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Journal CmdrTaco's Journal: Weddings, Vandals, and NOT Moderation 9

Journal by CmdrTaco
Nate & Rae got married yesterday. I'm just really happy for the both of them. I've known Nate since like middle school. We used to play Tradewars 2002 on the BBSs. Nate is the guy who wrote the first parsers that populated the Slashboxes on the right hand side of Slashdot in 1998. He dragged me through my language requirements in college. He's just a such a good person, and Rae is such a great girl. As a seasoned veteran of just over a year of marriage, I don't think I'm really actually qualified to give advice or anything, but I can at least wish the both of them my most heartfelt congratulations. Warms my cynical old heart cockles to see two friends so happy.

But all was not perfect! The wedding was in Holland- and since I moved to Ann Arbor a couple years ago, I've only been back here for a handful of holidays and family gatherings. But wouldn't you know it, vandals chucked a block of ice at my car while I was driving home from the wedding. Put a big dent in the drivers side rear door, and scared the crap out of Kathleen & I. Its funny- we live outside of detroit, but I have to come to the supposedly good and moral epicenter of the perfect christian universe to have my car vandalized by punks. Puts things into perspective.

Lastly is a concept I've toyed around with for moderation a few times in the past. I call it NOT moderation. I don't think I've mentioned it here before, but it is a relatively simple proposal to replace Over/Underrated in moderation. As some folks know, Over/Underrated are currently not eligible for meta moderation. To some users, this is a crime against humanity. Now to be fair, there are other controls to prevent the abuse of those mod tags, and while we do occasionally see abuse from them, they really aren't abused all that often. However, this is a potential loophole that I wouldn't mind closing at some point...

The idea of NOT moderation is pretty simple. A comment that was moderated as 'Insightful' would get a new option in moderation controls, "Not Insightful". This would replace "Overrated". The reason we have overrated in the first place is that sometimes a comment is insightful... but the moderator thinks "But its not THAT insightful..." but they are not comfortable calling it a Troll because the comment is well intentioned. Replacing Overrated and Underrated with NOT moderation means that we can meta moderate that decision. "Is this comment insightful?" or "Is this comment NOT insightful?" Similiarly a moderator could call that Score:4, Funny comment 'Not Funny' and knock it down a peg, without calling it flamebait, or shirking meta moderation.

It would be relatively easy to actually implement this, although we're pretty busy on this end with several other projects... one that users will hopefully see soon is a slightly revamped User Info page... I designed a new-and-improved User Comment History table which should go a long way towards improving the readability of those pages. Whats strangest to me is the fact that this particular HTML hasn't really changed since we first wrote it 5 plus years ago. Its kinda amazing I didn't get around to doing this a long time ago. Anyway Tim has started work on this stuff and I'm looking forward to seeing it in a code refresh soon.

This discussion was created by CmdrTaco (1) for Friends and Friends of Friends only, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Weddings, Vandals, and NOT Moderation More

Weddings, Vandals, and NOT Moderation

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  • How would you deal with redundant loops with NOT though? It seems to me that you could get recursive NOT NOT NOT.... that in the end could get moderated properly, but following the logic could get confusing. If you were to take the perspective that the end result (mod score) were all that mattered, this may work out just fine, but it seems that this could get confusing for some who are actually doing the moderating. For instance, what if the first mod ranked something as NOT? What would that mean? So,
      1. 'How would you deal with redundant loops with NOT though?' I wouldn't. There is only 'Insightful' and 'Not Insightful'. There is no NOT NOT NOT. That is stupid.
      2. 'what if the first mod ranked something as NOT?' It wouldn't. NOT moderation would only appear in response to another moderation. A moderation could not tag a comment as 'Not Insightful' unless another moderator had already declared it 'Insightful'

      I have 2 other outstanding variables on the Not M

      • There is no NOT NOT NOT. That is stupid.

        Exactly.

        We could conceivably only allow the 'Not' moderation to exist for the moderation type that provides the label. So a Score:4 Insightful comment would ONLY have 'Not Insightful' as an option.

        I like this, but of course one could make the argument that separate categories of moderation are useless unless there is some other meta-data that you are tracking that ranks users according to their "types" of moderation. Given that Karma appears to go up with +1
        • I don't think we need new mod categories for these types of moderations... a 'Not' just negates a moderation.

          There is a lot to be said for a simple + and - moderation system, I still fill that saying a comment is 'Good' or 'Bad' isn't nearly as useful to the end user as saying it is 'Insightful' or 'Flamebait'. But yes, Insightful and Interesting, while they do mean different things, are rarely used appropriately, and rather are both just used as a generic 'This comment is good'. When I rework moderatio

          • But yes, Insightful and Interesting, while they do mean different things, are rarely used appropriately,

            The noise on Slashdot has gone up a bit over the last little while, so while less democratic, (not in the political sense) how about restricting moderator status even more to those with say, higher karma scores or some other metric of contribution to the Slashdot community? This might help to reduce the pool of moderators to those who might be more discriminating in their decisions and resolve some of
            • I think the 'Noise' in the Slashdot moderation system is more a factor of the number of points in the system, and the Score:5 cap... and not so much of a factor of who gets points. 80-90% of our moderators do a good job, and I think thats pretty good. But it's pretty easy for a decent comment to go from Score:2 (karma bonus) to Score:4 or 5. Especially if the post is early enough in a discussion that the moderators don't have much else to choose from.

              The solution to the 'Noise' is planned. I need to r

              • Sorry to keep asking questions about this, but what about simply delaying any moderation to a discussion for a couple of hours? This will eliminate karma whoring, and the problem with early posts getting all the mod points while allowing a more complete discourse to happen before moderators begin assigning "value" to a comment.

                • Moderation exists to benefit the readers. Your suggestion would mean the vast majority of readers (who load stories within a couple hours of them being posted) would read Slashdot without any moderation. Kinda defeats the point.

                  Slashdot's readers and posters operate in real-time. Moderation has to keep up.

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