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Slashdot Meta-Discussion 20020511 More

Slashdot Meta-Discussion 20020511

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  • Once you hit the "submit" button, your post is gone, gone, gone. If you get a "slow down cowboy" or other error, the "back" button is suicide.

    Wrong. Just wait a couple minutes, press Shift+Reload, and your browser will re-POST your comment. Of course, you can't go back and Preview your post unless you're using a browser that doesn't destroy form data on a Back button press.

    Here are two better suggestions:

    • Do like Scoop [kuro5hin.org] and turn failed posts into previews.
    • Instead of failing comments that come in too quickly, delay them by holding the HTTP connection open and sleep()ing until the two minute limit expires.

  • I think the single bigest problem with the /. moderation system is that it follows "the microphone model"--roughly, that there is a single, monotonic attribute (call it "the attention of slashdot" or some such) and that all posts are in competition for this. Thus we give priority at "the microphone" to people who have in the past writen comments that were liked more than they were disliked.

    But liked by whom? There have certainly been posts that I have found witty and perceptive that were modded down by people who (I suspect) were too slow witted to appreciate them, as well as posts that I found inane which wound up highly rated for (to me at least) no clear reason. So, while I often agree with the agregate moderation of /., I quite often disagree with the details. Since no one else shares my exact tastes, this is about the best I can hope for, at least under the microphone model.

    There is an alternative. A few years ago I played around with a slashcode patch to implement "the party model"--something like the present friend/foe system but taken much further. The basic idea was that rather than ranking posts up or down adjusting the posters karma (small set of moderators, global "microphone worthiness" value) everyone had the ability to moderate at all times and the results affected the moderator's likeliness to hear from that poster in the future--in essence, you "walked towards" or "walked away from" the poster. No karma, no visible scoring system; the /. you get is the /. you ask for. If you like to troll and want to hang out with trolls, fine. They're over there and you are welcome to join them. Love to discuss politics? Enjoy puns? Whatever you want, you're free to wander around and find it.

    I dropped it when I realized that I wasn't getting it done fast enough to keep up with the slashcode (perl isn't one of my top ten languages), but the core math to keep it from blowing up (storage / computation / cluster stability, etc.) is of course version independent and I may dust it off some day.

    Anyway, that's my two cents.

    -- MarkusQ

    • I definately like the "everyone can moderate at all times" idea, but I think what would make it especially useful is if all moderations were public. Then at first we simply allow people to block moderations from certain moderators.

      For now what I do is give +2 for insightful, interesting, funny, and informative, so that triple weights upvotes as compared to downvotes. This solves the problem of people who downvote for bad reasons, for the most part, but it actually increases the inane posts which are modded up. I fight that a little by putting most people with inane modded up posts on my block list.


      • I definately like the "everyone can moderate at all times" idea, but I think what would make it especially useful is if all moderations were public. Then at first we simply allow people to block moderations from certain moderators.

        In the "party model" it doesn't make sense to have moderations public since the vast majority don't affect you; if two people "on the far side of the room" (e.g., in whom you have no interest) "walk towards or away from each other" (e.g. mod each other up or down) it has essentialy no effect on you.

        -- MarkusQ

        • In the "party model" it doesn't make sense to have moderations public since the vast majority don't affect you

          Yes, but it seems like that's quite difficult to implement. The advantage of public moderations is that it could be implemented today, with virtually no coding.

          Eventually someone could come up with their own party model, using the publically available moderations. And then you'd have a choice. Use that system, or use the slashdot system. And if enough people use an alternative system, then slashdot could eventually just incorporate it into slashdot. It leaves room for experimentation before forcing everyone into an untested model.

          JMHO.

    • What, if anything, does the present friend/foe system do?

      • What, if anything, does the present friend/foe system do?

        Short form: if you consistantly like reading someone's posts, mark them as a friend. If you consistantly find them anoying, mark them as a foe. (Do this by clicking on the little perl/LED icon on one of their posts.) Then go to your preferences and say, give +X points to my friends and -Y points to my foes.

        This should give you a somewhat nicer /. experience, since it increases the chance that you'l notice posts by people you like and reduces the chance you'll be annoyed by people you don't.

        -- MarkusQ

    • The system you describe resembles the "score files" in many UNIX platform mail readers, where each user moderates the others up or down locally.

      If you like to troll and want to hang out with trolls, fine. They're over there and you are welcome to join them. Love to discuss politics? Enjoy puns? Whatever you want, you're free to wander around and find it.

      If you like to discuss a particular subject, then either find a journal entry or hidden sid somewhere covering it or (failing that) make one yourself. Case in point: Trolltalk. Another case in point: this very journal entry.

  • M2 problems (Score:2, Insightful)

    by frozenray ( 308282 )
    Most of my gripes with moderation are with M2, which is not well implemented in my opinion. Randomly throwing a bunch of comments at willing M2ers is ineffective, since abuses are hard to catch out of context and, most importantly, most moderations do not need to be meta-moderated: a post which is undisputedly insightful/funny/interesting to most readers has no need for M2, and neither do crapflooders, BSD trolls and their ilk.

    Moderators are bound to screw up, they're only human after all. What we need is a means to correct those mistakes and punish those who abuse their moderation privileges.

    In my opinion, the following scheme would be an improvement on M2:
    • By default, there is no meta-moderation.
    • Moderation can be disputed either by the original poster or a third party and is then put up for M2. M2ers would only get to meta-moderate disputed moderations. Let's say a post gets Insightful=2, Troll=3, the latter clearly being inappropriate. One could then click on "Troll=3", choose a "dispute moderation" option and put those moderations up to M2. There should be the possibility for the submitter to give a short comment on why he thinks the moderation is unfair.
    • M2ers should be able to see if the M2 request comes from the original poster or a third party. If the latter is the case, the person who put up the moderation for M2 should be able to choose to remain anonymous, or reveal his identity (I am more likely to pay attention if a "member in good standing" is disputing a moderation and I'm willing to examine his posting history to check that out)
    • The outcome of M2 (by a sufficient number of M2ers of course) would determine if the disputed moderations are removed or not. The originator would be informed about the result of M2 using a message. Someone who has disputed a moderation should be able to do so only once.
    • Optionally, one could think up a scheme with an "M2 account" for every user. When the account balance becomes negative because the user has been voted down in M2 too many times or his moderations have been successfully disputed too often, he would be $rtbl'd (first time: 3 months, then 6 months, then 1 year, etc.). This would help to keep down the number of troll moderators and boneheads with moderation privileges.


    Do you see problems with my proposed scheme? Am I the only one who thinks that M2 is inappropriate? Opinions welcome.

    Greetings from Switzerland,
    Raymond

    p.s. why do I never get "overrated"/"underrated" moderations in M2? Those are quite frequent but do not seem to be M2ed and are often abused.

    • why do I never get "overrated"/"underrated" moderations in M2? Those are quite frequent but do not seem to be M2ed and are often abused.

      Moderators abuse *rrated because Slashcode excludes *rrated from metamoderation.

      • > Moderators abuse *rrated because Slashcode excludes *rrated from metamoderation.

        Well, this confirms a nagging suspicion. Try as I might, I cannot come up with a rational explanation why *rrated should be excluded from M2. Anyone?
        • Actually, it's pretty simple. *rrated is difficult to review, because you would need to know what the moderation total was when the person was looking at it. The totals go up and down over time (I've seen things go from -1 to +5 and back to -1) and so...

          I do agree that *rrated is for this reason more susceptible to abuse. Perhaps require someone to be in good standing WRT their metamoderation to get these? Or require two or more different moderators to mark something as *rrated before any change occurs?

          Just a few ideas.
  • In sid=32603&cid=3520477 [slashdot.org], dolanh wrote:

    Another issue is how to translate a haiku rule such as 5-7-5 mora to a language that, as you put it, has no concept of it?

    By not using the senryu form at all [phenry.org]. It really doesn't work for the English language, unlike the "limerick," or amphibrachic 3/3/2/2/3-meter with a/a/b/b/a rhyme.

  • In /comments.pl?sid=33221&cid=3588843 [slashdot.org], Anonymous Coward wrote:

    Can someone *please* code up a script to filter Slashdot so we don't have to read any more of Timothy's editorials.

    As Electrum and minusthink pointed out in that thread, it wasn't timothy's editorial; it was the submitter's. The editor's editorial is normally written in non-italicized type.

    To block timothy, go to your preferences [slashdot.org] and under "Exclude Stories from the Homepage", check "timothy".

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