When are you guys going to fix the extremely broken, gamed, and unworking moderation system?
Let's face it, Slashdot moderation has severe holes in it, as analyzed over here. There are exploits with a desperate need for fixes - people with multiple accounts made solely to harvest mod points via the random lottery, the ability to go back weeks into a commenter's history to stage assault raids on their karma, and of course a moderation system that encourages people who play by the rules NOT to moderate because they're then forbidden to comment anywhere in the thread.
There will always be general use pc's for those who are willing and have to skills to handle them responsibly..
And who gets them, and at what price? I refer you to the days of yore, when getting a development machine for a video game console cost a prohibitive amount of money. Even today, if you're not developing for the incredibly limited scope of "hey gaiz I ripped off another old 2D video game and put the clone on XBLive" games, you're going to have to shell out a pretty penny to MS to develop actual Xbox360 console titles. And you don't even want to KNOW what it costs to get a single dev unit for the PS3.
I for one welcome this new era when tech support nightmares get reduced to a minimum..
Except that the walled garden DOESN'T reduce tech support nightmares. What it really does is make it so that when someone really, really needs to get under the hood - be it the local sysadmin, or the home user - to fix something, they CAN'T and the only option, ever, is a factory wipe and your savegames/files/etc are toast. Don't believe me? Count up the number of people you know who have had to "factory reset" or replace a phone handset; that's the walled garden in action.
What the walled garden does, is DRM. The ability for the manufacturer to engage in illegal collusion and extortion with the MafiAA and other content cartels to say "your content is only available for our device IF you pay us the extortion fee to register and IF you don't do anything that we or our MafiAA partners don't want you to do, like compete with their products."
Here's an example: Apple killed Lexcycle's "Stanza" e-reader, which had USB syncing abilities and other features that had become very popular. Why? Because they have sweetheart deals with Barnes & Noble and Amazon to feature the Nook and Kindle apps instead.
I come here to read relevant viewpoints on interesting topics, not fristy pst nor Golden Girls/Astronaut's wife mashup lyrics posts. Let the cruft be downmodded to -1 where I choose not to see it.
And with a pure-positive system, all you'd need to do in order to get "the cruft" not to show would be to view at a floor of, say, 5 or 10 points. "fristy pst" and other posts would not be upmodded often, while truly insightful posts would still rise.
Also, if a post receives n upvotes, it should take n+1 downvotes.
Now how in the world does that eliminate a bury brigade? If anything, it encourages bury-brigaders to try to kill the post by mining for n+1 votes... come to think of it, that's the exact definition of (and PROBLEM of) the current system.
No, it's a different form of moderation. One without the ability to use mod points to directly attack another user.
unless youre looking for an ego boost and to apply peer pressure to conform to the common view.
Actually, if your post cannot be DOWN (but only up) modded, it encourages you to say what you have to say in an insightful manner. As it stands now, the point has been that there is too much incentive to "apply peer pressure to conform to the common view" in the use of downmods, which serve to directly hide posts from the view of others and can even serve to "ban" a user from posting further.
All the flame posts are there and you still get groupthink.
Yes, but in practice, positive-only modding encourages far less flame posts and much less fanatical groupthink. When there cease to be weapons, there is no need for the "enforcers" of a particular group, and they can only get ahead by actually producing positive discourse.
1) Is the meta-moderation system still in place? Assuming people participate it should really help with this problem... I ask about meta-moderation because there used to be a nag link for it, but I haven't seen it in ages - and if people used it consistently, even only a couple per visit or something, it would probably help a lot. - In reality, most readers ignore Metamoderation. Since Metamoderation pulls randomly from the same pool as does moderation (plus, only coming from those interested enough to do so), and since it only reviews a small slice of moderations, it is pretty much ineffective. It is especially ineffective in combating the "couple hundred accounts to mine for points" problem, since you can down-metamod one account, never affecting the other ones.
2) as would limiting mod points to people with good karma All accounts start with good karma. All the point miners need do is never post with their account, and it will never lose karma, thus never being disallowed from modding.
3) and/or limiting to people who have x number of visits logged over a given time period Simple login/check scripts will get around this. Probably already do. The account will "log in" to check for modpoints once a day or so, and that's a visit as far as the site is concerned.
4) (making it much more difficult to create loads of sock puppets to ensure you have mod points available at any given time - mod points are only good for a limited time, so you can't "bank" them) The system, as it stands now, "expires" your mod points already so that you can't bank them. That doesn't still mean that large arrays of sockpuppets won't have a certain percentage of accounts with mod points at any given time. Make 200 accounts, set a script to check them all, and I bet on any given day you've access to 30 points or so without ever "banking" them.
The problem is, downmodding is a weapon. It is a method that does not on the whole improve the site, but merely by which users attack other users. Metamoderation has proven ineffective at best in changing this; the only thing left is to take away the weapons.
Yes, but the differences between that system and the current are as follows:
1) Users no longer have the ability to remove/block/ban the other side. 2) Users have no option to "shout down" the other side, other than to write actually insightful posts. Your 200-mod post may get displayed, but the other side's will as well.
In other words: the bury brigade types no longer have weapons with which they can affect other users. They'll drift off of their own accord, ineffective at disrupting discourse.
Doesn't address the problem of "downmodding old posts" though. Set it to 10 days, and 9-day-old posts will be the targets. Set it to even 24 hours, and you'll just see direct attacks.
The problems of Slashdot's moderation system are:
1) Encouragement of mining. - Random distribution of modpoints encourages sockpuppet/"mining" accounts in order to collect large numbers of mod points at certain users' disposal. - "You can't mod a discussion you posted in" encourages the keeping of sockpuppets for moderation simply to be able to mod in the same discussions that interest you to read/post in.
2) Ease of targeting. - Ability to see other users' long past posts = easy way to find and target old posts for purposes of a massive downmod attack to karma.
3) Incentives to downmod versus upmod - If you upmod, you feel good about promoting good discourse: this does not apply to most Slashdotters, especially modpoint miners, on the basis of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. - If you downmod, you commit a direct attack on someone. You decrease their karma, you decrease the visibility of their post (directly attacking their words), and as something I didn't know about till the parent poster pointed it out, you apparently also can be hit with a temp ban: "Also, if a single user is moderated down several times in a short time frame, a temporary ban will be imposed on that user... a cooling off period if you will. It lasts for 72 hours, or more for users who have posted a ton." Therefore, if you go after someone's old posts, with a slew of modpoints from sockpuppet accounts established only to have more tickets in the modpoint lotto, you can actually ban them as described above by the parent poster.
I can't see how anyone can justify this as a good thing for Slashdot's discussions. I don't care what side you are on in a discussion, either side - or both side - having access to ban buttons is just not going to be helpful. Human nature says they're not using it on the trolls, they're using it to try to silence the other side.
4) Ineffectiveness of metamoderation - Metamoderation only covers a small sampling of the moderated posts, and only results in a very slight uptick to the percentage chance that an account will get modpoints again sooner. Further, metamoderation pulls from the same group of people that are generally moderating, meaning that downmods produced by polarized bury brigade members are relatively likely to be reviewed by other bury brigade members (who are interested in metamodding, unlike the general posting populace).
Kamiza's point below is absolutely spot-on; the solution to bury brigades is to take away their weapons.
Yeah, no kidding. The "bury brigade" problem is inherent to almost all "community modding" systems. Digg had it the worst because every account has a point to give, and users can trivially make a large number of accounts. Slashdot has the "higher percentage chance" for high-karma posters, but that's not really helpful for two reasons. First, because most high-karma posters would rather post something insightful on a particular topic of interest, and aren't allowed to mod on the same discussion where they comment - thus, most high-karma posters either never use their mod points, or wind up canceling their mods when they see something that makes them want to post instead. Second, because even if you run only one high-karma account, you mathematically have less chance of mod points and less modpoint-holding capacity than the bury-troll who's mining a couple hundred "default karma" accounts that never post (so never get downmodded to troll and lose the ability to receive modpoints) but simply mine for modpoints.
The underlying problem is that downmodding is simply not a useful tool. No matter what you call it, it's an attack on another poster. In the karma system, you do real damage to their future posts (in the term of "all future posts by this user are at -1 or -2 the previous threshold) if you can gather enough bury-brigadiers drive them from Excellent down to Good or below. Even absent a karma system, gathering a bury brigade allows you to do the equivalent of a shout-down attack, forcing anything you don't agree with below the viewing threshold of most people.
No, the Austrian School isn't respected by anyone except the paid CATO goons. It's just a boring rehash of the same laisseiz-faire "Invisible Hand, Adam Smith" bullshit that got us into the Great Depression and the Bush Depression today.
Adam Smith: "In the long run, everything evens out." Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead."
Add to it that historically, in the long run, everything does NOT even out. Far from it, economic disparity INCREASES without governmental controls to prevent the hoarding and accumulation of both wealth and power into the hands of an oligarchy.
Good software engineers are inherently lazy looking. They don't spray out a bunch of lines of code and then busily fix hundreds of bugs. They consider a good plan of attack, write clear, concise code, and fix very few bugs (because they have very few). This is lost on almost all managers in the tech industry.
This is because "managers" are, with few exceptions, brainless wastes of oxygen whose purpose is to look at "metrics" instead of actual work performance.
Programmer A writes 1000 lines an hour, but causes 90% of the bugs. Programmer B writes 250 lines an hour, but causes only 10% of the bugs. Programmer B is a better programmer, but by "metrics" (read: "lines of code") Programmer A looks better on paper, since "whose code had the bug" is never counted.
Likewise, even in the real world. Work crew A managed to lay/resurface 60 miles of road in a month. Work crew B only managed to lay/resurface 30. Sounds simple, work crew A are a "better" work crew, right? Oh, except that weather conditions and land conditions play a factor: work crew A was working during a clear weather period in a flat area, while work crew B was working on hilly terrain and got interrupted by a hurricane blowing through midmonth - again, not factored in by "metrics."
Actual, real, competent "managers" are few and far between, because they know that "metrics" don't mean shit... but in corporate life, the bean-counters demand "metrics" for everything, and the PHB factories where MBA's are churned out do nothing but teach "metrics" and corporate ass-licking.
I've got a buddy who works in salvage auctions. Company saw less auctions with the economy, decided to rent smaller office space. Now, company employees are *required* to work from home at least 2 days a week, because they don't have cubicle space to fit the whole staff.
Indeed. Where I live, there's a ton of crumbling infrastructure. A good portion of it is roads that are 50+ years old. I've driven on WPA-produced roads through a neighboring state where the road - poured concrete - has literally turned itself to gravel over the years through neglect. Republican leaders of the state don't spend anything on maintenance, and their "solution" to the road becoming unsafe is - I'm not kidding - to just keep reducing the posted speed limit to something that's "safe for conditions" on an unmaintained road.
A frightening concept, given that the US interestate system (formally, the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways) was originally pitched to Congress under the military provisions of Section 8 of the Constitution, to provide for a network of roadways capable of moving military equipment from base to base. These days, it's basically a bare-minimum subsidy for the trucking industry, which has caused our national railway infrastructure to decay in ways that are completely unreasonable and results in far more smog output than there otherwise would be from cross-country freight.
1) The WPA prolonged the Great Depression by about 7 extra years.
Show me one respected source saying so. And no, Gingrich and Palin's books don't count.
2) It wasn't something that really was within the mandate allowed by the Constitution.
Really? National, cross-state-border infrastructure would seem to be firmly in line with Section 8 of the US constitution.
3) At least for the debt, pain, etc. we GOT that standing infrastructure. The same can't be said for Obama's Stimulus, which seems to have produced LITTLE.
"Obama's Stimulus"... you mean the Bush Stimulus? Are you referring to the ERA of 2008, or the ARRA of 2009? If it's the latter, Obama signed it less than a month entering office. All the work on it was done months before by Congress, under the BUSH regime.
And in any event, the criticism of more than 90% of economists (read: any real economist that isn't a CATO Kochsucker) isn't that the ARRA was too large, but that it was too SMALL to have the desired effect and included too many bad tax breaks trying to get Republicans to sign on to the deal.
Oh yeah, they all STARTED with a big-ass pile of cash that they could fritter away on risk.
Like the recent Republican debate - Gingrich talks about Bill Gates being a "high school dropout" who founded Microsoft, but he fails to mention that Gates was the prep-schooled son of upper 0.5%'ers who had a ton of mommy and daddy's money to pay Paul Allen (the real programming genius of the company) and later to front in order to buy 86-DOS from Seattle Computer.
Funny how that all tends to work out only for those who already inherited wealth.
Not mine, thankfully. But I know plenty of people who go through this shit all the time. "Bad communication" is not usually from the IT end, it's from the department or end-user end. Sometimes, it's someone thinking that if they make enough bullshit requests, the IT guys will just give them install rights to "save time." Sometimes, it's sending in the denied request for the 4th time, thinking that they'll get a different person to come by who doesn't care about policy and will just do what they want - kind of like a 5 year old going and asking mommy after daddy already said no twice. Sometimes, it's even worse, because it's the end user's department manager saying "I can't take this to the CxO and go over the IT manager's head until the request is denied X number of times, no matter the reason."
Sometimes, it's that the person bringing the request doesn't really know what they want, they just saw $oohshinytoy and decided they want it, and that because they want it IT should be the ones to pay for it.
Sometimes, it's the end result of "people" (term used in the loosest possible sense) like you. The ones who think that the way to approach people in IT is to berate them, verbally abuse them, publicly humiliate them, or worse.
Taking it back to your original point: If after a rational explanation they still think you're an obstructionist, then your department has spent too much time saying no and not enough time trying to help.
Say you took your car to a mechanic. And they tell you your car will take $X to fix, and the part will take 3 days to come in. You have only a few possible responses: accept it with grace and pay it, accept it with grace and take your car back as-is to go look for a second opinion, accept it with grace and go looking to buy a new car, or throw a tantrum about how unfair it is that your car isn't fixed right now and for "more reasonable cost."
The type of users I'm referring to, the ones who will still call the IT guys an "obstructionist" after they've explained the issue and pointed the user to the CxO or Legal officer that they actually need to talk to? Yeah, they're the types of tantrum-throwers from that last set. People like you.
No, bullshit. Complete fucking bullshit, from the usual types of shit-monkeys who have no appreciation of what they are about to do.
What part of "Just plug in the damned USB" didn't fill you with dread? How about the idea of slamming in an entirely new set of drives, and re-partitioning an entire array, only taking "10 minutes"?
The problem is when we get the same situation over and over and over again. From the SAME USERS. They've already been told it's out of our hands - Legal is the ones who handle anything that involves a contract, especially if it involves putting company data on non-company servers. There are legal contracts involved here: some of "company" data is actually owned by the company that hired us to do the contract. Or it's "company" data covered by privacy policies or by laws like HIPAA and FERPA and SOX. You know, the shit where if it gets into the wild, there is a possibility of big fucking lawsuits and federal-sized fines and loss of future business.
Maybe they tried to get help with something and it took too long. Or they have a problem they really need fixed, and IT just muttered something about Legal and then went back to watching YouTube.
I doubt that, I really do. IT departments are understaffed, underpaid, and overworked. The LAST people in the company with any time to "watch YouTube" are the IT folks, because they are up to their fucking eyeballs in the unappreciated work that assholes like you heap around, along with the work that goes with keeping all the systems running that assholes like you NEVER fucking notice unless something goes down.
Or maybe it's just in how the news was delivered, maybe they were told they are "NOT FUCKING AUTHORIZED TO ENTER THE COMPANY INTO A CONTRACT" instead of saying "There are legal issues here and there's not much I can do there, but hey what's the problem you're trying to solve, maybe I've got an alternative!".
When you come and say "here's the problem I need fixed, can you guys help", you get an alternative solution. It may involve a little more work on your part - for instance, you might be required to sign on through VPN to verify your credentials, then RDC to your desktop box or pull up a secured SMB share to access the info you need. You know, to verify that it is YOU doing this, and that YOU are the responsible party, and that the info stays in secured company systems.
At this point, there are plenty of users who go into a tantrum about "but dropbox is so much easier and I can install it at home and I can do it all by myself and why do I have to do all that work." You know. Assholes like you, who don't care that Dropbox routinely gets hacked into, doesn't require secure passwords, doesn't require password complexity on the order required by the various contracts the company has (trust me, get into one DoD contract and you'll learn that the piddly shit password complexity and data security stuff your company has now is fucking NOTHING compared to what they require), and who don't give a damn enough to pay attention to what Legal has to say about this stuff, but are perfectly fucking willing to give the IT staff a hard time for trying to actually FOLLOW the letter of what the company is required to follow as interpreted by Legal.
Now, when you come to IT, and you're berating a manager because the IT guy wouldn't (because company policy says otherwise) give install rights to three idiots who repeatedly got their systems infected with rootkits by trying to download pr0n already, and it comes out that the reason they want install rights this time is to install Dropbox or something else that involves storing data on non-company machines and entering into legal agreements regarding storage that are not remotely designed for a corporate legal barrier, then your response is going to be "GO SPEAK TO LEGAL." Because that IS the right response, whether whiny, bratty tantrum-throwers like you like it or not.
IT people are human, just like everyone else. You come in with a fucking chip on your shoulder, you're going to get it shoved back in your face. You come in and work with them as fellow human beings, you'll find them quite pleasant. Your corporate environment says "IT are the guys to take your frustrations out on and talk shit behind their backs about while they are working on your computer and can hear you", your IT folks are going to fucking hate all of you. And it's YOUR FUCKING FAULT, not the IT guys.
For example, when many users still have 7-year-old computers and the CxO says that every manager gets a brand new iPad despite the fact that some managers have said they have no use for it, IT should be the one to question whether that's a good allocation of funds.
IT could also question why the CxO just spent money on hiring a "secretary" with 36DD's, no gag reflex, and abso-fucking-lutely NO other skills. But in both cases, raising the question of why the CxO's new toy is helpful to the business, is likely to result in the IT budget slashed in retaliation or the employee raising the question seeing his position RIF'ed.
... as if the users would read a memo from IT anyways?
"Oh, it's from IT. I'll read it later. It probably has something to do with some bullshit security thing or other, or some new change that I don't use. Back to my email. Ooh, free cute puppy screensaver from my brother's hacked yahoo account, I think I'll click on it..."
The 'fix' you're talking about is still a symptom of bad communication from IT. If after a rational explanation they still think you're an obstructionist, then your department has spent too much time saying no and not enough time trying to help.
No, if after a rational explanation they still think you're an "obstructionist", when you have patiently explained that the person who would have to approve (or deny!) their request is not IT at all but is instead Legal, or Security, or Manager/CEO level, then they are being a whiny fucking brat who thinks that throwing a tantrum will get them what they want... because they probably have figured out that they're going to get the same answer from the person who actually has the power to make the decision.
IT answers to people up the chain. Rarely, if ever, does IT create the policies they are supposed to support. Sometimes, the policies are the whim of a CEO, sometimes, they are the logical product of security restrictions, contract restrictions, privacy laws, business accounting laws, or any of a dozen other legal frameworks.
Key example: Dropbox, at home, YOUR personal files, you can enter into a contract with Dropbox (and that EULA is a contract) to put your files on their network. At work, those are the business's files. The company has to have some SLA and data restriction/privacy/security contract before putting files on an external entity's network. YOU, the "end user", ARE NOT FUCKING AUTHORIZED TO ENTER THE COMPANY INTO A CONTRACT with Dropbox or anyone else.
That's what Legal is going to tell you, and why you can't have it, and pitching a fucking tantrum at IT is not going to change it.
Oh goody, your nephew's PC got hacked and someone has your entire company's customer records in the wild.
That's what security would call LAWSUIT FODDER.
And this is why the sales people need to get a fucking clue and talk to both IT and Legal before installing insecure-as-fucking-hell crapware like Dropbox.
I don't necessarily know that there isn't basis. Certainly, a basic search turns up plenty of video.
Whenever the police are trying to hide information from the public, the first question you should ask is what they're likely to hide, not what they SAY they are wanting to prevent from being released. Pretexting is very common among governmental agencies trying to grab more power.
That's great IF your motherboard actually supports the command. A surprising number of SATA controllers will refuse to transmit the command (something about NSA involvement there too)...
Slashdot Mirror
When are you guys going to fix the extremely broken, gamed, and unworking moderation system?
Let's face it, Slashdot moderation has severe holes in it, as analyzed over here. There are exploits with a desperate need for fixes - people with multiple accounts made solely to harvest mod points via the random lottery, the ability to go back weeks into a commenter's history to stage assault raids on their karma, and of course a moderation system that encourages people who play by the rules NOT to moderate because they're then forbidden to comment anywhere in the thread.
There will always be general use pc's for those who are willing and have to skills to handle them responsibly..
And who gets them, and at what price? I refer you to the days of yore, when getting a development machine for a video game console cost a prohibitive amount of money. Even today, if you're not developing for the incredibly limited scope of "hey gaiz I ripped off another old 2D video game and put the clone on XBLive" games, you're going to have to shell out a pretty penny to MS to develop actual Xbox360 console titles. And you don't even want to KNOW what it costs to get a single dev unit for the PS3.
I for one welcome this new era when tech support nightmares get reduced to a minimum..
Except that the walled garden DOESN'T reduce tech support nightmares. What it really does is make it so that when someone really, really needs to get under the hood - be it the local sysadmin, or the home user - to fix something, they CAN'T and the only option, ever, is a factory wipe and your savegames/files/etc are toast. Don't believe me? Count up the number of people you know who have had to "factory reset" or replace a phone handset; that's the walled garden in action.
What the walled garden does, is DRM. The ability for the manufacturer to engage in illegal collusion and extortion with the MafiAA and other content cartels to say "your content is only available for our device IF you pay us the extortion fee to register and IF you don't do anything that we or our MafiAA partners don't want you to do, like compete with their products."
Here's an example: Apple killed Lexcycle's "Stanza" e-reader, which had USB syncing abilities and other features that had become very popular. Why? Because they have sweetheart deals with Barnes & Noble and Amazon to feature the Nook and Kindle apps instead.
Downmodding is not a useful tool?
No. It's not.
I come here to read relevant viewpoints on interesting topics, not fristy pst nor Golden Girls/Astronaut's wife mashup lyrics posts. Let the cruft be downmodded to -1 where I choose not to see it.
And with a pure-positive system, all you'd need to do in order to get "the cruft" not to show would be to view at a floor of, say, 5 or 10 points. "fristy pst" and other posts would not be upmodded often, while truly insightful posts would still rise.
Also, if a post receives n upvotes, it should take n+1 downvotes.
Now how in the world does that eliminate a bury brigade? If anything, it encourages bury-brigaders to try to kill the post by mining for n+1 votes... come to think of it, that's the exact definition of (and PROBLEM of) the current system.
That defeats the point of moderation
No, it's a different form of moderation. One without the ability to use mod points to directly attack another user.
unless youre looking for an ego boost and to apply peer pressure to conform to the common view.
Actually, if your post cannot be DOWN (but only up) modded, it encourages you to say what you have to say in an insightful manner. As it stands now, the point has been that there is too much incentive to "apply peer pressure to conform to the common view" in the use of downmods, which serve to directly hide posts from the view of others and can even serve to "ban" a user from posting further.
All the flame posts are there and you still get groupthink.
Yes, but in practice, positive-only modding encourages far less flame posts and much less fanatical groupthink. When there cease to be weapons, there is no need for the "enforcers" of a particular group, and they can only get ahead by actually producing positive discourse.
Let's take this in turn.
1) Is the meta-moderation system still in place? Assuming people participate it should really help with this problem... I ask about meta-moderation because there used to be a nag link for it, but I haven't seen it in ages - and if people used it consistently, even only a couple per visit or something, it would probably help a lot. - In reality, most readers ignore Metamoderation. Since Metamoderation pulls randomly from the same pool as does moderation (plus, only coming from those interested enough to do so), and since it only reviews a small slice of moderations, it is pretty much ineffective. It is especially ineffective in combating the "couple hundred accounts to mine for points" problem, since you can down-metamod one account, never affecting the other ones.
2) as would limiting mod points to people with good karma All accounts start with good karma. All the point miners need do is never post with their account, and it will never lose karma, thus never being disallowed from modding.
3) and/or limiting to people who have x number of visits logged over a given time period Simple login/check scripts will get around this. Probably already do. The account will "log in" to check for modpoints once a day or so, and that's a visit as far as the site is concerned.
4) (making it much more difficult to create loads of sock puppets to ensure you have mod points available at any given time - mod points are only good for a limited time, so you can't "bank" them) The system, as it stands now, "expires" your mod points already so that you can't bank them. That doesn't still mean that large arrays of sockpuppets won't have a certain percentage of accounts with mod points at any given time. Make 200 accounts, set a script to check them all, and I bet on any given day you've access to 30 points or so without ever "banking" them.
The problem is, downmodding is a weapon. It is a method that does not on the whole improve the site, but merely by which users attack other users. Metamoderation has proven ineffective at best in changing this; the only thing left is to take away the weapons.
Yes, but the differences between that system and the current are as follows:
1) Users no longer have the ability to remove/block/ban the other side.
2) Users have no option to "shout down" the other side, other than to write actually insightful posts. Your 200-mod post may get displayed, but the other side's will as well.
In other words: the bury brigade types no longer have weapons with which they can affect other users. They'll drift off of their own accord, ineffective at disrupting discourse.
Doesn't address the problem of "downmodding old posts" though. Set it to 10 days, and 9-day-old posts will be the targets. Set it to even 24 hours, and you'll just see direct attacks.
The problems of Slashdot's moderation system are:
1) Encouragement of mining.
- Random distribution of modpoints encourages sockpuppet/"mining" accounts in order to collect large numbers of mod points at certain users' disposal.
- "You can't mod a discussion you posted in" encourages the keeping of sockpuppets for moderation simply to be able to mod in the same discussions that interest you to read/post in.
2) Ease of targeting.
- Ability to see other users' long past posts = easy way to find and target old posts for purposes of a massive downmod attack to karma.
3) Incentives to downmod versus upmod
- If you upmod, you feel good about promoting good discourse: this does not apply to most Slashdotters, especially modpoint miners, on the basis of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
- If you downmod, you commit a direct attack on someone. You decrease their karma, you decrease the visibility of their post (directly attacking their words), and as something I didn't know about till the parent poster pointed it out, you apparently also can be hit with a temp ban: "Also, if a single user is moderated down several times in a short time frame, a temporary ban will be imposed on that user... a cooling off period if you will. It lasts for 72 hours, or more for users who have posted a ton." Therefore, if you go after someone's old posts, with a slew of modpoints from sockpuppet accounts established only to have more tickets in the modpoint lotto, you can actually ban them as described above by the parent poster.
I can't see how anyone can justify this as a good thing for Slashdot's discussions. I don't care what side you are on in a discussion, either side - or both side - having access to ban buttons is just not going to be helpful. Human nature says they're not using it on the trolls, they're using it to try to silence the other side.
4) Ineffectiveness of metamoderation
- Metamoderation only covers a small sampling of the moderated posts, and only results in a very slight uptick to the percentage chance that an account will get modpoints again sooner. Further, metamoderation pulls from the same group of people that are generally moderating, meaning that downmods produced by polarized bury brigade members are relatively likely to be reviewed by other bury brigade members (who are interested in metamodding, unlike the general posting populace).
Kamiza's point below is absolutely spot-on; the solution to bury brigades is to take away their weapons.
Yeah, no kidding. The "bury brigade" problem is inherent to almost all "community modding" systems. Digg had it the worst because every account has a point to give, and users can trivially make a large number of accounts. Slashdot has the "higher percentage chance" for high-karma posters, but that's not really helpful for two reasons. First, because most high-karma posters would rather post something insightful on a particular topic of interest, and aren't allowed to mod on the same discussion where they comment - thus, most high-karma posters either never use their mod points, or wind up canceling their mods when they see something that makes them want to post instead. Second, because even if you run only one high-karma account, you mathematically have less chance of mod points and less modpoint-holding capacity than the bury-troll who's mining a couple hundred "default karma" accounts that never post (so never get downmodded to troll and lose the ability to receive modpoints) but simply mine for modpoints.
The underlying problem is that downmodding is simply not a useful tool. No matter what you call it, it's an attack on another poster. In the karma system, you do real damage to their future posts (in the term of "all future posts by this user are at -1 or -2 the previous threshold) if you can gather enough bury-brigadiers drive them from Excellent down to Good or below. Even absent a karma system, gathering a bury brigade allows you to do the equivalent of a shout-down attack, forcing anything you don't agree with below the viewing threshold of most people.
No, the Austrian School isn't respected by anyone except the paid CATO goons. It's just a boring rehash of the same laisseiz-faire "Invisible Hand, Adam Smith" bullshit that got us into the Great Depression and the Bush Depression today.
Adam Smith: "In the long run, everything evens out."
Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead."
Add to it that historically, in the long run, everything does NOT even out. Far from it, economic disparity INCREASES without governmental controls to prevent the hoarding and accumulation of both wealth and power into the hands of an oligarchy.
Good software engineers are inherently lazy looking. They don't spray out a bunch of lines of code and then busily fix hundreds of bugs. They consider a good plan of attack, write clear, concise code, and fix very few bugs (because they have very few). This is lost on almost all managers in the tech industry.
This is because "managers" are, with few exceptions, brainless wastes of oxygen whose purpose is to look at "metrics" instead of actual work performance.
Programmer A writes 1000 lines an hour, but causes 90% of the bugs. Programmer B writes 250 lines an hour, but causes only 10% of the bugs. Programmer B is a better programmer, but by "metrics" (read: "lines of code") Programmer A looks better on paper, since "whose code had the bug" is never counted.
Likewise, even in the real world. Work crew A managed to lay/resurface 60 miles of road in a month. Work crew B only managed to lay/resurface 30. Sounds simple, work crew A are a "better" work crew, right? Oh, except that weather conditions and land conditions play a factor: work crew A was working during a clear weather period in a flat area, while work crew B was working on hilly terrain and got interrupted by a hurricane blowing through midmonth - again, not factored in by "metrics."
Actual, real, competent "managers" are few and far between, because they know that "metrics" don't mean shit... but in corporate life, the bean-counters demand "metrics" for everything, and the PHB factories where MBA's are churned out do nothing but teach "metrics" and corporate ass-licking.
True, until the company moves.
I've got a buddy who works in salvage auctions. Company saw less auctions with the economy, decided to rent smaller office space. Now, company employees are *required* to work from home at least 2 days a week, because they don't have cubicle space to fit the whole staff.
Indeed. Where I live, there's a ton of crumbling infrastructure. A good portion of it is roads that are 50+ years old. I've driven on WPA-produced roads through a neighboring state where the road - poured concrete - has literally turned itself to gravel over the years through neglect. Republican leaders of the state don't spend anything on maintenance, and their "solution" to the road becoming unsafe is - I'm not kidding - to just keep reducing the posted speed limit to something that's "safe for conditions" on an unmaintained road.
A frightening concept, given that the US interestate system (formally, the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways) was originally pitched to Congress under the military provisions of Section 8 of the Constitution, to provide for a network of roadways capable of moving military equipment from base to base. These days, it's basically a bare-minimum subsidy for the trucking industry, which has caused our national railway infrastructure to decay in ways that are completely unreasonable and results in far more smog output than there otherwise would be from cross-country freight.
1) The WPA prolonged the Great Depression by about 7 extra years.
Show me one respected source saying so. And no, Gingrich and Palin's books don't count.
2) It wasn't something that really was within the mandate allowed by the Constitution.
Really? National, cross-state-border infrastructure would seem to be firmly in line with Section 8 of the US constitution.
3) At least for the debt, pain, etc. we GOT that standing infrastructure. The same can't be said for Obama's Stimulus, which seems to have produced LITTLE.
"Obama's Stimulus"... you mean the Bush Stimulus? Are you referring to the ERA of 2008, or the ARRA of 2009? If it's the latter, Obama signed it less than a month entering office. All the work on it was done months before by Congress, under the BUSH regime.
And in any event, the criticism of more than 90% of economists (read: any real economist that isn't a CATO Kochsucker) isn't that the ARRA was too large, but that it was too SMALL to have the desired effect and included too many bad tax breaks trying to get Republicans to sign on to the deal.
What do all these books have in common?
Oh yeah, they all STARTED with a big-ass pile of cash that they could fritter away on risk.
Like the recent Republican debate - Gingrich talks about Bill Gates being a "high school dropout" who founded Microsoft, but he fails to mention that Gates was the prep-schooled son of upper 0.5%'ers who had a ton of mommy and daddy's money to pay Paul Allen (the real programming genius of the company) and later to front in order to buy 86-DOS from Seattle Computer.
Funny how that all tends to work out only for those who already inherited wealth.
Your problems at work are crystal clear.
Not mine, thankfully. But I know plenty of people who go through this shit all the time. "Bad communication" is not usually from the IT end, it's from the department or end-user end. Sometimes, it's someone thinking that if they make enough bullshit requests, the IT guys will just give them install rights to "save time." Sometimes, it's sending in the denied request for the 4th time, thinking that they'll get a different person to come by who doesn't care about policy and will just do what they want - kind of like a 5 year old going and asking mommy after daddy already said no twice. Sometimes, it's even worse, because it's the end user's department manager saying "I can't take this to the CxO and go over the IT manager's head until the request is denied X number of times, no matter the reason."
Sometimes, it's that the person bringing the request doesn't really know what they want, they just saw $oohshinytoy and decided they want it, and that because they want it IT should be the ones to pay for it.
Sometimes, it's the end result of "people" (term used in the loosest possible sense) like you. The ones who think that the way to approach people in IT is to berate them, verbally abuse them, publicly humiliate them, or worse.
Taking it back to your original point:
If after a rational explanation they still think you're an obstructionist, then your department has spent too much time saying no and not enough time trying to help.
Say you took your car to a mechanic. And they tell you your car will take $X to fix, and the part will take 3 days to come in. You have only a few possible responses: accept it with grace and pay it, accept it with grace and take your car back as-is to go look for a second opinion, accept it with grace and go looking to buy a new car, or throw a tantrum about how unfair it is that your car isn't fixed right now and for "more reasonable cost."
The type of users I'm referring to, the ones who will still call the IT guys an "obstructionist" after they've explained the issue and pointed the user to the CxO or Legal officer that they actually need to talk to? Yeah, they're the types of tantrum-throwers from that last set. People like you.
No, bullshit. Complete fucking bullshit, from the usual types of shit-monkeys who have no appreciation of what they are about to do.
What part of "Just plug in the damned USB" didn't fill you with dread? How about the idea of slamming in an entirely new set of drives, and re-partitioning an entire array, only taking "10 minutes"?
Completely fucking insane.
Oh for FSM's sake.
The problem is when we get the same situation over and over and over again. From the SAME USERS. They've already been told it's out of our hands - Legal is the ones who handle anything that involves a contract, especially if it involves putting company data on non-company servers. There are legal contracts involved here: some of "company" data is actually owned by the company that hired us to do the contract. Or it's "company" data covered by privacy policies or by laws like HIPAA and FERPA and SOX. You know, the shit where if it gets into the wild, there is a possibility of big fucking lawsuits and federal-sized fines and loss of future business.
Maybe they tried to get help with something and it took too long. Or they have a problem they really need fixed, and IT just muttered something about Legal and then went back to watching YouTube.
I doubt that, I really do. IT departments are understaffed, underpaid, and overworked. The LAST people in the company with any time to "watch YouTube" are the IT folks, because they are up to their fucking eyeballs in the unappreciated work that assholes like you heap around, along with the work that goes with keeping all the systems running that assholes like you NEVER fucking notice unless something goes down.
Or maybe it's just in how the news was delivered, maybe they were told they are "NOT FUCKING AUTHORIZED TO ENTER THE COMPANY INTO A CONTRACT" instead of saying "There are legal issues here and there's not much I can do there, but hey what's the problem you're trying to solve, maybe I've got an alternative!".
When you come and say "here's the problem I need fixed, can you guys help", you get an alternative solution. It may involve a little more work on your part - for instance, you might be required to sign on through VPN to verify your credentials, then RDC to your desktop box or pull up a secured SMB share to access the info you need. You know, to verify that it is YOU doing this, and that YOU are the responsible party, and that the info stays in secured company systems.
At this point, there are plenty of users who go into a tantrum about "but dropbox is so much easier and I can install it at home and I can do it all by myself and why do I have to do all that work." You know. Assholes like you, who don't care that Dropbox routinely gets hacked into, doesn't require secure passwords, doesn't require password complexity on the order required by the various contracts the company has (trust me, get into one DoD contract and you'll learn that the piddly shit password complexity and data security stuff your company has now is fucking NOTHING compared to what they require), and who don't give a damn enough to pay attention to what Legal has to say about this stuff, but are perfectly fucking willing to give the IT staff a hard time for trying to actually FOLLOW the letter of what the company is required to follow as interpreted by Legal.
Now, when you come to IT, and you're berating a manager because the IT guy wouldn't (because company policy says otherwise) give install rights to three idiots who repeatedly got their systems infected with rootkits by trying to download pr0n already, and it comes out that the reason they want install rights this time is to install Dropbox or something else that involves storing data on non-company machines and entering into legal agreements regarding storage that are not remotely designed for a corporate legal barrier, then your response is going to be "GO SPEAK TO LEGAL." Because that IS the right response, whether whiny, bratty tantrum-throwers like you like it or not.
IT people are human, just like everyone else. You come in with a fucking chip on your shoulder, you're going to get it shoved back in your face. You come in and work with them as fellow human beings, you'll find them quite pleasant. Your corporate environment says "IT are the guys to take your frustrations out on and talk shit behind their backs about while they are working on your computer and can hear you", your IT folks are going to fucking hate all of you. And it's YOUR FUCKING FAULT, not the IT guys.
For example, when many users still have 7-year-old computers and the CxO says that every manager gets a brand new iPad despite the fact that some managers have said they have no use for it, IT should be the one to question whether that's a good allocation of funds.
IT could also question why the CxO just spent money on hiring a "secretary" with 36DD's, no gag reflex, and abso-fucking-lutely NO other skills. But in both cases, raising the question of why the CxO's new toy is helpful to the business, is likely to result in the IT budget slashed in retaliation or the employee raising the question seeing his position RIF'ed.
... as if the users would read a memo from IT anyways?
"Oh, it's from IT. I'll read it later. It probably has something to do with some bullshit security thing or other, or some new change that I don't use. Back to my email. Ooh, free cute puppy screensaver from my brother's hacked yahoo account, I think I'll click on it..."
The 'fix' you're talking about is still a symptom of bad communication from IT. If after a rational explanation they still think you're an obstructionist, then your department has spent too much time saying no and not enough time trying to help.
No, if after a rational explanation they still think you're an "obstructionist", when you have patiently explained that the person who would have to approve (or deny!) their request is not IT at all but is instead Legal, or Security, or Manager/CEO level, then they are being a whiny fucking brat who thinks that throwing a tantrum will get them what they want... because they probably have figured out that they're going to get the same answer from the person who actually has the power to make the decision.
IT answers to people up the chain. Rarely, if ever, does IT create the policies they are supposed to support. Sometimes, the policies are the whim of a CEO, sometimes, they are the logical product of security restrictions, contract restrictions, privacy laws, business accounting laws, or any of a dozen other legal frameworks.
Key example: Dropbox, at home, YOUR personal files, you can enter into a contract with Dropbox (and that EULA is a contract) to put your files on their network. At work, those are the business's files. The company has to have some SLA and data restriction/privacy/security contract before putting files on an external entity's network. YOU, the "end user", ARE NOT FUCKING AUTHORIZED TO ENTER THE COMPANY INTO A CONTRACT with Dropbox or anyone else.
That's what Legal is going to tell you, and why you can't have it, and pitching a fucking tantrum at IT is not going to change it.
Oh goody, your nephew's PC got hacked and someone has your entire company's customer records in the wild.
That's what security would call LAWSUIT FODDER.
And this is why the sales people need to get a fucking clue and talk to both IT and Legal before installing insecure-as-fucking-hell crapware like Dropbox.
Don't forget how politicians enter into the mix - take a look at how many US politicians started out as lawyers.
Then again, anyone from an honest profession can't afford to spend the amount of money it takes to run these days.
These are the same guys who arrest people who videotape them misbehaving in public on "wiretapping" laws.
Are you SURE you want there not to be oversight of them? Because I don't trust the local cop as far as I could throw his donuts.
I don't necessarily know that there isn't basis. Certainly, a basic search turns up plenty of video.
Whenever the police are trying to hide information from the public, the first question you should ask is what they're likely to hide, not what they SAY they are wanting to prevent from being released. Pretexting is very common among governmental agencies trying to grab more power.
That's great IF your motherboard actually supports the command. A surprising number of SATA controllers will refuse to transmit the command (something about NSA involvement there too)...