Ask Slashdot: Going Beyond Comment Threads?

asa writes "The Knight Foundation and Mozilla are running a series of news innovation challenges. The goal: get the world's smartest hackers thinking about how news organizations can harness the open web. The current challenge is all about comment threads. This seems like the perfect question to pose to Slashdotters: how would you foster more dynamic spaces for online news discussion? How would you preserve the context of online discussions and stamp out trolls? All ideas, technical, practical or impractical are welcome. What technologies (federation, atomic commenting, moderation, algorithms) would you employ? What are the immutable social dynamics? Knight and Mozilla will work with the best challenge entrants to deploy the solutions in newsrooms at Al Jazeera English, the BBC, boston.com, The Guardian, and Zeit Online. Submissions are open until May 22nd."

The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well

[elrous0]

People can say whatever they want, moderation points stamp out trolls and assign relative values to posts (not always the best system, but not bad), etc. Of course, for it to work, you have to assemble a pretty smart/knowledgeable/literate bunch of people (that's the real trick). And you would still have to avoid kdawson stories, of course. Not a perfect system by a longshot, but one of the best.

Most of the systems I've seen on news sites for commenting have ranged from "suck ass" to "MAJORLY suck ass." Moderators are either too tough (nothing controversial gets through) of too lenient (leading to comment threads loaded with spam). Just go look at the "Wired" story comment sections sometime. Half of them don't work at all, the other half are loaded with spam, and some of their stories don't seem to let you comment at all. And that's from a *tech* magazine.

News is about trolling for eyeballs.

[djl4570]

News is about trolling for eyeballs. The most sensational, shocking, scandalous and salacious stories attract the most eyeballs which means more advertising revenue. If it bleeds it leads. How can trolls be stamped out when the news media culture is rooted in a form of trolling?

Re:take any apple related thread

[Freultwah]

Quite the opposite seems to be true: if you dare to say anything about Apple that ranges from neutral to good (for example, I dare you post a comment where you're critical of hardware support in Linux and mention that you elected to go with Apple instead, because in your line of work, it lets you get said work done way more easily), you'll be instantly labelled an Apple fanboi and would probably be modded as such if the site so permitted. Just head to the most recent story about Apple being evil for not releasing latest WebKit LGPL code and browse through the comments.

Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well

[Cogita]

To be technical, GPL is copyleft, not copyright.

To be more technical, Copyleft is copyright, just a permissive and viral license.