4 ms·

It's not strictly noise, per-se, but the biting vitriol of comments and downvotes. There are moments of insightful dialog, but more commonly I get tired of the

It's not strictly noise, per-se, but the biting vitriol of comments and downvotes. There are moments of insightful dialog, but more commonly I get tired of the way things turn into a grudge match. Especially in light of the Endless September phenomenon, I'm not sure how one solves this problem, as every online forum seems to eventually devolve to that state.

protomyth 8y ago
The basic problem is two very incompatible goals. You don't want to become part of an echo chamber[1], but at the same time you want to protect yourself from fools. The hope of every moderation system is to solve both. We've seen HN-style crowd control and folks on twitter using ban lists, and both have problems. In a lot of ways, I think Advogato[2] was on to something with their web of trust. The line on wikipedia Despite the trust metric, posting privileges to the front page of Advogato have been gained by controversial individuals, leading some to claim Advogato's trust metric solution is faulty. seems like sour grapes. I still think its worthy of another couple of steps down that path. Also, I think folks miss handling the joy of tangents cause a lot of problems in moderation that are really just a structure problem. Mostly they are marked as off-topic and down-voted which cuts down on some amazing streams of knowledge. I have yet to see a system that allows branching of something the poster knows will be off-topic but is a tangent of the main article. It seems like generated articles might be the way to go and leave a "tangent pointer" in the main article. I think solving the tangent problem would solve a lot of moderation problems and hard feelings of the users. I really don't like some solutions, like shadow banning or making every comment by a user drop to the bottom of the sort right away with little hope of getting "above the fold" no matter how many upvotes the comment gets. 1) Although, quite a few people actually do want to be part of the majority with only the "acceptable" opposition represented. This pattern repeats so often, it makes me think its just baked into humanity's tribal thinking. 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato
- raphlinus 8y ago
  I think it's worth continuing to explore as well, but the basic observation holds. Whenever you have a metric, the wannabes and self-promoters will game it. The people who are actually expert usually don't have the same kind of motivation to get their voice heard above the noise. I've had some discussions with the lobste.rs folks about another attempt to do a sophisticated trust metric, but nothing ever rose to the level of "we should do this."
  - protomyth 8y ago
    The people who are actually expert usually don't have the same kind of motivation to get their voice heard above the noise. Interestingly, a lot of people know who the real experts are. I sometimes wonder about why most systems focus on the internal to the exclusion of any real world input.

protomyth 8y ago

The basic problem is two very incompatible goals. You don't want to become part of an echo chamber[1], but at the same time you want to protect yourself from fools. The hope of every moderation system is to solve both. We've seen HN-style crowd control and folks on twitter using ban lists, and both have problems. In a lot of ways, I think Advogato[2] was on to something with their web of trust. The line on wikipedia Despite the trust metric, posting privileges to the front page of Advogato have been gained by controversial individuals, leading some to claim Advogato's trust metric solution is faulty. seems like sour grapes. I still think its worthy of another couple of steps down that path. Also, I think folks miss handling the joy of tangents cause a lot of problems in moderation that are really just a structure problem. Mostly they are marked as off-topic and down-voted which cuts down on some amazing streams of knowledge. I have yet to see a system that allows branching of something the poster knows will be off-topic but is a tangent of the main article. It seems like generated articles might be the way to go and leave a "tangent pointer" in the main article. I think solving the tangent problem would solve a lot of moderation problems and hard feelings of the users. I really don't like some solutions, like shadow banning or making every comment by a user drop to the bottom of the sort right away with little hope of getting "above the fold" no matter how many upvotes the comment gets. 1) Although, quite a few people actually do want to be part of the majority with only the "acceptable" opposition represented. This pattern repeats so often, it makes me think its just baked into humanity's tribal thinking. 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato

raphlinus 8y ago
I think it's worth continuing to explore as well, but the basic observation holds. Whenever you have a metric, the wannabes and self-promoters will game it. The people who are actually expert usually don't have the same kind of motivation to get their voice heard above the noise. I've had some discussions with the lobste.rs folks about another attempt to do a sophisticated trust metric, but nothing ever rose to the level of "we should do this."
- protomyth 8y ago
  The people who are actually expert usually don't have the same kind of motivation to get their voice heard above the noise. Interestingly, a lot of people know who the real experts are. I sometimes wonder about why most systems focus on the internal to the exclusion of any real world input.