is the lowest-impact way of doing this, since it only give the moderator more choices. This change could be kind of controversial, but I think it's fine. In fact, I think giving more points would make more sense than giving more choices, since karma is (theoretically, at least) a predictor for making good moderation judgements, and not so much for deciding which comments to moderate. There is still no way for moderators to collaborate, meaning that that decision should be centralized.
Finally, I kind of like M2 the way it is, on a separate page. The fact that it's an added chore seems like a good selector, in that only dedicated people will do it. Also, it has a nice side effect of making me read some comments that I had otherwise missed. I was even thinking that ordinary moderation should be pulled out onto a separate page, to make it a bit more of a chore. Maybe the front page could have an additional link "Moderate" next to "Read More...", which would take you to a differently-formatted version of the page, optimized for moderation: nested view, names, sigs, and current scores stripped, and maybe even restricted to show only the comments for which moderatability has been assigned, with their context.
By the way (yeah, I know I said "finally" last paragraph), here's a suggestion for the problem of context in M2 pages, as well as for my idea above: show a comment's ancestors, but no siblings. I know replies sometimes include sideways references, but most of the flow should be recoverable by just following the chain straight up.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
All these weird and complicated (but, I have to add, pretty good and well tought-out) rules and systems seem to rely on a large database of past events, like who moderated what and the like. I'm just curious how big the whole DB is now, how fast it grows (I assume the growth speed accelerates as more and more moderation aspects depend on history -> more info is needed to be stored), and how long the information gets stored. I mean, if I were to comment on "GNOME 0.1 released" or something like that, were I also able to moderate it (and other messages in the thread) just as I can moderate posts made today?
Guikachu: Resource editor for PalmOS developers
All these weird and complicated (but, I have to add, pretty good and well tought-out) rules and systems seem to rely on a large database of past events, like who moderated what and the like. I'm just curious how big the whole DB is now, how fast it grows (I assume the growth speed accelerates as more and more moderation aspects depend on history, more info is needed to be stored), and how long the information gets stored. I mean, if I were to comment on "GNOME 0.1 released" or something like that, were I also able to moderate it (and other messages in the thread) just as I can moderate posts made today?
Guikachu: Resource editor for PalmOS developers
All these weird and complicated (but, I have to add, pretty good and well tought-out) rules and systems seem to rely on a large database of past events, like who moderated what and the like. I'm just curious how big the whole DB is now, how fast it grows (I assume the growth speed accelerates as more and more moderation aspects depend on history -> more info is needed to be stored), and how long the information gets stored. I mean, if I were to comment on "GNOME 0.1 released" or something like that, were I also able to moderate it (and other messages in the thread) just as I can moderate posts made today?
Guikachu: Resource editor for PalmOS developers
I think there is a certain confusion in the idea of 'karma'. Is it there to decide who would make a good moderator, or does it decide whose posts should get +1 or -1 bonuses? The two are not necessarially related.
At the moment, karma just seems to be a 'nice person-ometer' which doesn't do either job properly. For example, you could sit around and meta-moderate each day, getting a small karma bonus, and then after a few weeks, all your comments would be posted at Score: 2. But meta-moderating has nothing to do with your ability to post meaningful comments! Similarly, if somebody M2s a moderation you have made, and says it was 'unfair', you lose karma not just for moderation but also for comment posting. Maybe you are just a good poster, but a bad moderator.
To continue an earlier analogy, if you award kills for destroying asteroids, then combat ratings no longer accurately reflect fighting ability.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
the problem with this idea is that it penalizes the people who read /. with below average frequency. like, if the system gives moderator points to someone at 1am, but they dont read /. until their lunch break, they may never get their chance.
its true that if the % system is used, someone with moderator points may not be able to moderate an article they feel deserves it (good or bad), but like rob said, most likely someone will come along and get it eventually.
regarding the side question(s): i dont see why m2 moderation would not be instantaneous, but then i only know what i read in faqs. see the moderation faq for more info about moderation and m2.
--siva
Keyboard not found.
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All perfectly good idea IMHO. It's strange to note that the majority of people against moderation are AC's. I'm not trying to point fingers here.. it's just a notable fact. As for the little old ladies, they drive me crazy! Get 'em off the road I say! ;)
All perfectly good ideas IMHO. It's strange to note that the majority of people against moderation are AC's. I'm not trying to point fingers here.. it's just an observable fact. As for the little old ladies, they drive me crazy! Get 'em off the road I say! ;)
Well you are in luck because I have even been thinking of a scalable implementation of the rating network stuff. I'll try to layout some database tables for you but please excuse me if my explanation isn't perfectly clear.
One table holds all of the comments. The table has the userid of the author, the comment id of the comment, a score, and the total number of votes cast.
Another table has all of the authors with a userid, a score, and the total number of votes cast for that author.
A third table holds the individual scores for each author by each user. The worst case for this table is that it grows to n^2 where n is all of the users on slashdot. In practice it will not grow to n^2 because not everyone will vote for every author.
A fourth table holds all of the individual votes for an article. Assuming there are n readers and p articles, the potential size of this table is p*n. That shouldn't be too bad as most people don't post articles and only some people will vote for every article.
There are two things which pin the whole system together. For purposes of calculating an article's score, the user's own votes get a weight of 10 out of 10. The user can specify the weight of the community vote on a scale from 0 to 10. So as you count the score for the article, you multiply your own vote for that author by 10. Other authors that you have previously ranked get weighted depending on how you ranked them, and the rest of everybody gets the wieght that you grant to the public at large. Any article that can't be assigned a personal score just gets the community score. Every article always has at least one vote: when the author posts the comment is automatically scored to some constant, perhaps 10/10.
Anyway as you can see I've been modelling this for some time. With the right indexing scheme and efficient SQL, this should scale really well. It would be a bigger load over time, but over time computing power is increasing so you come out even.
Regards,
jwb
What is your opinion on this subject if you take it outside of the context of HTML delivered over HTTP? You say that moderation is a chore, and I completely agree! But the reason I think moderation is a chore is because 1) all of those select boxes make the page load and render slowly 2) When I wont to moderate I have to wait for the page to reload.
I believe that both of these problems would go away with the use of a custom desktop client. Imagine that you are sitting in front of your computer using KSlashClient. To vote on an article, all you have to do is click on a gradient strip. Full left is 0, full right is 10. When you click, your vote is transmitted to the discussion server adn registered, but you don't have to wait for anything. The vote is delivered asyncronously while you continue to read (and rate) the rest of the comments. Suddenly moderation isn't a chore any more.
Now, let's take your pathological case. Little Johnny has the day off from 3rd grade and is rating all of the flames 10 out of 10. Nobody else is around so them flames are the highest ranked articles in the discussion.
When all of the hard-working rational adults logon to read slashdot, they immediately see "Gnome SUCKS KDE RULES!!!!! (Score 10)" and they think "WTF?" So they click on the zero end of their voting scale and read on. I believe that there are a lot more good, thinking people on slashdot then there are vapid flamers, so the result would be an immediate and decisive downgrading of the flames to the bottom of the list.
As a benefit, since Johnny's personal score is 0.2 and the rational adults all have 6-10, Johnny's votes are easily overpowered.
What do you think?
-jwb
Actually, wild fluctuations are what happens now! A moderator moderates an article up to 5, then it goes back down to three, then up to four, down again, until the moderators get bored.
In my system, the scores are *much* more stable. For example, suppose 1000 people have given an article an average score of 5/10. Now another user comes along and gives the article a ranking of 10/10. What is the article's score? Still 5/10.
One of the best parts of this system is it's stability.
-jwb
Rob,
Please accept my humble criticism of slashdot's comment system. I have been thinking about this system a lot lately and designing a replacement for it. I have no delusions of replacing slashdot: slashdot is a community that would be hard to duplicate. The only problem I have with slashdot is the comment mechanism, and I will present those problems and some possible solutions.
Problem: Moderation race conditions. Joe and Jane are both moderators reading a slashdot article. They both see a comment that they think is interesting, but not incredible. They both choose to spend one moderator point to raise the article to "Score: 2 (interesting)". They continue to read the comments and click the "moderate" button a few minutes later. Now the article is rated 3, but neither of them thought it was worthy of 3. Moderation has failed for both of them. One of them could choose to moderate it back down to 2, but then the article would be rated "Score: 2 (overrated)", which does not reflect their true opinion of the article.
Solution: Instead of incremental ratings (+1, -1), allow the moderator to score the article on a range, say from 0 to 5. Then if two moderators assign a score of 2, the article's score is 2, not 3.
Problem: Only a few people have a few moderation points at once. This leads to several worst-case failures. One of them is that no moderators will read a given article, and the comments in that article will be clustered around 0 and 1, making the "Show highest scores first" setting much less useful.
Solution: Allow all readers to be moderators all of the time. There will never be a deficiency in the number of moderators with this method. The number of people scoring articles will be directly proportional to the number of people reading that article. When 100% of the participants can cast votes, there is no outlying possibility if lack of moderation.
Problem: The community ranking does not allow for individual preferences. The individual may have a strong opinion for or against a certain author, but the score given by the moderators is unlikely to reflect his preference.
Solution: Use a network of preferences to tailor the rankings that a user sees and to delegate the ranking of articles.
I believe that the ideal system would allow the user to cast a vote on every comment posted. The comment display system would use the user's voting history to score and sort the comments on every new article. Take an example:
Joe, John, Jack, Jerry, Jane, and Jennifer are all users. In the past, Joe has given articles by Jack an average rating of 4.2 (out of 5), and has given John an average ranking of 3.8. Joe has consistently rated Jerry at 0. Joe, John, and Jerry all have overall ratings (the average rating given by all the system's users) of 2.
In a new article, Jane, who has never posted a comment before, posts an unusually insightful comment. John, Jack, and Jerry all post their usual stuff. All three of them rate Jane's article at 5, but the overall community ranking for Jane is only 3. When Joe reads the comments for the article, the article display system will give John and Jacks votes more weight than the community vote, because Joe has rated those two authors highly. The system will completely ignore Jerry's votes because Joe doesn't think much of him.
The result is that Jane's article (along with John's and Jack's) are listed at the top of the page, instead of lost in the middle of the pack. Other users with completely different preferences will get completely different displays. When there are no personal votes for an author or article, the community ranking can be used to score the article.
Whew, I hope that example was clear. It really isn't very complex or even original. It is just like what firefly was doing 5 years ago, but with a little less complexity and a lot more scalability. If slashdot were to implement a reputation management system like this, I think it would be a much better place.
Regards,
jwb
It stikes me, that moderators get 10 M2 points per day but merely about 5 regular mod. points per month(!) to do their job in the first place. Using 98% of the pontential ressources for control and merely 2% for the actual work might be acceptable when handling nuclear weapons or biotoxins, but is IMHO total overkill when it comes to managing voluntary moderator work for an online forum, esp. since the exactly same information as provided by the M2 scheme could easily been extracted by better analysing comment moderations. Here's how:
Hypothesis 1: The majority of moderators are fair and take thir job seriously.
Hypothesis 2: If one moderator rates a certain comment up, and another moderator rates the same comment down, it is reasonable to assume, that they would equally inclined to consider the other's decision as unfair.
Conclusion 1: The ammount of mutually nullifying moderator decisions on a certain post provides a measure for the total 'unfairness' p of a comments moderation, where p = 2*min(#_of_ups,#_of_downs). If hypothesis 2 is true, then this p should be proportional to the karma penalty generated by the current moderation scheme.
Conclusion 2: Since we assume that there are more good moderators than bad ones, it is reasonable to assume that in a contoversial comment moderation the majority has a higher propability to be "right" than the minority (provided that there are more than 2 moderation decisins involved)
Proposed Solution: In the case of a controversial comment (i.e. a comment with up *and* down votes), generate a (very small) karma penalty proportional to p and distribute #ups/(#ups+#downs) of the penalty among the down-voters and #downs/(#ups+#downs) among the up-voters.
Example: A comment gets 4 votes up and 2 votes down. Each up-voter gets 1/12 (33% total) and each down voter gets 1/3 (67% total) of the total penalty which ammounts to 2*min(4,2)=4 penalty points (which should IMHO be somewhere around 1/5 to 1/10 of a current karma point)
In order for this system to work, it would be necessary to increase the total ammount of moderation points floating around and it might be reasonable to give some karma reward for each moderation to compensate for the total penalty generated by this system (so that in the end only the guys who regularily make minority decisions take the punishment).
Of course, the used formulas are only a proposal and fine tuning could certainly increase the overall efficiency of the system, once empirical data is available.
;)
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The whole point of this system is that Rob has to spend as little time policing Slashdot as possible.
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I very much agree that moderators need to moderate where needed, not just randomly. This is why the moderation system works, because the moderators have judgment in what needs to be moderated. Removing or reducing the ability to exercise that judgment will merely make the moderation system less effective.
If moderators promoting personal agendas is seen as a problem, the following should fix that:
1) meta-moderation, which Slashdot is already doing.
2) increasing the number of moderators/decreasing the moderation points per moderator.
Say you normally get your comments moderated up to, say, 3. Pretty good. But then suppose you just want to provide a little bit of information, or a brief comment; something that wouldn't warrant a 3. It would get the 3 anyway; which might also trigger the Highlight Threshold for some people (depending on individuals' settings for this).
One perhaps better way would be to take the average of past comments and create a separate variable, maybe call it AverageScore. Then give users a choice in their prefs whether to add the AverageScore to the Score, or add a fraction of the AverageScore to the Score (I envision 1/2 or 1/3 of AverageScore, rounded to an integer), or do nothing with AverageScore.
Another consideration with such a system is that Slashdot would have to find the AverageScore of every user who posted on a given page, do manipulations based on the viewer's prefs, and use that in the dynamic generation of the page. This could be more load on the server than any value we might get out of it.
Personally, I don't see a need to have a historical score influencing a present score. The moderation works pretty well at bringing out the good stuff and eliminating the crap. Adding a predictor value like AverageScore seems redundant at the least, and it could interfere in an undesirable way with the moderation process.
It seems that karma expires over a fixed time horizon. Is this true? If so then could you change that to a horizon of a fixed number of posts?
As things stand someone who posts occasionally but has consistently excellent posts will be less likely to be automoderated up than someone who posts frequently and has OK to good posts. But I would prefer to see the consistently excellent posts automoderated up, and the frequency of posting not matter.
Thanks,
Ben
PS Any chance of adding a CODE tag one of these days...?
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
What the hell is so wrong with trolls? slashdot is becoming more and more anal rentative as its popularity among the "normal" world grows. I for one think this is quite annoying... trolls make for some of the funniest threads there are. Yes there are the occasional assholes but I find that many comments moderated down to -1 are actually pretty damn funny. slashdot (the community) needs to get over itself and lighten up.F /...
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Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
Suilad!
If moderation is incremental/decremental (+1/-1) and not absolute (-1 - 5), you have to let the values grow beyond the pre-set limit of five. That way grades 4 and 5 wouldn't suffer the inflation they do now -- way too many articles have grades 4 or 5 nowadays, in my opinion. The signal/noise rate is getting worse...
If the limits were removed the really excellent articles would stand out much better and not vanish in the vast sea of stories graded too good.
The other option would be absolute moderation: moderators would give grades -1 to 5 and the average would determine the final grade.
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I agree, perhaps if you choose those you could then get the option to directly metamoderate what other moderaters have said about that post.
The power of technology is manifest in how it is applied within the social matrix.
You raise an interesting and valid point, which is that the {Over,Under}rated specifier is redundant with respect to M2. I think the solution should be to remove OR/UR from the regular moderation menus, and let MetaModerators determine how well or poorly a post was moderated.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
A poster before me has asked "how" you propose to do this. I'd like to ask "why?"
/. has started getting overly popular", smacks of arrogance and old-timer-ism. Does anyone care how few digits are in your Slashdot uid? (I don't.) Rather than moaning about how everything sucks now that the newbies are here--shades of Usenet 1993!--why not moderate and meta-moderate (as applicable), contribute stories, post sensible things that are likely to be well regarded, and otherwise do your part to make Slashdot a better place?
At the risk of seeming like a pedantic pointer-out of the obvious, you can "limit the amount of noise and increase the signal" by your very own self, by setting the filter to (e.g.) +2.
Personal aside: Your tone, as evinced by comments like "Ever since
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
M2 moderation acts as a disincentive for me to moderate as my karma is (was) over 10.
I have been wondering why my karma has been gravitating towards 10, now that you mention M2 moderation doesn't take someones score outside the -10..10 range I understand why.
Since my karma is (was) over 10 meta-moderation applied to my moderation can only drive my karma down towards 10 (well it tends to oscillate between 9 and 10). When people disagree with my moderation I lose points, when someone agrees with my moderation nothing happens.
Actually I remember on a previous moderation story an AC complainined about their karma rapidly dropping (a few points a day) and that after a week the would hit zero. They wrote back the next day saying that there score seemed to have stopped decreasing, I guess they finally dropped to 10 as well.
I'm quite sure that the karma does not have a half-life.
Everyone I've spoken to regarding MetaModeration has watched their karma plummet through the floor. It appears to take plunges soon after the user completes a batch of moderation - mine, for instance, dropped 3 points on the first day moderation was enabled (I was a moderator that day), and five points the next day I moderated. Other users have reported similar patterns.
I am convinced that massive negative meta-moderation of my moderation is causing this, and as a result, I am now afraid to moderate. In the last week, I've had one +4 post and one +5 post, and my karma is still five points lower than it was seven days ago.
What we're seeing here is moderators getting afraid to moderate (such as me - I keep doing it anyway 'cause my Karma is quite high, but I will stop when I'm within range of zero). This is not good.
The Meta-Moderation system is flawed in that it subtracts a full point for every negative vote, but does not add an equal amount for every positive vote. There is no way around this flaw, however: to add a positive integer for every positive vote to your moderation would probably cause the opposite; people's karma rocketing skyward.
I'm all for scrapping meta-moderation. Here's my replacement system:
Give each moderator a number of moderation points proportional to his or her karmic level.
The highly-ranked people have obviously got a handle on how to write a good comment. Wouldn't they, therefore, be the best people to tell good comments? Give them the weight they deserve. And keep all the other people in the system at a lower level to help out.
I have just one question:
Has anybody seen or felt any improvement in the atmosphere at /. since the M2 system was implemented?
If people want to moderate, why not have them pay for the privilege?
Consider this:
Signing up to be moderator a costs $10 or so. The money goes to charity
chosen by the moderator (fsf, spi, eff, etc.) Meta Moderators would need
to pay a heftier fee ($50-$100).
All moderators could start out with XX points, and either gain or lose
based on the review of the meta moderators (who could only meta moderate
a moderator once - try saying that five times fist). Once they lose all
their karma points, they lose moderator privilges and their money. If
they get meta-moderated to a higher Karma, they would have the ability
to become a meta-moderator (possibly for free or for a reduced rate).
Meta moderators would be under the control of slashdot itself (I'm sure
andover.net could spring for the cost of a Meta Moderator Manager). Any
meta moderator caught abusing the system would loose their status and their
money.
This way, it weeds out the moderators who are just in it to cause trouble
and some deserving non-profits get some cash. Plus, it goes great with chicken.
I visit /. a few times a day, and I've moderated twice. That doesn't count as "very often", but it seems reasonable to me.
I've said before that I believe moderation is the most important thing that slashdot has done. It's great. I hope that detailed archives are being kept, though -- because moderation (or ratings, or whatever you want to call it) is going to be one of the most important key ideas of the 'net.
So -- it's vital to keep records. Find out things like "do trolls decrease when moderating occurs?" or "How does karma vary over time?" or whatever. The important thing, though, is to keep the raw data so that questions that can't be formulated now can be answered in the future.
Now, of course, it would be ideal if these records could be blinded somehow, so that they could be made public in the future. But I'd be happy just to know that detailed archives were being kept -- even if I never had access to the information.
If you think about it, there is a resource that is being underutilized here. I believe that most moderators invest quite a bit of agony and effort in their valuations, and that sweat could be used to fertilize other things than merely the articles they moderate. If I really wanted to go off the deep end, I would say that judgement, or valuation, or moderation, is the key to intelligence -- and there is a database of intelligent judgement here that could be quite valuable. Maybe not now that /. is small, but when there are millions of readers and hundreds of thousands of moderations daily...
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I agree with this completely.
When my number has come up to be a moderator, I shift the way I read SlashDot. I make an effort to read comments I wouldn't normally read, and I refrain from participating in conversations if I think I can add more to the discussion by moderating up some interesting posts.
I think that this shift is necessary to be a good moderator. And I'm not sure I'd be willing to make the shift if I wasn't confident I'd be able to moderate up the good posts, and down the really bad posts, because which articles I could moderate was chosen randomly.
My Web Page
One unexpected benefit of mass moderation is that moderation becomes an alternative to posting. I find myself wanting to moderate more than I want to post. This increases the quality of the communication for everyone. Less posts, less redundancy -- with cogent, consensus views (and welcome humor) emerging from the chatter. The %20 rule would dillute this effect to a vanishing point.
Anyway, what problem is the %20 idea supposed to solve? Moderator advocacy? Is this really a problem? Not in my experience here. The place is lousy with zealots of this or that - but what is the harm in them expressing their zealotry by moderating? Better that than posting nattering, redundant screeds that we all have to read. But if it is a problem, I like HSinclair's idea of fewer moderations points allocated more frequently. If I only have 2 points to cast, I'll cast 'em more carefully.
Check out movielens for an example of this technology. (I work for them.) The way it works is that everyone rates as many items as they can, and then the system figures out which comments you're likely to like based on your similarity to other moderators.
It appears that you get karma for metamoderating. Just now my karma was 1, then I metamoderated, and immediately it was 2.
--John
I haven't been able to moderate either, and it's made me quite curious what is considered "obsessive". Where I work I visit /., LWN, and a few other sites to break up my day and keep up on the news. This may result in 20 visits in an 8 hour period....is this obsessive? Then, over the weekends, I'm lucky if I read it once a day.
It's not that I feel some power-hungry need to control the reception of posts, I'm just curious. To my knowledge, Rob hasn't said what constitutes too many visits, probably to avoid freaks who would visit just that many times to try and increase chances of moderation. Now I'm wondering: how many people have accounts that otherwise qualify but haven't gotten moderation?
Except that HTML isn't a fixed-length posting medium like Usenet is. Putting the original text into
pooptruck
Bah. What I meant was putting the original text into a BLOCKQUOTE element.
pooptruck
All Rob would have to do is stick in some HTML anchors and then link the comments that he wants MM'd together. That way you can click your way through the MM process. If he also makes any MM comment visiable no matter what your tolerance, you are all set. Much more convenient than the current situation.
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
Are you usually logged in when you read/post? I noticed you're an AC now and since you won't get moderation points unless you're logged in that could be the problem.
Just a thought.
--
Reject
--
Reject
reject@metaphorcity dot com
Here's a solution: If the whole point behind M2 is to weed out the "good" moderators from the "bad" ones, why restrict M2 moderation to posts over 1 day old (or some such number)?
Under this scheme you are no bringing back posts that have been unfairly moderated down into the current conversation, but as a tradeoff you no longer have to worry about "unfair pressure."
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
On an almost off-topic but related note (hey! it says topic=slashdot on the URL doesn't it?), I noticed today that some instances of pages (I'm not sure wether it's to do with the ad up top), with certain ads (and sometimes not), but usually over 30 comments blow Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape 4.6 on '95 out of the water; the available resources go below 5%, and Windows refuses to do anything else.
Has anyone else experienced this? I've never seen it happen before....
--
-- Buddy
Either way, moderating /. should be taken seriously, and it filters out the worst noise, but it's not the be-all-end-all of the /. experience.
It's definitely not something you should get upset about. It'll float your way sometime soon; after that, the glamour 'll wear off pretty quickly. IMO, of course.
--
-- Buddy
I'm in favor of having more moderation points, because every time I've been a moderator, I've been very parsimonious with my points. If I had more, I could demoderate the flamers and up the good posts, without having to be so stingy. One scheme I can think of is to start out with, say, 3 or 5 points, and for every karma point above 20, you get an extra moderation point.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
If, by his theory there are more good people than bad, ditch all the levels of moderation and just let EVERYONE moderate EVERYTHING. It will all wash out in the end.
Rob is trying to tinker and control too much. Let the community decide.
Oh, and can we find a way to eliminate all the idiotic meta-commentary on moderation. I am tired of seeing crap like "moderate this up please" - "why was that given 'funny' when I was moderated down as 'flamebait'".
It seems like slashdot has become obsessed with moderation. To tell the truth my internal moderator did a pretty good job before all this tinkering. I just don't see that the moderation system has added all that much value to be worrying about it this much. And the levels and Karma just go to create a social hierarchy within slashdot that is entire uneeded and distracting.
-josh
One more way of displaying a discussion would be nice. We can now look in order of post, or by score, either with threads or without...
For moderating purposes, it might be useful to see the most busy threads first (or last) to see wether there is a flame-war raging, or a hot discussion (of value) brewing...
Just a thought.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I very much like the idea of judging the overall worth of a posting (-1 to +5) rather than adding a point to it's value... But, a comment can't possibly go from 0 or 2 to 5 just because I said so...
:)
So how about a compromise:
Moderators still get moderation quanta (I vote for fractions of points, see my rant at #33). They then get to choose what worth a post has, and their quantum adds (or subtracts) the actual value of the post in that direction.
In this way, the overall moderator opinion of worth, coupled with their quanta towards that end, result in a post that is moderated to the average of all moderator opinions... Preferably where it started.
It's another level of complexity, and should keep Rob busy for weeks in trying to figure out how to implement it. [VBSEG]
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Some of the Funny ratings are quite pertinent to the discussion at hand though. And a humorous attitude about something tends to show understanding of the subject... Well, to me at least. So a person with enough understanding to make a joke is, in effect, making a worthwhile contribution.
Maybe we should have an additional category? For relevant humor or offtopic humor? But here I diverge from my personal opinion that simpler is better...
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
IMHO, the 'Overrated' and 'Underrated' moderation items should have the effect of MetaModeration. These are, essencially, means by which moderators can correct one another's work.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
First off, MM is not really necessary.
/. being a self-correcting mechanism already, they just add another layer.
:) I, for one, would rather see Rob bring his considerable talents to bear on extending the article discussion forums. On many occasions, a great off-topic discussion has been sparked by an article. This discussion either flops for being off-topic, or dies when the article expires from the main page. It would be nice to have some quantifiable worth of such a discussion, that would enable it to live on until it dies a natural death.
A good comment is good. It is unlikely that a single, rabid individual, will sink a good comment into oblivion, without an equally determined benefactor raising it up again. By that same token, a conspiracy of evildoers to elevate each other's trash, whenever one of them has moderator access, is slim to none.
Occam's Razor applies, and a system of lesser complexity is preferable to one of greater complexity. Slashdot should not hamstring itself with rules, and rules about rules, else it will become a burocracy in which nothing ever happens.
Personally, I've never used MM, but I would rather see it go away - simply because Moderation points strike me as a rare commodity, so their negative effect seems to be outweighed by their utility to the holder. Also, with
MM is an interesting exercise for Rob, it nothing else, and as such it is as useful as anything that keeps a mind from being idle.
As for a redoux of the moderation philosophy, how about fractional moderation? Increase the number of moderators, certainly, maybe by a factor of four. But reduce the worth of each assignable point by that same amount. This way, several moderators would have to agree to elevate a post to the next higher integer score. The ability to abuse moderator privilege goes away, as does the confidence that a single vote of one individual will make a lot of difference.
As moderators, we would then add our voice to a comment, not knowing if we're the first, or the decisive ones to raise the message status. Follow?
This way, good posts will rise, bad posts will sink, and iffy posts will tent to teeter-totter on the edge of where they started.
Ah, all this opinionated rambling has tired me out. But, before my hands completely cramp... How's about making all posts require a Preview??
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Of course this system is based on scoring per individual, not per post, but I think it's safe to assume that the overall quality of a given user's posts is going to be fairly consisten
I strongly disagree. An obnoxious poster still has moments of brilliance and a briallant poster has moments of stupidity. We should be rating the post not the person.
Why do we need "moderation" per se? Wouldn't something simple like a simple 0-10 "rank" scale work much more effectively and much simpler? I'm thinking that everybody has the ability to rate every comment on a scale of 0-10. All the scores from all the users are averaged and you can sort by average score or whatever. You could still keep this karma stuff by having select people (good comment posters) ranks count for more than just 1 vote or something. Every user can moderate every comment once. Then it's okay if the KDE hater ranks KDe comments as 0, the KDE lovers will rank it as 10. But the really stupid posts (hopefully not this one) everybody will rank low. I think this method could be a lot more straight-forward, unbiased, simpler to implement, and probably more runtime efficient.
My $0.02
I think that it is a bad idea to restrict moderation excessively. When I have moderator access, I change my prefs to browse at low scores, and look for new comments (i.e. ones that probably haven't haven't been moderated yet). That way comments that deserve to be moderated up get there. Comments that are at 3 or 4 don't need that much help.
However, once I'm done moderating, I switch the preferences back to a more filtered view, and go back and re-read the articles looking for the content, as usual.
I think it is *essential* that moderators be allowed to pick which comments they moderate during the 3 days they have their points. Giving moderator access more or less frequently based on karma is a perfectly good idea, and could achieve some of the same effect.
Finally, I would like to just throw a reality check out there. Slashdot should be good, but there is *no* way to weed out all the a-holes, flamers, trolls, etc. Slashdot already does a very good job of tagging their comments so that people like me who don't generally want to see them don't have to. I think that, at this point, the moderation system is sufficiently effective, and time would be better spent squashing some of those SQL problems, and implementing some of the great ideas for additional forms of content that could be added.
-Cheetah
I've never moderated, but it seems like you get an equal number of points to moderate comments up and down.
I think one should be able to moderate more comments up than down. Scores may go up a bit, but there still will be a spread of comments. It will also reduce the risk of "somebody thought this post about bsd was flamebait when I was being serious."
You could make a -1 change equal to a +2 change, or something.
We should celebrate when we see something we agree with, and ignore that which annoys us. To make sure this happens, the moderation system should be tweaked to encourage postive moderation.
This is sort of off-topic, but it would be really sweet if there were a checkbox or some such widget that you could select before posting a reply that would automatically quote the text of the original message with a line-prefix like ">".
--Jamin Philip Gray
jamin@DoLinux.org
Celebrate the finer things in life
I'm surprised as well and I doubt it's the obsessive reloading bit either. I routinely reload more than 10 times a day and I've had a couple of kicks at the can.
if they tie it too closely, some people will make slashdot into a big game, where the object is to get as many karma points as you can so that you can have the most influence you can, both in your moderation and high initial comment scores. I know some people already think of it this way, but it's not something to be encouraged.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
No. Being able to see what is good does not imply that you are able to create something good (But it does imply that you don't write something bad). In the same way, being bad at moderating does not imply that you are bad at writing.
So the system should not tie together Karma for moderations with Karma for postings.
And, finally, a question to Malda: Why is the moderation Karma (M2 moderation done to you) , but not the posting Karma (Moderations done to your postings) shown on your usder page?
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
I really like your system. It's a slow day at work, so I have been pondering it for a while.
/. and to my mailbox.
What this entire debate boils down to is: can one trust a group of people, or should there be someone in the middle with a large stick? Will an unregulated system automatically degenerate into chaos and then entropy, or will it adjust on its own?
As this particular question has been at the center of the political scene ever since there's *been* one (believe me, I studied classical Greece), I doubt a group of people whose main interest is not social interaction is going to solve it satisfactorily!
Personally, I have all but given up reading comments, as I find I can spend my time much better following up the links in the actual story. Browsing at +x doesn't work for me, as a comment is often not nearly as insightful/interesting/funny outside its thread.
One modification that would convince me to go back to reading the comments more regularly would be if responses were mailed to the author of the parent comment in a thread (and the parent of a "Reply to" comment). Wading through all the other stuff to see if anyone said anything interesting in response to my post is just too much hassle.
Another useful addition: Karma for Grammar! Misspelt words and poor construction greatly detract from a post's readability, and while allowances shopuld be made for non-native speakers, none should be made for sloppiness. I'd appreciate feedback on this, both on
" There is a rational explanation for everything. There is also an irrational one. "
Engineers have used redundant subsystems to create reliable systems from less reliable systems. The idea is to create a system which fails only when multiple components all fail.
84% good moderators? Then design a system that changes the rating of posts only on the recommendation of multiple moderators. Institute fractional moderation, and the appearance of a fractional score will be an indicator for other moderators to look at the posts "in transition."
Because more than one moderator will be required to affect a full one step score change, this change will require distributing more moderator points, but that can be seen as a good thing.
I don't like the idea of giving everyone moderator points because if they appear rarely, the good moderators tend to see them as a responsibility, and want to help out. I don't spend moderator points just because I have them, but when I do have points I feel obligated to browse at 0 and look for good comments in the discussions I would have read at level 2.
With a redundancy method, you can still detect and downgrade moderators who vote in conflict to other moderators, but instead of the work to M2 moderate, readers are doing the more valuable (and easily understood task) of rating comments.
Forrest J. Cavalier III, Mib Software Voice 570-992-8824
The Reuse RocKeT: Efficient awareness for software reuse.
Free WWW site lists over 6000 of the most popular open source libraries, functions, and applications.
Wow, what a hell of an idea!!
The debates that never re-e-e-e-eally get settled (like Hellmouth, for example) would be the site of constant debate, with all sides continuing to moderate, meta-moderate, and add to the discussion; new points from current events, old points re-packaged in more concise arguments... one might even be able to come up with an Open Source political platform from the political nature of the grand debates.
Why not set up some comment-farms and get geek opinions on
* sexual harassment and gender equality among geeks
* best way to run a tech startup
* security
* best Linux distro (shudder)
and more...
-Jurph
*
grin
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
Yet another data point to fuel my theory: anyone who asks that their comment be moderated down is ALWAYS moderated up.
A note to moderators: Try not to be swayed by this. True, many of the people who make this request have interesting and different points, but sometimes (case in point above) they seem to be moderated up for no good reason...
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
Heh... We were typing the same thing at the same time...
I've seen this many times before. It seems to be a very effective ploy to gain attention.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
Well, I for one think the 20% is a bad idea. If you limit it to 20%, the chances that you have a comment worth moderating which shows up in that subset is getting a little thin. You'll then have moderators with these points to spend, nothing worthwhile to spend them on, and they'll end up using them in less effective places just to use them up.
Someone a while back in this thread mentioned a few things that I thought were really great ideas... if you happen to get the call for moderator duty, you shouldn't display any scores for the posts. That way, each moderator will be unbiased by each other's opinions and would be expected to go with their own inclinations.
I also agree with removing the numeric karma rating and just showing a positive/negative indicator... perhaps a little "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" icon or some other cutesy graphic.
-- Gary F.
*blantant brown nosing*
/. is already great, anything else is just icing on the cake.
First off, i like to point out that this site already has an excellent system for this, and the fact that rob is thinking more about this shows that he really loves this site, his work, us, penguins, Linus, the world, etc.
*/blatant brown nosing*
that said, i'm not sure i like the whole meta moderation bit, what happens when people abuse that? meta meta moderation?
on the other hand, i like the idea that someone else had pointed out in a previous moderation related story. (i apologize for not knowing where i saw it...) if it took two people to moderate a comment down (or up) before it lost a point, two moderators would have to agree. while that doesn't solve the problem totally, and certainly doesn't stop world hunger, it would take two idiots to make a bad decision. I know it would also make it harder to give the good comments the credit they deserve, but based on the statistic that less than 20% of moderation is considered "bad" it would improve things overall. Other than that, i think we have a great system here. i know i deserve the karma i have (we all have to be immature sometime right? but i'm over that...) We all know that people tend to resist change, and that's why any change or talk of it get people worked up, but relax,
-Dan
Any plans to have a "submitted-articles-posted" adjustment incorporated into the karma calculation?
Just noticing that, although I've had a few of my submissions posted over the past few weeks, it hasn't affected my karma level. Only moderation of comments posted in discussions has affected it.
--The more you know, the less you know.
Thanks for the trolling check.
No, I think I hit some nerves, and the rating system was being used to punish rather than moderate. It's hard, but moderation should be narrowly, and unemotionally, applied. And I got the feeling it sure wasn't in this case.
I think that showing Karma to the world is a mistake. It should only be shown to the person it belongs to when they go to their 'page'. I'm beginning to wonder if a high Karma doesn't cause two effects, intimidation and resentment. Those easily intimidated (or swayed) by high Karma keep piling it on, while those resentful (or trying to be 'tough') go out of their way to drop a few points, or don't moderate at all.
Essentially, I'm with you that the moderation points are too high. I'm just curious about the 'psychology' of the whole process.
A number of comments, somewhat scattered.
:).
First, I don't envy you. It's a no-win situation, and it does indeed take the innocence of youth to put up with something like this.
Second, I'm still confused. I have a post here ( The heights of low taste ) that has been moderated more strangely than any other post I've ever made. It has 1 Troll, 2 Informative, 1 Overrated, and 1 Underrated. I can understand the over rating, but the troll moderation is somewhat curious. What rates as a troll message? And please don't say "your message"
Third, I think the real-time meta-moderation next to each message would be a very nice touch, if you can make sure that an even number of meta moderation tokens are handed out fairly. Having the seperate page is just fine by me, as I can go off to the various threads and check context if I have a question. Like you, I've never looked at any of the moderated messages and thought the moderator subhuman based on their moderation, and it's been my experience that the number of moderations I disagree with is around 5-10%.
Finally, don't try to hard to make this perfect. It never will be, and trying will only make the system more convoluted, complex, and fragile. I really do have a life, and slashdot is nice to have and a lot of fun at times, but I can live without it. Just like I'm sure you can.
The problem I see with interspersing M2 moderation at random into the day's supply of comments is that a meta-moderator then has to go through everything in order to meta-mod. I'd like to help with it, but I don't have the time to read every comment that goes through here. I hit the current M2 page, rate the moderators, and I'm done. Intersperse it, and I either a) waste time reading everything or b) don't moderate at all.
trolls make for some of the funniest threads there are. Yes there are the occasional assholes but I find that many comments moderated down to -1 are actually pretty damn funny. slashdot (the community) needs to get over itself and lighten up.
Look, there are times when I consider a well-written troll to be one of the more outstanding examples of modern prose. Plus they are truly unique. I liken this to a city next to a forest. The troll is a very interesting creature, spawned from the Usenet, and the troll can lead a very interesting life, causing wonderfully hiliarious havoc, by blundering out of the forest, knocking down mailboxes, kicking over fire hydrants for the children to play in the water, peeing on telephone booths, then disappearing into the trees, leaving wonderful confusion in his path. Also usually leaving lots of hair lying around.
But a lot of the time I'm looking for something good to read, to stimulate the mind. A discussion with those I consider to be my peers. I liken it to a formal dinner party. In this case, the average troll is a horrible beast, blundering around the room, knocking over the furniture, spilling all the beer on the rug (okay, not that formal of a party), and generally making enough racket to be unable to have a rational conversation.
Moderation allows each person to selectively turn off the trolls in their vision. In other words, if you want to read the trolls, go for it. Just don't expect to force everyone do to things your way.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Perhaps we should quote the Jargon File:
Let's define FlameBait while we're at it:
All I really ask is that, when a person is moderating, keep these ideas in mind. Don't mark something stupid a troll just because it's stupid. Stick to the definitions of the terms. If you simply want to mark something up or down, use over/under-rated..
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I don't think that it's too easy to abuse, I think that one persons' funny is another persons' offtopic. So alot of moderation points go to waste. For example, moderators wasted 9 moderation points on this post of mine.
I would have been quite happy for it to have been a -1. (Although it was on topic, and I thought it was funny)
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
1.Put 5x (Numbers are Variables here: Don't complain about them!) as many moderators into the system.
2.When you have moderator access, only display moderate controls on say 20% of the comments.
I'm not convinced that moderator dilution is the answer here. I would expect that by spreading out the pool of moderators, Slashdot would see even more problems with badly moderated posts. What we want is instead a smaller pool of people. but people who moderate more thoughtfully.
But how to distinguish thoughtful moderators from irresponsible ones? I like the "karma" system since it provides more personal accountability. I don't think it has been in use long enough to really show its potential, but people who regularly post articles that other people like should have a chance to participate more in the moderation process
Here are some thoughts:
With that said, I feel that the present system is working VERY well. It is extremely rare that I see a post moderated up which didn't really deserve it. Even better, by setting high thresholds, I can browse very quickly and still get some valuable insights on the articles.
Good work, guys!
It seems like a valid concept (many moderators with few points) but it is a moot point because of the Karma system.
If everything works as it should, the gnomish guy would lose the opportunity to moderate again.
I think this guy has a good point. You should only have to spend one moderator point and rate the comment anywhere from -1 to +5... then all the moderation that has been done to this comment is averaged, and that is the final moderation. Out of all the comments I have read so far on here, this one seems that it would work the best overall. Some of the other comments have been interesting but they have their problems.
Joseph?
Once again, I started my online experience in the BBS community way back when, and a complex moderation system just seems silly to me.
/. Leave the current moderation system in place (with or without the M2 moderation...it really wouldn't matter that much). The subject experts (think BBS-style SubOps) would then have the ability to change moderations that are unfair, moderate the occasional lame-ass post that falls through the cracks or moderate up comments that deserve it.
/employees/ and thus have a /stake/ in seeing that moderation is fair and unbiased, there really wouldn't be a lot of problems.
:)
Go back to basics. I think the moderation system should be fairly simple. The M2 moderation seems silly to me.
If you really like the current system, then try this Have "subject experts" who specialize in one category of subjects or another and ALWAYS have the ability to moderate and M2 moderate. These would be a few, HIGHLY TRUSTED individuals, perhaps people who work for
Of course, this leads to discussions that take on that moderator's "slant" and to a sort of aristocracy. But, since these people would be
Of course, this probably seems like a stupid idea and a commercialization of Slashdot, but I'm a fairly pragmatic person and not much of an idealist like Rob...
My journal has hot
Hum, what about a section in which users would not only be able to rate comments, but also OSes, computer makers, etc., following their production/comments/attitude/whatever. It'd have to be carefully handled (I can already see M$'s karma...woohoo), but it could sort of give a visual apreciation over what our community thinks about those who produce the stuff we work with.
/. seems to have some influence, maybe it could improve certain things... Sounds like rating, but add the karma and it could be even better...
What do you guys think? Since
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
I *really* like the idea of integrated M2 moderation in the comments section.
I can't tell you how many times I've thought the moderators-in the context of a comments thread, were either clueless or not paying attention or just plain dumb. However, with the current M2 setup, I don't understand the context and don't really want to take the time to go look. I am already taking the time to do the extra moderation.
When I'm not a moderator, it would still be nice to feel I am having some sort of role in the moderation process-even if its just keeping a check on the moderators.
Problems I foresee-Someone moderates a comment, and immediately the moderation is moderated (jeez, i should choose a new word) to be Unfair. So does the moderator go back and change it? Is that unfair pressure? And if you M2 a comment in a thread, are you unable to participate in that discussion?
I like the idea of Karma. Though I think it would be cooler to see it on a scale when presented on the user info page. I pay quite a bit of attention to this site, but I still don't remember the scale offhand. A graphical bar would be nice. And instead of just numbers, relate the the numbers to real world behavior. ie. karma of -1 is called 'troll' or something like that. Be creative!
-Lisa
I have noticed some small problems with the moderation system.
They might be connected.
1) Good messages not posted fast after the news are not moderated up.
2) Points used on 5 points messages don't add to the story points
but decrees your moderation points.
This mean lesser points for messages in 1)
3) There is no way to view unmoderated messages
when you moderate.
I think that a solution to 2 and 3 will help on 1.
Knud
Aeiwi is a search tool with a unique interface.
Which let users add more search terms,
until they have a small number of results.
Your point about "manipulating history" is good and, I think, very important.
Leaving aside the discussion of M2, perhaps there should be a limit on moderating historical records, that is, no moderation at all for comments more than (say) 4 days old, and no M2 on moderations more than (say) 7 days old?
This would ensure that history doesn't get rewritten on the sly.
Torrey (Azog) Hoffman
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
For example, if I see a post moderated up to "5" and I think's it's a bonehead post, I would like to de-value the opinions of the moderators who liked that post.
One problem with this is performance: It would require the intersection of moderated comments with your own preferences; I think that would either square the size of the data set or lead to lots of inefficient lists, depending on how you implemented it. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, just something to be aware of...
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I absolutely agree. How the hell did I get a 10 Karma? I rarely post, and none of my comments have been moderated up. I've been reading for a while, but I've never been really vocal.
:-), when I get moderation points, I do something that hasn't really been addressed (at least as far as I've seen). I look at the people who have a default score of 2, and make sure they're still talking on topic, and that their message is "worth" 2. In this case, I'm not trying to say that what they said was bad... just offtopic, maybe, and not worth showing up on the "good stuff" radar for a topic, maybe because the person might not necessarily be posting brilliance related to the topic every time, and can go off with someone on an unrelated thread just like anyone else.
Despite that
The race condition can also be fixed by timestamping each page. For example, the page could have an "input type=hidden" tag containing the time the server generated it. Hidden tags are submitted like text boxes so this data gets send back when you click moderate.
Then the server could invalidate any moderation done if someone else has moderated the same comment between the "served" time and the moderation "submission" time. Slashdot could then say something like "comment +0: comment rating changed since last reload" or something.
This kind of thing comes up a lot with web apps; keeping the state in the web page itself usually does the trick.
One other idea (and it might have been said already, I currently have my threshold up pretty high so forgive me if this is a duplicate) would be to give moderators with higher karma more points to use as well as a wider selection. The idea here is to encourage good moderation, so there should be tangible rewards for being a good contributor
--JT
I think the meta-moderation would be uneccessary if the moderation was a little bit smarter to begin with. For instance, if you moderate a comment by marking it as "-1 Overrated" aside from adjusting the score, aren't you saying that the last person that upped the comment is a bad moderator? I think so.
So "-1 overrated" and "+1 underrated" could have 2 effects:
Voila! Both moderation and meta-moderation have been taken care off in one step!
As a moderator, you should have the ability to moderate where it is needed, and not have your moderating ability limited to randomly selected comments.
If a moderator sees a particularly outstanding comment, they should be able to moderate it, and not be hindered by a random 20% factor. If you are going to increase the number of moderators, do so at the expense of moderation points, not at the expense of the ability to moderate.
And I do have to agree with Rob: if you don't like the system he's worked so hard to build, you can get around it without asking him to take it away.
Maybe banning somebody isn't the answer. What is irratating is that a troll starts a thread, then people respond to the message. The replies to that comment are still visible as long as they meet your filter limit. Even with the filter set, there is still the noise that makes it through.
Perhaps a better solution would be to hide all the replies and threads started by a comment that your filter catches.
I didn't mean to sound arrogant or like an old-timer. I feel that I am never going to be old enough to consider myself an old-timer. I (as well as a bunch of others) have just noticed a serious decrease in noise/signal ratio in the last few months. A change in moderation is going to be necessary to stop this trend.
-- toolie
...is to have Rob ban, for just a day or two, trolls and flamebait. Maybe not based on some moderators comments, but on what Rob/Hemos/Katz/crew actually read. Ever since /. has started getting overly popular (ie, stories in some major online publications), there has been an increasing amount of noise in here. Something that will limit the amount of noise and increase the signal would be much appreciated. I think I'm going to puke if I see anymore comments that are trying to contribute nothing to the discussion except insults and flames.
Phew... that felt good to get that off my chest. Other than that, I think the moderation is going OK.
-- toolie
Accually I'm quite surprised you havn't been able to moderate.. Are you sure the moderation option is checked in you user prefereces? But then again, maby it is the obsessive thing. As Rob did say that can be a reason for no receiving moderation access.
I say moderators should automatically have their viewing prefrences (only while they're moderating) as newest first, cut off at 0 (maybe -1), and threaded. This way they can still fallow threads and as the conversation goes on, the newer posts are moderated (i.e. begenning wave of posts come in and the first set of moderators moderate, then the second set, etc etc).
Also, I think another problem is everyone looks at the 2-5 range more and therefore moderators look at it and say "someone else moderated it up, it must be smart". I know this is a pain in the ass and would mean just more code, but i say put in a ceiling for moderators so they only look at the -1 through 1 range, with maybe a few random +2 or +3's thrown in.
another problem with that though is then moderating turns into a job and you cant really follow the thread.
Just wanted to thank rob for a great job at this and not just saying "screw it" and letting it go the way of newsgroups. Somehow i doubt hes reading this, but some asskissing cant hurt, ne? ^_^
-confidential
AIM: confdntl98 ICQ: 150685 E-Mail: above... you can figure it out ^_~
The people who complain about the point system aren't complaining because they don't like to look at the numerals 0-9, so turning it off won't assuage them. Their complaint is that certain people can't be heard because of
Obviously the users who complain can still view those comments, but that's not the issue. The issue is that Slashdot is a forum and if, for any reason, certain people can't be heard from then the forum becomes self-defeating.
Now then, at this point I'd like you to re-read my subject line. "Devil's Advocate" means I don't necessarily hold these views myself. As it happens I did and to some extent still do. But I've come to realize that high noise levels defeat the forum as well and something had to be done.
However, I think it is important to remember that we don't have to create rules just to have rules. Nor do we have to create rules just to have something to write a program about. All that said, I have a comment about M2.
I don't think we need it. Bad Moderators have only one effect: Lowering the scores of good comments. The solution is two-fold:
The first step ensures that there are moderators who are reading the unfairly moderated comments at the -1 level. And the second step ensures that there are enough moderators to raise those scores up.
---
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)
Once again CmdrTaco has come up with a bunch of great ideas.
:)
I just have one more to ponder. Instead of making the % that we can moderate based on karma, make the duration of time that we have the points, or the number of points based on karma.
I'm sure we all have seen posts that we want to take a point from, or instantly add one, but if we have moderation access and can't edit that particular post, then the moderator points are useless. This way you still reward the moderators with good karma, while not taking away any of their priveleges.
Here is a side question: If we M2 a comment down or up does it instantly take effect? Are there any rules on who can M2? Or is everyone above moderators?
Just some food for thought.
ClarkBar
A quick point, the ability to form and write ideas cogently and the ability to judge them, while related, are NOT equivalent.
My Suggestion:
Have the basic karma work as is, but have a moderator rating that is affected by the M2 ratings you have recieved, that affects how MANY points you get. Make it nicely logrithmic, and consitantly GOOD moderators raise to the level they need to be, while the rest of us stay hampered around 5 pts.
And yes, you will get people spending hours a day moderating slashdot, with MANY points. But those people will only be your good moderators.
On another point, race conditions are mentioned in this discusion, and I think that while a given moderator should be able to specify what level s/he wants a comment to go to, I don't think that moderator should be able to supply more than 1 pt towards that goal.
Ex. Quux posts at 1
Foo modertates a comment to 4, the comment raises to 2.
Bar moderates to 3, the comment raises to 3
Baz moderates to 3, the comment does not change
Bat moderates to 5, the comment raises to 5. (Bar + Baz brings it to 3, Foo brings it to 4, Bat brings it to 5)
-Crutcher
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
Sorry, Bad Math on my example, here's a working version.
Ex. Quux posts at 1
Foo modertates a comment to 2, the comment raises to 2
Bar moderates to 2, the comment stays at 2
Baz moderates to 3, the comment changes to 3
Bat moderates to 5, the comment raises to 4
Monkey moderates to -1, the comment stays at 4 (because of the buffer point provided by Bar)
-Crutcher
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
>>I'll admit that this may be more expensive in terms of implementation complexity and resource usage,
>> but I think it's a conceptually clearer system than what exists now.
No, No, No, to this and all other forms of (server side) Trust or reputation based moderation systems.
Why, because you have to evaluate an N-Dimensional polygon (where N is the number of user accounts on Slashdot) EVERY time you load a page. And you have to optimize it, with potentialy N forks trying to change it in parallel. It gives me a headache just thinking about it. The system just can NOT handle more than a few values for each user, and I can't even start to handle trees.
-Crutcher
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
I have a solution:
1) Let everyone moderate -- or not moderate, if they choose -- everything but their own posts. However, each person could only moderate a given post once per day (say).
2) Don't, however, *show* the scores of comments. Thus, each comment stands on its own. Internally, of course, scoring would be kept so people could still use highest scores first.
3) Permit moderators to score each comment on 3 different scales at once: Boring -> Interesting; Redundant -> Insightful; Stupid -> Intelligent. This takes care of the what-word-shall-I-use-to-describe-this problem.
4) Show each scale as a balance, and start every post off in the middle. (e.g. -5 to +5, all start at 0).
5) Keep track of the comments that are *not* moderated, i.e. they come back still rated at 0,0,0. The higher a percentage not moderated a comment gets, the less passion it is arousing.
6) By popping up each comment as a separate browser window that vanishes when the rating is submitted, moderation is performed automatically, without anyone *having* to rate it if they don't want.
7) You have to have an account to rate anything. So you can cruise as an AC if you don't feel like rating today.
8) Have a "churn" rating on every comment: The more ratings coming in (per day, say) on a comment, the longer it -- and its associated topic -- will "live". (Also see (5) above: the lack of passion might be an indicator of oncoming death.)
Since every comment is automatically rated by everybody who reads it, yet any given comment can be rated by an individual only on a periodic basis, any individual cannot substantially skew the results. Subjectivity is completely removed from the moderation equation.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
This article was posted at 12:11. By the time I got to it, there were -1:163 comments. When I got through those and refreshed with "newest first" there were 50+ more.
So, this post will probably get completely lost in the shuffle. My only hope is that Rob may read it, since he posed the question and actually cares about his community. The up-side is that I have all the previous comments to try to pull together.
First, when I've noticed that I had moderator points, I have tried to switch to -1, flat mode to be as fair and impartial as possible, but, if I were to try to moderate a topic such as this I'd have to quit my day job. A couple of things would help this:
Random Moderation
Nope. Been said all over this page. Moderation would be less of a responsibility and less compelling for those of us who care about the impact to the /. community. It wouldn't be worth the effort.
Meta-Moderation
I think M2 may work in 2 directions. Instead of just ranking the moderators, it could also rank your opinion of the moderators and be another factor in your preferences. I'd like to see the M2 boxes on all the comments. I don't think they'd be used that much, but when they were used, they'd be used on comments that people really care about. This should address the problem of moderators with agendas. Let's face it, if someone has an agenda, that happens to agree with mine, than that's a good thing to me.
Fractional Moderation
This is a good idea, both for moderation and for M2. It would take at least 2 moderators to change the moderation.
Unscored Moderation
Some people have pointed out that the categories available are not necessarily complete (like missing stupid), approriate (OR/UR being more relevant to M2), or positive or negative (some people LIKE Trolls, some don't want Funny). So:
Karma
Rob says it doesn't factor that much anyway, but I think it should be affected by only the most positive and negative moderations and M2. I know I said no numbers, but, while one person's Flamebait is another person's Funny, Offtopic is not good. Redundant is irrelevant, since everyone has different views (prefs., NOT opinions) it's probably not redundant to readers with different preferences.
Maybe instead of adding +1 to future posts, Karma could add personality tags. If a poster consistently gets Interesting:2 or higher, then that person is probably interesting. These tags should be clearly distinct from moderation tags, so the reader and moderators knows that it applies to the author and, not necessarily, to the post.
A Changing Face
This should keep Rob busy for a year or so, but imagine the possibilities. For a discussion about webcams in public restrooms, I could view at Funny:2, Interesting:3. For a discussion on security, I could use Insightful:2, Interesting:2.
Since this would put my viewing entirely into the hands of moderators, I'd probably add Normal:1 to any view. Or, I could read on pass one a topic for Interesting and Insightful comments, and a second pass for Funny.
Conclusion
The whole point of moderation and meta-moderation is to filter the /. experience for the sake of the individual participant. Being a moderator is a pain in the [insert your desired portion of anatomy here] and it is difficult to do fairly. Try to remember that if it weren't for their efforts, you wouldn't be able filter your view at all.
And thanks, Rob. It just keeps getting better.
is simply the total amount of moderation done to you're acount. Belive me, as someone who's gone from -2 to -9 since karma's been around I know.
:)
btw, if anyone would moderate this up, I'd really apreaciate it
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The problem is the hideous UI on Slashdot. It is quite possibly the worst web-based threaded messaging system I have ever used. It is tedious and confusing.
Take a cue from Usenet - instead of having threads that descend to seperate page, then have others that descend to more seperate pages and thus getting people hopelessly lost, have all threads descend on a single page.
I like the moderation system because, in general, it seems to weed-out the "Ricki Lake" and "Jerry Springer" type posts.
I "use" slashdot to stay abreast of the latest and greatest in the greatest technologies on the planet and I often am frustrated by the irrelevant "I-posted-a-flame-ball-today-look-at-me-grin" posts.
I understand the intention of the moderation to help me waste less time and get more valuable information without making people feel like they don't have a say, even when they probably shouldn't be saying anything. If /. does become a Dante's Inferno because of flaming, I'll be forced to at first, participate less, and perhaps eventually stop visiting.
As far as how it is implemented; I think /. is doing a fine job. Don't let the qualified moderators get too out of hand and make sure that their moderation is not "I agree" or "I disagree" with the post. My humble 2 cents.
P.S. Thanks for all the hard work. This is now my PRIMARY source for news.
That's not a bad point. I find that I often forget to check the box to not add my automatic +1 to posts that I'm just spitting out (like this one :-) )in response to someone else's discussion that probably, although not a bad or off-topic post, probably isn't a +2.
Also, for other reasons, I _do_ want to see scores when I get points to moderate. Nothing I hate worse than seeing a -1 post that is neither flamebait or off-topic, just merely an opposing opinion. As long as its someone's opinion with some valid arguments, it should have as much chance to be seen as any other 'good' post. Also, posts that are marked up waaay too much can be knocked down.
My feeling is that meta-moderation can be used to correct this problem, if there were only additional info in the m2 page. Sequence of moderation.
This might be real tough to do but here's what I'd like: When presented with a comment on m2 page that has had multiple moderations, show what the post was scored at the time the moderator marked it.
So, if a post ends up +5, when it shows up in M2 the first time, it might have an original score of 2 and went to 3. I would mark that as 'fair'.
The next time it shows, the original score was 3 and went to 4. Maybe I leave this alone, maybe 'unfair'.
The third time I see the post and it goes from 4 to 5 and its not a 5 comment and the moderator is just doing a 'mee-too' like has been suggested, it is markeed 'unfair'.
Now, the moderator who put the post over the top loses karma and maybe gets less points.
I know, but it was a thought...
(oh and Rob, showing me my Karma points is bad, makes me hit reload waaay too much to look at my post history to see what I did right/wrong) =D
As always, appreciate your work, Rob!
You make an example of a bad (GNOME-bigot) moderator moderating down 5 KDE-related posts. I think it's more likely (and I've seen on slashdot many times) that the moderator will moderate up 5 rather uninspiring or moderately interesting GNOME-related posts, and ignore more insightful KDE-related ones. I metamoderate and think "well, that wasn't THAT insightful. But I can't really say it was unfair either."
Personally, I don't see that as an easily solvable problem; you can't metamoderate taste in what people find interesting or funny. No matter how you randomly choose people, you will probably always end up getting the same ratio of, say, pro-GPL to anti-GPL moderators (whatever the ratio is in the /. reading community). But it would make matters worse if more prevalent views (and thus, higher karma) could feedback into more moderating power.
Oh, and I'd like to point out that I like your idea of metamoderating in the context of an article. If it wouldn't slow things down too much!
JMC
rate every post. This would generate a lot more moderation (signal+noise). This is okay because there are more good (signal) and less bad (noise) moderations. Thus, signal should rise from the noise. The more moderation the better. Also by allow each user meta-moderate to his or her personal taste would help sort the signal. Letting each person agree or disagree with how the article has been moderated allows one to build a profile of the moderators they agreed with. Then the moderators they agree with will become more important to them. This meta-moderation would be unique to each user. Meaning mean each person would have his or her own score for a post. If they liked 'funny', then the would 'funny' articles would rise to the top. If they like 'trolls' then 'trolls' would rise to the top. Example: Ms. Poster posts an offtopic but funny joke. (+1 for being logged in) Mr. Funnyman comes along and moderates it up because it is funny. (Giving it +1) Mr. Hateofftopic comes along and moderates it down because it is offtopic. (Giving it -1) Then Mr. Reader reads it at a score of 1. He agrees with Mr. Funnyman and m-moderates Mr. Funnyman up. The article is now a 2 for Mr. Reader. (+1 for being logged in +2 for Mr Funnyman's moderation , -1 for Mr. Hateofftopic's moderation) Ms. Reader2 reads it at a score of 1. Agrees with Mr. Hateofftopic and m-moderates him up. So the score for the post (just for Ms. Reader2) would go to 0 (+1 logged in +1 for Mr Funnyman's, -2 for Mr. Hateofftopic's) (This actually might be done with a multiplier and not an adder.) So the moderators you like, you listen to. (You could even put a disagree in to show the ones you don't, but I don't thinks this is necessary.) This would generate and personally tailored moderation system. -RossB
How about going in the other direction and allowing just about everyone to moderate every post. This would generate a lot more moderation (signal+noise). This is okay because there are more good (signal) and less bad (noise) Moderations. Thus, signal should rise from the noise. The more moderation the better.
Also by allow each user meta-moderate to his or her personal taste would help sort the signal. Letting each person agree or disagree with how the article has been moderated allows one to build a profile of the moderators they agreed with. Then the moderators they agree with will become more important to them. This meta-moderation would be unique to each user. Meaning mean each person would have his or her own score for a post. If they liked 'funny', then the would 'funny' articles would rise to the top. If they like 'trolls' then 'trolls' would rise to the top.
Example:
Ms. Poster posts an offtopic but funny joke. (+1 for being logged in)
Mr. Funnyman comes along and moderates it up because it is funny. (Giving it +1)
Mr. Hateofftopic comes along and moderates it down because it is offtopic. (Giving it -1)
Then Mr. Reader reads it at a score of 1. He agrees with Mr. Funnyman and m-moderates Mr. Funnyman up. The article is now a 2 for Mr. Reader. (+1 for being logged in +2 for Mr Funnyman's moderation , -1 for Mr. Hateofftopic's moderation)
Ms. Reader2 reads it at a score of 1. Agrees with Mr. Hateofftopic and m-moderates him up. So the score for the post (just for Ms. Reader2) would go to 0 (+1 logged in +1 for Mr Funnyman's, -2 for Mr. Hateofftopic's)
(This actually might be done with a multiplier and not an adder.)
So the moderators you like, you listen to. (You could even put a disagree in to show the ones you don't, but I don't thinks this is necessary.) This would generate and personally tailored moderation system.
-RossB
Whatever arguments there may be for comments, this isn't one of them.
I am glad to see any M2 system developing. Since I habitually take the opposite side in many discussions, I see my comments get either pounded down or at least not promoted. When a comment sparks daughter comments perhaps it should automatically be raised. I think all moderaters should consider the difference between things they disagree with, and comments that don't contribute to the discussion.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
I'm pretty sure that in the original details about moderation, part of the moderation criteria was, "people in the middle range": neither those who logged on once a month, nor those who repeatedly reloaded Slashdot in the course of a day. I also think that the amount of reloading that disqualified you was not specifically stated. Just a guess, but plausible, perhaps.
While I agree that integrated M2 is fundamentally correct and wanted, 'random M2' has some very important properties as well: it in a sense _forces_ and ensures the moderator to take up 'independent' issues/comments and judge them. An M2 almost by definition only ever sees articles in which he is interested - this again creates inhomogenity in the distribution of M2's. Randomness distributes M2's much better between moderations, and this also makes it sure that 'bad moderators' will be caught sooner or later. Eg. if a 'malicious moderator' goes back to a KDE vs. Gnome thread, and moderates down KDE-positive comments, then this skews the _historic record_. Newcomers, analysts (and history) will be manipulated. It has a very low likelyhood that such malicious moderating will ever be detected - M2's by definition do not read old articles. (but there _are_ people who read old articles, but they are not likely to M2 moderate, or even _notice_ that the historic record has been manipulated with.)
All in one, I very much like the current 'daily random M2', because 1) it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling that even such random samples are usually 90% well-moderated 2) I can be sure conceptually that the bad guys will be caught sooner or later, and it might be me who catches one of them. M2 is really like law enforcement, you both want to patrol on the streets but you also want to do larger scale (and more random) searches.
The solution? Honestly I dont really know. Maybe this hybrid method: there would be a 'get me 1 random comment to M2-moderate' link right at the top, but also it would be possible to M2-moderate 'in the field'. Thus I could eg. random-M2 5 comments, and realtime-moderate another 5 comments. The 'split' between random and realtime M2 is thus up to the M2-moderator.
--Coke
One possible solution is to allow moderators to moderate only posts which have been entered within a set period of time (for instance, in the last two hours). This is plenty of time for moderators to downgrade the troll posts as they appear; it also makes sure that some of the later posts are noticed and up/downgraded as necessary.
;)
Another is to assign each moderator to one or two threads and allow them to moderate comments only in those threads. (In the same way as MM appears to select moderated posts from one or two [rarely three] threads.) Kill the time limit on moderation points, but moderators won't be able to moderate in another thread until they've used up their points, or the threads they are assigned to are archived.
Simply assigning more moderators won't work unless you can get them to look past the first fifty posts - and in addition, the more moderators you have, the more idiotic moderation you're likely to see. (I saw a post that had been moderated Flamebait -3, Interesting +1, Funny +5, Overrated -1 recently [or thereabouts]. If this isn't a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, I don't know what is - though the net result was about right for the post, ironically. I think a number of moderators decided the MM facility was ineffectual and did their own metamoderation-by-proxy.)
Allocating more moderation points to good moderators is to be welcomed. Five moderation points is often not enough when a thread can contain 500+ comments and there are dozens of threads on the go at once.
This isn't a "my karma is crap because I think before I post" whinge. It's more of a "If post X (#4) gets +4 slapped on it, then that really good post Y (#383) should have at least one or two points on it so that people with their thresholds at +3 will actually see it" whinge, if you like. (Which would disqualify most of my posts anyway.)
--
This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along.
--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
A related idea is self moderation based on karma. Those who post tend to have a good idea of the relative merit of their comments, whether they are informative, funny, etc. Thus when posting, an option should be able to select what category your post falls under. Bad karma, or overrating ones posts would eliminate this ability. Additionally, high karma would allow one to post anonymous content that is self rated. This methodology could reduce the amount of posts that are overlooked missed due to lack of moderation (ie the early posts get moderated, but late posts tend to accumulate as 1's ... as noted by another poster...). Tom M.
This reads a little bit like a Request For Comments. Have you assigned an RFC number yet? :)
(Maybe we could call it the "Moderation Manifesto")
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
That's exactly what I had in mind. At the least, some highly distilled FAQs on various subjects could emerge. At best, it could morph into a collaborative consensus-building sort of thing.
;-) Oh well, we can bring the idea up again sometime.
Then people could take the Slash codebase and use it to set up specialized sites, e.g. on politics, jazz, saving the world, etc. I know I would, at any rate...
Unfortunately this whole debate is off the main page now and in the dustbin of history
From my earliest Slashdot-lurking days, I've wished that the interesting, lively debates didn't get whisked off the front page and into oblivion so soon.
;-)
Imagine a page or pages, linked to Slashdot's front page, called:
- Current "Liveliest" Discussions: ordered by comments/minute
- Week/Month/Year's Hottest Debates: ordered by total no. of comments
- Active Debates: "old" articles with recent comments (ordered by "recency"?)
Etc... other criteria are possible.
Wouldn't this add a fascinating static element to Slashdot? Eventually certain discussions would emerge as "Slashdot's All-Time Great Debates" , with thousands of comments from a period of years. Set your threshold to +30 to savor the distilled, democratic wisdom of 30000 slashdotters
What do you think?
Dugan
An extension of this would be to have more than one category for moderation. Instead of a single, nonspecific number acting of a measure of how relevant, witty, well-researced, poignant, froody, and insightful a post is, why not have a few ways to rate a post? For instance, some of the most interesting threads I've seen on Slashdot have wandered somewhat from the story's topic. Unfortunately, some interesting statements have been moderated down because they were not directly relevant. Say such a statement receives a +2. How, then, could we distinguish between an off-topic but interesting post and one which is only slightly insightful, interesting, etc.? Having multiple ratings would allow one to filter based on certain criteria (I, for instance, might only allow posts with a +3 for content, but -1 for relevance.) Certain people have voiced complaints about humorous posts or off-topic posts receiving too many points. MM is not the answer here, since each moderator and M2 has his/her own idea of what makes a post "good." You can't please everyone with a universal definition of good. Allow ./ers to define it for themselves. If I wasn't already late for class, I'd clean this post up a bit. Apologies for the sloppiness/length.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
One of the reasons that I think that Slashdot moderation works so well is that each moderator called upon to do it so infrequently. This makes it a responsibility, like voting.
For example, I usually set my moderation filter pretty high unless I'm really interested in a subject and have the time to sort through several dozen comments. But when I get tagged to moderate I switch over to a 0 filter, and spend a little more time reading every article to watch for anything worth moderating.
If I were to be a moderator every day or two, I wouldn't have the time or inclination to do this. Especially if when I did find something that was worth moderating there would be any 80% chance that I couldn't do anything about it. I'd probably just surf around at my regular filter level and if I happened to spot something worth moderating that I could moderate I would. But the chances of me finding that level 0 or level 1 comment worth bringing to the attention of everybody would be very small.
I agree that postings should be listed as a meritocracy, and that people should carry karma. But why do we need moderators? Can't we self-moderate?
Take the Meta-Mod page for instance. What if we were able to rate the article like that? Maybe a pull-down where we could assign a flame-bait, informative, etc etc rating. Of course, it would probably need to be wieghted to a single flamebait didn't condemn you to hell for eternity, but what do you think?
Dirk
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
I Meta Moderated for the first time today, and I have to say the system is good. Though it was a very small sample, I have to say that it reaffirmed my belif that for the most part the comments that people moderate up are usually deserving.
/. should have an equal opportunity to be heard. As long as what they say is on topic, I have no problem with someone having a different opinion than mine.
The ones that really need to be examined are the ones that are moderated down. Basically, everyone who posts on
It definately makes me suspicious when a comment has been moderated down though, as they're less commonl. If a comment is moderated down, and it is on topic, I'm extra suspicious. What offended the person who read it so much they wasted a prized moderation point downing someone else's thought? Were they really moderating rationally?
As for features, Rob: It would be nice to know what the values of the post were before and after moderation (or maybe just one with the delta). It would help to put moderations like "Overrated" in better perspective.
hmmm an intersting thought, would that be meta-meta-moderators? but then you would need meta-meta-meta-moderators, and then meta-meta-meta-meta-moderators...
:)
you get the pic.
now how to stop the infine regress, of meta-moderation? i dont know. i havenot finished Godel, Escher, Bach i have a feeling that the answer (42) is in there somewhere
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
The M2 thing seems to be going nicely, but I would like to propose an additional idea. When you moderate, you're limited to having very few subjects that detail how you feel about the message. Sometimes they don't do justice to your feelings about the post. That's why I think that it would be nice to have a one line comment detailing why you think the moderation you just made was fair. This is something that I have actually wanted in the past, and it might even help with the M2 moderation.
Writing a comment would be optional, as many moderations are simply self explanatory. But, it could be useful to say "I moderated this down because it was repeated above in comment #xyz," or "I moderated this down because we aren't discussing foo here, only bar." Of course, positive feedback would be good, too. Good posters could be rewarded with feedback like "Good post," or "Nice job researching this subject."
This information could then be made available on the M2 moderation page, permitting people to get an idea about why a moderation took place. A comment that might look perfectly normal could have been grossly off topic. Further, it would give the original poster an idea about why he was moderated up or down. Everybody wins.
Of course, the moderation comments would have to have limits. Perhaps the complete history of the moderation comments would only be available to the original poster, while everyone else only saw the most recent. This would prevent silliness like whole discussion threads on why a post was moderated in such and such of a way.
Anyway, it's just a thought.
Third: It's already required for a person to send in an e-mail address when registering. Perhaps it would be best if only one account were allowed per e-mail address. Couple this with the idea posted earlier in this thread that a person whose post gets moderated to Flamebait or Troll (this would have to be changed to require a consensus of three moderators in order to change a person's post to Troll status) cannot post anything more until the next day. The result would help to cut down on trolling, since a person cannot simply create another account and continue on. Since there's already a "Post Anonymously" checkbox there isn't a need for more than one account per person anyway. E-mail addresses can't be faked, since the password is sent to the e-mail address given when a person registers (so an account with a faked address is useless since you can't log on).
Don't forget, generating new e-mail addresses is trivial. There are all the free web mail providers, and also (if you want messages to reach your "real" mailbox) sendmail is often configured to ignore anything after a comment character (typically '+') in the username.
For example, I typically add a '+' followed by a unique code whenever I submit my address to a web site, so I can tell who's selling my address to spammers.
So "e-mail addresses can't be faked" is not quite accurate; limiting anything based on e-mail addresses is kind of pointless.
when i moderated i read through an article and if i find one (or 2 really) good posts i moderate them up.. i assume most people do it that way. the result of the new system would be that probably peopel see a good comment and can not moderate them ..
so they search for a similar one that does express a similar idea (or simply repeats most of the idea) that they can moderate up.. and the will moderat that up. so the whole moderation process would loose sharpness it would be somehow blurred. it would not help to find the perls form the posts...
mond.
The way things are set up now, with a potentially infinite number of levels of meta-moderation (what if the meta-moderation isn't fair? do we need meta-meta-moderation?), is too complicated. I propose a simpler system.
Set up a directed graph, with the nodes being the slashdot users, and the weighted connection between user A and user B being A's average opinion of B's posts. (Maybe put in an "uncertainty" factor, as well-- only having rated one post means the rating has a high uncertainty, while having rated dozens means the rating is quite accurate.) Now, use paths through the graph to determine whether a post should be seen. If I like B's posts, and B likes C, then I should be likely to see C's posts. This way, there is no one universal standard for a "good" post. If I happen to think that it's really funny when people flame each other and post a bunch of offtopic stuff, I should be able to adjust my ratings so that is mostly what I see. On the other hand, if I want to see well-balanced, reasoned posts, I can do that, too.
This kind of system would mimic the kinds of trust systems you see in real life-- you trust the opinions of your closest friends, those of friends of your close friends a little less, and those of random people off the street not very much at all.
You could also set it up so if there is no path between yourself and a given user, you just look at the overall average of paths coming into that user and use that to build a reputation score. You go back more than one level deep, though, so if 10 people rate user A highly, but each of these 10 people has received a poor rating from 10 other people, A's rating should not be that high. (In effect, the first extra level deep is your "meta-"moderation and the extra levels are even more exponentially diminishing "meta-" levels.)
Of course this system is based on scoring per individual, not per post, but I think it's safe to assume that the overall quality of a given user's posts is going to be fairly consistent.
I'll admit that this may be more expensive in terms of implementation complexity and resource usage, but I think it's a conceptually clearer system than what exists now.
As someone who's only moderated once (I have a history of lurking, rather than posting) perhaps I'm not best qualified to comment on this, but I would prefer to avoid the sort of "real-time moderation" that Rob is proposing here. It would indeed limit some of the abuses of the system, but I think the greatest benefit of the existing system is that it allows moderators to choose what they want to promote or demote. I would find it very frustrating to see an absolutely *wonderful* comment that I thought deserved a +1 Interesting or +1 Informative, only to be thwarted by the fact that it wasn't one of the ones I had the little mod box for ...
5 points are way too little. give at least 20 and reduce the no. of people getting points. Also randomise it. Out of the huge pool of moderators nominate say 20 on any given article and then revoke their points after 24 hrs. Meta moderation can keep the moderators in check. I also dont like the concept of banning poeple from posting..let them post at -2 or whatever.
I'd moderate it up if I could (I realize that this revelation doesn't do anything to help, but I figured it couldn't hurt too much either).
I kinda understand the principle of the karma thing; I certainly understand the process by which it is obtained; but I don't quite understand what it does for us all.. what greater purpose it serves. How is it making Slashdot a better place? And darn it, mine's only 4, or 9, or some random (yet positive, fortunately enough) number. woo hoo for me
(Of course, I do appreciate all those who have ever moderated me up, and I'm happy to have that positive karma number)
--- just my $0.0000000000000000000000000002 cents worth--
Insert mind here.
Having read a significant proportion of this discussion so far and seen a significant number of people arguing against M2, I'd like to put in an argument for it.
M1 is in place for several reasons:
1. Removing spam and flames
2. Adding notice to well written articles
Where exactly does this fail? several points have been raised:
1. People push their own agenda, moderating up articles by friends or whose topic they agree with, rather than the reasoning behind it.
2. Its a simple fact that some people have very different views from others.
In a collaborative moderation scheme such as this, it is entirely necessary to limit these bad effects as much as possible. The first attempt here on slashdot was to minimise the damage moderators could do, by giving them an extremely limited amount of power.
I believe M2 represents a better solution. While it cannot have effect instantly, since it will take a short amount of time for karma ratings to settle properly and for people to get used to the system, it now gives us the ability to not only limit those moderators who moderate inappropriately, but also to give more power to those who regularly moderate well, thus reducing the need to have more and more people moderate (reducing its special status and making it a chore) while at the same time, increasing the likelyhood that any given moderation point awarded is from a moderator whose moderating methods meet the approval of the community.
In this case, the presence of M3 or higher would never be necessary, M2 represents the will of the community as a whole, and M1 represents the average of that will, with a human intellect.
All in all, an excellent system, and as a collaborative system (as opposed to personal moderation, which is another issue entirely) I believe it only requires some tweaking to achieve excellent results.
You can't win a fight.
In response to the people who are upset about /. getting "anal" and the users needing to "get over themselves":
/.'ers. If Rob et al. have the time and desire to improve the system for us, great. If not, I'll live. I'll still read /., post when I can, and continue with my life when I can't. But for cryin' out loud, don't act like somebody stepped on your toes when the end result of all this can be totally turned off, or even selectively turned off, by anyone who so chooses.
:)
Look, I usually have neither the time nor inclination to read a bunch of "m1cr0s0ft sux" posts, nor "First!", nor posts that are nothing but flamebait. Sometimes I do, and I read the comments with my threshold set at -1. It's at 4 most of the time, but I still go to -1 when I can to get the flavor.
But I'm not being anal. This isn't about what I should or shouldn't read, though I do skip posts I find useless. This is about trying to filter the massive amounts of information that come my way every day. If you have the time and desire to read it all, have at it! I'm actually jealous, since Lord knows I would like to do so.
Sadly, I can't, and neither can a lot of other
There, I feel so much better now.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
The present system of moderation always seemed a little arbitrary and too easy to abuse. So here's a strange idea that I think just might work:
On each comment, have three radio buttons for Good, Bad, and Average, set to Average by default. Each comment gets a score, which starts at 0. Now, whenever someone gets moderator status, have them pick a button for every comment. When they click "Moderate", "Good" posts get their score incremented, "Bad" posts get it decremented, and "Average" posts are left alone.
Now for the important part: When the page is displayed, posts with scores in the top 15% get "Very good", next 20%, "Good", next 30%, "Average", next 20%, "Bad", and last 15% "Very Bad". Or those names can be changed to whatever. Since this system needs more raw feedback to work right, increase the number of moderators or frequency someone gets moderator access.
Another idea is to let everyone moderate all the time, but then people might not take it seriously, or not do it carefully.
Note that the method of determining the final category of a comment by definition averages out the individual moderations, so it is very difficult to abuse the system.
Possible problems would be the complexity of the code, especially keeping track of which comments a moderator has already moderated (because they get to moderate all comments). However, it doesn't seem much harder to implement than the metamoderation system.
I've been reading /. for quite some time now, and I've had the pleasure to have a couple of Moderation points bestowed uppon me. And it gave me great pleasure to be able to point out outstanding comments, ass-wipping funny remarks and hopefully not so often to have to weed out neuron-impaired messages.
;)
I realy think that this system has to be the best implementation of free speech, in our thoughtless society. Because nobody should forget that free speech != arrogance.
I would love to see a goverment use of such a system. Imagine Senators beeing given good or bad Karma.... hmmm...
Murphy(c)
Of course, the problem with deriving karma almost directly from an average of moderation is that it would discourage those with high karma from posting. For example, if I had high karma I might want to protect it under the system you suggest by only posting when I have a very solid comment to make. However, other comments that might rate a +2 I might not want to post since it would bring down my karma.
;)
I actually like Rob's karma formula as it is now -- I'm just curious about how it is calculated.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
After reading literally hundreds of comments re moderation and having tried the metamoderation thing.. I don't think increasing attempts at control will accomplish much. I think overall it worked well enough when regulars found themselves with the occasional 5 points to use in 3 days, and however posts got rated was how they got rated. Under that system, I take it seriously and try to spend my points to the best possible effect.
As to metamoderation, I tried it once, found I more or less agreed with about 80%, only found one that was a truly dim moderation (but perhaps only because it was re some esoterica that I may know more about than most folk), and decided the whole process was a waste of my valuable reading time.
Nothing will make it "perfect" for everyone. Reasonable agreement on the value of posts that **more people happen to have seen** is about the best you can ask for without making it so convoluted that we don't really know WHY some post is rated as it is, other than because a bunch of folk with unlike opinions and divergent expertise had an argument over its value.
"Everything in moderation -- even moderation." Abdul Ba'ha
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Hey Rob,
Well, I quite like the way that slashdot is right now, but you're right in thinking there is room for improvement... one day we'll get there.
Anyway, as a few people have said, the first comments tend to be the most moderated... I always view the newest first and on a story a day old I tend to have to go the the beginning of the story to find any well moderated comments, and these tend to be in the five points regen.
*idea*... you say that the idea of limiting the amount of comments that can be moderated might work... go for it ! How about the last twenty comments posted ? Only twenty to moderate ? Well, there are other storys, you knows.
I also think that the more moderation points for those who have a good karma is going to work... that way it can be taken for granted that i) the user has been here 'a while' and ii) they are actually relevant to the world of slashdot.
However, how does meta-moderation work ? I've never seen one of my comments come up and neither one of the ones I've moderated (I think)... so far so good...
...also, as far as I'm aware, anyone can meta-moderate as long as they're logged in... how about this is changed so that the amount of comments on can m2 is limited by ones karma ?
I am not sure that posting skills and moderation skills are necessarily tied. A good writer is not always a good editor.
I suspect that skilled posting is a combination of knowledge, insight, interest, and time.
Skilled moderation has less to do with intrerest and time and all to do with insight. With enough knowledge thrown in to weed out the bozos.
However, the one time I can recall being moderated up for amusement value (I think the post in question made it up to #4) was for a carefully-done parody of the article I was posting to. It was no one-liner, and it required about a half-hour of thought and editing on my part -- probably more raw effort than I've put into most of my
Butanyway. The problem with "funny" is that it's easy to abuse, but I don't think the solution is to get rid of "funny" as a moderation option. I'm not sure how to encourage better-quality satire, however.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
In any case, it's getting a bit tedious IMNSHO. It's not that I generally have anything against the comments contained in posts that also have this statement, but the statement would make me, personally, less-inclined to moderate the post in *either* direction.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Of course, there is the slight potential problem of moderators who can't otherwise post to the discussion trying to get their two cents in that way, but limiting it to one line will cut down on that.
In addition, it would help pick out problem moderators. If, for instance, someone is moderating a post down and puts as a comment "You're a loser. Go away!" or something similar, we might have a clue that there's some personal bias going on. Well, that's not quite universal. I used to be a sysop on a YAWC BBS, and we used to put comments on people's Aidelines like "twitted for bad info." One such comment by another 'op was "Abusive Loser. I hate that."
Perhaps a better example would be the inevitable "Go away Katz" posts, if they were being moderated up with a "Yeah! Katz sucks, heh heh heh," or something similarly unproductive. Or moderating a Linux criticism down with "Are you nuts? Linux r00lz, dude!" You get the idea. Also, I know that a few times when I've moderated, I've wished for a "misinformation" category with which to mod something down,sort of like the opposite of "informative."
Like I said, though, the above poster has an excellent idea!
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
It does seem like a good idea, I agree. Less usefull to me I suppose, since I doubt I'll ever raise enough karma to do much anyway. I don't post often. ...
Still, if it keeps out the trouble-makers
1- Hey you americans (in vast majority) think about foreign people who READ prefectly english, but are not easy at WRITING english !
2- We should only post pertinent comments on subjects we know fairly well.
For those reasons I've never posted, but I've read a lot, and I wish I could have participated in conversations by MODERATION, as far as I know the subject.
Right to moderate should not be associated to past posts. why not now associate it to meta moderation ?
Hello from a rainy morning in Paris !
I have written and am polishing an Internet Draft to address this sort of problem for NNTP news, and it was primarily inspired by Slashdot.
Basically it allows everyone to moderate/rate/vote and then allows readers to select who's opinions will impact the presentation for themselves.
I think it's fairly concise and may be useful in this situation, and many others.
It's callen NNMP (NetNews Metadata Protocol):
http://www.dimensional.com/~xenon
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
1. I don't see why AC's are started at 0 and named users are started at 1. What's the point? It seems like unnecessary pressure to get people to register.
2. Moderation is a chore the way it's set up currently. The first three times I was moderator, I did my best, but nowadays, I ignore it. It's a pain. If I want to moderate a comment, I have to scroll to the end of the page and reload the whole thing? It needs to be quick and easy. Press a button and be done - no scrolling, no reload of the page. Otherwise, I have no idea will keep people from getting tired of moderating. The current moderation scheme works excellently (though I would suggest letting everyone moderate all the time), but the implementation of the technical details needs work.
3. Automatic moderation of posts based on karma is probably not a good idea. People don't post worthwhile stuff all the time, or junk all the time. I've said before, negative karma makes no sense. Punishing is inefficient. Ignore the bad, promote the good.
Just some thoughts....
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
Doesn't sound like a very good idea. Most comments out there don't need to be moderated at all, just a small number of good or bad ones. Since the whole point is to bring forward good posts, and hide stupid ones, wouldn't we want this to happen quickly? Limiting the # of comments moderatable will just slow that down.
The other ideas sound great. Thanks for all the work you've been putting in lately, Rob.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
I hope Rob doesn't read this, you'll make him cry.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
There's no need to be heavy handed about this. We could simply give the moderators the ability to mark a moderation "does not affect user's karma." Then the moderator could make the determination of exactly how offtopic the (funny) post is, and judge accordingly.
Also, it seems to me that people should be allowed to moderate themselves down, either at the time of the post or later on. I strongly suspect that many of the FIRST PSOT!!!!!1!!!!1! people would take advantage of this, as even they realize how offtopic it truly is.
What if the randomly chosen M2 posts showed up (nested in with the others, if that is your method of viewing) regardless of your threshold? It would be few enough articles as to not be a nuisance, IMHO.
I just got my first five moderator points last week and loved every minute of it (Suprized me too..didnt know what the little boxes were until I asked some people :) )
/. crew that keeps this thing chugging along. I found this site a few months ago and now I'm addicted. (anyone know were I can go get help? Support groups? or should I check myself into a hospital ASAP?) [Other suggestion for /. put like a 30 or so minute refresh on the main page so I dont have to hit the refresh button on my browser every 30 minutes..yes..i am extremly lazy :)]
I have always thought that everyone should be given the chance to moderate (except for ACz). Then if like 100+ people agree it gets moderated up/down. This would allow the good stuff to be eliminated from the bad stuff easier. Though you should also have moderators who can change them w/o a majority rule.
I also have to thank Rob and the great
take a deap breath and go get some sleep
I agree with your gripe completely.
I would like to add that another problem is created by the wide variety of stories presented on slashdot. Some of the topics I would certainly not feel qualified to evaluate whether someone's comment was "insightful" or "informative". Figuring out who is a "troll" or "flamebait" is usually obvious, but for good comments, the moderator needs to feel that they understand the post well enough to judge it. Then there are the mediocre comments that don't deserve to move from their initial score of '0' for AC's or '1' for users...
...if the moderator's random 20% gives them these sorts of posts, the good moderators will likely feel frustrated at their inability to moderate and the bad moderators will probably find some way to be annoying within this context anyways.
A better fix would be to reward good moderators (based on Karma?), and hope that M2 weeds out the bad moderators.
---
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
Although the improved context aspect is appealing. The problem I forsee with integration is due to our threshholds.
I don't mind taking 5 minutes to meta-moderate and then be done with it. I don't mind, in that context, reading a few loser comments, which have likely been appropriately moderated.
However, if M2 was integrated, to properly participate, I would have to do it throughout the day as I read articles, with which I would probably lose patience. Or if many of the randomly chosen comments had low scores, I wouldn't even see them at all, since I like to read articles with a threshold of 2.
Furthermore, how many randomly chosen comments would be set for meta-moderation? As it is, I only can meta-moderate 10 per day, would this be kept track of if the comments were integrated?
---
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
This is funny. I have just been given moderator access for the first time before this post. I'll use it later I guess.
This being said, I think that giving more moderating power to people with a good karma is a good thing. On the other hand, it assumes that people who post _good_ comments will be _good_ moderators. I believe this is more or less true but this has to be verified.
I'm personally doubtful about the "random" comments moderation. First, it will be a pain to program as the comments should not change each time you reload (OK.OK. that's not my problem, but...:) ). Second, I think that moderators should be given full power for a limited amount of time or small power for a long time. If I'm frustated too often that I can't moderate the comments that I find highly interesting or that irritate me, I think I would not want to moderate any more.
A true contribution to society. Keep it up.
Rob, thanks for your efforts at improving Slashdot.
Here's a problem I've noticed, and I'm afraid I don't know a good solution. Moderation tends to favor the early posts. There is a tendency to over-moderate the first responses to an article, while good and bad responses a hundred items down don't get moderated up or down, as they should be. It's clear why this happens -- moderators evaluate what they see, and they usually see the earlier posts and not the later ones.
I don't know what in the world to do about it. You can hardly randomize the posts as seen by the moderators, because they could never follow threads that way. And you can't make everybody wait until all the posts or in before there's any moderation, or else moderation would be of no use at all.
Nevertheless, it's the biggest problem I see with Slashdot moderation. If anyone has a brilliant idea, post it.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
That having been said, I think that there might be one area where moderation might be improved:
Instead of (or perhaps in addition to) giving someone more moderation points based on karma, how about increasing moderation based on the total score of all their previous posts in a given topic? Say for instance, that a person has posted a number of comments under a given topic, all of which have been moderated to a four or five, since they have all proven to be relevant, informative, insightful, etc. When later on, this user gets their moderation points, they get X points for general moderation, but Y points (where Y is a function of their total posts' moderation points) under the topic that they have been posting under? The point here is that if someone's posting under a given topic, and they have regularly posted well (and this could include some kind of deduction if they similarly post flames, trolls, etc.), they probably have a good understanding of the topic, and should perhaps be given a little more leeway and/or (dare I use this word?) power under that topic.
This power would, of course, be subject to revocation if the meta moderation found them suddenly becoming Mr. Bad Moderator (an obvious flaw in my suggestion, I know.)
Just a thought.
In general I agree with the proposed changes. With one exception. The 20% rule.
:).
You mention that you believe that in general the majority of people are good and behave in a manner consistant with this evaluation. Ergo, the majority of people when given moderation powers will exercise them with the best possible judgement they can (we're not perfect and moderation is an exercise in personal perference to some degree or another).
So then why limit to 20% of the comments. By your own argument this restriction would do more harm then good, as there are more good moderators who would be hindered by the restriction then there are bad moderators who would abuse the ability.
Add to this the idea of giving karma more overall effect in the moderation process and I think you've pretty much solved the problem. Bad moderators will not gain moderation status as often, thus further raising the proportion of good moderators. Adding the 20% rule to this would only exasberate the problem. In my opinion
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
That would work, but it seems somewhat inferior to the way it works now. All I think that it would do would be to cause ratings to fluctuate wildly depending on who was on. That doesn't seem very conducive to pointing out better things to read. If the above happens too often, people are just going to give up on the whole concept.
I think that no matter what you do, moderation is going to take a bit of work. After all, you are supposedly thinking about the article before moderating, right?
The cake is a pie
Solution: Allow all readers to be moderators all of the time. There will never be a deficiency in the number of moderators with this method. The number of people scoring articles will be directly proportional to the number of people reading that article. When 100% of the participants can cast votes, there is no outlying possibility if lack of moderation.
The trouble with this is that most people will soon cease bothering to moderate. When it is a rare occurance, people will take it as an honor, and work to do a good job. When it is a constant duty, people will slack off and not moderate. The only people who will moderate are those with very strong opinions on the subject, and I'd suggest that they are the least likely to be objective.
If you take KDE vs. Gnome as an example, with random moderation, you have to assume that a large percentage of the moderators will be in that largest class of people who doesn't greatly care one way or another and moderation will be fair. If everyone has the power to moderate, most people (the moderate moderators) will be sick of moderating and probably won't bother. The only ones who will are those who think it is really important to moderate posts up or down. Those are likely to be the more fanatical posters, and you won't get objective moderation.
Moderation will just turn into a new sort of internet poll, and we all know how accurate those are!
Ideally, you'd always want moderators who had no opinion on the subject. Since that isn't likely possible, choosing at random is likely the next best bet.
I do like your other ideas, though. The averaging of scores would help one problem, which is that in popular topics you seen pages and pages of fours and fives while in a lesser used topic, you might see only a couple of twos and threes. Obviously this has little to do with post quality!
The cake is a pie
Although I do appreciate all the time you've spent coding in all this crazy moderation stuff, rob, I am somewhat concerned about some things.
A large portion of comments deserve no more or no less than the 1 (or 0 for AC's) that they get.. when you only display moderation controls on only part of the coments, almost all the comments with controls won't really be deserving of a moderation up or a moderation down. I think when this happens, some moderators, esp. the new ones will be just "itchy" to spend their points on something before they go away, and will moderate all the posts they can, regardless of whether they are deserving. (I may be wrong on this though)
What I feel might be a better solution than only having the moderation controls on a few of the comments.. Have a lot of moderators with only 1 or 2 points so your exampled Gnome bigot won't be able to moderate down all the KDE comments he sees , yet the "good" moderators will still be able to put the deserved -1 on those "Let's petrify nitrozac and hump her leg" posts.
Whups. How do you navigate to stuff like that? Or is that a document that you get the URL when you're picked to be a moderator? I'd been looking for that very thing.
"There's so much left to know/ and I'm on the road to find out." -Cat Stevens
Would people who submit good articles be worthy of increased Karma? This is similar to people who meta-moderation has flagged as discerning judges of comment worth being given better karma. If a person is a good judge of an article's interest level, they're likely to be good at judging comments.
The temptation is to make Karma the "reward" for being a good community member, and not just a measure of how good your comments usually are. Or are they the same thing?
"There's so much left to know/ and I'm on the road to find out." -Cat Stevens
How's this for an idea, if a user's comments are consistantly moderated as good, then new ones default to being rated good, until moderated elsewise. Same idea for a bad user's comments, as long as there is still some hope of an anomolous good comment by a bad user getting to the masses.
It could be as simple as the default value for your comment being the arithmetic average of past comments (within limits), or it could be more complex.
"There's so much left to know/ and I'm on the road to find out." -Cat Stevens
Just encode trolls and flamebait rot13, with the agreement of three or more more moderators (numbers are variables:-)). In three of the moderators, selected at random agree, the post is very likely flamebait and/or troll.
Give the option of decoding these as well.
1> No karmic points are to be added or subtracted for this rating, except for M2.
2> Let funny comments be indicated differently, say as F and allow settings for F also.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Hi!
I don't mean to be a syncophant--but I do want to make a point to the seemingly vast number of people who have ways to "improve" SlashDot.
The moderation system is reasonably sophisticated. The M2 system is reasonably sophisticated. The Karma values are reasonably sophisticated. The end result, to paraphrase a client of mine, is a system that is perfectly understandable--so long as the end user has an IQ of 140. [smile]
Rather than tweak the existing moderation system, it might be best to let it gel for a bit--let users spend time as moderators, and let other users spend time doing M2. We're all geeks--and one of our common traits is a tendency to explore. So when we get moderator points or an invitation to M2 we have a tendency to say, "hmm--what happens if I do this?" Those tendencies don't go away right away--it might be weeks before we give up noticing how clever Rob's moderation scheme is and get back to writing comments.
So my suggestion is this: don't do anything. Don't change anything about the moderation system for a good 30 days or more, and wait and see. If something needs to be changed, make the changes and wait another 30 days. Don't rush through a bunch of changes--the end users (us) will focus more on the changes than on what we're doing. (Business schools call this "the Hawthorne effect.")
The Ancient Geek
P.S.: Take it from me. Kiss Rob's posterior in your messages, and you get extra Karma points.
Well, as I see it :
;-)
The opportunity to see what is your Karma value tend to let you think "I have to improve my Karma skill" or "I'm chaos devoted, i've to be the worst"
Perhaps renaming it with a no-meaning name would prevent this sort of behavior, or just seeing as a binary value : can moderate/can't
( and I apologize for my poor english-writing skill, need to improve it
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
I like this idea. I M2ed today and I mostly got a bunch of two liners which I didn't know what to do with. Being out of context, these were difficult to rate fair or unfair. I left a few in neutral. I know I could've reload to get a new batch but ain't that cheating?
OTOH, slashdot was unreachable to me for most of the evening. So the additional performance hit from implementing this would be brutal.
The other night I was on across midnight and, sure enough, when the clock struct twelve, I turned into a pumpk... err, a MetaModerator. This is especially odd as I'm not in the same time zone as /. I guess I wouldn't expect these functions to be timezone adjusted.
Is this working as intended? I thought being a MetaModerator was a sporadic thing. I've MetaModerated for at least 4 days straight and always the first time I'm on /. on that day.
Bug? Feature? or both?
However, for reasons I explained you would expect this. If there infinite + and - points that could be assigned, etc. you'd expect it to be a Bell Curve (? wouldn't you?).
+5s are pretty rare, 2s are very common, 3s less so, 4s fairly unusual. I might seem that -1 is assigned rather too often, but that might just be an illusion based on the fact that the bell curve ends at -1 on the minus side, so you have a "piling up" of all bad posts in the -1 category.
If what you are saying happens, you'd expect to see more 5s than 4s. Especially considering that the bell curve ends at 5 on the plus side, you'd expect to see more 5s than 4s ANYway, but I've not noticed this to be the case.
How about it Rob? What's the statistical breakdown on all Comments?
The problem:
:)
Half the complaints are about people pursuing private agendas when moderating. Some sort of M2 moderation (or information collection about the original moderations) is needed for that. The other half are about posts being over-moderated (i.e. pushed to a 5 when only deserving of a 3, say).
Note that the current M2 moderation is not working for this. An article about GNOME or KDE may be insightful, but only worthy of, say, a +2. Using M2 it is impossible to critisise the bias of the person who pushed it to a +5.
Yet another moderation system:
I've elaborated on a scheme mentioned by an earlier poster using a sliding scale. Each post you wish to moderate you give a score in the -1 to +5 range. One of your moderation points is then used to push the posts score in the right direction.
In practice, lets say that a post has got scores of -1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5. To find the correct score, take the central score / pair of scores. If these contradict each other, ignore them (and all further scores). Otherwise, move the score in the right direction, moving the score minimally. (i.e. let the more extreme point move the score first)
In this example we would have
Score:1 -1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5
Score:2 -1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5
Score:3 -1, 2, 4, 5
Score:3 -1, 5
Score:3
Disadvantages:
- The main disadvantage is that you no longer get the 'insightful', 'funny', etc. comments. One solution would me to have a separate box where you can choose these, or a box where you can type in 'Excellent research' or 'unreadable' or whatever, which can be listed for anyone who's interested.
- More load server side, although admittedly only when someone moderates.
Advantages:
- It is similar enough to the existing system to let everything work as it does now.
- It is certainly no more prone to abuse than the current system. Each point is just smarter.
- It allows people to try to guide the comment to a sensible level, preventing the over-hyped humour posts.
- It makes it better for the meta-moderators - They can see where the moderator was trying to get the post to, and (with the box to type in the ideas), why the moderator thought it should go there.
- If nothing else, viewing the statistics of who gave the most number 5 moderations should be interesting
CloudWarrior . "I may be in the gutter but I'm looking to the stars"
The most recent issue of Jakob Nielsen's excellent Alertbox column about web usability is about reputation management. It even mentions slashdot!
Currently, everybody sees posts that are ranked on the same scale: what the moderators think. I don't agree that this is (always) the right thing to do.
/. based on their preferences.
/. (and the linux kernel dev list, and comp.lang.perl.misc) there are some people whose posts I consistently value. I would like a way to always read their posts. Conversely, I would like a /. "killfile" so that I don't have to read posts by people who have irritated me in the past. Again, I'm not talking about reducing their karma so they can't post - I want a filter so I don't see their posts.
Rather, each reader should have the ability to see a customized view of
For example, if I see a post moderated up to "5" and I think's it's a bonehead post, I would like to de-value the opinions of the moderators who liked that post. This is different from meta-moderation: I'm not saying that these moderators are bad and should be prevented from moderating, I'm saying that I don't want to see the results of their moderations.
Similarly, when I read
Eventually, each user will build up a profile of posters and moderators whose opions they trust and distrust. One can picture people trading these profiles, merging profiles with other people's, etc.
As the amount of information on the net grows, developing a systematic way to figure out which of it you trust and which of it you don't is going to become a very important problem.
Didn't Brin have some sort of reputation management system in Earth? Reading up on this might be a good place to start.
Anyway, the point I want to make is the people have different tastes and want to read different subsets of all posts. There's no reason to force the same view of moderation on everyone.
Rob, give it some time after you change things. Changing things every two weeks is not going to give you a 'stable' solution, and will merely confuse a lot of people.
well i think this might get interting , so far your ability to make /. more interactive has drawn ppl like myself to this site day after day . not that it matters much but i think this site just keeps getting better. hopfuly it will not get to 9 million sec. to load ,and still keep this stuff coming. but so far /. been great at it.
/. ranch we are making some / stakes and dot burgurs thank you drive throw - over 100 sites slashdoted."
"hear at the
So obviously it's important for Slashdot to have a good moderation system, otherwise we might end up with a SNR equal to that of newsgroups.
The good thing about Slashdot is that we can add and take away as many features as we want, because there's no protocol involved here, only code. So we can try one thing, see how it works, and if it doesn't work out, try something else. I think though, that we have to try not to make the moderation system *too* fancy. If we make moderation too difficult and subject to review after review after review, then I think moderators will begin to ask themselves "what is the point?". I would hate to see something like this, for example, become reality.
On another topic, I think that meta-moderation in the comments list itself is a bad idea. Let's say I'm person A, or a friend of person A. Person A gets their post moderated down. I might choose to meta-moderate that post. Even if we ban the poster themselves from meta-moderating where their own posts are involved, we can't stop them from telling all of their friend to go there and do it for them.
Slashdot was mentioned as one of the shining examples of 'Reputation Managers' by Jakob Nielson in his latest Alertbox column on USEIT.COM. In the article Nielson is basically saying that Reputation Management systems are up and coming ways of adding important value to the web. Only thing is, he has one rather pithy comment about useability on /. (he is, after all, a usability guru). Quote: "Unfortunately, the ability to filter out poorly rated comments is not turned on by default, so only diligent users who study the slightly confused user interface will discover this useful feature."
Personally I don't find the /. system that difficult to understand, but I do remember having some difficulty finding documentation on how to use the moderation/scoring/karma features. I know there is some stuff in the FAQ and all that, but a more formal set of documentation might be in order.
I know, I know. Documentation is always the last thing a programmer gets around to writing. But look at it this way, with /. being a continual work-in-progress there is little chance any one will get around to doing some simple 'man pages' for /. anytime soon unless it is made a priority.
Perhaps we users should take this task on for ourselves. No, I am not volunteering, or at least not to do all the work...
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
>Put 5x (Numbers are Variables here: Don't complain about them!) as many moderators into the system.
I think thats great because, rarely I'll get my post within the first 100 and then they don't seem to move up or down at all.
Anyway,
keep up the good work Rob!
Aaron "PooF" Matthews
E-mail: aaron@fish.pathcom.com
To mail me remove "fish."
ICQ: 11391152
Quote: "Success is the greatest revenge"
The fact that you can customize your view of the discussion, doesn't necessarily mean that you can actually apply your desired degree of freedom to it. Free speech does not refer only to what you can see and what you can say.. but mostly to the mental state of confidence that you have the ability to say something as loud as anybody else can. Moderation up and downs the volume of each voice in here, and since its effects are available to anyone who wants it, the rest of us suffer the impact of this volume unequality whatever our setting are.
I'm not saying I disagree with moderation on /. After all it's Rob's site and he can do whatever he likes with it. I suspect that the reasoning behind his choices does not necessarily follow the spirit of freedom, but also of practicality.. which is good in a sense. But the point is, that ./ is a censored discussion (Rob is trying his best though to make a censorship system that is as fair as possible to everybody) and it certainly isn't free. There is no scaling in freedom. There is no such thing as "some freedom" or "lotsa freedom". It's either there, or not. In ./'s case, it's not.
Nick Moraitakis
-- say with me: i'm a monkey child
Though I think it would be cooler to see it on a scale when presented on the user info page. {snips] And instead of just numbers, relate the the numbers to real world behavior. ie. karma of -1 is called 'troll' or something like that. Be creative!
/. user I am, but I want to focus on the comments, not on the poster of the comments.
/. 'community feeling' and hence in the quality of comments themselves :)
But Karma isn't really designed to be an indicator of the 'quality' of the user. As Rob said, It's not supposed to be an integer determining anyone's value as a human being, it merely functions as a sort of 'Risk Factor' for moderation related activities.
IMHO using Karma for that purpose would become tricky, and possibly misleading. In my case, my karma of 1 simply means 'Has never posted before but was a Meta-Moderator yesterday.'
I don't know how 'typical' a
However, I'm impressed with the moderation and M2 system - it's probably close to a best possible solution to the 'freedom of speech' v. 'quality of speech' problem.
Having 5x as many moderators is an excellent idea - it dilutes the power of any individual whilst increasing community participation. Ideally it's greatest impact wouldn't be an improvement in comment ratings, but an increase in
Personally, I've never used MM, but I would rather see it go away
Would it be possible to compromise here and add another option to the User page - instead of asking merely if someone is willing to moderate, ask if they are willing to be an M or an M2 separately, allowing people to opt out of the M2 system alone if they so choose.
Here are my thoughts:
/. works amazingly well.
-- you are solving a problem that mostly doesn't exist. The system pretty much works, and you are over-engineering it.
-- "The Problem" is not bad moderators; as you note, there are more good than bad people, so just give out more moderator points. The number of moderator points outstanding should be a function of the number of comments; contentious "i hate stevens" types will generate more moderators with their multiple posts.
-- (as others have said above) Don't kill the ability of good moderators to switch to a "veiw everything" mode to seek out gems to be moderated up. If you want to add on three moderator points to used at random, and leave the other five, that might be ok. How about giving out moderator points on a per-article basis ? Then the contentious articles could receive more moderation, and people would view the main page and see an article marked as moderateable.
-- integration of M2 moderation into the comments list is obviously the way to go.
-- Again: stop worrying. The system mostly works. Some people will always be unhappy. For a system that has humans in the loop,
SlashDot gets a lot of comments per article. Imagine if there were no moderation, then you'd probably get even more, and also more "waste of time" comments that have nothing to do with the topic at all. I've been to several other news pages that I found through www.linuxstart.com (linuxtoday wasn't one of them - another good news site!), I looked at the comments, and thought, crap. The comments were totally off topic, and just made the sites in to a farce. SlashDot could also become that way IF IT WASN'T for the moderation.
When M2 appeared, the first thing I thought it that it opens up a pandora's box of moderation levels. The moderation system tends to work well, and the M2 system should compensate for rogue moderators. but there will be calls against "bad" M2 moderators. This is inevitable. But what can be done to moderate the moderator's moderators?
Simple - instead of (possibly) adding additional M's of moderation, maybe it would be better to solicit feedback from the people who post to /. On a separate page - accessable only to users with accounts - allow all users to view a sample of M2 moderated posts and comment on their fairness.
This could work kinds like the quizzes that appear on the sidebar of the main page. There might be five or ten M1 and M2 moderated comments that people could look at and vote on fairness. If an M2 moderator consistently (over the space of weeks, months?) is out of line according to the /. users, then their priviledge to M2 moderate will diminish accordingly.
Now here's a (possible) catch. In addition to real M2 moderated posts, a few fake posts - the specifics of this are a little beyond me right now - would be included. These posts would serve to gauge the response of the /. users (some would be obviousally biased, others not so much so) and would just throw some randomness into the equation.
There's not going to be any one final solution to keeping any forum free of worthless posts, but this system would do much to bring the /.'ers back into the fold of self-administration. Any thoughts?
I find myself in total agreement with practically everything set forth. At the very least, I don't really see anything I'd care to speak out against. My only suggestion is that the only AC posts be by people who are logged in and posting anonymously. Not too hard to get around the not being able to moderate and post the same discussion thing by logging out to post. Might also detract from pointless posts. Whee..
~ Kish
Take a look at Here's my human translation.. 7 points for being informative?? If I were a moderator, I would have dubbed every last one of the "translation" posts on that discussion as being redundant, especially the one just before this one which was just a rehash of the Babelfish translation (yet got like 5 points for being informative, despite the fact that Hemos provided the link to do it yourself.. the only moderation that made sense here was -1 point for overrated).
Of course, practically every comment I've ever seen with a rating over three has thrown me for a loop. Almost none of them were deserving of more than a single point or two. Is this just a case of favoritists giving lots of points to their buddies? Some other sick crusade? I don't get it. There should be a limit on how many points you can get for any one category. Like a hard limit of two points (who really has anything to say which is worth +3 or so points of "informative"? Something this redundant surely can't be worth +7!!)
I'm not sure that letting moderators rate a comment between 0-5 or whatever and having the end score being an average of these ratings would make all that much sense either. In fact, I disagree totally. I think having hard limits in place would be a good thing. And of course, anything with a score of over 3 should be considered "highly questionable" with regards to moderation, and perhaps Rob and the boys should ponder taking a little time install a system which allowed them to easily review comments with that high a score for verification or something along those lines.
As a side note, if people keep getting 7 or so points for redundant posts, giving more power to those with high Karma would be.. not the best of ideas. You see where I'm headed? I hope so.
By the way, shambler snack, I see nothing particularly "trollish" about your post. :)
~ Kish
Funny... I could have sworn I was just reading a post by you.