tomhudson's Journal: Tracking meta-moderation behaviour

warning: if your tin-foil hat is already too tight, this might give you a migrane ...

Anyone else notice the little boxes that get checked if you either "see the quote in context" or go to the story link to read the article before meta-modding?

Presumably, they're checking to see who is just blowing off meta-moderation, and who's serious. It might be a good thing, except that you won't be checking the context if you've already read the story and recognize the quote. Oh, well, every solution has the seeds for another problem or two.

Of course, they may have been doing this for a while w/o the check boxes giving visible feedback to us ... considering they had to test it, my guess is that meta-mods have been tracked for the last 6 months or so (remember the last big "we have to update the structure of our databse" thingee).

Tracking meta-moderation behaviour

[maja33]

I always felt a bit guilty for using "see the quote in context" before metamodding. I find it difficult to judge comments in 'stand alone mode'. No wonder I have mod points every week ;-).

Huh?

[turg]

I think you might need an adjustment in tinfoil-hat-size yourself.

What makes you think that this is the purpose of the checkbox? There is no need at all for the checkbox in order to achieve the tracking you describe.

Also, there is rarely a need to see the context or the article to metamod properly. If it sounds like a reasonable part of a discussion and received an upmod, that's okay. If it's an obvious troll (e.g. goatse, GNAA, etc.) and received a downmod, that's okay. Those two rules cover 95% of the cas

Re:Huh?

[turg]

Also, the metamod instructions at the top of the page still discourage the user from using the links to context and original discussion.

Looking at the HTML, it appears that these checkboxes are just CSS magic and not part of the form that is submitted.

Some experimentation: Right click on the link, copy the URL, and paste into the adress bar of a different tab and load the page that way. Return to the original tab and the box is checked. Does CSS or javascript have access to the browser history?

Re:Huh?

[tomhudson]

Yes, javascript has access to your browser history ...

As far as the tinfoil hat, I put that comment in italics to show that it wasn't to be taken too seriously. As I pointed out, they've been tracking this behaviour for at least 6 montsh (the last database structure update).

If they find a way to use it to track down mod and metamod abuse, there's no problem. The problem I saw is that there are a lot of stories I don't have to check the context b/c I recognize both the story and the quote. On the other

Re:Huh?

[turg]

Metamoderation has nothing to do with your opinion of the quality of the comment -- it's a question of whether there's no way that anyone could have genuinely believed that this comment should be moderated up/down. Context is rarely required for this.

The only moderation which generally requires context is "redundant" and I usually just skip those.

Especially as the instructions explicitly say that seeing the context is not required (and not recommended), I don't see that this has anything to do with metamod

Re:Huh?

[tomhudson]

One good example - If the person hasn't bothered to quote the parent comment they're responding to, you have to look at the context.

Other times, they'll quote just a portion of the parent comment, out of context ... then who's trolling who?

Either way, to be fair, I look at the context. I make a point of ignoring how others modded it, or what the current mod is, in the interest of fairness.

Re:Huh?

[turg]

One good example - If the person hasn't bothered to quote the parent comment they're responding to, you have to look at the context.

Why? I think you're missing the point of metamod.

Metamoderating is not re-moderating. It's not about how you would have moderated it.

The moderation system was begun because people were taking advantage of the no-censorship policy to flood slashdot with crap or extremely inflamatory trolls. Metamod was begun because people were downmodding non-trolls and upmoding trolls. An upmo

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Huh?

[tomhudson]

There'll be times when I'm not sure how to M2 something ... I'll look at it, say "ok, someone grinding their personal axe here..." but then I check the context and "maybe not ..." In those cases, they get a pass.

Ditto for subjects where I just don't know enough to be able to decide whether the original mod was a fair one or not ...

What's really missing is a comment box for when the original moderator moderates - it would get rid of a LOT of ambiguity in the sense of "wtf was going through your head to r

Re:Huh?

[turg]

I guess we disagree. I'd say false statements of fact should be corrected by discussion in the thread, not by moderation. Using moderation when the problem with the comment could be addressed by a response in the thread is moderation abuse and the root of the problem with moderation.

Re:Huh?

[plover]

Disclaimer: I usually start metamodding from the viewpoint that the moderator should be modding "up" not "down". I frequently disagree with the "troll" and "off-topic" mods, because those are often used to smack-down an opposing viewpoint instead of engaging in discussion.

I do agree with your principles. If the topic of discussion matches the topic of the post, it's not off topic (even if it's a BSD story and someone trots out the old "BSD is dying" joke.) If they are modded insightful, well, that's a

Re:Huh?

[tomhudson]

One of the problems about trying to be fair is that you *know* the other side doesn't give a rats' ass and wouldn't hesitate to try to use M2 to extract revenge/blood/whatever. Still, that's their problem.

The REAL probelm is that there are sometimes some darn interesting discussions, and the next thing you know, you've blown 20 minutes on a couple of threads.

Re:Huh?

[tomhudson]

I'm not missing the point of meta-moderation. As I originally pointed out, I don't moderate based on whether I agree with the comment. I moderate based on whether the comment could be a resonable response, keeping in mind the usual stuff - such as "comment moderated Interesting, its Funny, so the mod is fair, since they're obviously working around the brain-damaged no-karma-for-funny post).

A good example was a comment that looked like pure flame-bait ... until I checked the context, and it was actually t

Re:Huh?

[arb]

Okay, JavaScript has access to browser history and can affect the display based on that,

Javascript doesn't have access to the browser history - at least not since the very early days of Javascript. There is a history object, but all you can do with that in Javascript is navigate backward/forward - you can't actually see the URLs.

All that seems to be happening is just a little CSS trickery using the "visited" psuedo-attribute of the links. (This explains why sometimes you may have seen an article, but the ch

Re:Huh?

[turg]

That's what I've been saying. This has nothing to do with tracking anything.

Re:Huh?

[tomhudson]

they don't actually need to see your history to check the checkbox ... just know that you clicked on a link (at least that's how I would do it - on the onmusedown event handler)

all moderation is good moderation

[weierstrass]

i decided recently to meta-mod everything as 'Fair'. who am i to say that other people weren't right to moderate comments the way they saw fit? i've certainly done enough moderations based on whims / agreeing or not w subjective opinion / the desire to piss people off.. in some cases just modding down random comments by my foes.

i think the checkboxes are a feature in a wider context. if you open a comment in it's own page, say because it was beneath your threshold, when you go back to the main conversation

I noticed them too

[Ashtead]

Having read a front-page story, a day or so later I got to metamod posts from that same story, and for these metamods, the check-box for the story was already ticked, and the link indicated that I had previously visited that story.

Seems to me, that the check-box just turns on when the link has been visited before, in parallell with the changing of the link color. Whether this is the case or there is something more nefarious behind this, I don't know, and I don't really care. I guess someone will figure t

Re:I noticed them too

[tomhudson]

I saw some boxes that weren't checked on posts that were archived, but that I had read. Stranger and stranger ... or maybe I'm wrong. I'll check it out more carefully next time.

Re:I noticed them too

[turg]

Stories you had read, but you hadn't visited that exact URL, so it wasn't in your browser history.