Dealing With Venom on the Web 326
theodp writes "In a world where nastiness online can erupt and go global overnight, BusinessWeek finds Corporate America woefully unprepared and offers suggestions for how to cope, including shelling out $10,000 to companies like ReputationDefender.com to promote the info you want and suppress the news you don't. And in what must be a sign of the Apocalypse, BW holds Slashdot's moderation system up as a model for maintaining civility in message boards."
No help for smaller businesses. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have personally dealt with this where I refused service to someone for harassing my other members on my online business. It's actually less a business than just a hobby, but my name and business name are out there and involved nonetheless. This underage person freaked out and spent months inventing various things to complain about and posting them on every recommendation site possible. They even went so far as death threats and attempting to extort getting their account back or else they'd spread rumors about improper discussions with said person by myself (the owner). Now, again, I never did any actual business with this individual and I knew nothing about them other than they were harassing my users so I shut down their account. That was the extend of it. Yet they have been a thorn in my side for two years now and there is nothing I can do about it. Anyone searching for my company online will find the most horrendous things said about me by a completely anonymous nutjob.
Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, Slashdot has a relatively mature audience compared to digg (I know, I know). While there are imbeciles here too, for the most part, the Slashdot crowd tends to be in the industry and/or college and seems a tad experienced in the ways of the world.
Digg crowd, for the most part, seems to be full of highschool kids who just learnt about the Intranets and decided to hop on and share their extremely mature views on things. And give these people the ability to moderate anyone and everyone, you have an inherently flawed system.
Not that Digg doesn't have the occasional good article or two, but the comments and the participation are not anywhere close to the levels seen on Slashdot. Once again, age plays a role - Slashdot comments, ignoring the idiotic and inane ones, tend to contain a few genuinely good ones. Even if you took an article on something obscure (say, something obscure in medicine or chemistry or whatever), you will find the occasional comment by someone who knows what's going on.
This is hardly the case with Digg, which has a bunch of kids who have no idea what's going on, and is choke full of nothing but opinions and little else (not that Slashdot doesn't have its fair share of asshats, it's just not as big a number).
My two cents.
Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd say on most days it does a fair job of at least hiding the blatant trolls from view. The nice thing about Slashdot's threaded system is that heated arguments don't mean the entire story is taken over. Besides, I think arguments in the comments is one reason some people read them.
Of course Slashdot's moderation is also at the whim of the subset of users that have mod points on a given day. For example on April Fools, all somebody has to do is say "Please mod my post insightful! kthxbye." and they hit +5 in minutes. Alternatively, a story like this might prompt someone to say "Reverse the polarity of the moderation flow!" suggesting moderators go nuts modding up trolls and flamebait and modding down everything else. (That would actually be pretty funny. Read More -- 10 of 381 comments). And of course moderators would probably do it, just to spite the system
(That actually sounds like a funny April Fools joke for next year. Give everyone mod points for the day and then randomize or invert what they do. Heck, even just giving everyone infinite mod points would be funny, and probably break Slashdot in the process).
Re:Why *I* like the /. moderation system. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's just an ad pretending to be an article. (Score:5, Interesting)
An author over-hyping a situation for his new book. How
If you've ever worked for or with a PR company, you'll know how wrong that is. "Transparency" is exactly what they do NOT want.
And so on. This is nothing more than an ad piece.
Re:No help for smaller businesses. (Score:3, Interesting)
Personal story (Score:5, Interesting)
As everyone was walking out, I talked to the asshole and said "You fucking pig, shouldn't you be helping in NYC, not fucking harassing innocent students who are trying to make a difference?" I got arrested, charged with felony riot, disobeying a peace officer, summary harassment, and disorderly conduct. The two most serious charges (riot and disobeying...) were dropped the next day. The two other ones, I plead no contest to in exchange for 48 hrs. community service and a year's probation with the informal understanding that I leave the state after graduating that spring and completing the 48 hrs. In retrospect, I should have fought it and plead not guilty, but I was young, naive, and had a stupid attorney.
Anyway, after two years, my record was expunged. However, the original newspaper article; written before I was interviewed but NOT before the police chief was interviewed, remained the first thing that appeared under a Google search of my name for another year or two. Was kind of interesting to explain when I was interviewing for jobs!
For some reason, this no longer appears at all when you search for my name (I think the campus and local newspapers have put up a robots.txt file, and, anyway, there's more recent stuff by me and my business website on the web).
-b.
What can "ReputationDefender" really do? (Score:5, Interesting)
Accord to the website: "Our trained and expert online reputation advocates use an array of proprietary techniques developed in-house to correct and/or completely remove the selected unwanted content from the web."
Yeah, okay. And that would be what? Send an email to the website maintainer? For $15.95 a month, I doubt that ReputationDefender will be filing any lawsuits.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:snake oil (Score:3, Interesting)
Sooooooo.... what happens when two companies pay the $10000+ to ReputationDefender and have opposing viewpoints?
RD salesman, to client #1: "Yes, that slanderous party are a tenacious bunch, aren't they? I can sign you up for our premium DefenderPack, it's another $20000.... but what's your reputation worth? You will? Ok, we'll start straight away and do our best."
RD salesman, to client #2: "Yes, that slanderous party are a tenacious bunch, aren't they? I can sign you up for our premium DefenderPack, it's another $20000.... but what's your reputation worth? You will? Ok, we'll start straight away and do our best."
RD salesman, to rest of team: "Is anyone actually doing anything for clients 1 and 2? No? Good. Keep it that way."
Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, it also lets fanboys/shills for platform/company/philosophy X hide comments critical of platform/company/philosophy X. And they do, with great regularity.
Re:Maintaining Civility? (Score:5, Interesting)
Been there. Yes, it's stupid and moronic. Yes, it happens. There are plenty of mods who feel "overrated" is there to be used on comments with which they disagree.
Still here, for the comments. (Score:4, Interesting)
Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation system was carefully thought out, and kept ahead of the wave of forum-spam and general "hey look maw ahm on the interweb" disruption that you find in every other forum. For that, it should be held up as an excellent example of the ThinkAboutItCarefully pattern.
Oh, and my UID's lower so thhhhppppt.
Re:Metamoderation helps (Score:5, Interesting)
I read people posting and complaining that they never get to moderate. I've often wondered why this is, especially in how slashdot manages people who get negative metamod's, etc.
Personally I think I get to moderate alot - Probably about once a week, sometimes more often. There are times when I let my 3 days slip by, because its too hard to keep up.
But I do take the moderating seriously. I actually rarely moderate people down, but rather try and pick the good posts and push them up. On a personal stand I've pretty much stopped using underrated and overrated moderations - I may as well be judged for my actions too. Then again, I've never posted anonymously (which you will just have to take on faith as I obviously can't prove this).
Anyway, whatever I do, the mod points seem to keep coming back.
Personally I like to think its because the way I moderate is approved by the majority of meta-mods.
Michael
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
I like Tufte's thoughts on moderating [edwardtufte.com], particularly his point about avoiding "the chronic internet disease of 'All Opinions, All the Time.'" Different websites have different goals of course, but there is nothing inherently wrong with refusing to allow anyone to publish any opinion on your website. Tufte's own forum is much lower traffic than Slashdot, but it has the interesting property of discussions that are years long, and the majority of posts are on-topic and very useful. Slashdot discussions more than a day or two old are all but dead. One thing I see often enough that it bugs me is a post like, "So and so behaves in ways X, Y, and Z" and a followup post correcting it, "No, it's most like X, Y, and W"; further posts support the correction or provide links to further info, but as a reader I'm still stuck reading the whole conversation when I'm more interested in the correct information that could have fit into a single paragraph. Discussion sites tend to shy away from editing and consolidating correct information, preferring to leave everything as individual posts. It would be a lot of work to implement, and perhaps even impossible, but I get the impression that the reason nobody tries is not due to the difficulty but because individual posts are treated as sacred; any editing is "censorship". At the very least, one should not be afraid to delete the GNAA trolls and the like at -1...
Admittedly, editing of comments may be a waste of effort on Slashdot. But many tech blogs will post an article and some points will be corrected in the reader comments. The blog publisher will update the article yet leave the comments as is, creating a confusing page of comments that refer to an article that is no longer there. Is there any reason, other than it's too much work, to not delete the comments that no longer make sense and credit in the article those who made corrections?
Re:What can "ReputationDefender" really do? (Score:5, Interesting)
In any case, services range from sending polite requests on customers behalf (automated and manual depending on context), search engine optimization techniques, arranging for legal intervention in certain cases, and more. You can find much of this information on our Frequently Asked Questions [reputationdefender.com] page. Many of our customers have found our techniques effective and feel like we've provided them with excellent value for their money.
Nobody can make bad content posted repeatedly by a determined adversary disappear entirely, obviously, and we would be foolish to claim that we could do the impossible.
I should also mention that we hold ourselves to a very high ethical standard regarding the types of intervention we perform and the types of clients we will take on, and we are very sensitive to First Amendment issues and not trying to interfere with the dissemination of genuinely newsworthy content. However, there are a lot of people out there who've faced crazy stalkers and people trying to unfairly bash them, or just chunks of stale information out there that they really didn't want to be public, and having a service offering to track down that information, figure out who's responsible for it, and attempt to get it removed, or in some cases reduce its impact, is quite valuable to many people.
Sometimes real life makes you more careful (Score:5, Interesting)
So today I usually think twice about whatever I post, and there's many times I decide it's better to just hit the delete button. I've been shocked at what some people post online in their blogs; or anywhere on the web with the same user name over and over. They never seem to think that it's very easy today to link it all together and see all the things they assume no one will ever know. You could say I'm just being paranoid, but in today's world it's better safe than sorry.
Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes this is exactly how all moderation systems fail. Regardless of forum, any community driven karma system becomes dominated by agendas. Karma tends to promote group think and more individual opinions are stifled. Even though trolls, redundant posts, and other useless posts are pushed down, so are plenty of thoughtful, intelligent posts.
On Slashdot, for stories that I care about I typically read threads on 0 up to see a more diverse selection of opinions, because the +5 points are usually either jokes or pro group-think posts, and you'll find the more insightful replies buried.
Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? (Score:4, Interesting)
I took a peek at Digg when it started and looked at it every now and then for the first few months. Now it's below useless. Even the stories that get voted up are for the most part regularly more fit for News of The World than for some kind of techno geek website.
Bah, it's september all the time nowadays, what can you expect...
Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? (Score:1, Interesting)
That said, Slashdot has a relatively mature audience compared to digg (I know, I know). While there are imbeciles here too, for the most part, the Slashdot crowd tends to be in the industry and/or college and seems a tad experienced in the ways of the world."
That's completely made up crap and you know it. The reason
Fact is, the mod system inherently detracts against those professionals you pretend to talk about; professionals don't have time to read
Also, you seem to be thinking that the reduced complaining mod system means that they improved it sufficiently. That's rather narrow.
Readers left en masse. Most of those people who complained simply stopped reading or reduced their reading and posting. I'm one of them. I know about 3 others that simply don't participate on the forums much, if at all; we were voracious readers, reading everything
Some restrictions made no sense and took years to fix, like the ORIGINAL bug (oh, sorry, feature!) posting AC after the mod system was implemented--the "posting too fast" bug. See, if you post too fast, you get an error as such. So you wait. But wait! If you resubmit your post too fast, the posting counter resets (posting counter not the same as overall time passage from a successful post). It's amazing when the damn minute counter is 'you last posted 59 minutes ago' and you still can't submit a comment. So what, 2001 or so the mod system goes into place, and late 2006 or early 2007 they finally fixed it?
Worse, I once made something like the 10 posting limit under AC a day, and ran into the just mentioned bug, when the damn post was finally "accepted" by that checkpoint (replying to comments too fast), then, oh, it errored that I couldn't submit the post because I had met that limit.
Oh, not done yet--if you wait for some time to pass to get over the post per day limit, your post will be rejected because the comment/posting ticket they used is expired. (This still exists.)
*Great* features guys.
I've been reading
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
If an employer decided to profile me based on what I said here, and then decided not to hire me based on what they read, I don't think I'd want to work there anyway.
The moderation system works well... (Score:5, Interesting)
I unchecked "Willing to Moderate" in my account preferences, because I know I'm an intensely biased, flawed person, and I would happily ostracize my enemies and laud my friends regardless of the quality, or lack thereof of their posts. I hate a lot of people. A lot of the people on here, come to mention it. Having mod points gives me the power to act on the desire to do something about it, and power (even the power to demote your post because I think you're an idiot, or meta-moderating with an agenda) corrupts. I, apparently, am quite easily corruptible. I couldn't enjoy reading this site, because I was looking to deal with people I thought should be pushed down. Now that I can't do anything about it, it's a lot less frustrating to read things here.
However, I've set my highlight threshold to +4, because experience has taught me that even a bunch of my fellow random idiots on the internet can't be wrong all the time. Approximately 90% of the stuff that gets modded that high, I can only assume as a result of some kind of emergent reasonableness from a sea of unreasonable stupidity. The other 10% is easily skipped, and doesn't enrage me like reading the vast sea of idiocy those posts have somehow risen above does.
It's a bit hypocritical of me, to take the product of the moderation system without contributing to it, but if that matters, you shouldn't allow people not to opt out. I don't contribute to any open source projects, either financially or by helping at all, and use the hell out of their software either, and that doesn't trouble me much either.
Re:Metamoderation helps (Score:2, Interesting)
From the FAQ [slashdot.org]
As to metamod, Do people really use it that often? I've modded ~30 comments so far, and none of those have been metamodded. That is, of course, assuming that the "Metamoderation Results" setting in the options that sends you a message when you get metamodded actually works.
Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? (Score:2, Interesting)
Registered users are necessary for the system to work. Without them, picking out a few good posts to mod up would be infeasible, no one would do it, the system would be worthless, and everyone with one of those late-posted insightful comments wouldn't even bother coming.
Allowing anon comments is a nicety, but it's as much leeway as can be given and still have the system work.
The system isn't perfect, but
It sounds like you care, so do the rest of us a favor and actually participate instead of coach from the sidelines?
Hell, at least with the current system, someone that posts anon at end-of-day has a small chance of being modded up on an evening story, and even if they're getting recognized 1/20th as often as they should, that's still infinitely more than not posting at all.
Opposite problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Why? I don't want them to learn my Slashdot username. Not that I really have anything to hide, but it's more out of trying to retain some semblance of privacy. And they do have that annoying censor firewall in place, though my boss is nice enough not to care what I do online so long as I get done what he wants done.
Oddly, I end up submitting almost as many stories as comments, and waiting an hour to post another anonymous comment is kind of annoying, but that's somewhat better, because it makes me think about which comments are the most useful, rather than dashing off every post that comes to mind
Slashdot moderation is *far* from perfect... but it's a hell of a lot better than elsewhere. You have to wade through a lot less crap to get to the good stuff than you do anywhere else. Fark comments aren't worth reading, although the photoshop contest pics can be cool. I don't even read Digg, and sites like Groklaw are nice enough, but it's really time consuming to find the interesting posts. Unless PJ reposts them as a story, you'd never know that the 39th post in that huge thread was the interesting one, while all the rest just said "when will SCO get delisted?" (Short answer? They'll hit bankruptcy first.)
Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? (Score:3, Interesting)
I certainly prefer those stories. Usually it is in the more obscure stories (some which don't make to the homepage) that have better Signal to noise ratio ans as they are more "obscure" less people try to pose as knowing about the issue.
Digg comments are completely stupid. Although I like the speed in which Digg gets the news. I always see the stories posted in
Woefully Unprepared... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:NO! (Score:4, Interesting)
Really, it's just another column in a database that can't realistically even be linked to you.
Actually, when the aggregate of all your posts, plus writing style, which is extremely hard to disguise, is considered, it's not that hard to link it, if anyone cares to.
Me, I support anonymous posting, including being able to post with a handle but without registering. I've never been happy with the present system.
Re:NO! (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, that's why I went back and put 'realistically' in there. For that to happen you'd have to have the suspicion that some slashdotter is someone you know of, and have access to written material of that person. Likely that it's never happened, certainly not to 0.01% of the user base. I see no way that, for example, an employer could find your
I think allowing anon posts is essential, but I see no reason to argue about theirs being the first ones culled when the number of posts is overwhelming. They can always sign the bottom, and in fact I see that done fairly often. As someone's sig pointed out, people are probably recognized most by their sigs - I rarely pay attention to the posters name.
Re:snake oil (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.positiveliberty.com/2007/03/reputation
Apparently, they just piss off the slanderers even more, and this just causes more and more of the postings Reputation Defenders is supposed to deal with. Look what happens when you Google the name of one of Reputation Defender's first clients:
http://www.google.com/search?q=heide+iravani&ie=u
That's not helping, is it? I think companies and people should try their hardest to not post things on the Internet they don't want publicized. Hiring some startup does not seem to be working too well.
Re:Metamoderation helps (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not exactly new here. I've always had good-to-excellent karma, had mod points fairly often, usually used them (although not always), and metamoderated pretty frequently (whenever eligible, pretty much). I like to think I've been pretty evenhanded all round (posting, moderation, metamod).
However, a couple of years ago, there was a spell of about 2 months where most if not all of my moderations got negatively metamoderated. I've no idea why - all I know is that I noticed that it'd stopped about the same time I noticed that one of the editors wasn't posting any more stories, and I've not been metamodded (or at least not got any notices about it) since then.
I never (knowingly) had any dealings with the guy, so make of that what you will.