word munger's Journal: Basic description of slashdot

It seems a bit silly to be posting this to slashdot, but according to the methods described by Geertz, it's a fundamental step. Geertz's method relies on "thick description"--careful description of even the most seemingly benign aspects of a community.

Slashdot originated as a technology news web site: editors would post links to other interesting technology sites, providing a sort of central clearing house for tech news. The difference was that slashdot allowed its readers to post comments about the story being covered. Eventually thousands of computer nerds began to virtually congregate there to discuss the latest news on technology and science. Often the most popular news stories would accumulate hundreds of comments. For the most part, comments were interesting, informed, and on-topic, but after a while, a few troublemakers began posting deliberatly misleading or off-topic comments.

Being nerds, the slashdot editors developed a very technical way of managing online discussions to separate interesting comments from worthless ones--in technical terms, they described it as separating the signal from the noice. Here's the system they came up with: comments are "moderated" by the site's regular readers. The best comments can be ranked as high as 5, with the worst comments moderated down to -1. Moderaters can also add descriptive words, such as "interesting," "insightful," or the damning "troll," signifying a comment that is obviously only looking to pick a fight. The trick to this community-level moderation is that a given reader only gets a few "moderation points" at a time, and they can only rate a single comment one time. Otherwise, moderaters themselves might abuse the system. There are many more rules to moderation, but this is enough to give you the idea.

The more important point is that moderation allows Slashdot to "shape" knowledge. Highly rated comments carry more authority, and so a reader can use the ratings to sift through hundreds of comments, with the option to choose to view only comments rated at a certain level--say 1 or 2. Does it work? Though there are frequent disagreements, it's generally true that by the time an issue has been thoroughly discussed, the reader comes away feeling that they have a good sense of the "truth," or at least the range of opinions on the issue.