Ask Slashdot: Going Beyond Comment Threads? 393
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."
Three paths (Score:4, Interesting)
Full identification like Facebook, moderated semi-anonymity like slashdot, full-on unfiltered anonymous chatter. Each has fans and faults.
So make three tabs and call it a day.
I mean maybe I'm missing something, but is there a rule that there has to be one best way?
Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well (Score:3, Interesting)
You can't get away from that anywhere humans are involved, but Slashdot really does work better than most sites in that regard. I mean try expressing even a slightly conservative opinion on reddit.
DO stamp out trolls (Score:4, Interesting)
Trolls may be a problem. Personnally, I think that special interests groups present a more formidable challenge.
Once they target a thread on an organized attack, either by themselves or through a PR agency too happy to cater to their needs, there is little that a few, by definition disorganized, moderators can do. The tone heats up in minutes, you can see that any of the seasoned intelligent commentators stay away from such threads. Sometimes, they back off from the site entirely.
Slashdot has a pretty impressive record, and the administrators surely have valuable experience in this regard. Even then, from time to time, you see the sturdy moderating system collapse under an persistent assault. This is always a disheartening experience for me, to see bullies have their... I mean our, cake.
In these times, I always wonder what we could do to prevent this from taking place. I do think that an awful lot is at stake: public interest, to say it in two words.
Everybody choose their own view. (Score:5, Interesting)
How about everyone getting to choose their own way of tagging and displaying every comment and user with an optional added numeric modifier for every tag?
Some days I might want to see (or hide) for example what the most popular "+3 Constipated"(and up) comments from anyone modded at least "+2 United-Fruit-apologist" by self described "Anarcho-Marshmellowians". At other times I might choose something less ridiculous, involving tags like "Conservative", "Insightful" and the like.
One could also choose to view comments in the style of reddit or slashdot (except maybe everyone would always have points, so the slashdot style would be filtered by mostly most popular moderators calculated in some way.)
Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well (Score:4, Interesting)
Why should we assume that there's any value at all to having a "dynamic" discussion/commenting section on general news sites?
Part of the charm of Slashdot is the unique quality of the users (at least those with UIDs lower than about 1750000). The stories don't matter as much as the "dynamic" discussions. And the worst behavior of jerks (like me) is kept to a minimum by the modding system. It works because the stories are not the main draw of the site.
On a general news site, where people go for information, there's really little value in any "dynamic" discussion except to let us know the level of stupidity among the readers. If you don't believe me, go read the comments section of your local newspaper. Don't spend too much time doing that though, or you may become afraid to ever leave your house.
Comment sections for general news sites are pretty bad ideas. I don't believe developing better commenting systems is going to change that.
Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well (Score:2, Interesting)
No, it doesn't. Groupthink mentalities foster persecution complexes, so even the groupthinkers agree with the GP.
Then You're Not Paying Attention (Score:4, Interesting)
And I've never seen anything even vaguely pro-copyright get above a 2.
Right here, in at least two [slashdot.org] stories [slashdot.org] there are many counters to your claim. GPL is a form of copyright and people demand that be protected and be upheld.
I think what you are complaining about is that everyone on Slashdot is upset with "The Mickey Mouse Act" and is disgusted that lobbyists determine how long copyright stands so now it's an unreasonable length of time. And yeah, anyone defending that deserves to be modded down. But you're not going to find anybody other than massive studios defending that because why would an artist care that their work is copyrighted past their death? Hell, I would demand it be public domain so that more people could enjoy my work.
You can post positions counter to "group think" but you have to pose them intelligently and try to achieve a neutral point of view when you do it. An example might be proposing copyright reform down to twenty years but enforcing it even more rigorously to ensure that the artist truly gets royalties for those twenty years. Swearing at people and calling them thieves only illustrates you don't understand the nature of copyright infringement nor how the biggest most powerful players have the public by the balls and all politicians in their pockets.
I assure you on copyright and patents, I have often posted comments asking people what they thought a responsible length of time was or asking them how biotech firms should recoup their losses on searching for/developing drugs if they should not be able to patent them.
Re:Then You're Not Paying Attention (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe I'm reading a bit too much into it, but the Twain quote does kind of sound like he's simultaneously getting in a jab at the dim-witted. How can I phrase this... it's like he's saying "this is so long a term that it would even take care of your children for life - so even the greediest fool couldn't object to it." In which case it's still *whoosh*-ing over heads a century after his death.
I mean, think about the choice of words for a moment here: "children". For fifty years? :) That's long enough for a child born after your death to reach full adulthood and then have children of their own also grow up to full adulthood. Even if I take him fully literally, I'd have to conclude that he considered life+20 to be fully sufficient. (And that's not inconsistent with the realities of his time - copyright was 28 years plus a 14 year renewal until the year before he died, when the renewal part was extended to 28. Considering he lived into his 70s, at least some of his work entered public domain during his lifetime. So I could completely believe he both wanted it longer while also mocking people who wanted it to be damn-near-eternal).
Re:The Slashdot system seems to work pretty well (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously Slashdot has a liberal bent
That's funny, just a few posts up in this thread [slashdot.org], someone else said:
And just try expressing an anti capitalist or critical of capitalism/libertarian/market opinion on slashdot. Slashdot is a bastion of free marketeers, libertarians and virulent 'anti left'.
This is what I find interesting about Slashdot; people on either side of the aisle claim that it holds the opposite of their own bias. I find that that generally means someone has struck a radical middle ground, standing for something which both supposedly opposing sides are jointly against. In Slashdot's case that's mostly simple libertarianism, but now and then I see an opinion not so easily categorized, which are the real gems here.
Now, Slashdot is not one person with a single coherent opinion, so it's hard to say what "our" collective opinion is. But that there is enough going on that both liberals and conservatives find the discourse challenging their opinions means that there's some real intelligent dialogue happening here, and that's what I still like about this place.