You'd be seriously surprised. I think you guys are underestimating the number of quality submissions we get. We might get 50 submissions to a breaking news piece, but something even SLIGHTLY more obscure may arrive only once.
So you may be seriously surprised... but it's true. When someone submits 15 different URLs in 3 days, they are going to be the only submittor for 2 or 3 of them.
But if the link is good, why NOT share it with the audience? I believe my first priority is to the readers here. If they would enjoy a link, why should the fact that it came from a user with a negative repution make me not choose the link?
The intent was to prevent confusion between nicknames. Bob and B0b look very much alike. But Bob (867) won't be confused with B0b (5309). This was done largely to deal with a huge number of imposter/parody user accounts.
It's less of an issue now, but in the early days we allowed users to be created with almost any combination of numbers and letters... over the years we had to tighten up the rules to prevent abuse.
The reason we don't have M2 of 'over' and 'under' is that you don't have the same context as the moderator. Saying a Score:0 comment is overrated is different than saying a Score:5 comment is overrated. Moderators see the comment as it exists to day, not as it existed when the moderator saw it.
I really wish I had more time to participate in a lot of discussions. The problem for me is that I have to find the next story to post. And read my email. There's actually something funny about Slashdot being a huge time sink for so many people, but since it's actually my job, I can't sink to deep into the discussions.
The other problem with the editor participation is that some percentage of people don't like "Authority". Why should my opinion be more valued just because I picked the story? I already said my bit by selecting the story in the first place- beyond that, I'd rather let the community voice their opinions.
I considered moderating you down as flamebait for cussing... but you actually express my opinion pretty accurately here. Slashdot is not a normal news site. Never has been. And if it ever has to be one, thats probably when I quit and move on and flip burgers somewhere.
Don't think that the irony of all this is lost on me either- I've said many times that over/underrated mods on Slashdot are problematic. We're definitely removing them when we rewrite the system. And we've talked a lot about some sort of feedback system so moderators and meta moderators can figure out a way to explain their actions. My problem with that is that I don't want the thing to degrade into namecalling. I don't have time to meta moderate the comment on a meta moderation;)
You occasionally hear ingame about someone well respected selling their account. Their gameplay changes, but their avatar/gear/chat stays the same. I imagine it to be very awkward. There are a dozen players I look for, that i want to party with. Who are good players, and fun to hang out with in a virtual world. To suddenly find yourself playing with someone that looks the same but acts different is something totally new. Something that happens virtually but not IRL. It's a new issue in a virtual world.
To be fair, my main currently is a Horde Mage and azjol-nerub. I'd actually agree with your point about alliance- there are many similiarities between horde and alliance (each side thinks the other is unbalanced) but the alliance seems to feel it stronger.
To be fair I'm not exactly sure how long it took. 10 minutes maybe? The GM apparently had to talk to his supervisor before telling me it was the prefix that was the problem. I type pretty fast, so it might have been 8-10 lines of me asking various questions, it might have been like 25. I also explained to the GM that I was a journalist, and i would like to write a story about attachment to on-line identity, and asking to get contact information with someone with some authority so I could get some quotes or feedback for this article. I don't know if he wasn't taking me seriously, or if he thought I was just trying to threaten him. None of that was my intent, but as everyone who communicates via a chat system knows, subtleties of communication are often lost when translated to line-by-line text;)
Most of the personal email has been positive. I appreciate the words of support. I'm glad some people here got what I was aiming for out of this essay. I didn't really think this article was as much about Warcraft as some other readers do.
I'd write more, but I'm fairly busy these days. And honestly it's hard for me to write unless I feel something personally. I don't want to just phone it in.
Thanks for saying it! Slashdot has always been my soapbox. It was my soapbox before any of you read it. And it still is. I just choose not to use it as often today as I did 8 years ago. But I felt that this was important enough to talk about.
We actually have a well written faq entry that tries to address that very thing. Just because I'm pro linux doesn't mean that I'm against something proprietary. I love video games. I love movies. I love music. I have no problem paying for things that I enjoy. I can still believe that freedom of speech is important. I can still believe that open source is better than closed source. I see no hypocrisy in this. I'm quite pragmatic- especially about closed source and video games. For gameplay reasons, you need to obscure implementation details of some types of games.
Believe me that was not my intent, nor do I want it to appear as such. I don't honestly care if blizzard reads this article or not. And I certainly don't expect to get my nickname back. I just felt it important to share this experience with people. I've never spent so much time thinking about the importance of virtual identity. I doubt I'm alone in this experience.
If you regard this as petty, I understand, but I tried not to write in an agressive tone. My intentions are anything but petty.
Believe me the irony of this experience was not lost on me. As it happened, and while I wrote this article I thought a lot about the similiarities of what I do, and what the Blizzard game designes, and what the GMs over there do.
This is exactly the plan. Historically "Light Mode" addressed 2 meanings of "Light"... (A) Low Bandwidth and (B) Simplified Design.
The plan right now is to have a few large chunks of the site drop in and out for a less bandwidth intensive version. Essentially we strip the site down to what must be here: Less menu items, less boxes on the right. Basically, "Title" "Advertisement" "Stories" "Some Menus And Links". VERY minimal. Get the page down to as few bytes as possible. This We'll probably have a stylesheet too, but mainly this page will just have far fewer bytes of stuff.
Design-wise we can create themes for modern handhelds. A generic theme is already available but it's a real quickee job. But now we can create thinned down look and feel customized for any individual handheld. Of course we don't really have any of these fancy devices ourselves, so hopefully readers will help by designing CSS that does just that.
I didn't think it was really a hint as much as me saying that we would provide
occasional original coverage- which I assume would include game reviews;)
CowboyNeal wants to write a review of Pokemon Saphire so badly, he might rupture something if we don't let him.
Right now the Hot 10 Comments box is simply the N comments the DB pulls out first, when ordered by score.
We could change it so that the 10 Hot Comments is actually the shortest time frame between the 1st and last moderation for all Score:5 comments. A comment with 15 moderations would have a long time frame between #1 and #5... but a comment that went zip straight up to 5 would have a relatively small gap. If a comment goes up really fast but is moderated down, then that time lap would increase... eventually falling off the list.
We would also need some sort of absolute limit on this... like only count comments posted in the last 24 hours. Alternately, I could see this as being a useful factor when we rework scoring. Certainly 2 mods in 3 minutes are worth "More" then 2 mods in 3 hours. Since we start "The Clock" at the first mod, Score:0/1/2 starting comments are relatively equal anyway... although Score:2 have the edge since they only need to get 3 mods... but a really good Score:0 comment could conceivably get up there fast if it was good.
If someone submitted patches, I'd probably take 'em.
We're gonna have to disagree on this one sir. I think the capping of moderation far outweighs the value of the N hot comments slashbox. I don't think more moderations means a better comment. More controversial perhaps, but not better. In fact, it might mean the comment is *worse*. If the comment flew straight up to 5, and was never moderated down, that means no moderator contests its value! That comment could very likely be far better then a piece of crap comment moderated up to 5 until a smart moderator calls shenanigans on it as a troll, and then it bubbles around absorcing moderator points.
Plus, once a comment makes it to the Top 10, it could stay because now it is suddenly getting the attention of many new moderators seeing the "Hot" comment for the first time because it made a list. A feedback loop causes the Hot comment to remain hot... all the while *wasting* moderator points.
I think the difference between 4 and 5 is relatively negligible in our current moderation system. And most mod suckers just cause a comment to bobble around from 4 to 5 and back to 4.
Sleep on this again... shoot me off an email. I gotta rip the bandaid off this discussion or I'm gonna be pulling hairs off my arm all week.
Geez man, you sure are chatty;) I'm calling this good after this message.
The problem with M2 feedback is that there's really no way to get ahead. The system is designed to take as many M2s as we get, and use them. If M2 doubles, we'll get more accurate M2 because the numbers will slide up... 7 M2s per M1 or even 9. That just means more accurate and better M2... but the system will never be caught up. We're posting a thousand comments an hour during the posting peaks, so a user wanting feedback could come back and hour later, and see things *worse* then when they left it!
As for an M2 Game, I'm not sure. But I never really predicted karma whoring either. In hindsight is was obvious, but I didn't think about it before we made karma public. We probably could rank users or something based on the M2 that they do, but I'm still not sure if thats beneficial or not. Perhaps we could try it and see if it causes trouble. But that comes back to the time thing- its hard to justify time for experimental features.
I don't like the idea of simply forking an entire journal & discussion. It just gets messy. Plus users could get double benefits or punishments for their discussion. And I've seen many stupid journal entries that are actually useful because of a couple of intelligent comments. I don't have examples handy- I just don't care enough to bookmark them or anything;)
Editors have infinite moderator points. We always have. This is addressed in the FAQ. Practically speaking, editors represent a couple percent of all moderation on Slashdot. Very small. According to Meta Moderation, our fairness is inline with the general population. Some users troll and freak out and rant about this, but they are idealists and I'm practical. If I see a shitty comment, I'm going to moderate it down. Thats my perogative;)
I meant the policy decision as a somewhat vague thing, but I have to make a lot of decisions about what robots we allow, or decide what is a crapflooding robot. That sort of stuff. It's not really "Policy" but that was the closest word I could come up with. I see what a dozen robots do, and then try to make a generic rule. The robot stuff is taking a lot of my time lately since we've been having problems with robots beating the shit out of us.
WRT scheduling, there is a schedule. We have shifts. Someone is always in charge during normal biz hours: weekdays 8am to 11pm. These shifts are shared between the authors. Usually during the 9-5ish slot there are 2 or even 3 authors available, but ultimately only 1 person wearing the daddy pants. It is *their* job to make sure that stories are queued up and posted.
Yeah, I've posted a lot in the last 3 days, which is why I don't generally do it. I learned long ago that I have to budget my time. Getting deep into discussions means I don't have time to do other things that are usually more critical.
I believe everyone can see their accepted submissions on their users page. I could be wrong. Now that I look at it, I wonder if there was a problem with that, because i had a couple of other stories on that list (authors don't get their posts on the list unless the story is not based on any submission, so I rarely get any listed there)
Slashdot Mirror
The "Waiting 5 minutes" is simply not true in many many many cases.
So you may be seriously surprised... but it's true. When someone submits 15 different URLs in 3 days, they are going to be the only submittor for 2 or 3 of them.
But if the link is good, why NOT share it with the audience? I believe my first priority is to the readers here. If they would enjoy a link, why should the fact that it came from a user with a negative repution make me not choose the link?
It's less of an issue now, but in the early days we allowed users to be created with almost any combination of numbers and letters... over the years we had to tighten up the rules to prevent abuse.
I wanted to reply with just an emoticon, but I got my own damn lameness filter ;)
As more M3, thats just to crazy ;)
The other problem with the editor participation is that some percentage of people don't like "Authority". Why should my opinion be more valued just because I picked the story? I already said my bit by selecting the story in the first place- beyond that, I'd rather let the community voice their opinions.
I considered moderating you down as flamebait for cussing... but you actually express my opinion pretty accurately here. Slashdot is not a normal news site. Never has been. And if it ever has to be one, thats probably when I quit and move on and flip burgers somewhere.
I love when 5 digit UIDs remind people of this ;)
Don't think that the irony of all this is lost on me either- I've said many times that over/underrated mods on Slashdot are problematic. We're definitely removing them when we rewrite the system. And we've talked a lot about some sort of feedback system so moderators and meta moderators can figure out a way to explain their actions. My problem with that is that I don't want the thing to degrade into namecalling. I don't have time to meta moderate the comment on a meta moderation ;)
You occasionally hear ingame about someone well respected selling their account. Their gameplay changes, but their avatar/gear/chat stays the same. I imagine it to be very awkward. There are a dozen players I look for, that i want to party with. Who are good players, and fun to hang out with in a virtual world. To suddenly find yourself playing with someone that looks the same but acts different is something totally new. Something that happens virtually but not IRL. It's a new issue in a virtual world.
Well, I did post it using the 'Editorial' topic icon, which I thought might subtly imply that I was editorializing ;)
To be fair, my main currently is a Horde Mage and azjol-nerub. I'd actually agree with your point about alliance- there are many similiarities between horde and alliance (each side thinks the other is unbalanced) but the alliance seems to feel it stronger.
To be fair I'm not exactly sure how long it took. 10 minutes maybe? The GM apparently had to talk to his supervisor before telling me it was the prefix that was the problem. I type pretty fast, so it might have been 8-10 lines of me asking various questions, it might have been like 25. I also explained to the GM that I was a journalist, and i would like to write a story about attachment to on-line identity, and asking to get contact information with someone with some authority so I could get some quotes or feedback for this article. I don't know if he wasn't taking me seriously, or if he thought I was just trying to threaten him. None of that was my intent, but as everyone who communicates via a chat system knows, subtleties of communication are often lost when translated to line-by-line text ;)
I'd write more, but I'm fairly busy these days. And honestly it's hard for me to write unless I feel something personally. I don't want to just phone it in.
Thats awesome- I thought about doing the same thing on my horde server. I loved the idea of a troll rogue named Slashdot ;)
Thanks for saying it! Slashdot has always been my soapbox. It was my soapbox before any of you read it. And it still is. I just choose not to use it as often today as I did 8 years ago. But I felt that this was important enough to talk about.
We actually have a well written faq entry that tries to address that very thing. Just because I'm pro linux doesn't mean that I'm against something proprietary. I love video games. I love movies. I love music. I have no problem paying for things that I enjoy. I can still believe that freedom of speech is important. I can still believe that open source is better than closed source. I see no hypocrisy in this. I'm quite pragmatic- especially about closed source and video games. For gameplay reasons, you need to obscure implementation details of some types of games.
If you regard this as petty, I understand, but I tried not to write in an agressive tone. My intentions are anything but petty.
Believe me the irony of this experience was not lost on me. As it happened, and while I wrote this article I thought a lot about the similiarities of what I do, and what the Blizzard game designes, and what the GMs over there do.
The plan right now is to have a few large chunks of the site drop in and out for a less bandwidth intensive version. Essentially we strip the site down to what must be here: Less menu items, less boxes on the right. Basically, "Title" "Advertisement" "Stories" "Some Menus And Links". VERY minimal. Get the page down to as few bytes as possible. This We'll probably have a stylesheet too, but mainly this page will just have far fewer bytes of stuff.
Design-wise we can create themes for modern handhelds. A generic theme is already available but it's a real quickee job. But now we can create thinned down look and feel customized for any individual handheld. Of course we don't really have any of these fancy devices ourselves, so hopefully readers will help by designing CSS that does just that.
CowboyNeal wants to write a review of Pokemon Saphire so badly, he might rupture something if we don't let him.
Right now the Hot 10 Comments box is simply the N comments the DB pulls out first, when ordered by score.
We could change it so that the 10 Hot Comments is actually the shortest time frame between the 1st and last moderation for all Score:5 comments. A comment with 15 moderations would have a long time frame between #1 and #5... but a comment that went zip straight up to 5 would have a relatively small gap. If a comment goes up really fast but is moderated down, then that time lap would increase... eventually falling off the list.
We would also need some sort of absolute limit on this... like only count comments posted in the last 24 hours. Alternately, I could see this as being a useful factor when we rework scoring. Certainly 2 mods in 3 minutes are worth "More" then 2 mods in 3 hours. Since we start "The Clock" at the first mod, Score:0/1/2 starting comments are relatively equal anyway... although Score:2 have the edge since they only need to get 3 mods... but a really good Score:0 comment could conceivably get up there fast if it was good.
If someone submitted patches, I'd probably take 'em.
Plus, once a comment makes it to the Top 10, it could stay because now it is suddenly getting the attention of many new moderators seeing the "Hot" comment for the first time because it made a list. A feedback loop causes the Hot comment to remain hot... all the while *wasting* moderator points.
I think the difference between 4 and 5 is relatively negligible in our current moderation system. And most mod suckers just cause a comment to bobble around from 4 to 5 and back to 4.
Sleep on this again... shoot me off an email. I gotta rip the bandaid off this discussion or I'm gonna be pulling hairs off my arm all week.
Geez man, you sure are chatty ;) I'm calling this good after this message.
The problem with M2 feedback is that there's really no way to get ahead. The system is designed to take as many M2s as we get, and use them. If M2 doubles, we'll get more accurate M2 because the numbers will slide up... 7 M2s per M1 or even 9. That just means more accurate and better M2... but the system will never be caught up. We're posting a thousand comments an hour during the posting peaks, so a user wanting feedback could come back and hour later, and see things *worse* then when they left it!
As for an M2 Game, I'm not sure. But I never really predicted karma whoring either. In hindsight is was obvious, but I didn't think about it before we made karma public. We probably could rank users or something based on the M2 that they do, but I'm still not sure if thats beneficial or not. Perhaps we could try it and see if it causes trouble. But that comes back to the time thing- its hard to justify time for experimental features.
I don't like the idea of simply forking an entire journal & discussion. It just gets messy. Plus users could get double benefits or punishments for their discussion. And I've seen many stupid journal entries that are actually useful because of a couple of intelligent comments. I don't have examples handy- I just don't care enough to bookmark them or anything ;)
Editors have infinite moderator points. We always have. This is addressed in the FAQ. Practically speaking, editors represent a couple percent of all moderation on Slashdot. Very small. According to Meta Moderation, our fairness is inline with the general population. Some users troll and freak out and rant about this, but they are idealists and I'm practical. If I see a shitty comment, I'm going to moderate it down. Thats my perogative ;)
I meant the policy decision as a somewhat vague thing, but I have to make a lot of decisions about what robots we allow, or decide what is a crapflooding robot. That sort of stuff. It's not really "Policy" but that was the closest word I could come up with. I see what a dozen robots do, and then try to make a generic rule. The robot stuff is taking a lot of my time lately since we've been having problems with robots beating the shit out of us.
WRT scheduling, there is a schedule. We have shifts. Someone is always in charge during normal biz hours: weekdays 8am to 11pm. These shifts are shared between the authors. Usually during the 9-5ish slot there are 2 or even 3 authors available, but ultimately only 1 person wearing the daddy pants. It is *their* job to make sure that stories are queued up and posted.
Yeah, I've posted a lot in the last 3 days, which is why I don't generally do it. I learned long ago that I have to budget my time. Getting deep into discussions means I don't have time to do other things that are usually more critical.
I believe everyone can see their accepted submissions on their users page. I could be wrong. Now that I look at it, I wonder if there was a problem with that, because i had a couple of other stories on that list (authors don't get their posts on the list unless the story is not based on any submission, so I rarely get any listed there)