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Nobody old enough on here to remember Slashdot's moderation system? Not everybody could promote or demote comments. You got randomly assigned the ability to mo

by Yhippa 10y ago

Nobody old enough on here to remember Slashdot's moderation system? Not everybody could promote or demote comments. You got randomly assigned the ability to moderate comments so when it came your turn you took it _seriously_. That community had one of the highest quality comments. Then somewhere in the mid-2000's it got super anti-Microsoft and anti-anything-not-F/OSS. I'll give them credit; it probably reflected the highest quality comments of their userbase at the time.

dredmorbius 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308662 At one point I actually helped design something somewhat better (which was implemented in part). I've had further ideas since. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content_rating_moderation_and_ranking_systems/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content...
michaelt 10y ago
Slashdot's moderation still had some problems - which might be inevitable, I don't know. There was a big bias towards early comments - moderators had to see your comment before they could upvote it to the top of the page, but once it was at the top more people would see it and keep it there; so a comment that would score well if posted as comment 10 would score nothing if posted as comment 50. And karma tended to reward /popular/ comments, which were often things the hive mind agreed with, rather than high-effort comments. Discussion about DRM? Get in early with "DRM is impossible because" or "format-shifting should be a right" for a quick high score.
mahranch 10y ago
> That community had one of the highest quality comments. One of the biggest differences between slashdot, and a site like reddit is simply size. Reddit is now the 8th or 9th largest website in the U.S according to Alexa, it's getting as big as Twitter, and is larger than Netflix. Slashdot at it's peak popularity wasn't even a drop in that ocean of traffic & pageviews. When you get that big, your problems are of a different sort, requiring different solutions. Hell, I think reddit has single subreddits that are bigger than Slashdot was at its peak. This is important because it's easy to have "high quality" when your traffic is low. It's easy to moderate and easy to keep people on-topic. I speak from experience -- I moderate one or more default subreddits on reddit, as well as smaller subreddits, and the smaller ones are much easier to handle. They're virtually on autopilot with minimal moderation required. The larger ones on the other hand... It's like a non-stop war.

by Yhippa 10y ago

dredmorbius 10y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308662 At one point I actually helped design something somewhat better (which was implemented in part). I've had further ideas since. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content_rating_moderation_and_ranking_systems/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content...

michaelt 10y ago

Slashdot's moderation still had some problems - which might be inevitable, I don't know. There was a big bias towards early comments - moderators had to see your comment before they could upvote it to the top of the page, but once it was at the top more people would see it and keep it there; so a comment that would score well if posted as comment 10 would score nothing if posted as comment 50. And karma tended to reward /popular/ comments, which were often things the hive mind agreed with, rather than high-effort comments. Discussion about DRM? Get in early with "DRM is impossible because" or "format-shifting should be a right" for a quick high score.

mahranch 10y ago

> That community had one of the highest quality comments. One of the biggest differences between slashdot, and a site like reddit is simply size. Reddit is now the 8th or 9th largest website in the U.S according to Alexa, it's getting as big as Twitter, and is larger than Netflix. Slashdot at it's peak popularity wasn't even a drop in that ocean of traffic & pageviews. When you get that big, your problems are of a different sort, requiring different solutions. Hell, I think reddit has single subreddits that are bigger than Slashdot was at its peak. This is important because it's easy to have "high quality" when your traffic is low. It's easy to moderate and easy to keep people on-topic. I speak from experience -- I moderate one or more default subreddits on reddit, as well as smaller subreddits, and the smaller ones are much easier to handle. They're virtually on autopilot with minimal moderation required. The larger ones on the other hand... It's like a non-stop war.