Can't give you more attention that that. Just heard about the death of another old friend... Already sent my condolences, but now you've reminded me to watch for the condolences of another old friend of the friend. He's also retired now, but he is probably the greatest programmer I've ever worked for or with, though he was completely unemployable by any of the big companies where I ground out my career. Based on the period when I worked for him, I came to understand that it was the managers he couldn't stand. He liked the work, and the companies were always begging him for more, but he was sort of picky about what he would touch and quite assertive about how much he was going to be paid for it... No salary information for him to share with anyone.
However, that reminds me of the funniest part of it. He told me the best single investment he ever made was a domain he registered and later sold. As was his typically clever way, he sold it at the peak value before the big dotcom bust. Kind of funny to see that the domain is now a semi-generic redirector. They're making a little income out of it, but no way they are paying off what he cashed... Pretty obvious that they are holding the domain in hopes of another dotcom boom.
Read the reviews of companies and then talk to the people who actually work at (or who formerly worked at) those companies. You will find significant distortions.
I'm not certain that the salary data is as flawed, but I can certainly understand why the employers would want it to be distorted. It's also clear which direction the employers would want it to be distorted. Then you consider who's paying the bills for the website.
I wish there were a website funded on the employees' side. Then there would be more of an economic alignment in favor of telling the truth to the employees. Until the big companies sued it into bankruptcy for telling too many ugly truths.
So what about the big salaries that do appear on websites like Glassdoor? I think it's lottery-based advertising. Hearing about the stellar salaries paid to the star employees at the super-galactic companies is quite attractive and gets people to visit the website. Later on most employees wind up settling for less. MUCH less, including nothing, but no one ever worries about or even notices the lottery losers.
However, I'll go a bit farther and say that I've never been at the top of any organization period (though there was that time I was on the board of directors), so I've always had some managers above me. Mostly retired now, and happily so, but I had LOTS of experience with LOTS of managers, with LOTS of second- and third-hand evidence from books, too. Many of my managers (and most of the managers I've read about) were shit, and that's putting it politely. When you get a good one, you work like hell to keep him (or her), and the usual result is he gets promoted away because ALL of his people are working the same way and his results show it.
I already believe you, dcw3, are one of the managers who make the top 90% of managers possible. Probably more than 90%. You should read The Peter Principle for the career advice.
If I ever got a mod point I'd give you an insightful for that, though you didn't go into how the divide and conquer strategy works. (Nor did I in my longer comment. Whoops.)
As the salary system works now, the highest salaries tend to go to the biggest con artists and most skilled BS artists. The confidence game is to persuade the con artist's peers to tell him their salaries so he can negotiate from a position of knowledge, but of course without revealing the con artist's own salary. The BS artist wins by blowing smoke up the boss's arse, which includes evading blame for mistakes and claiming credit for other employees' work.
Actually I think it should be done in a way that protects privacy, but the privacy-protecting entity must NOT be under the control of the employers. That's what's wrong with such websites as GlassDoor.
Let me try to reframe the question from a higher perspective: You can't know if you are being paid fairly without valid data on what other people are being paid for similar work. However you cannot know the truth when the underlying objective is to lower your pay (and all the other employees' pay) as much as possible.
Or in philosophic terms, there needs to be a balance between the needs of the customers, the employees, the managers, and the corporations themselves. As things are evolving, the cancerous corporations are running roughshod over ALL the human participants.
Actually that reminds of a time when I did want to use Beyond Compare... I think it had something to do with binary file comparisons?
That was around the same time as the big crackdown on unofficial software. Different form of corporate cowardice, but they were mostly terrified of getting sued for copyright violations or something. However, the fear of spyware bundled into useful software is a real threat, too.
I didn't know that, but I'm not surprised they didn't mention it to us... Not exactly the best historical reference to cite considering what happened at the theater...
In my college days I worked nights as a Pinkerton and even made sergeant, but I'm also surprised that they retained (or revived?) the name after the sale of the company. I believe the buyer was Wackenhut? Though I wasn't involved in any "actions" involving labor unions, I know the company was historically heavily involved in protecting scabs and otherwise working to bust unions. In my doddering maturity, I think we need balance between the interests of labor and management and that many of America's problems are due to the increasing imbalance... My memories on this part of the history are fuzzier, but I believe the original founders of the agency were two brothers who did a lot of bounty hunting.
Anyway, my ancient experiences are obviously obsolete. Pinkerton certainly had no computer-related skills or expertise in those days.
In my more recent experiences at the shadowy ghost of IBM, I saw plenty of evidence of intrusive but mostly ineffectual monitoring of what employees were doing. They were slightly diplomatic in that they would give you some subtle warnings and it was easy enough to figure out what to stop doing. Most of the explicit guidelines seemed quite reasonable to me, though some of the monitoring software also crippled the employees' machines in significant ways. That was in addition to the anti-virus and configuration remote control software, but the managers never asked about how much efficiency we lost in struggles with the automated configurations and re-configurations.
Trying to figure out if I have any conclusion to offer... I guess it would be that demotivated employees were the largest problem I saw, but I might be projecting. I don't think I was ever demotivated enough to be motivated to actual industrial espionage, but if it had gotten to that point I sure wouldn't say so on Slashdot, would I? (As things actually turned out, I got too old and was sent to the farm upstate to play with the other puppies. But I can't say I wasn't in a race condition at the end.)
Slashdot karma has influenced my thinking about EPR, but mostly as an example of how not to do it. I wrote a longer comment earlier when I had a bit of time...
I think karma is only a baby step in the right direction. Collapsing reputation to a single value is effectively worthless. It needs to be fixed on such a massive basis that it may as well start from scratch, which is why I favor EPR (Earned Public Reputation) over a more incremental label such as "enhanced karma".
Again, only time for the elevator pitch, but let me just say: The dimensions need to be more carefully considered for orthogonality and symmetry. Each dimension should represent distinct and important concepts, and they should be symmetric in the sense that the comment and the person who wrote the comment can both be considered in the same way. I think the best dimensions should also capture positive and negative values of the attribute of that dimension. Minor aspect, but I think the reporting should be logarithmic, too.
In addition, your ability to rate someone in a dimension should be related to your own EPR in that dimension. For example, if you have a positive reputation for writing humorous comments (that make people happy), then your ratings of other comments for that dimension should have more weight, and if you have a negative reputation in that dimension, then your ratings in that dimension would have reduced weight.
All of the EPR data should be easily available, but perhaps the largest reason is to make it hard to game. I actually think it should be displayed as a standardized icon next to your personal avatar. Times up for now, but ADSAuPR, atAJG.
I think this solution is effective for a specific category of abuse, but I can easily think of ways to game it. The only barrier is motivation, which basically translates into the question "How much of a nuisance is it?" If the use of this approach becomes widespread, then they will game it by any of the methods I've already thought of (and I'm confident they'll think of others, too).
I think the better solution is to use EPR (Earned Public Reputation). To put it in the terms you [mykepredko] have presented, you would be paid with an increase in your reputation for the comments you made that earned positive evaluations, and your reputation would be penalized when you did things like propagate fake news or told lies. By setting the default visibility to a slightly positive value, most trolls and all of their sock puppets would instantly lose most of their visibility. I think this system can also be made extremely difficult to game by making the data available. Even an attack by a network of fake identities could be exposed by tracing the links.
Just an elevator summary on time grounds, but feel free to ask politely for more detailed suggestions. Getting me to put up some of the seed money as an investment would require a bit more...
Your main comment is an imposed ontology, but I regard that as unfair. It is important to understand that the binary decision to vote or not vote for #PresidentTweety was overlaid on a rather complicated reality. I actually think the key to understanding Trump's so-called victory is the poor analytic skills of people who could convince themselves that Trump was lying to everyone else, but telling ONLY THEM the truths they wanted to hear. Yes, they might well know that Trump had said exactly opposite things to other people, but they believed he was lying at those times. The amazing thing about a YUGE liar like Trump is that nothing he says can be regarded as more or less accurate just because he said it.
You shouldn't have wasted the keystrokes feeding the (invisible to me) troll below. As someone who doesn't like lawyers in general or Hillary Clinton in particular, I think the "lesser of two evils" is ridiculous as regards 2016. No one is perfect, but Hillary's imperfections were trumped up [humor intended] over decades to portray her as some kind of Bond villain. In reality she is a fine person (well, as fine a person as such a shrewd lawyer can be) while Trump is legitimately evil (though perhaps just coerced into becoming evil by his weakness, ignorance, self-love, and stupidity).
The bottom line is that the First World Cyberwar is over, and America lost. Badly.
Terse, but perhaps worth an insightful mod if I ever saw one to give. The soulless and cancerous corporations should NOT own our personal data to abuse for their greater profits. Not even a real problem, since there is no amount of profit that could satisfy the fake problem.
I think we should own our own personal data, including where it is stored and how it is used. In the case where we post something (like this comment) for public consideration, that should be available for public use, and Facebook (but even more so the EVIL google) should add value by sharing the summary statistics back to us in the form of EPR (Earned Public Reputation) so we can use our time better by seeing (preferably in advance) who is worth paying attention to and who has earned a reputation for writing or linking to true things.
For that you got an insightful mod? Fundamental misconception of lumping the Trump voters into one mass. How can you claim much insight with such a flawed foundation?
There are many small groups that form Trump's constituents. It will be interesting to find out which ones remain in his "deep base" when this next election comes around.
While I sort of agree that collectively they are responsible for the #FatNixon fiasco, this story is about a couple of groups that were subject to convenient manipulation via Facebook. I think the most important descriptor is "mindless mushrooms", but Putin only harvested what we sowed when we destroyed the public schools. We allowed them to be divided and conquered. There are still a few good ones, but most are obedience schools you wouldn't send your dog to. Thoughtful evidence-based citizens was NOT the objective, but most schools now produce future wage slaves or docile prisoners who will obey the ads to buy toothpaste or vote for #PresidentTweety.
Imagine that the people who wanted to use this RSS service were routed to an ongoing-cost project to support the service. If enough of the people who want to use it agree to pay the costs, perhaps $10 each, then the service would continue.
My take is that the problem is bad financial models, and if you [Opportunist] actually earned that insightful moderation it is only for a light touch on the root of the problem. I think advertising is fundamentally lies, and it is crazy even to try to fund truth (in journalism) with lies (in advertising).
The general financial model that I advocate would also work for funding new features. If enough people agreed they wanted a new feature enough to buy a "charity share", then it would be funded and created. AtAJG, DSAuPR.
That's very close to the heart of the problem, and I wish I had an insightful mod point for you (even though that's a fuzzy and almost meaningless dimension). I have actually read that the google's secret reputation vector for each identity has around 700 dimensions. To a certain degree, I think that EPR is a kind of return sharing of the information that the google (including YouTube) is already collecting about each of us, but I think it should be limited to the intentionally public information. In other words, I should be held accountable for what I choose to say in public, but I think the google is actually mining such sources as my credit history, the better to decide what sorts of ads to shove in my face.
My general principle about private information is that it should remain the property of each person. Unfortunately the politicians (especially the Bolshevik Republicans) feel differently. Extremely differently. In accord with their bribes, they write the laws to permit the soulless and inhuman corporations to own OUR privacy. Minor and limited exceptions if you can afford enough lawyers.
If that was a bid for a funny mod, you didn't deserve any, and so far you haven't gotten any. That anecdote does not prove the Slashdot moderation system is working well.
However, in EPR terms, I think it might deserve negative votes on the "polite" or "thoughtful" dimensions.
IF (and that's a gigantic "IF") Slashdot implemented a proper system of EPR (Earned Public Reputation), then it should be possible to see at a glance what sort of person you're dealing with, at least clearly enough to decide if you want to spend any time reading what that person wrote. More to the point, I would want to use such a system to render invisible most of the people who are just likely to be wasting my time.
Just for clarity, let me pick the easy dimension of "funny". I actually think that dimension should be defined more objectively as "Comment makes me happy" (which includes laughter), so the negative side would be the more clear "Comment makes me sad". If someone has earned a reputation for posting lots of bummer posts, then I would count that as a significant reason to make that person and associated comments less visible. Combine that with a couple of other dimensions that are important to me and the system would be much more valuable by not wasting my time with some people. (By the way, I think the defaults should be low weights for "tribal" and "close-minded" dimensions.)
I agree with you about the need for human involvement and preventing gaming. That's why I think the EPR icon needs to link to the actual data, where the data is based on reactions by real human beings. Actually the first link would be to the summary page for all the statistics for the various dimensions of EPR, and that page would also have the links to the actual data. In the default case I think the data links would be basically chronological, but that's appropriate because the most recent data should count more heavily. Not so common, but some people do get better over time. By making the data available, it will be easy to detect gaming, even in networked forms.
What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, the YouTube problem where the recommendation system is effectively being gamed with YouTube's support because it boosts YouTube's metrics of fake success. Perhaps I haven't been clear enough on that aspect? It's still an EPR problem. I just don't want to see videos that were recommended by or even created by people with bad reputations.
Certainly matches my own experiences on YouTube, though I think it's not purely the EVIL of the google that's driving it. I'm convinced that there are also trolls who are loving the chaos and who are strategically promoting their videos to be linked from opposition videos. Less annoying but similar to the original article are extremists who are also involved in strategic promotion of their videos to viewers of other videos that they regard as sympathetic.
However, as gawdawful as the EVIL google and the most EVIL YouTube have become, I'm convinced that Facebook and Twitter are worse. Much worse.
And yet all of these problems could be greatly reduced by the use of EPR (Earned Public Reputation) to gently filter in favor of nice folks. The trolls and other villains can be nudged back under invisible rocks to amuse themselves and the play with the few people who enjoy that form of slumming. I have much better uses for my time.
If an AC actually earned enough mod points to be visible, then I might see it. Not even free-riding in my case, since I never get any mod points to give.
If the ACs are actually providing some humor and not getting moderated into visibility, then that's yet another aspect of the brokenness of the moderation. However I am unable to recall any evidence to that effect. Nor I am able to think of any example of humor or joke that is enhanced by coming from an anonymous source.
You got me to look at the troll's comment. I do not thank you.
But I wonder what you get out of feeding the trolls? I recommend setting your reading level to exclude ACs, even though it's a weak tag for the weaker trolls.
Many improvements would be possible, but these days I wonder how I can retain any optimism in relation to Slashdot. I was going to list a few constructive suggestions, but I've just sapped my own energy, with a little help from my trolls.
Slashdot Mirror
<Sarcasm>So?</Sarcasm>
Can't give you more attention that that. Just heard about the death of another old friend... Already sent my condolences, but now you've reminded me to watch for the condolences of another old friend of the friend. He's also retired now, but he is probably the greatest programmer I've ever worked for or with, though he was completely unemployable by any of the big companies where I ground out my career. Based on the period when I worked for him, I came to understand that it was the managers he couldn't stand. He liked the work, and the companies were always begging him for more, but he was sort of picky about what he would touch and quite assertive about how much he was going to be paid for it... No salary information for him to share with anyone.
However, that reminds me of the funniest part of it. He told me the best single investment he ever made was a domain he registered and later sold. As was his typically clever way, he sold it at the peak value before the big dotcom bust. Kind of funny to see that the domain is now a semi-generic redirector. They're making a little income out of it, but no way they are paying off what he cashed... Pretty obvious that they are holding the domain in hopes of another dotcom boom.
Read the reviews of companies and then talk to the people who actually work at (or who formerly worked at) those companies. You will find significant distortions.
I'm not certain that the salary data is as flawed, but I can certainly understand why the employers would want it to be distorted. It's also clear which direction the employers would want it to be distorted. Then you consider who's paying the bills for the website.
I wish there were a website funded on the employees' side. Then there would be more of an economic alignment in favor of telling the truth to the employees. Until the big companies sued it into bankruptcy for telling too many ugly truths.
So what about the big salaries that do appear on websites like Glassdoor? I think it's lottery-based advertising. Hearing about the stellar salaries paid to the star employees at the super-galactic companies is quite attractive and gets people to visit the website. Later on most employees wind up settling for less. MUCH less, including nothing, but no one ever worries about or even notices the lottery losers.
Look for comments like that one. 'Nuff said.
However, I'll go a bit farther and say that I've never been at the top of any organization period (though there was that time I was on the board of directors), so I've always had some managers above me. Mostly retired now, and happily so, but I had LOTS of experience with LOTS of managers, with LOTS of second- and third-hand evidence from books, too. Many of my managers (and most of the managers I've read about) were shit, and that's putting it politely. When you get a good one, you work like hell to keep him (or her), and the usual result is he gets promoted away because ALL of his people are working the same way and his results show it.
I already believe you, dcw3, are one of the managers who make the top 90% of managers possible. Probably more than 90%. You should read The Peter Principle for the career advice.
If I ever got a mod point I'd give you an insightful for that, though you didn't go into how the divide and conquer strategy works. (Nor did I in my longer comment. Whoops.)
As the salary system works now, the highest salaries tend to go to the biggest con artists and most skilled BS artists. The confidence game is to persuade the con artist's peers to tell him their salaries so he can negotiate from a position of knowledge, but of course without revealing the con artist's own salary. The BS artist wins by blowing smoke up the boss's arse, which includes evading blame for mistakes and claiming credit for other employees' work.
Actually I think it should be done in a way that protects privacy, but the privacy-protecting entity must NOT be under the control of the employers. That's what's wrong with such websites as GlassDoor.
Let me try to reframe the question from a higher perspective: You can't know if you are being paid fairly without valid data on what other people are being paid for similar work. However you cannot know the truth when the underlying objective is to lower your pay (and all the other employees' pay) as much as possible.
Or in philosophic terms, there needs to be a balance between the needs of the customers, the employees, the managers, and the corporations themselves. As things are evolving, the cancerous corporations are running roughshod over ALL the human participants.
Actually that reminds of a time when I did want to use Beyond Compare... I think it had something to do with binary file comparisons?
That was around the same time as the big crackdown on unofficial software. Different form of corporate cowardice, but they were mostly terrified of getting sued for copyright violations or something. However, the fear of spyware bundled into useful software is a real threat, too.
I didn't know that, but I'm not surprised they didn't mention it to us... Not exactly the best historical reference to cite considering what happened at the theater...
In my college days I worked nights as a Pinkerton and even made sergeant, but I'm also surprised that they retained (or revived?) the name after the sale of the company. I believe the buyer was Wackenhut? Though I wasn't involved in any "actions" involving labor unions, I know the company was historically heavily involved in protecting scabs and otherwise working to bust unions. In my doddering maturity, I think we need balance between the interests of labor and management and that many of America's problems are due to the increasing imbalance... My memories on this part of the history are fuzzier, but I believe the original founders of the agency were two brothers who did a lot of bounty hunting.
Anyway, my ancient experiences are obviously obsolete. Pinkerton certainly had no computer-related skills or expertise in those days.
In my more recent experiences at the shadowy ghost of IBM, I saw plenty of evidence of intrusive but mostly ineffectual monitoring of what employees were doing. They were slightly diplomatic in that they would give you some subtle warnings and it was easy enough to figure out what to stop doing. Most of the explicit guidelines seemed quite reasonable to me, though some of the monitoring software also crippled the employees' machines in significant ways. That was in addition to the anti-virus and configuration remote control software, but the managers never asked about how much efficiency we lost in struggles with the automated configurations and re-configurations.
Trying to figure out if I have any conclusion to offer... I guess it would be that demotivated employees were the largest problem I saw, but I might be projecting. I don't think I was ever demotivated enough to be motivated to actual industrial espionage, but if it had gotten to that point I sure wouldn't say so on Slashdot, would I? (As things actually turned out, I got too old and was sent to the farm upstate to play with the other puppies. But I can't say I wasn't in a race condition at the end.)
Slashdot karma has influenced my thinking about EPR, but mostly as an example of how not to do it. I wrote a longer comment earlier when I had a bit of time...
I think karma is only a baby step in the right direction. Collapsing reputation to a single value is effectively worthless. It needs to be fixed on such a massive basis that it may as well start from scratch, which is why I favor EPR (Earned Public Reputation) over a more incremental label such as "enhanced karma".
Again, only time for the elevator pitch, but let me just say: The dimensions need to be more carefully considered for orthogonality and symmetry. Each dimension should represent distinct and important concepts, and they should be symmetric in the sense that the comment and the person who wrote the comment can both be considered in the same way. I think the best dimensions should also capture positive and negative values of the attribute of that dimension. Minor aspect, but I think the reporting should be logarithmic, too.
In addition, your ability to rate someone in a dimension should be related to your own EPR in that dimension. For example, if you have a positive reputation for writing humorous comments (that make people happy), then your ratings of other comments for that dimension should have more weight, and if you have a negative reputation in that dimension, then your ratings in that dimension would have reduced weight.
All of the EPR data should be easily available, but perhaps the largest reason is to make it hard to game. I actually think it should be displayed as a standardized icon next to your personal avatar. Times up for now, but ADSAuPR, atAJG.
I think this solution is effective for a specific category of abuse, but I can easily think of ways to game it. The only barrier is motivation, which basically translates into the question "How much of a nuisance is it?" If the use of this approach becomes widespread, then they will game it by any of the methods I've already thought of (and I'm confident they'll think of others, too).
I think the better solution is to use EPR (Earned Public Reputation). To put it in the terms you [mykepredko] have presented, you would be paid with an increase in your reputation for the comments you made that earned positive evaluations, and your reputation would be penalized when you did things like propagate fake news or told lies. By setting the default visibility to a slightly positive value, most trolls and all of their sock puppets would instantly lose most of their visibility. I think this system can also be made extremely difficult to game by making the data available. Even an attack by a network of fake identities could be exposed by tracing the links.
Just an elevator summary on time grounds, but feel free to ask politely for more detailed suggestions. Getting me to put up some of the seed money as an investment would require a bit more...
Your main comment is an imposed ontology, but I regard that as unfair. It is important to understand that the binary decision to vote or not vote for #PresidentTweety was overlaid on a rather complicated reality. I actually think the key to understanding Trump's so-called victory is the poor analytic skills of people who could convince themselves that Trump was lying to everyone else, but telling ONLY THEM the truths they wanted to hear. Yes, they might well know that Trump had said exactly opposite things to other people, but they believed he was lying at those times. The amazing thing about a YUGE liar like Trump is that nothing he says can be regarded as more or less accurate just because he said it.
You shouldn't have wasted the keystrokes feeding the (invisible to me) troll below. As someone who doesn't like lawyers in general or Hillary Clinton in particular, I think the "lesser of two evils" is ridiculous as regards 2016. No one is perfect, but Hillary's imperfections were trumped up [humor intended] over decades to portray her as some kind of Bond villain. In reality she is a fine person (well, as fine a person as such a shrewd lawyer can be) while Trump is legitimately evil (though perhaps just coerced into becoming evil by his weakness, ignorance, self-love, and stupidity).
The bottom line is that the First World Cyberwar is over, and America lost. Badly.
How many sock puppets in your herd to get the fake moderation points? And how did you hack the relatively low user ID?
Terse, but perhaps worth an insightful mod if I ever saw one to give. The soulless and cancerous corporations should NOT own our personal data to abuse for their greater profits. Not even a real problem, since there is no amount of profit that could satisfy the fake problem.
I think we should own our own personal data, including where it is stored and how it is used. In the case where we post something (like this comment) for public consideration, that should be available for public use, and Facebook (but even more so the EVIL google) should add value by sharing the summary statistics back to us in the form of EPR (Earned Public Reputation) so we can use our time better by seeing (preferably in advance) who is worth paying attention to and who has earned a reputation for writing or linking to true things.
For that you got an insightful mod? Fundamental misconception of lumping the Trump voters into one mass. How can you claim much insight with such a flawed foundation?
There are many small groups that form Trump's constituents. It will be interesting to find out which ones remain in his "deep base" when this next election comes around.
While I sort of agree that collectively they are responsible for the #FatNixon fiasco, this story is about a couple of groups that were subject to convenient manipulation via Facebook. I think the most important descriptor is "mindless mushrooms", but Putin only harvested what we sowed when we destroyed the public schools. We allowed them to be divided and conquered. There are still a few good ones, but most are obedience schools you wouldn't send your dog to. Thoughtful evidence-based citizens was NOT the objective, but most schools now produce future wage slaves or docile prisoners who will obey the ads to buy toothpaste or vote for #PresidentTweety.
Solution to follow in the other comment...
Z^-2
Z^-1
Imagine that the people who wanted to use this RSS service were routed to an ongoing-cost project to support the service. If enough of the people who want to use it agree to pay the costs, perhaps $10 each, then the service would continue.
My take is that the problem is bad financial models, and if you [Opportunist] actually earned that insightful moderation it is only for a light touch on the root of the problem. I think advertising is fundamentally lies, and it is crazy even to try to fund truth (in journalism) with lies (in advertising).
The general financial model that I advocate would also work for funding new features. If enough people agreed they wanted a new feature enough to buy a "charity share", then it would be funded and created. AtAJG, DSAuPR.
That's very close to the heart of the problem, and I wish I had an insightful mod point for you (even though that's a fuzzy and almost meaningless dimension). I have actually read that the google's secret reputation vector for each identity has around 700 dimensions. To a certain degree, I think that EPR is a kind of return sharing of the information that the google (including YouTube) is already collecting about each of us, but I think it should be limited to the intentionally public information. In other words, I should be held accountable for what I choose to say in public, but I think the google is actually mining such sources as my credit history, the better to decide what sorts of ads to shove in my face.
My general principle about private information is that it should remain the property of each person. Unfortunately the politicians (especially the Bolshevik Republicans) feel differently. Extremely differently. In accord with their bribes, they write the laws to permit the soulless and inhuman corporations to own OUR privacy. Minor and limited exceptions if you can afford enough lawyers.
If that was a bid for a funny mod, you didn't deserve any, and so far you haven't gotten any. That anecdote does not prove the Slashdot moderation system is working well.
However, in EPR terms, I think it might deserve negative votes on the "polite" or "thoughtful" dimensions.
Many of my posts discuss the problems of corporate cancerism. Feel free to look them over.
Do you perhaps have any evidence that the google is not a cancer?
IF (and that's a gigantic "IF") Slashdot implemented a proper system of EPR (Earned Public Reputation), then it should be possible to see at a glance what sort of person you're dealing with, at least clearly enough to decide if you want to spend any time reading what that person wrote. More to the point, I would want to use such a system to render invisible most of the people who are just likely to be wasting my time.
Just for clarity, let me pick the easy dimension of "funny". I actually think that dimension should be defined more objectively as "Comment makes me happy" (which includes laughter), so the negative side would be the more clear "Comment makes me sad". If someone has earned a reputation for posting lots of bummer posts, then I would count that as a significant reason to make that person and associated comments less visible. Combine that with a couple of other dimensions that are important to me and the system would be much more valuable by not wasting my time with some people. (By the way, I think the defaults should be low weights for "tribal" and "close-minded" dimensions.)
I agree with you about the need for human involvement and preventing gaming. That's why I think the EPR icon needs to link to the actual data, where the data is based on reactions by real human beings. Actually the first link would be to the summary page for all the statistics for the various dimensions of EPR, and that page would also have the links to the actual data. In the default case I think the data links would be basically chronological, but that's appropriate because the most recent data should count more heavily. Not so common, but some people do get better over time. By making the data available, it will be easy to detect gaming, even in networked forms.
What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, the YouTube problem where the recommendation system is effectively being gamed with YouTube's support because it boosts YouTube's metrics of fake success. Perhaps I haven't been clear enough on that aspect? It's still an EPR problem. I just don't want to see videos that were recommended by or even created by people with bad reputations.
Certainly matches my own experiences on YouTube, though I think it's not purely the EVIL of the google that's driving it. I'm convinced that there are also trolls who are loving the chaos and who are strategically promoting their videos to be linked from opposition videos. Less annoying but similar to the original article are extremists who are also involved in strategic promotion of their videos to viewers of other videos that they regard as sympathetic.
However, as gawdawful as the EVIL google and the most EVIL YouTube have become, I'm convinced that Facebook and Twitter are worse. Much worse.
And yet all of these problems could be greatly reduced by the use of EPR (Earned Public Reputation) to gently filter in favor of nice folks. The trolls and other villains can be nudged back under invisible rocks to amuse themselves and the play with the few people who enjoy that form of slumming. I have much better uses for my time.
If an AC actually earned enough mod points to be visible, then I might see it. Not even free-riding in my case, since I never get any mod points to give.
If the ACs are actually providing some humor and not getting moderated into visibility, then that's yet another aspect of the brokenness of the moderation. However I am unable to recall any evidence to that effect. Nor I am able to think of any example of humor or joke that is enhanced by coming from an anonymous source.
You got me to look at the troll's comment. I do not thank you.
But I wonder what you get out of feeding the trolls? I recommend setting your reading level to exclude ACs, even though it's a weak tag for the weaker trolls.
Many improvements would be possible, but these days I wonder how I can retain any optimism in relation to Slashdot. I was going to list a few constructive suggestions, but I've just sapped my own energy, with a little help from my trolls.