4 ms·

What went wrong for them?

• jordyhoyt 17y ago
  I think what went wrong was that they publicly displayed the score for whichever axis was most significant. Here, the only score that is displayed to all is the only positive one we have: "this comment adds to the discussion." The reason I think this is what went wrong for them was that they had flags like "funny", for things that obviously don't add to the discussion, and too many choices for the other positive votes. IMHO, having one meaning for upvote and a handful of negative flags would be ideal if the flags were only visible to the submitter (to educate noobs/reprimand those who should know better) and whatever process is responsible for threshing the chaff.
  • tptacek 17y ago
    This is a good point. "Uncivil" is more valuable than "Offtopic" and "Troll".
    • ericb 17y ago
      The Uncivil tag should prove a fun exercise in reading tone and sarcasm from text. Someone needs to invent Tone Markup Language--and not just emoticons.
    • TeHCrAzY 17y ago
      The "Troll" tag on Slashdot comes with some sense of acheivement. "Uncivil" seems much more refined, and less likely to award poor behaviour.
    • fragmede 17y ago
      How about adding a free form tagging field to the flag process? Don't show all tags on a post, just a given subset (most common and not blacklisted).
• jmatt 17y ago
  Slashdot used to be my goto location for tech news. If I go far enough back, I used to read and enjoy the comments. The beginning of the decline was the growth or maybe how they dealt with the growth. Meta-moderation was the nail in the coffin. The tags were never fine grained enough, at least for me. I quickly found out that my taste and what I appreciated in a comment were not the same as the masses. Then I found reddit and HN :) Where I still feel at home and often enjoy the commentary as much as the stories. To summarize it, after looking back. I think what killed it for me was the decrease in quality of stories and comments while there was an increase in stories overall.
• gregwebs 17y ago
  These attempts at explaining what went wrong are likely all wrong themselves if the primary negative effect on on-line discussions is the size of the audience. The only thing we can really conclude is that it wasn't enough to turn the inevitable tide.
• potatolicious 17y ago
  Not much. I'm personally a huge fan of Slashdot's moderation system - one where there is both a minimum and maximum "karma" on a post, and the context of this rating is also recorded (e.g. +5 Insightful). There's certainly room to improve on this model - I for one would like to see a "-1 Uncivil". Either way, where Reddit and Digg have repeatedly struggled with designing a sustainable commenting system, Slashdot's has stayed relatively constant for years, and the moderation quality has also been similarly consistent. This is not a trivial accomplishment. IMHO the problem with "raw" upvotes and downvotes is that it is very difficult to circumvent the mob mentality, and that this system absolutely fails to scale with the population of the community. IMHO the Slashdot system works far better for large communities than what the competition seems to have going.