4 ms·

the best thing here is active moderation weeding out the most negative and unhelpful comments, trying to keep the discussions civil. It's hard and requires a lo

the best thing here is active moderation weeding out the most negative and unhelpful comments, trying to keep the discussions civil. It's hard and requires a lot of effort but HN is a good example of what it can look like at best.

tom_mellior 6y ago
It could be better. Slashdot has (or maybe had, I haven't checked in a while) a way of associating votes with tags. So upvotes could be tagged "insightful" or "funny" or whatever, and downvotes tagged "flamebait" or "off-topic" or others. Especially for downvotes I would often be interested in this kind of quick feedback.
- the-dude 6y ago
  But did it actually work better? I am inclined to think not as lots of people moved from ./ to HN.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    I think a lot has to do with culture itself and not the moderation system. Slashdot was always a bit unruly.
  - gwd 6y ago
    I think it did. I'm an old-skool Slashdot person who just moved over to HN a year or two ago, and there are lots of things I really miss about the Slashdot moderation system. One of the most noticeable things is trying to skim a discussion with thousands of comments. On Slashdot, you can set your threshold to +5, and see only the very most insightful comments, no matter where they are in the thread. On HN, there's a lot more digging required to get the gems. That said, I do think HN's "story-selection" algorithm is an improvement. What shows up on the front page relies a lot less on the quirks of the editors, and seems to result in a much more diverse set of posts. As others have mentioned, I think the top-level moderation is the most important factor keeping HN worth reading. It's dang intervening and setting the tone which does the most for HN at the moment. We need to keep him happy; and I hope that he has a "succession" in place in case he's ever unable to continue the work.
- echelon 6y ago
  Slashdot is insufferable trash today. If you read the comments, every article gets sniped by Nazi swastika ASCII art, which they still haven't bothered to ban. (You would have thought the teenagers doing this in the 90's would have grown up by now...) How hard is it to ban the same post being made repeatedly, over and over? Slashdot stopped trying.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - friendlybus 6y ago
    I feel slashdot stopped trying ages ago when the editor had to fight to not put ads (or excessive ads) on the site. They were bought up and its been on autopilot for years.
  - watwut 6y ago
    > (You would have thought the teenagers doing this in the 90's would have grown up by now...) They grew up. They kept their opinions and attitudes, as people do. You can grow out of graffiti, but you will still like the style. Getting older does not magically make you stop liking nazi if you liked them as teenager. Instead, you seek to pass your values to teenagers that follow you.
- cinntaile 6y ago
  From what I have seen downvotes get used a lot here on posts that users disagree with, which seems like an unfortunate side-effect. You'd want to reserve them for rude posts or other posts that aren't helpful to a discussion.
  - hamburglar 6y ago
    I think this has the potential for going down an infinite rat-hole, but I always think it would be interesting if downvotes required justification (e.g. a "why?" popup that included stuff like "rules violation", "trolling", "this is wrong", etc) and then other people were allowed to evaluate specific downvote reasons for whether or not they seemed reasonable. You could then weight downvotes based on how legit the reasoning of the downvoter is (does everyone think you're full of shit when you say it's trolling?) and also based on whether you tend to downvote for reasons that are not actually worthy of a downvote (you just disagree with the post).
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    Yes, my personal conclusion is that downvotes are not useful and the functionality is usually best removed. All the more so when they are used to, in effect, remove comments by making downvoted comments more difficult to read. Now, I can understand the idea of making it easier to navigate through many comments by crowd-sourcing a metric of each comment's 'value', but in practice this is extremely difficult to do while preserving the diversity of views. It usually ends up being the "tyranny of the majority".
  - tom_mellior 6y ago
    "Disagree" describes a wide range of things though. It can be "you claim facts that are demonstrably false", "you claim facts that I cannot demonstrate are false, but I have strong doubts and you do not provide sources", "you cite correct facts but your interpretation of them is demonstrably wrong", "you cite correct facts but I interpret them differently", etc. And those are just factual disagreements, without getting into "you're making a strawman argument", etc. Thinks probably shouldn't be this fine-grained, but I hope you get the idea that there is reasonable room for more helpful feedback than "I disagree".
- watwut 6y ago
  I left slashdot when the openly sexist comments became too frequent (they used to be less frequent). It was years ago, I dont know whether it was temporary or long term trend. Same with 9gag btw. It was funny, then funny with occasional eye roll and then "I dont have to look at this". I dont know whether it changed back or not.
- jonathanlydall 6y ago
  I still look at the Slashdot front page, but don’t look at the comments anymore. I think the majority of the enjoyable community moved on a long time ago. For example, if you just mention you’re a happy Microsoft user, you’re accused (often in a racist way) of being a schill and the cause of everything wrong in the world.
- JohnBooty 6y ago
  I read Slashdot nearly every day for quite a few years, stepping away at some point in the 2000s. That particular aspect of the moderation system sounds good on paper, but was rather useless in practice. Essentially, what "matters" is that people are upvoting or downvoting a particular post. Theoretically, it's good to have a bit of additional metadata telling us why they're doing it: i.e., do they find the post Funny, Insightful, or Informative? In practicality, it's not that useful, or at least it wasn't put to any practical use by Slashdot when I stopped reading it back in the 2000's. At a moment's glance, it's pretty trivial to see why people might've upvoted a particular post - it's clearly meant to be funny, or it has a lot of informative links, etc. So the metadata of "why" was just redundant. On the other hand, I suppose the metadata could have been put to some practical use after all. For example, it would have been perhaps useful to filter out all of the "Funny" [1] and "Insightful" [2] replies on Slashdot and to focus on the most "Informative" [3] ones. I don't remember the interface allowing you to do that. Perhaps they added it later, or perhaps it's something you might explore in your own system. ------ [1] I mean, one can only read so many "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of THOSE!" jokes before one wants to jump off of a bridge. [2] In my experience, 99% of the "Insightful" comments were just those that forcefully/eloquently regurgitated FOSS talking points that resonated well with established Slashdot groupthink. "Insightful" upvotes tended to mean "I agree with the author of this comment" and not "wow, actual new insights are presented here." Perhaps this might have been avoided if there was a separate "I agree with this" upvote method, distinct from "Insightful." [3] It was easy to farm for karma this way; if you stumbled upon a recent Slashdot article without many replies, you could throw a few easily-Googled relevant links into a reply and be assured of getting a bunch of "Informative" votes. Nonetheless, while imperfect, the replies deemed "Informative" had a decent signal-to-noise ratio relative to the rest of the replies.
  - DharmaPolice 6y ago
    >For example, it would have been perhaps useful to filter out all of the "Funny" replies on Slashdot The interface did indeed allow you to do this. At least, I remember it being there in about 2001. Additionally, the metadata on voting was particularly important for meta-moderation which other platforms don't really have. Users were (at random) shown a comment that you've voted on and your vote. They then said whether your vote was fair or not, based on what they see. Stepping back a bit - the most important difference between the Slashdot system (vs something like Reddit) was that votes were much more limited on Slashdot. Not everyone had modpoints (votes) and you only got a handful at a time. This allowed meta-moderation to actually have some impact - if you continuously abused modpoints by downvoting someone as troll just because you disagreed with them then you wouldn't get banned - just you'd get less votes in the future. The system was a little opaque and I've not used the site in years but that was my understanding back then, it may have changed since then. While it's a bit complex I think the fundamental idea is very good. Ok making a distinction between informative vs insightful never seemed that useful to me, but certainly allowing people to hide "Funny" content definitely has value because funny one liners tend to crowd out other content by sheer volume.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  former link site "sensibleerection.com" had similar, where votes for category, and votes for value where separate. As such you could get +20 flamebait, for a popular or welcome flamebait post, or -10 funny, and so on - the tags where not inherently good or bad.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rimliu 6y ago
It is also the worst. And don't get me started on "you are posting to fast" crap, wheny you cannot comment on something, because you recently commented on totally different post.

tom_mellior 6y ago

It could be better. Slashdot has (or maybe had, I haven't checked in a while) a way of associating votes with tags. So upvotes could be tagged "insightful" or "funny" or whatever, and downvotes tagged "flamebait" or "off-topic" or others. Especially for downvotes I would often be interested in this kind of quick feedback.

the-dude 6y ago
But did it actually work better? I am inclined to think not as lots of people moved from ./ to HN.
- jacobush 6y ago
  I think a lot has to do with culture itself and not the moderation system. Slashdot was always a bit unruly.
- gwd 6y ago
  I think it did. I'm an old-skool Slashdot person who just moved over to HN a year or two ago, and there are lots of things I really miss about the Slashdot moderation system. One of the most noticeable things is trying to skim a discussion with thousands of comments. On Slashdot, you can set your threshold to +5, and see only the very most insightful comments, no matter where they are in the thread. On HN, there's a lot more digging required to get the gems. That said, I do think HN's "story-selection" algorithm is an improvement. What shows up on the front page relies a lot less on the quirks of the editors, and seems to result in a much more diverse set of posts. As others have mentioned, I think the top-level moderation is the most important factor keeping HN worth reading. It's dang intervening and setting the tone which does the most for HN at the moment. We need to keep him happy; and I hope that he has a "succession" in place in case he's ever unable to continue the work.
echelon 6y ago
Slashdot is insufferable trash today. If you read the comments, every article gets sniped by Nazi swastika ASCII art, which they still haven't bothered to ban. (You would have thought the teenagers doing this in the 90's would have grown up by now...) How hard is it to ban the same post being made repeatedly, over and over? Slashdot stopped trying.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- friendlybus 6y ago
  I feel slashdot stopped trying ages ago when the editor had to fight to not put ads (or excessive ads) on the site. They were bought up and its been on autopilot for years.
- watwut 6y ago
  > (You would have thought the teenagers doing this in the 90's would have grown up by now...) They grew up. They kept their opinions and attitudes, as people do. You can grow out of graffiti, but you will still like the style. Getting older does not magically make you stop liking nazi if you liked them as teenager. Instead, you seek to pass your values to teenagers that follow you.
cinntaile 6y ago
From what I have seen downvotes get used a lot here on posts that users disagree with, which seems like an unfortunate side-effect. You'd want to reserve them for rude posts or other posts that aren't helpful to a discussion.
- hamburglar 6y ago
  I think this has the potential for going down an infinite rat-hole, but I always think it would be interesting if downvotes required justification (e.g. a "why?" popup that included stuff like "rules violation", "trolling", "this is wrong", etc) and then other people were allowed to evaluate specific downvote reasons for whether or not they seemed reasonable. You could then weight downvotes based on how legit the reasoning of the downvoter is (does everyone think you're full of shit when you say it's trolling?) and also based on whether you tend to downvote for reasons that are not actually worthy of a downvote (you just disagree with the post).
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  Yes, my personal conclusion is that downvotes are not useful and the functionality is usually best removed. All the more so when they are used to, in effect, remove comments by making downvoted comments more difficult to read. Now, I can understand the idea of making it easier to navigate through many comments by crowd-sourcing a metric of each comment's 'value', but in practice this is extremely difficult to do while preserving the diversity of views. It usually ends up being the "tyranny of the majority".
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  "Disagree" describes a wide range of things though. It can be "you claim facts that are demonstrably false", "you claim facts that I cannot demonstrate are false, but I have strong doubts and you do not provide sources", "you cite correct facts but your interpretation of them is demonstrably wrong", "you cite correct facts but I interpret them differently", etc. And those are just factual disagreements, without getting into "you're making a strawman argument", etc. Thinks probably shouldn't be this fine-grained, but I hope you get the idea that there is reasonable room for more helpful feedback than "I disagree".
watwut 6y ago
I left slashdot when the openly sexist comments became too frequent (they used to be less frequent). It was years ago, I dont know whether it was temporary or long term trend. Same with 9gag btw. It was funny, then funny with occasional eye roll and then "I dont have to look at this". I dont know whether it changed back or not.
jonathanlydall 6y ago
I still look at the Slashdot front page, but don’t look at the comments anymore. I think the majority of the enjoyable community moved on a long time ago. For example, if you just mention you’re a happy Microsoft user, you’re accused (often in a racist way) of being a schill and the cause of everything wrong in the world.
JohnBooty 6y ago
I read Slashdot nearly every day for quite a few years, stepping away at some point in the 2000s. That particular aspect of the moderation system sounds good on paper, but was rather useless in practice. Essentially, what "matters" is that people are upvoting or downvoting a particular post. Theoretically, it's good to have a bit of additional metadata telling us why they're doing it: i.e., do they find the post Funny, Insightful, or Informative? In practicality, it's not that useful, or at least it wasn't put to any practical use by Slashdot when I stopped reading it back in the 2000's. At a moment's glance, it's pretty trivial to see why people might've upvoted a particular post - it's clearly meant to be funny, or it has a lot of informative links, etc. So the metadata of "why" was just redundant. On the other hand, I suppose the metadata could have been put to some practical use after all. For example, it would have been perhaps useful to filter out all of the "Funny" [1] and "Insightful" [2] replies on Slashdot and to focus on the most "Informative" [3] ones. I don't remember the interface allowing you to do that. Perhaps they added it later, or perhaps it's something you might explore in your own system. ------ [1] I mean, one can only read so many "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of THOSE!" jokes before one wants to jump off of a bridge. [2] In my experience, 99% of the "Insightful" comments were just those that forcefully/eloquently regurgitated FOSS talking points that resonated well with established Slashdot groupthink. "Insightful" upvotes tended to mean "I agree with the author of this comment" and not "wow, actual new insights are presented here." Perhaps this might have been avoided if there was a separate "I agree with this" upvote method, distinct from "Insightful." [3] It was easy to farm for karma this way; if you stumbled upon a recent Slashdot article without many replies, you could throw a few easily-Googled relevant links into a reply and be assured of getting a bunch of "Informative" votes. Nonetheless, while imperfect, the replies deemed "Informative" had a decent signal-to-noise ratio relative to the rest of the replies.
- DharmaPolice 6y ago
  >For example, it would have been perhaps useful to filter out all of the "Funny" replies on Slashdot The interface did indeed allow you to do this. At least, I remember it being there in about 2001. Additionally, the metadata on voting was particularly important for meta-moderation which other platforms don't really have. Users were (at random) shown a comment that you've voted on and your vote. They then said whether your vote was fair or not, based on what they see. Stepping back a bit - the most important difference between the Slashdot system (vs something like Reddit) was that votes were much more limited on Slashdot. Not everyone had modpoints (votes) and you only got a handful at a time. This allowed meta-moderation to actually have some impact - if you continuously abused modpoints by downvoting someone as troll just because you disagreed with them then you wouldn't get banned - just you'd get less votes in the future. The system was a little opaque and I've not used the site in years but that was my understanding back then, it may have changed since then. While it's a bit complex I think the fundamental idea is very good. Ok making a distinction between informative vs insightful never seemed that useful to me, but certainly allowing people to hide "Funny" content definitely has value because funny one liners tend to crowd out other content by sheer volume.
Chris2048 6y ago
former link site "sensibleerection.com" had similar, where votes for category, and votes for value where separate. As such you could get +20 flamebait, for a popular or welcome flamebait post, or -10 funny, and so on - the tags where not inherently good or bad.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rimliu 6y ago

It is also the worst. And don't get me started on "you are posting to fast" crap, wheny you cannot comment on something, because you recently commented on totally different post.