Is Slashdot the Answer to Facebook's Fake News Problem? (wordpress.com) 284
David Collier-Brown led the Sun Microsystems Canada team specializing in performance and capacity planning. He later becoming a consulting systems programmer and performance engineer, as well as an O'Reilly author (co-authoring the 2003 book Using Samba). He's also davecb, Slashdot reader #6,526, and today submitted a story headlined "Slashdot is the answer to Facebook's 'fake news' problem."
"OK, not the whole answer, but I argue that /. is part of a defense in depth against the propagation of lies, sophistries and deliberate disinformation in discussion groups like ours and Facebook's."
There's more details on his technical blog: William Gibson once said The future is already here — It's just not very evenly distributed.
That also applies to the solutions to problems, like that of finding out who's telling the truth in widespread discussion. By Gibson's dictum, we should expect to find different parts of the solution, but not together, and likely in all sorts of unexpected places. It's up to us to find them all and compose them together...
With luck, machine learning (ML) can be trained to recognize minor variants of a banned article, and refer them to the staff to be sure that's what is being recognized. Those can be treated the same way as the original posting. But how can we credibly detect the lies in time? The kind of team a site can afford are always going to be behind.
That is solved for a distantly related problem, one that is as as unexpectedly helpful as looking at policing stock trades. Slashdot.
The post describes Slashdot as "One of the older big discussion groups" that "from its inception in 1997 needed to deal with overenthusiastic commentators, flamers and trolls. In 2020, it's still easy to 'read at 4 or 5', and see a measured, reasonable and informative discussion of a difficult subject.
"Or you could 'read at -1', and listen to the madmen and flamers that elsewhere would drown out the insightful comments."
It's an interesting read, and ultimately proposes solving Facbook's "fake news" problem by empowering readers with moderation points, overseen by a staff of double-checking humans who then pass along their conclusions for execution by an automated system.
Is Slashdot the answer to Facebook's fake news problem?
"OK, not the whole answer, but I argue that /. is part of a defense in depth against the propagation of lies, sophistries and deliberate disinformation in discussion groups like ours and Facebook's."
There's more details on his technical blog: William Gibson once said The future is already here — It's just not very evenly distributed.
That also applies to the solutions to problems, like that of finding out who's telling the truth in widespread discussion. By Gibson's dictum, we should expect to find different parts of the solution, but not together, and likely in all sorts of unexpected places. It's up to us to find them all and compose them together...
With luck, machine learning (ML) can be trained to recognize minor variants of a banned article, and refer them to the staff to be sure that's what is being recognized. Those can be treated the same way as the original posting. But how can we credibly detect the lies in time? The kind of team a site can afford are always going to be behind.
That is solved for a distantly related problem, one that is as as unexpectedly helpful as looking at policing stock trades. Slashdot.
The post describes Slashdot as "One of the older big discussion groups" that "from its inception in 1997 needed to deal with overenthusiastic commentators, flamers and trolls. In 2020, it's still easy to 'read at 4 or 5', and see a measured, reasonable and informative discussion of a difficult subject.
"Or you could 'read at -1', and listen to the madmen and flamers that elsewhere would drown out the insightful comments."
It's an interesting read, and ultimately proposes solving Facbook's "fake news" problem by empowering readers with moderation points, overseen by a staff of double-checking humans who then pass along their conclusions for execution by an automated system.
Is Slashdot the answer to Facebook's fake news problem?
Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems Slashdot suffers from vulnerability to the "bury brigade", as they used to call it on Digg. There is still a lot of abuse of down / Troll / Funny modding going on. It might be good to throw meta-moderating more in our faces than it is now, to encourage its use.
Re:Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:5, Informative)
Meta is a bit weak but also it doesn't work for some people.
CmdrTaco explained it on Twitter a while back. A user can get a flag set which means that never get mod points and their meta mods are ignored. No time limit, no way to remove it.
Didn't elaborate on the details but it's basically when the system thinks you are not a good moderator. There are/were fake honeypot comments and I think too much contradiction from meta mods can do it.
So the older your account the higher the probability it can't moderate.
Re:Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:5, Informative)
You will find that the Slashdot people who are behind the "FEEDBACK" link on Slashdot are quite reasonable and very helpful. They're also quite aware of the mod-bombing by script-generated accounts in the >6000000 range. If you are locked out of modding, you should check with them. Just be patient and respectful toward them, and explain the the situation. They are overworked, and understaffed and are plugging leaks in a modding system written in perl, which I believe is slowly being dealt with.
Re:Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, I have been talking to them. I didn't want to mention the mod bombing thing in case they were trying to keep it quiet. They have done a great job lately, moderation has dramatically improved in the last couple of weeks.
Re:Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I have been talking to them. I didn't want to mention the mod bombing thing in case they were trying to keep it quiet. They have done a great job lately, moderation has dramatically improved in the last couple of weeks.
It seems there is a lot less total moderation over that period too. Mod'ing takes time. I have to read at least 200 comments to use up my mod points when I get them and I have 2 or 3 days to do it. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. When I can't, I notice I don't get mod points for a few days. When I can, I get them every other day in batches of 15. While its good to clear out the mod-bombing, if the system was a bit more lax on busy people who don't always have time to engage then I think we could get the total amount of moderation back up to previous levels without some of the bad bits.
Also, you post a lot, I mean a lot. So targeting you is pretty easy and depending on their politics could be quite attractive. So I think you are a bit of a lightening rod for mod'ing. Not sure the rest of us noticed so much.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
That "attractive" part is a bug and can be fixed.
Do you only notice problems when they directly affect you? You might want to work on that.
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That "attractive" part is a bug and can be fixed.
Do you only notice problems when they directly affect you? You might want to work on that.
With friends like Ratzo, who need enemies. Seriously, you are not helping...you've never been helping. Other POVs are healthy and the world doesn't exist to bend to your very narrow ideals.
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You don't even say why you don't like him. You just allude to other points of view being better than his for some undefined, unspoken reason.
Wah. Cry me a river and drown in it.
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Not sure but I think what he's saying is that the system shouldn't reward attacking people like me with censorship of opposing views.
I mean the more you post, the more sensitive to issues with mod'ing you will be because you will have more experiences (data). It is also the case that sometimes people decide to target specific other users (it has happened to me and it sucks). I imagine its happened to Mojo 100x more often. However, the solution isn't to censor the other side, it's to down-mod (censor-lite) shit posts. Otherwise we turn this place into another echo chamber and we already have social media for that.
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The problem is they had someone or some group of people creating thousands of sock puppet accounts. Solving the captcha every time, a huge amount of labour. They would wait until one of their accounts got mod points and use them to boost their other accounts, to boost people who shitposted and to systematically mod down people they didn't like.
You would see it happen, in fact it happened last night, 4 troll mods in a row within a minute on different posts. At the height of it it was far more severe, with 20
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Want to see what really will happen, simply go to Reddit. No matter how well thought out the contrary the group, that specific group, they will mod it out of existence, -100 or more every circle jerk member modding the same way. Every group in Reddit is locked to one group, one thought process, one set of locked in beliefs, anything contrary to group think will be modded out of existence, right, wrong, indifferent, well written or poorly written and things like "I agree", just that, as long as it is aligned
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Yeah, I'm guessing I got flagged a long time back. In the past few years, I've gotten maybe, maaaybe 1 round of mod points. In like 3 years.
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I am almost certainly flagged. I haven't gotten a single mod point in more than five years. No idea why.
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With me it's a lot longer than that, and I think I know how it happened. ./ often asks me to metamod - those privileges may still be active.
I was modding some postings in a story which interested me and saw something I wanted to comment on. You can't mod and comment on the same story. The flag got set.
This might be 15-20 years ago, although - given that
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I always thought that undid you mods? Why on FSM's green Earth should it trigger a flag to disable mod points?
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With me it's a lot longer than that, and I think I know how it happened. ./ often asks me to metamod - those privileges may still be active.
I was modding some postings in a story which interested me and saw something I wanted to comment on. You can't mod and comment on the same story. The flag got set.
This might be 15-20 years ago, although - given that
I don't think that's it, when my fingers have slipped I've commented just to undo the moderation.
moderating on mobile (Score:2)
Do mod points & meta-mod even work on the mobile view?
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A bad moderator is worse than not moderating, so if you get such a flag then good. The only concern I have is that you might get de-modded by bad meta-moderators rejecting good mod decisions on the content. But if we're in that kind of crazy situation with enough people moderating what their preferred narrative is, then the site is lost completely.
I'm sure there's ways to ensure a fair moderation system, perhaps including something like stackoverflow's tests - where you are given some pretty obviously bad t
Re:Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:4, Insightful)
You are always voting on the moderation, not the comment, when doing metamods.
It's not, "do I agree?", it's, "was this mod appropriate for the context?"
It might be an insightful comment you think is utter trash, but it's still insightful. It might be a post calling you out personally, modded informative. If they're right, they should still get a + vote, even though you're butthurt.
FSM knows I've been wrong in public often enough. (Y'all can queue up below to remind me.)
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Dammit, wrong again. It seems that they've changed it (and having mod points disabled gets you out of the habit of metamodding too).
Guess you are voting on comments. When did metamod become a straight moderation tool?
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That's what it did. Throw in some obvious troll mods and set the flag on anyone who mods them up.
Your example of "Trump is an arse" might be insightful in the right context. One of the biggest issues with meta mod is that it doesn't show context.
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CmdrTaco explained it on Twitter a while back. A user can get a flag set which means that never get mod points and their meta mods are ignored. No time limit, no way to remove it.
Didn't elaborate on the details but it's basically when the system thinks you are not a good moderator.
So the older your account the higher the probability it can't moderate.
I remember something many, many years ago where it gave users/members the option to not moderate comments and I selected that. At the time, I I was only interested in reading so I didn't care. I think this may be what you're referring to 'cause - and I haven't looked that hard - I don't know how to re-enable the ability to moderate comments if I wanted to.
Re: Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:4, Insightful)
there is a definite anti-science liberal bias
*ROFLCOPTER*
Sorry, but no.
Re: Remember, you did ask (Score:3, Interesting)
âoeThe Leftâ
I stop reading the second I see that. Itâ(TM)s your favorite bogeyman.
Iâ(TM)ve turned on Fox News a handful of times over the past month or two. What was the subject? âoeThe Left.â Every. Single. Headline.
Ben Shapiro? âoeThe Left wants ....â
You label everyone you donâ(TM)t like as the Left. You have no idea what the Left actually looks like. Joe Biden? Heâ(TM)s right wing centrist. Bernie Sanders? Heâ(TM)s moderate. On the world s
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems Slashdot suffers from vulnerability to the "bury brigade", as they used to call it on Digg.
As someone who has come under attack by the bury brigade from time to time for telling hard truths, I agree this is an issue - but behind the scenes Slashdot appears to have done something to address this, as it's no longer nearly as much of a problem as it has been in the past.
It might be good to throw meta-moderating more in our faces than it is now, to encourage its use.
I agree with this, I try to do this
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If by "hard truths" you mean bullshit, then yes you will get down modded, like your multi year denials of climate change... my how times change, eh?
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I get modded down often when the topic is contentious but it never looked as a concerted effort to me. Just that when people strongly disagree the mods 'flamebait', 'troll', and even redundant and offtopic are so readily available and open for interpretation. .Sometimes someone else adds a mod to correct for it afterwards.
So overall a lot of modding is tied to the opinions of the posters which is something hard to grow above, but at least it still appears to be largely organic rather than gamed.
Re:Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is saying that Slashdot is perfect. Just that it is better than the alternatives.
There are sometimes low-quality discussions here, but there are also high-quality informative discussions. On mainstream social media, it is all crap.
Re:Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:4, Interesting)
I do not believe that Facebook wants a user-moderated path to sanity
The want to get paid to promote whatever message their advertisers want to push, nothing more
I also have the persistent feeling that /. is being gamed by the media company that owns it, even if it is less obvious than FB
Is meta-moderation still a thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems Slashdot suffers from vulnerability to the "bury brigade", as they used to call it on Digg. There is still a lot of abuse of down / Troll / Funny modding going on. It might be good to throw meta-moderating more in our faces than it is now, to encourage its use.
Is meta-moderation still a thing? I haven't been asked to meta-moderate in ages, and I assumed the feature was removed by current management.
Thinking about the moderation system, "meta-moderation" is what keeps the system honest. If honest people outnumber the bury brigade, then giving everyone a chance to moderate posts and each others behaviour (their moderation) will eventually lead to a civilized discussion.
I strongly suspect that Slashdot's system is scraped and trolled by companies that deal with online reputation, who have a user profile of everyone who posts and who jump in to penalize specific users. Companies like the "correct the record" group that Hillary was using during her campaign (and other side companies) would be motivated to ding people for political reasons.
For example, firehose submissions can be reported as "spam", and when you get a few of these your account is locked. There is no online way to undo that, you can only email the mods and hope they respond. The mods do respond, but I wonder how many people submitted honest stories to slashdot, got locked out, and didn't bother (or know how) to fix it?
The fact that a "bury brigade" even exists means that not enough meta-moderation is being done. You karma goes down every time someone mods your posts down, so any motivated programmer could easily suppress anyone they want to - simply have a couple of hundred login IDs, scan them until you find one with mod points, and ding the user of your choice.
There's been lots of chatter her about insightful posters leaving, and it's probably partially because their karma was lost from honest posts being modded down as troll. Slashdot used to be ranked the 14th most popular site on the internet, but now it's in the mid 5,000s.
A real pity. Slashdot was fun in its heyday, but now all the political infighting is really hard to take.
Re:Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems Slashdot suffers from vulnerability to the "bury brigade", as they used to call it on Digg. There is still a lot of abuse of down / Troll / Funny modding going on. It might be good to throw meta-moderating more in our faces than it is now, to encourage its use.
yes. i was surprised and disappointed to see it go, and its disappearance coincided with the transfer of slashdot over to a new team (yes, i have contacted you, yes, you have been extremely helpful - you are however only just a handful of people. you said it yourself: you're overworked and understaffed).
moderation "works"... however my experience is that "not very nice things about reality" still tend to be automatically modded down - not once or occasionally but *regularly*. even when you use words that warn people "this isn't going to be nice, but it's just how reality is, so i am taking the time to bring it to the attention of a wider audience", it does not matter: it *will* get buried.
often - interestingly - that happens when one moderator notices that the comment is "insightful", which raises it up in the tree. when the "not nice reality post" then comes to a *wider* audience (a 4 rating), that's the point at which it gets slammed into oblivion.
i really do not know how this can be dealt with. it basically means that slashdot is as vulnerable as any other forum to "popular consensus".
Re: (Score:3)
Make one up mod need two down mods to cancel out and anything that gets at least one up mod can't go below score 2.
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The problem with /. is that as more people got on the internet, more people disinterested in the topic just bandwagon together to cause chaos for their own fun.
Like what would solve /.'s problem would be for articles submitted to be fulltext searched for truthiness, and then the comment posted must be a response to something truthful actually in the article, not generic underpants gnomes meme's.
eg
article: Climate change deniers deny gravity
source: theonion
article fulltext: Climate change deniers are now den
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Those shitposts are to make you waste mod points. Ignore them.
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Right, and I've always focused on modding up solid comments. But when the editors seem to be letting pure ASCII art spam go wild, particularly with hate graffiti, someone needs to spend some mod points.
Now, you start not replenishing those mod points, whether they were spent on quality comments or cleaning up graffiti, and the people trying to do right by Slashdot's committment to free speech are precisely the ones silenced.
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Right, and I've always focused on modding up solid comments. But when the editors seem to be letting pure ASCII art spam go wild, particularly with hate graffiti, someone needs to spend some mod points.
Now, you start not replenishing those mod points, whether they were spent on quality comments or cleaning up graffiti, and the people trying to do right by Slashdot's committment to free speech are precisely the ones silenced.
Those are almost instantly mod'ed down pretty much all the time. Not sure what you expect the mods to do? If it bothers you so much, browse at 2. If you aren't mod'ing there is no reason to read below that.
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot doesn't support images. Can we remove the swastika images, which seem to be the only kind of image it does support?
They're not an argument in the sense of, "this because that." It's a meaningless spam image without so much as a line of comment in it.
I read at -1 because actual arguments (of whatever stripe) do get modbombed and people do have their account karma decimated for no apparent reason.
Not usually an issue if you've been around forever and stick to mostly good faith argument and only a lit
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Right, and I've always focused on modding up solid comments. But when the editors seem to be letting pure ASCII art spam go wild, particularly with hate graffiti, someone needs to spend some mod points.
I just flag them as "nazi spam".
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Yeah, it's progressive that's the problem. After all, we know that religion and fascism have been the pinnacle and bastion of free speech defense.
Bad ideas and bad ideologies require censorship to exist. It's not a matter of left or right, it's a matter of just how insane a doctrine is that people have to be stopped from saying "wait a minute, that doesn't check out".
Re:Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:4, Informative)
Nazi supporters seem to be able to put up swastikas
The Nazi guy gets downmodded to -1 every single time.
vote-brigade every LynnwoodRooster and Mi and luckyo post up to 5, instantly.
I just looked at LynnwoodRooster's posting history [slashdot.org]. In the first two listings of his 30 most recent posts, downmods outnumbered upmods by two to one, and none were modded to +5.
Re: (Score:3)
Let's look at YOUR posting history [slashdot.org]: For your 30 most recent posts, 8 were up-modded and ZERO were down-modded.
Thou doth protest too much. Your claims of persecution appear to be greatly exaggerated.
Re: Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:3)
"I removed the flag. Itâ(TM)s an old issue we are working on fixing."
From the Slashdot staff just a while ago. I don't think I'm protesting something that isn't happening, since my own account had mod points disabled, as confirmed by the staff.
Re:Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:4, Insightful)
I only talked about progressive views being downvoted (downvotes are mostly asinine except for pure spam). The rest was about availability of upvotes.
The answer to them would be to upvote progressive speech, but the only upvotes going around seem to be for hate speech.
I'm the last person on this site you ought to try and twist the words of, with respect to supporting freedom of speech. I've been defending, since day zero of my membership, the right of people to say offensive and disagreeable and hateful stuff--because you can't assign censors. "Good" censorship always comes with "bad" censorship.
However, what Slashdot has are downvotes, a flag to prevent users from getting mod points (just confirmed with Slashdot staff who helpfully removed it, and verified that they're working on a fix), and a default minimum visibility.
Together, this has been abused so one small sect of people, those verbally arguing in support of the ideals that the spam graffiti espouses (racism, genocide, eugenics), are the only ones functionally able to speak. They figured out how to disable everyone else's right to speak (voting up is a kind of speech too).
So, no, we shouldn't censor in the sense of "preventing any particular viewpoint from being expressed". Remove anything that's just spam. Viagra pill ads, ASCII art. Make a reasoned argument, any reasoned argument, and you can stay. And restore the mod points to everyone else, so they can also upvote (and downvote to remove spam).
Re:Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:5, Insightful)
I only talked about progressive views being downvoted (downvotes are mostly asinine except for pure spam). The rest was about availability of upvotes.
You seem to be from reddit. Please go back there (did you arrive in September?).
What you are seeing is people disagreeing with you. That's ok, we want quality arguments from multiple viewpoints here. You seem to want to win a tribal argument that goes back hundreds of years and only want your side's POV mod'ed up. We don't want that here. We want informed discussion and thoughtful comments.
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Try RDI, not Reddit.
Been around for all of it. But thanks anyway. Reddit's a shithole, that does exactly that tribal bit. Rather not go there.
Re:Maybe if the meta-moderation actually worked (Score:5, Interesting)
I just quit reddit after 13 years. I'm done with it. Slashdot is only slightly better than reddit. Hacker News is slightly better, too. But it seems that connecting people via anonymous message boards always leads to simiular results, unless there is adequate moderation.
I'm all for letting voices be heard, but if those voices are belligerent toxic nonsense, in the real world people just leave whenever that's happening, but online it's just like a constant fog of feces hanging in the air after someone just said something toxic in a comment thread. The only way to really leave where that is going on is to never visit the comment, the sub, or the site again. Goodbye Reddit, it was sometimes nice, but mostly awful.
I'm engaging Slashdot more than I ever have in the 15+ years I've been here, and it's becoming practically as toxic as reddit. The Anonymous Coward second-level of anonymity only seems to reinforce some people's bad behavior and is rarely used for any purpose close to what it may have been intended for.
When hate is the objective, that is toxic speech that should be removed to preserve rational discourse - without the ability to just leave an area and have a reasonable discussion with reasonable people we're forced into a virtual enclosed space, and the only way out is to jump out of the window and not return to that specific comment thread, or on Reddit an entire sub.
It's more than just hate speech, upvoting a meme or joke when interesting comments are further down is also a hallmark of cynicism and anti-intellectualism, and just intellectual laziness, and it's rampant on reddit. There's very few instances of interesting posts not having a joke or meme as the top few comments, with interesting comments coming further down. It's walls of hur-dur before anything actually interesting takes place in the comments. Very few subs moderate that stuff out, even forbidding jokes or memes (r/science is one of them), where adults can discuss interesting things. And suggesting this gets you branded r/iamverysmart or "okay boomer", or whatever the insult of the day is. The web has just become a toxic place and I'm a lot less into it today than I was 20 years ago. And no, I'm nowhere near a "boomer".
There's so much spin and defense put up by the racists and asshole trolls so that they can keep acting out in public with some bit of anonymity. I supposed the -1 comments work towards fixing that but when voting can be gamed it turns Slashdot into another toxic/hate board. If racists and hateful toxic people are anything, they are persistently loud about it.
I'm left wondering how long before I cancel my Slashdot account.
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Citation needed.
Please, show me these vote brigading progressive censors who have triggered the no-mod-points flag on the hard authoritarian right accounts and prevented Lynnwood, Cold Fjord, Luckyo, and Mi from their racist screeds?
They seem fine. They're at +5. Clearly, not being silenced
hahahaHAHAHahahaha (Score:3, Funny)
slashdot "solves" the fake news problem the same way a 404 would.
hahahahahahaha
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"slashdot "solves" the fake news problem the same way a 404 would."
A Peugeot?
It's as good as any solution but... (Score:5, Insightful)
... I really can't see how on earth it could apply to Facebook.
For most people, facebook is a place to keep in touch with friends.
They attempt to read around anything that doesn't sit within those confines, but this doesn't always work.
Facebook algorithms want to throw in stories to bolster ads, to put news into a feed for that aim - to actually distract the very reason that people want to use Facebook, which is to stay in touch with each other.
The popularity of the platform has trapped millions of eyeballs - they get drawn into discourse they wouldn't normally be drawn into.
Most people aren't interested nor equipped to handle great philosophical debates on national or global news, so they are easily swayed.
They went online to have a chat with a buddy and ended up ranting about racism or politics or any manner of things - these posts get regurgitated, shared.
Memes develop, lots of mini-tub-thumps happen all over the platform.
Bad actors enter, sway people - push people's buttons.
No amount of moderation in the style of slashdot is going to work.
The only thing that will work, is a subscription system where those that subscribe can have a private area, free of adverts, free of bullshit, to share their time with family and friends.
That's never going to happen.
As for Twitter - well, it's the worlds great narcissism experiment, isn't it?
"Look what I'm doing!" "Me me me me"
Meh.
Re:It's as good as any solution but... (Score:4, Interesting)
The only thing that will work, is a subscription system where those that subscribe can have a private area, free of adverts, free of bullshit, to share their time with family and friends.
That's never going to happen.
It is easy to set up a private group on Facebook. I belong to several, including one for my extended family.
No trolling. No fake news. No intrusive ads.
No. (Score:5, Interesting)
First off - don't Betteridge like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Second - no, Slashdot isn't terribly different than a classic forum, including all the groupthink and bias effects. Moreover, just like most forums, one of the problems Slashdot has had is the established user effect - that is, a defensive conservatism that closes its users off to new ideas over time, and increasing hostility to exploring new concepts, as numbers dwindle.
The editors have tried to combat this in the usual ways - with silly site redesigns, and encouraging social media to invite new users - and it has gotten new folks over time, but not proportionally to the internet as a whole, and thus has become something of a shadow of what it used to mean.
Yes - the moderation system is a nice set of features - but there's a reason it isn't implemented the same ways in places that adapted similar systems. The 4-5 cap presents a scalability issue that has to be dealt with heuristically by limiting mod points - which means trolling becomes a real weapon competing against helping good posts. It can still work - but that's mostly a function of having a 'nerdy' audience that can prioritize clever posts.
Ultimately, good users are the answer, more than the website funny bucks connected to it.
But good users are illusive - minds seek new stories, and play all kinds of roles to seek that, and what is good now might not be, or might not stick around - and the successful often consider their luck to be skill, so a recipe for success is often confused with the circumstances.
Slashdot isn't the answer - it's an option, and one with a decent history, but it isn't automatically better than the others.
Ryan Fenton
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That word starts with an "e", fancy man.
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>>That word starts with an "e", fancy man.
Illusive is a word - google it. Yes - elusive is expected (and probably what I meant also) - but I was highlighting illusion/self-deception too. Not the worst of 'typos', I'd say.
Ryan Fenton
Re: (Score:3)
Very clever. Even fancier than I thought!
Re: No. (Score:3)
Your concise and well-reasoned post that explains why Slashdot cannot be the answer was modded up to 5. I'm not sure what that proves, but it does reminds me why I have visited Slashdot almost daily for 20 years.
Re: (Score:2)
The Life Cycle of a Community / Website / Forum site is nothing new. I've written about it in the past [slashdot.org]
TL:DR;
1. New site starts. It is the new "hotness" and attracts the geeks. Discussion is usually civil since the majority of people share a like-minded opinion.
2. It gets popular.
3. As it gets bigger manners start to go out the window. The S:N takes a nose dive as stupid flame wars erupt over pointless shit.
4. Moderators clamp down on trolls and spam. Anything that doesn't tow the status quo is also dow
/. still bans lots of phrases (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been on this forum long enough to remember a good 6 month stretch where the comments were useless because of all the spam.
Point is, at some point you need to have an authority move in and censor because automatic trolling is faster than anything the community can keep up with. Community moderation is good, but Facebook already has that with it's "like" system. Facebook is so huge that down voting is kind of pointless. Anything that isn't massively up voted just gets lost. This is why Facebook didn't bother with a down vote system. They didn't need it.
Re: (Score:2)
Much of that was relatively benign, as it lived in parallel with the actual discussions, unlike what we see now, which seem like attacks on discussion itself. Even the modern-day "Swastika Banner Guy", aside from the length of some of his posts, was not of much concern to me, as it was just simple spam. I haven't seen him for months now.
BTW: Anybody interested in those old memes on Slashdot should look up "Slashdot trolling phenomena". It's a shame that article was "beneath" Wikipedia...
It stopped being benign (Score:2)
No. (Score:2)
First, In slashdot, the posters' own their own messages, and that's how slashdot can disclaim all responsibility for their content. Facebook cannot do that because then they couldn't monetize its users' posts.
For moderation and meta-moderation, I can't see how it could scale to the size of Facebook.since meta-modding would be too manual and would only be able to review a minuscule fraction of modded posts.
No. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with fake news isn't a moderation problem. People engage with it because it confirms already-held views, or serves as a contrast to them ("look at what X is saying! Aren't they crazy?"). Websites host it because it delivers numbers, and numbers mean advertising revenue. People produce it because they have incentives, whether monetary or ideological. Those in positions of power either benefit or simply don't care.
At every level there is reason for the fake news machine to continue. You can't simply hope to moderate it away.
Slashdot's front page fares a little better because it's subject-focussed with a smaller user base, but the site has its own biases and blind spots despite its moderation system. It and its discussions are not inherently closer to some platonic truth than another site. Sure, browsing at 4 or 5 makes for less aggravating reading, but people still get it wrong in good faith, argue in bad faith, and always, everywhere, someone's going to be the dumbest boy alive [youtube.com].
There's too many "closet trolls" on Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
Slashdot suffers from the same things every other sites have - what I call "Closet Trolls".
Closet Trolls are people that push their own point of view/agenda, in a convincing way (either by belittling others' points of view, or being eloquent in the way they speak so that they sound more convincing) so that people are more drawn to that point of view/opinion/agenda, rather than actually being objective.
What I've noticed that is particularly insidious about Closet Trolls, is that some don't even realize that
That's not a troll (Score:2, Insightful)
Closet Trolls are people that push their own point of view/agenda, in a convincing way
I think you are confusing the word "troll" for "Advocate".
It's understandable, since in this modern world you are mostly told an opinion you disagree with is literally impossible, therefore any arguments for some other position are obviously disingenuous and therefore a troll...
Re: (Score:2)
Wouldn't that be too little credit?
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot suffers from the same things every other sites have - what I call "Closet Trolls".
Closet Trolls are people that push their own point of view/agenda, in a convincing way (either by belittling others' points of view, or being eloquent in the way they speak so that they sound more convincing) so that people are more drawn to that point of view/opinion/agenda, rather than actually being objective.
What I've noticed that is particularly insidious about Closet Trolls, is that some don't even realize that they're such trolls, and are absolutely convinced they're right (and so convincing that others are actually swayed by them).
Socrates complained about this.
They killed him for it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
if you're to the right of Stalin and want to participate.
Stalin was way over on the left. So this would be pretty inclusive.
[Waiting for the down mods]
/. Has spoiled me... (Score:3)
I wish all news sites had a community as effective as /., especially in telling or getting to the story-behind-the-story. All comments are not created equal, and the lack of structure in commenting on some sites makes for a miserable experience.
Don’t know anything about this facebook think though.
No, it's not the 'solution' to anything (Score:2)
Furthermore it's 'moderation' system has been gamed and leveraged by the trolls, racists, sexists, and what-have-you-ne'er-do-wells, to silence people who don't fit their narrative and their agenda. When someone can have multiple accounts that gain moderation points which can be misused to silence people, then the system is as profoundly broken as the rest of the Internet is in
Re: (Score:3)
I just read two articles in a row. One claims Slashdot is full of left-wing commies. And this one, which says Slashdot is the domain of right wing trolls. So yeah. I'm going to trust Slashdot to sort through my news and decide what I should be reading.
And why shouldn't I be reading stuff that I don't agree with? Or posts by people with differing political points of view, but perhaps a modicum of technical knowledge.
Absolutely not (Score:2)
Firstly - Fakenews is propagated through echo chambers. People read what they want to read and thus will subscribe only to channels that fit their world view.
Secondly - Moderation relies on a system of trust in moderators. 4 and 5s don't magically appear, they are voted up. If you don't get the moderation team correct you don't end up with a balanced view. It's a system which is easily gamed.
Finally and most importantly - the entire idea begs the question of whether or not Slashdot is measured, reasonable o
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, at least partly (Score:3)
By the way for some reason, I have not gotten my mod points. I have a couple of submissions making in, lots of +ve mods but for some reason no mod points awarded recently.
Not possible (Score:4, Insightful)
Proper “moderation” requires people to be objective, and know the subject matter being moderated.
You cannot achieve proper moderation with a group of randomly chosen people as “jury” - get enough of these “moderators” with similar opinions together, and they’ll be a “bury brigade” like we’ve seen here on Slashdot.
Not at all (Score:2)
No.
Because Slashdot aggregates news which aren't reliable either. They fit in the dominant groupthink but that doesn't make them reliable. Also, the moderation system worsens that as the most popular posts are upvoted, confirming the already existing biases. I do not come to slashdot to be informed. Sometimes to be entertained. If i want information i got to sites like Phys.org.
I do not believe ANY social media can be a reliable source of information. It's basically word of mouth on steroids. The worst poss
Thanks, folks! (Score:2)
No way (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot's moderation system sucks. This is especially apparent when you consider I have never once been given a positive mod point in spite of the fact that I consistently and constantly only post highly insightful, funny, and informative comments.
They should let us pay for mod points. I'd be willing, but I expect they should give it to me for free seeing as how it's my idea.
Betteridge (Score:2)
No.
And not just to make +Funny points with an obligatory response. Put Slashdot forth as any kind of 'solution' and it will be targeted as an influencer, gatekeeper or decider of truthiness on various topics. And both sides will fight to stack the membership in its favor.
The best we can do is to promote ourselves as a forum for the open discussion of technical ideas. But post here and give up the possibility of ever having sex again. It's your decision.
Fake news isnâ(TM)t the problem (Score:2)
This incorrectly assumes a steady, stable /. (Score:3)
Lets set aside the concept of if /. actually had a credible content ranking system that could be of use at a large scale.
For this conversation, for just a moment, let us assume it does.
The underlying problem is that if it was implemented at scale, /. or whatever system mimicked a /. style system would rapidly be consumed by a 1000x fold increase in users wanting to rank and judge, both those of a "i want my say on this" types and the rank-farming coordinated effort kind. Any value the current system has would be rapidly defeated by the masses coming to either share uninformed, biased "facts" or to deliberately corrupt the "source of truth".
If the past 4 years (and particularly 2020) have taught us anything, relying on the citizenry to have a level head for facts is a losing proposition.
One possible solution (Score:4, Informative)
The root problem is that social media assesses content by metric: popularity. It's easiest to do this on a unary axis (Like), however certain user features can be offered, and additional data can be gleaned from, a binary axis (up/down vote).
But the platforms have no incentive to introduce other metrics (such as truth) because popularity begets views begets ad impressions. Any other metric or filtering mechanism would siphon away their revenue.
No (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason Slashdot has, or, rather, used to have, a fairly well working moderation system is that Slashdot has, or rather, used to have, a fairly well educated user base. Back in the days when your reason to join a discussion board was mostly because you were interested in the content the board offered. Back before everyone and their dog had to push some sort of agenda and shit it in every medium that they get their grubby paws on.
Slashdot used to be "news for nerds". Which essentially also meant that the page was simply not interested for the mainstream duds. In other words, it was possible to find a spirited discussion about Cardassians in the Star Trek universe while you'd leave sorely disappointed if you tried to create a discussion about the Kardashians from a universe that's almost as believe- and likable.
For some odd reasion we had to endure the influx of stories about politics, climate change and social issues, and while I can somewhat see how climate change and how we employ technology to combat it applies to nerds, I am hard pressed to figure out who the fuck gives half a shit about social issues.
This in turn gave us the agenda pushes. Who are now littering the site with their bullshit and basically ensure that even if there could be some sort of sensible discussion going on, it will be sidetracked and somehow shoved into their agenda pushing bullshit. And $deity help us if they get modpoints because then anything not following their particular brand of bullshit and their prefered worldview gets modded into oblivion.
And no, I don't give a fuck if you're pro or contra Trump, pro or contra BLM, whether you're Democrat or Republican or whether you're liberal or conservative. If you feel like reminding everyone of oh-how-important your agenda is, you're WRONG.
Re: (Score:3)
For some odd reasion we had to endure the influx of stories about politics, climate change and social issues, and while I can somewhat see how climate change and how we employ technology to combat it applies to nerds, I am hard pressed to figure out who the fuck gives half a shit about social issues.
I agree with the sentiment, to some degree anyway, but I'd note that many of the social issues that we're talking about here come, in a large part, from increased access to otherwise quite interesting technology (e.g., powerful mobile phones, widespread wifi and mobile Internet, etc) and services built to leverage that increased access (e.g. social media, E2E-encrypted messaging apps, etc). While a lot of the posts in these kinds of threads do tend towards focusing on boring left-vs-right kind of issues, t
No (Score:3)
A moderation system works on a small technical community, it's not going to work very well once organised groups with significant resources seek to influence the system.
What's needed is not moderation or censorship, it's education and openness. If a subject is important to someone then they should familiarise themselves with all sides of the argument and evidence from multiple rival sources.
If you trust a single source, whoever that source may be is going to be biased, you need to read multiple competing sources and study the raw evidence for yourself.
Re: (Score:2)
Those are idiots trying to get a rise/reaction out of you. How you equate that with Russian spies is why the rest of us know you're an absolute idiot.
Re: (Score:3)
A healthy response might be to explain that asking that question at this point in time might be insensitive or provocative (in a negative way), or something like that...but instead you will be modded into oblivion as a Troll.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Bullshit. There are no Russian trolls here because SLASHDOT LITERALLY DOESN'T MATTER.
Why not? It's cheap.
You know the site is dying when you are modering your own posts in meta-moderation.
That's evidence of its technical inferiority, certainly.
Slashdot is full of trolls, because dumbshits like you are SO FUCKING ANNOYING and deserve it.
Trolls are just tedious. At least aspire to offensive.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not? It's cheap.
High-quality trolling is not cheap.
If you are paying 5 cents per post, you can flood Facebook with crap and drown out the sane opposition.
But on Slashdot, that is just going to get you a bunch of -1 posts that almost no one sees.
At least aspire to offensive.
Amateur trolls are offensive. Professional trolls aspire to flattery and subtle provocation, so the targets don't even realize they are being trolled.
Re: (Score:2)
High-quality trolling is not cheap.
What does that have to do with the trolls on Slashdot?
Re:Betteridge says GFY (Score:4, Funny)
This website literally has 200 regular visitors. Russian trolls won't bother. There are trolls here, but we are here because we want the site torn down. This used to be a great site that has just turned into another Pseudo-Marxist bullshit site. It needs to shut down and if I can help kill it I will.
It's hilariously awesome that you have convinced yourself that your time trolling on slashdot is actually a productive use of your time. You're not just trolling, you're trolling for the greater good.
Keep fighting the good fight. . .
Re: (Score:3)
Many people have moved on to Reddit. Reddit has been effective at showing the trolls out the door, with shadowbans from the first post on.
I'd give you a +1, Troll just for that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot? No. Too much political correctness (Score:5, Interesting)
"Slashdot is the answer to Facebook's 'fake news' problem."
This is based on the false assumption that Facebook WANTS to solve the fake-news problem.
They don't.
Content that is sensational, inflammatory and/or controversial attracts more readers and that directly translates into more advertising revenue for Facebook. Since Facebook is run by the scummiest of scumbags, they will NEVER do anything that will reduce their profits. Never. Ever.
Re: (Score:3)
Perhaps so; those people can read at -1. Maybe, however, they could also attract people who are interested in "measured, reasonable and informative discussion of a difficult subject" who would read at +3,4, or 5.
That would be an improvement, without reducing the sensationalist crap that is their bread and butter.
The down moderation of the above post (Score:2)
is further confirmation of how insightful it is.
Pass it on.