Dealing With Venom on the Web

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."

Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

Clearly, they must be new here.

Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

You must admit, Slashdot's moderation system is infinitely more successful than Digg's system.

Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

Today, yes. It wasn't always so, and some of us do remember a time when there was a big hue and cry over this as well. And I do not know how many of you here remember michael, and the whole moderation abuse that happened.

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?

Slashdot, I read for the comments.

Digg I _used_to_ read for the headlines & links.

Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

Hear, hear.

There's lots of bad things that can be (and have been) said about Slashdot, but the comment system is one of the things that actually seems to work well. Shit happens on occasion, with troll comments getting modded up or legitimate (if controversial) ones getting modded down, but it's my impression that this is relatively rare and that metamoderation is taking care of it; and of course, nobody and nothing is perfect, anyway, so the fact that there are *some* errors *occasionally* doesn't mean that Slashdot's comment system isn't working.

And as others have remarked already, a good amount of the comments on Slashdot really *are* insightful, interesting, informative or funny, too. I, too, read Slashdot mostly just for the comments - if those didn't exist, I really wouldn't care much about the site, or at least not more than I care about any other news aggregation site.

NO!

Slashdot moderation is seriously flawed.

A lot of good comments go unnoticed because they get a 0 score (for being ACs), while an entire ocean of useless babble get automatically promoted to +1 (registered users) or +2 (karma loaded jerks).

And how does a jerk get +2? Just think about how many people voted for some idiot... as one writer once said in my country: "All majorities are dumb."

Heck, I've seen a lot of +5, Insightful which are (IMO, granted) totally clueless. It really hurts to read them... automatic scores do lower the content-to-noise ratio.

Of course, it's important to avoid useless racist posts; but a lot of valuable content comes from comments -- and in those, a lot of good-willing ACs contribute with things they wouldn't otherwise say... yes, I know, there is no real anonymity on the Internet, but what is stopping ill-intentioned guys from faking names? (Good people do not want to lie, they'd rather go AC).

Some stories get 300 +1-rated posts and another 80 0-rated ones: what would go wrong in displaying these extra 80?

Say what you want. On Digg, you can get the "upcoming stories": non-voted, not-yet-manipulated. On /., registered people see the stories first (I infer this from what I read in the past) and ACs are de facto ignored (this I know from experience).

Digg is now what /. was 8 or 9 years ago. /. got older, with clogged arteries and deaf: I've written oh-so-many-times about this and nobody has done anything about it.

As of the last year, I've been even refraining from posting. I may well one day surrender and register, but I'm sure to feel defeated if I do so... and, besides, will /. still matter?

Re:NO!

There's no surrender in registering. What are you losing? I have no idea.

What do you stand to gain? You can realistically have a conversation if you accept e-mail notifications. You gain the ability to moderate down those nonsense +5's, metamoderate the ones that put them there in the first place. Save your prefs, etc.

The system only has value by having people registered. By refusing to you're merely complaining about things you're being too lazy to help fix.

There's an advantage to attaching a name to your words, but you always have the ability to take the penalty and detach that name to say something that either needs to be said, or probably shouldn't be said but you feel like it anyway.

Stop seeing registering as surrender, stop celebrating your sloth (or maybe paranoia, but I have no idea what your reasons are. I can't even understand them). Really, it's just another column in a database that can't realistically even be linked to you. You seem to care by what you say, so why don't you care enough to participate that much? Stage fright?

Re:NO!

Meh. Personally, I held off on registering until I was forced to because they stopped letting you enter in the name that would appear on your posts manually. (This is why my /. number is about twice as high as it otherwise would be; my then-roommate Altus has a lower number because he didn't wait)

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!

Some stories get 300 +1-rated posts and another 80 0-rated ones: what would go wrong in displaying these extra 80?

Slashdot does display 0-rated posts, just not by default. What would go wrong? Spam. If people have to go out of their way to view an anonymous post, then fewer anonymous trolls will bother, because their posts will get modded down before they get seen. If 0-rated posts were seen by default, there would be 300 +1-rated posts and 2,000 0-rated posts.
0-rated posts that are worth anything get modded up.
You're free to browse at 0, by the way.

Re:NO!

Ironically, if you choose to log in, you can change how karma and other affects scores, and still check the box to "post anonymously". Apparently someone posted they use +4 Flamebait. So there is some benefit to registering, since it's difficult to personalize the site and remain "anonymous".

YES!

I also find it ironic that his AC post about how AC posts get buried, is +5 insightful. Obviously the system is working as intended...

Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? [EDIT]

While there are imbeciles for the most part here too, the Slashdot crowd tends to be in the industry and/or college and seems a tad experienced in the ways of the world.

Sorry, just clarifying the sentence for you.
And comparing /.ers with diggers? That's like comparing six year olds with two year olds. Or six year olds with Fark-ers. Or six year olds with Fox News.
Clearly the six year olds are more intelligent, but they're still six years old...

Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

Going by your UID and his, I'd say he's been here longer than there ever was a Digg.

Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

What's "Digg"?

Is that a new protocol or something?

I tried to find it in Archie and Veronica, but all I found were some old DigDug ROMS.

Is there an RFC I've missed? I admit I'm a little behind on comp.sys.networking these days.

Perhaps one of these newfangled Gopher links?

DG

Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

As soon as slash dot "dumbs down" there will be more morons and illiterates here as opposed to Answers on Yahoo

And what, you are here scouting it out for them?

Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

Both sites have "younger" audiences--neither represent a cross section of society. Youth are generally more liberal than older people, and thats probably why you justify the label "extremely liberal." We don't have the same audience as the 10 O'Clock News.

I'll say this: here, I'm not likely to mod up a post that I strongly disagree with (unless it's very insightful in a way I've never heard before, factually and logically sound). I guess an alternative viewpoint must meet a stronger standard than one that just seems obvious to me. Maybe thats not completely fair.

I'd be interested in you pointed out your posts that have been modded troll while being "well informed, concise, accurate and written in a professional manner." Generally the posts I see modded as troll are disrespectful and incomplete. Tone matters. If you really think there's some vast conspiracy to undermine your positions, well . . . a tin foil hat might not be thick enough.

Slashdot's moderation has instructions--bring posts deserving attention up, and get the completely unproductive stuff out of the way. Digg doesn't have this. There are no guidelines at all. What criteria should I use? If I'm participating in a thread, should I mod the people up that have agreed with me? Mod down the ones that don't? Mod up the buried comments that are well stated but not the popular opinion? If a comment is modded +20, what does that mean? It's a popularity contest. In terms of groupthink, digg's system will always be worse when everyone's opinion matters all the time.

Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

Digg is OK for churning news links to the surface that one would otherwise not see but as a place to hold civilized, rational discussion on important topics, it's useless.
Anytime someone says something useful and productive on Digg, it gets buried.
That is unless it's about tits, condoms or illegal drugs, all of which seem to be priority #1 on Digg.
Commenting on Digg is a total waste of time. Unless you're a teenager.

Just goes to show the level of maturity of the average, typical Digg member.

Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

Fark is mostly "weird and amusing stuff from around the board" though. There doesn't seem to be a common concept behind the stories singled out. That being said they are often worth checking out, if only for the giggle value.

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?

Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

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:Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

I don't think this is a failure of the moderation system; it's a failure of the human race.

Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

Of course Slashdot's moderation is also at the whim of the subset of users that have mod points on a given day.

The more I think of it, the more I think that's a bonus. A huge problem on digg is that people will go through and mod up or down anything that they either agree with or disagree with, without regard to the actual content of the post. At least when mod points are scarce, users generally only use them on posts that are actually deserving.

As has already been said, there's a great difference in the userbases of each site. I'd be willing to bet that the average Slashdot user is better educated, has more experience (in industry, in life, ...), and is older. Digg is just in it's infancy compared to Slashdot; I think there could be a lot of improvement when they fix their commenting system and their user base ages a bit.

As a community, Slashdot is pretty critical of itself--but it really is one of the best online communities out there. If you don't believe me, you spend way too much time here.

Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

"I'd say on most days it does a fair job of at least hiding the blatant trolls from view."

Erm... if by 'blatant trolls' you mean the GNAA posts, then yes, I agree. However, I've seen quite a few cases of moderation being based on public opinion, as opposed to a more objective line of thought. Unfortunately, I think this has caused the community to develop a style about how they post here that goes against the initial wishes of this system. For example: Take ANY cell phone story and you'll find several +5 comments about how people angrily wish they could get a phone that's just a phone. Umm.. okay. So... that encourages people to make the same post in every story. Microsoft product in a car story? A mad rush to be the first to make a 'crash' joke. Sony? Hehe, you know what I mean.

I do like the moderation system, I just wish there was a better sense of objectivity. Fortunately, though, my complaints about this have gone down a LOT in the last 5 years. I'm just not sure if it's because M2 is actually working (albeit slowly) or if it's because public opinion has shifted in my favor.

BW holds Slashdot's moderation system up

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."

Queue the modding up of blatant trolling and such silliness.

Digg moderation is horrifically worthless

I think the digg model works much better, the moderation is almost instaneous.

Are you on crack? The Digg moderation is *totally* worthless. Half is rabid fanboys downvoting en masse *anything* that attacks their chosen obsession (typically Apple). Combine this with fairly incomprehensible moderation elsewhere (i.e. I look at it and can't fathom why that particular post was moderated that way), and you have a system that's totally useless for its intended purpose.

The lack of nesting makes it harder to filter out irrelevant discussion subtrees; in short, with Digg, you display all messages or you miss out. Slashdot's moderation may be far from perfect, but it's outstanding compared to the adolescent pack mentality on Digg.

Well...

That's not to say that /.'s moderation system completely keeps the nasty posts out, either... it only buries them way out of view. It's still a pretty effective system, though, especially in the way that it automatically picks out the people with the best reputations to handle the moderation. Without manually lowering the viewing threshold, I almost never see rude, disgusting or otherwise insulting posts on here.

If /. were even more serious about keeping the crap out, they could disable the anonymous coward. But as you can see, it is still open to anybody's input, even without requiring a login.

Re:Well...

My biggest beef with the Slashdot moderation system is the overwhelming majority of posts that are modded high and "funny." It's such a letdown when you want to read good replies only to find that 80+% of the +4s and +5s are "Funny."

Re:Well...

"If /. were even more serious about keeping the crap out, they could disable the anonymous coward.." There's a fine line between an effective system & censorship. Some posts by ACs are interesting, informative, funny... I'm happy reading the good stuff, and if that means I have to burn some time & points modding idiots or sickies down, well, that's a price worth paying. All societies cost - I live in France, and hate paying the high taxes. On the other hand, when I travel to some other places, I miss the ameneties that those taxes bring me and my family.

Re:Well...

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:Well...

For a while we had some backslash articles (not to be confused with slashback articles), in which the editor went through all the +4/5 posts and created some sembelence of a new article based on all the information.

It's actually a nice way to bring closure to a topic or to restart discussion at a much more advanced level.

Of course, you would probably have to hire a serious amount of editors to do that to every article on /.

Re:Well...

I think allowing AC posts is great. I often want to contribute to discussions here, but I only post anonymously. Not because I'm afraid to stand behind my opinions, but because it's not uncommon for employers to google potential applicants.

I try to maintain the same level of civility on the interweb tubes as I do in RL, and AC posts allow me to express opinions that, while I would be willing to have a civil discussion with most people on, may not acceptable to many of the businesses for which I may want to work.

Re:Well...

So if you registered "GeeIDidntThinkThatThrough" as a user name, exactly how worried would you be about someone searching for information about you associating the posts with you?

Re:Well...

I think the AC's point is perfectly valid. I know in the time I've been visiting /. I've posted sufficient clues for anyone to deduce precisely who I am -- not that I particularly mind, as I didn't choose my nick for anonymity.

And yes, there's a danger in that: the danger of temper tantrums, mostly. If you've never lost your temper online, you're a better person than I am. (I basically just figure as long as I don't say things that are too much more outrageous than what a lot of colleagues say on professional-oriented mailing lists every day, I should be OK. :-)

Opposite problem

I have almost the inverse of his problem. I post anonymously, but only when posting from work.

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.)

No help for smaller businesses.

This is great for a big corporation. But the real damage is done when one vindictive person freaks out on the internet and takes it out on a small business. The small business can't afford legal actions and they can't afford to pay some firm $10k to deal with their reputation. However, there are plenty of websites where you can register and file complaints in the public about a specific company. Even if you've never actually done business with them. Or even if you're just going nuts on the company because you forgot your medication.

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.

It's just an ad pretending to be an article.

From TFA:

"The CEOs of the largest 50 companies in the world are practically hiding under their desks in terror about Internet rumors," says top crisis manager Eric Dezenhall, author of the upcoming book Damage Control.

An author over-hyping a situation for his new book. How ... common.

In the beginning, the idea of this new conversation seemed so benign. Radical transparency: the new public-relations nirvana!

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.

Maintaining Civility?

If by Maintaining Civility they mean "Only showing what the majority agrees with while everything else is downmodded" then yes, that is a good description. I'm not saying /.'s mod system doesn't have its merits, but it does suffer from groupthink.

Yep, but....

You can probably tell from my UID I've been coming here a long while. In fact I was a slashdot visitor back before it even had a domain name and was hosted on Rob Maldas University server. That said, slashdot has gotten a lot better than it was and I think in part it's because of the moderation system. People who continuously get modded down for the flamebaiting and trolling eventually get frustrated and leave. Some remain, others are just burning karma, but all in all the system is a solution, regardless of how imperfect it is. Yes some group think comes into play but it's generally only on political matters.

The bottom line, to me, is that when dealing with humans who by nature are imperfect, no system can possibly be perfect.

Still here, for the comments.

It was always for the comments.

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:Maintaining Civility?

By "groupthink" he means people like me, who were banned for being pro-Windows. With enough -1s, inclusive (not a couple of comments scored -1), you will eventually receive one free /. vacation. It's gotten much better recently, but it used to be the point that posting a comment like "I don't think Linux is easy to use at all. The Windows GUI admin tools are much better" would land you at a score of -1. Enough of those, even over relatively long periods of time, and you get banned.

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.

Responsibility is iffy online

In the real world, slanderers will face penalties. In certain countries falsely accusing anyone is punishable by death. In the internet world, people are not bound by such physical punishments. You can kick people off temporarily, but you cannot actually prevent them from returning under a different name - just as you cannot ban a paying player from MMORPGs because of offensive behaviors. The part that needs changing is reception, and most people who read net news are not ready for such.

Why *I* like the /. moderation system.

You'd be amazed what kind of crazy-ass posts you can find if you browse at -1.

TLF

Re:Why *I* like the /. moderation system.

I don't browse at -1, I just have a flamebait modifier of +5. And let you tell you, it's *hilarious*.

Here's a thought ...

1) Treat your customers, partners, and employees fairly.
2) Empower your employees to deal with problems when they arise and make things right
3) Obey laws (for instance don't cook the books, backdate stock options, spy on employees and the press).
4) Have contact information for problem resolution on your web site.
5) Admit problems when they occur, publicly state what you're going to do to fix them, never cover things up.

Metamoderation helps

At least it can help weed out the most abusive moderators. I seldom call a mod unfair, but when I do I suspect I'm not alone.

Re:Metamoderation helps

At least it can help weed out the most abusive moderators. I seldom call a mod unfair, but when I do I suspect I'm not alone.

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

nastiness erupting overnight?

In a world where nastiness online can erupt and go global overnight,

Oh ya, well go to hell submitter.

snake oil

From the ReputationDefender wesite:

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. This is an arduous and labor-intensive task, but we take the job seriously so you can sleep better at night. We will always and only be in YOUR corner.

No tell me exactly how they are going to remove my old website from archive.org, my embarrassing posts in news groups from google groups, or porn pics done in my youth shared by millions on p2p networks ?
Short of bombing every server on the planet you cannot do anything. Once things are out, there are out, you cannot take them back.