On Collaborative Weblogs 175
fernand0 writes "The 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism has dealt with some blogging issues (see the Symposium Research Papers). One that can be of interest for Slashdot readers is When the Audience is the Producer: The Art of the Collaborative Weblog (pdf). There, four collective weblogs are examined: MetaFilter, Plastic, Kuro5hin, and Slashdot, and some discussion is done about the different ways of collaboration that emerge from these sites."
Slashdot as a blog (Score:5, Interesting)
Audience is the Producer (Score:5, Interesting)
And colaborative 'ciclopaedias? (Score:5, Interesting)
I just mentioned wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and everything2 [everythin2.net] on my work.
One interesting thing I found out: the content in wikipedia is much more "professional", and enciclopedic than E2's. But the software for E2 has much more possibilities, and is far more entertaining to create content for than wikipedia's. E2's larger weakness seem to be the lacking of support for image uploads or linking.
Absent (Score:5, Interesting)
The article talks a bit about the moderation system, and karma, and all the fun stuff we have come to love here at SlashDot. What it carefully avoids is the discussion of trolls and AC posts. It is summarized by stating that -1 in the moderation system is sufficient to render a troll invisible.
Over time there have been a lot of discussions here about trolls and ACs. They have their place here, and they each contribute as well as take away. It would have been interesting to have read a little more about what the study found about trolls and AC posts, positive and negative...
Re:Slashdot as a blog (Score:2, Interesting)
Using the catchphrase "weblog"... (Score:4, Interesting)
In theory, the organization of a group weblog is similar to the structure Hamilton was searching for. This form of weblog also falls into the general category of an online community, alongside more traditional community forms like bulletin boards and chatrooms.
In his study of decentralized mob behavior, Rheingold pursued this line of inquiry further (2002). He also highlighted Slashdot and its 300,000 members as an example ofself-organized behavior by "smart mobs" and "swarm systems," which grow to exhibit collective intelligence that is greater than the sum of their parts (Rhengold p179).Rheingold notes that the many-to-many media model found in a group weblog empowers the audience by allowing them to "create, publish, broadcast, and debate their own pointof view" in ways previously unheard of in the print and broadcast mediums. Like others before him, Rheingold was not sure if this newfound ability would provide a legitimatecounterforce to society's dominant forces, or just be a simulation of a counterforce that feels empowering but, in reality, is toothless. Nevertheless, he concluded that beforeanyone could reach such a verdict, or determine a way to alter that outcome, there is a need for more knowledge of how such technologies, and the people that use them,function today.
The author then continues to refer to Slashdot (and the others) as collaborative group weblogs without ever trying to make the distinction between a weblog and the aforementioned "online community". So as best as I can tell, the author simply likes the buzzword "weblog" and is actually studying online communities and group/thought dynamics(how's that for a buzzword?) on the web.
Re:Absent (Score:2, Interesting)
A lot of what makes Slashdot Slashdot is how Slashdot has handled the problems of trolls and AC posts in real time on a live system.
Not all trolls and ACs are problems. Sometimes, a good troll adds a bit of interesting humor to an otherwise dry thread. That said, that's not often the case... ACs are a completely different animal. It is all too often that you see someone who posts anonymously just so they can snipe at someone while hiding behind anonymity. Other times, there is a fascinating and well-thought-out post that is anonymous, which is a shame for the poster because it would be worth good karma points. I have yet to figure out why there are AC posts like that.
The article skipped journals, too. There's a whole lot of stuff happening in user journals. And not all of it technical. You're as likely to hear about a dead hard drive as you are to hear about someone's recipe for chicken soup in journal entries.
Re:Purple monkey syndrome (Score:3, Interesting)
Back when
Weblogging as a direct digital democracy tool (Score:5, Interesting)
This goes a little bit beyond simply "e-voting", but not too much given all of the other technologies available. It would also be funny to have a public record of all the flamewars that erupt in the process of sausage-making :P . But particularly because all that frank discussion would be there and wouldn't have to be revisited later down the line.
Anything like this out and about?
Already out of date re. Kuro5hin (Score:5, Interesting)
The analysis of rusty's March 26th announcement is shoddy. There never was anonymous posting on K5, and no "trials" for news users were announced. The announcement was that each new user would have to be sponsored by an existing user, and that if the new user was banned, the sponsor would be too.
Whatever the practicality of that, what actually happened is that since March 26th, new user registration on Kuro5hin has been closed. The sponsorship system has not been turned on (or implemented, although rusty claimed it was effectively done when he announced it). It's just closed. As of the time of writing, you cannot create a new account on Kuro5hin, and so you cannot post.
The catalyst for all this was some users posting links to a badly photoshopped fake image of rusty's wife's head on a porn body. rusty's reaction was instant and extreme. The accounts were banned and several other long term trolls were purged in the aftermath. To this day, the criteria for banning is still unclear.
It should be noted that rusty has previously removing rating abilities, banned and anonymised (i.e. wiped commands of) accounts, and IP blocked posters at his sole whim and discretion. The freedom of Kuro5hin is the freedom to things rusty's way or not at all. The trouble with having a benign dictator is that he's still a dictator. Without oversight, there's no security.
Of course, rusty can do whatever he wants with his site. Except that, in his own words, after taking $70K (or $35K or $45K or $80K or whichever of his various figures and calculationg that you want to believe) it's not his site. "I think the clearest way I can put it is: you just purchased Kuro5hin.org". [kuro5hin.org] Well, that's a funny kind of ownership.
K5 might recover. Stranger things have happened, and a (sketchy) article on prime numbers just made it to the front page, so there are still non-trolls there. They just don't contribute much content any more.
In the long term though, it can't recover its past popularity without new users, that's for damn sure. The salient lesson: dictators are never a good idea, no matter how benign. In fact, the more benign they appear, the harder they can finally snap.
Poorly researched, quickly written. (Score:2, Interesting)
So what is a good ragchew site these days? (Score:3, Interesting)
I hung out on half-empty for a while, but eventually stopped going there, I guess partly because almost everybody there was a college student, and I didn't feel like I had much in common with them. (I'm 38, and have a family.) The new half-empty.org seems cool (just created an account today), but it seems to have a completely different focus (reviews).
Kuro5hin was cool, but now it's dead. I don't have any hard feelings against Rusty, but he clearly got frustrated and intentionally killed it off. (I did subsidize the site slightly by buying ads, but I hope nobody is under the impression that the money people gave Rusty even came close to paying for the time, money, and anguish he put into the site.)
Husi [hulver.com] seems to be a nice Scoop site, but it's got extremely low traffic so far. It'd be nice to see it take off. Seems to have a UK focus, though.
Re:Already out of date re. Kuro5hin (Score:3, Interesting)
The hidden slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
but if you make people your "friends" you can get messages whenever they update their blogs.
The slashcode could use some more features to bring prominent discussions and journals to the front page. (Like a slashbox with newest journal entries, etc.)
If there's too few topics on the front page, there's the Sections in the left menu, which sometimes carry more stories than reach the front page.
Then there's the
Other discussions [slashdot.org], some of whom are not related to a story and can function as sub-group blogs.
Here are some active blogs:
BlackHat [slashdot.org]
Red Warrior [slashdot.org]
frankie [slashdot.org]
I'm sure others can reply with more active blog users.
Eh BOO (Score:3, Interesting)
Now I am sitting in Plastic Chat, watching people comment on the paper. It seems as if the author has barely spent any time on Plastic, and he seems to have missed the forrest for the trees (as in, he looked at details, decided he didn't like them. Meanwhile all these features added up together make for a pretty nice, relatively diverse community/discussion)
Not that I am encouraging you people to give Plastic a try. More like, I am commenting on the lack of thoroughness in the paper. Which, admitedly, I did not read.
You're impressed with the moderation system? (Score:2, Interesting)
Overrated and Underrated mods don't get metamodded, so people always use it to follow your posts when they don't like you and mod them all down. This is a little known fact, for some reason. At least Taco made it so Funny mods don't affect karma, because 90% of the upmodded Funny posts aren't funny in the slightest bit.
If a ton of people mod you up to +5, it only takes one person to knock you down to +4, and their moderation type ("Troll") is the one displayed. The way it's designed leads to groupthink, where if someone interprets a post as a joke, it will be marked as "Funny," and from that point on others will see that "Funny" marker and also interpret as funny and mod it up. However, if it was originally marked as "Flamebait," others will see that marker and unconsciously interpret that way, causing them to skip over it or also mark it down.
Not to mention that going against any majority opinion around here is almost guaranteeing 99% of the time that you'll be modded down into oblivion for violating the hivemind. And Anti-Slash [anti-slash.org] is always exploiting the flaws of the moderation system for its own amusement. They list their troll posts on the front page complete with links, and even have a searchable database storing past +5 posts that trolls can repost later on and get modded up (and they do, every time).
Not to mention the Slashdot editors have infinite moderation points and have abused this in the past--case in point, The Post. Several people have never gotten moderation points to this day simply because they posted a reply in that discussion. Michael has even insulted people for having a high post count. The guy who squatted Censorware and is the most despised and unprofessional editor at Slashdot actually makes fun of its devoted readers.
For a site that professes "openness" so much, the editors keep a lot hidden and don't talk very much to vistors (try e-mailing Taco sometime and expect either nothing at all or a very nasty sarcastic reply). Heck, if you even dare suggest that Slashdot move away from this ugly, godawful, absolutely horrible 1998-era visual design, the response is either nothing at all or "submit a patch if you want." Nice.
This place has been going down the crapper ever since VA Linux bought it out. Don't people realize this website is corporate-owned now? For all the anti-corporation spiel that goes on around here, I'm surprised that fact is ignored. Suddenly all the anti-"M$" posts are put into perspective. Must be nice for a company to own a "news" website that just so happens to post a lot of "news" articles negative toward competitors ("Microsoft Violates Human Rights In China").
There was a time when Kuro5hin was the alternative, and I used to visit that place back when they actually posted technology news that Slashdot wouldn't touch for whatever reason. But now Kuro5hin is a left-wing hellhole, where Bin Laden is a "misunderstood freedom fighter." The sad truth is that Slashdot is seen as the bastion for tech news in the geek community, and the fact that Taco shrugs off its relevance as "this is just a hobby" means we don't get any sort of professionalism at all, but instead more reposts, typos, completely false articles, and broken discussion systems.
Kuro5hin is dead now? (Score:3, Interesting)
Once it stopped being fun, Kuro5hin became something you participated in because you paid for it or were being paid to work on it. Once you weren't paid for it, you stopped caring. If you happened to be a person who paid for it, maybe you paid in a little more because you weren't sure. It took the remaining 2 years for all this to sort itself out.
Once it became about political speech that never really went anywhere (I'm not talking about interesting projects, like freenet, I'm talking about the people who wanted to protest, but never did outside of Kuro5hin), it was officially dead. Slashdot avoids this by having stricter control over the stories, but it also lacks the various tools that allowed users to find each other. I think that's part of what kept K5 going so long.
I'm not sure what will be the solution of a social site where people can post interesting things to a wider audience, and still managed to make friends and such. Livejournal seems to be a good example of this situation (it serves the purpose for me), but there isn't really an easy digest method that allows you to get into it -- you pretty much have to know someone using it, or sift through thousands of random, shitty journals before you find any of the social groups that are interesting.
I just hope I have a hand in making the next big thing
Plastic ... and a question on other Weblog UIs (Score:4, Interesting)
I read and comment on Plastic [plastic.com] way more than I ever did on Slashdot. Of course I did most of my slashdot commenting in the days before accounts were necessary. Not that I think things have changed too much - it's that the threads are all too large now it seems. I don't have any sense of communicating or community here. I think this is my third account because I keep forgetting the damn usernames and passwords - that's how seldom I think it worth it to log in. I still read here of course, but commenting seems to not add much value.
Simply too much 'stuff' to wade through on
Wha? No, really. When I mouse over the links I get a cute little 'tool tip' giving me a preview of the linked comment. When those links have their 'title' set to be the first n characters of text in the comment it makes it a lot easier to skim along and determine what's deserving of 'drilling down'. I mentioned this on slashdot before I'm sure.
It's a small thing but it makes navigating a thread much easier when you can quickly gauge the tone/value of replies without having to click on them all to open them in another window. It works wonders with reading short replies, deciding which comments to investigate first and helps with often meaningless subject lines like "Re:The thing this thread started as but it no longers bears any relation to'. It's surprising how used you get to depending on that little bit of introductory info. I constantly mouse over the links in huge Slashdot threads and am surprised everytime when nothing happens.
It's changed the way I read on Plastic, I now read many more of the comments to a story because I seldom get frustrated by chasing replies that are of no interest to me. It also lends itself to interesting idioms.
Take this example of a post. Subject line is bold and the first line of the comment body (which'll show up in the popup and completes the 'thought') is in italics
My wife calls this...
Now, I'm curious. Anyone else here discover a convenient UI feature that you wish more people used? There's probably lots of neat things going on out there that I've just been to lazy to notice.
Kevin
Re:You're impressed with the moderation system? (Score:2, Interesting)
the first few paragraphs are insightful, the rest -
Topics:
- meta- & moderation system
- design/style of
- reposts, typos,
meta meta meta (Score:3, Interesting)
It is tedious. The format is not the content, and the medium is not the message.