Ask Slashdot: How Can We Improve Slashdot? 1839
Hi all. Most of you are already aware that Slashdot was sold by DHI Group last week, and I very much enjoyed answering questions and reading feedback in the comments of that announcement story. There's no doubt that the Slashdot community is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and prolific communities on the web.
I wanted to use this opportunity to get a discussion going on how we can improve Slashdot moving forward. I am not talking about a full re-design that will detract from the original spirit of Slashdot, but rather: user experience, bug fixes, and feature improvements that are requested from actual /. users. We appreciated many of your suggestions in the story announcing the sale, and I have taken note of those suggestions. This story will serve as a more master list for feature requests and improvement suggestions.
We welcome any and all suggestions. Some ideas mentioned in the sale story were, in no particular order: Unicode support, direct messaging, increased cap on comment scores, put more weight on firehose voting to determine which stories make the front page, reduced time required between comments, and many more. We'd love a chance to discuss these suggestions and feature improvements and pros and cons here before we bring them back to our team for implementation.
I wanted to use this opportunity to get a discussion going on how we can improve Slashdot moving forward. I am not talking about a full re-design that will detract from the original spirit of Slashdot, but rather: user experience, bug fixes, and feature improvements that are requested from actual /. users. We appreciated many of your suggestions in the story announcing the sale, and I have taken note of those suggestions. This story will serve as a more master list for feature requests and improvement suggestions.
We welcome any and all suggestions. Some ideas mentioned in the sale story were, in no particular order: Unicode support, direct messaging, increased cap on comment scores, put more weight on firehose voting to determine which stories make the front page, reduced time required between comments, and many more. We'd love a chance to discuss these suggestions and feature improvements and pros and cons here before we bring them back to our team for implementation.
You must be new here (Score:5, Funny)
here's no doubt that the Slashdot community is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and prolific communities on the web.
You must be new here.
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot might not be objectively good, but compared to plenty of other places it may as well be the pinnacle of internet civilization.
If there were honestly something better in a general sense, there would be far fewer people here.
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't want to toot the site's horn too much, but have you looked at other communities on the internet lately? Slashdot might not be objectively good, but compared to plenty of other places it may as well be the pinnacle of internet civilization. If there were honestly something better in a general sense, there would be far fewer people here.
Heh. Remind me of the comments I've seen in assorted places, to the effect that the intelligence of any group of humans is an inverse function of the number of members.
There's dispute about just what the inverse function is. This might be settled, in a sense, by the easy observation that the large body of internet groups show wide variation in visible intelligence, and it's fairly easy to show that this variation is very poorly correlated with a group's size. The conclusion is that there's not just one inverse function between population size and intelligence, there are many such functions.
This opens up what could be an interesting research proposal: Can we collect enough detailed data on populations, including not just their sizes and apparent intelligences, but various other quanitites that might be measurable (and which the groups' leaders will tell us)? If so, maybe we can infer useful information about why some online groups have the intelligence levels that they do.
Or maybe it's all just a hopeless mess. The value of the current IQ tests gives us little hope. But we do have something they don't: many petabytes of comments on all topics by billions of humans, most of it backed up so that repeated access is possible.
OK; it probably really is a hopeless mess. But think of how useful it could be if we could give discussion leaders useful guidelines for improving the intelligence of discussion groups. OK, with things like politics and religion, they'd just use it to drive the level down, but for most other subject, it could lead to an improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio.
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You must be new here (Score:4, Interesting)
You must be new here.
This. There are several missing important moderations. "You must be new here" should be one of them. Along with "+1 Troll" (or "+1 look at that") a positive mod for things which are sufficiently bad to be worth reading.
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Interesting)
You must be new here.
This. There are several missing important moderations. "You must be new here" should be one of them. Along with "+1 Troll" (or "+1 look at that") a positive mod for things which are sufficiently bad to be worth reading.
The simplest way to get this is to separate the qualitative from the quantitative i.e. have one drop-down with the score (+ or -) and one with the qualifier. More or less the way metamod works now, but with all the options all the time.
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't disagree more. A "disagree" mod that didn't affect a posts score would be pointless. What's the point of disagreeing if you can't post a contrary argument or idea?
As for if the "disagree" mod has a -1 value, down voting is in essence silencing a person as I imagine a lot of users don't browse at the 0 score level. A person shouldn't be silenced because you disagree with them. Meanwhile most would agree that relegating those who post Obama erotica or the like to a 0 score is fine as they're not contributing to the conversation in a positive way. Sure, some people miss use the tools Slashdot provides to drown out Trolls and Flamers as a means of stifling legitimate ideas or arguments but that doesnt mean we have to legitimize the process by giving it an actual mod title.
I doubt the modding system will ever be perfect but providing a "disagree" mod would only serve to stifle discussion and debate if it was scored and would be just pointless if it wasn't.
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Interesting)
Having a "+1 disagree" would work, though...
All the three -1s are used to silence opponents, and some use sockpuppet accounts.
It would be nice if the new and improved slashdot could do some log file analysis, and at least strike down on patterns of posters that quickly get +1 while the parent gets -1. Once in a while can happen, but there are some posters where this happens far too often for it to be chance. Statistical anomalies should be easily discoverable.
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Insightful)
I have mod points right now. I could easily have downvoted this. BUT there are enough people who think you are insightful to mod you up and simply modding people DOES NOT add to the conversation.
If you disagree with a comment
Post. A. Reply.
Do NOT stifle discussion just because you disagree with someone. I've modded people up who I think are horribly wrong about something but they make a good point and are adding to the discussion in a meaningful and non-toxic way so they are free to hold different opinions.
I cannot say this strongly enough. DO NOT DOWNMOD JUST BECAUSE YOU DISAGREE! We need to be free to disagree with each other and hold opinions that differ from the norm so that we can talk about this stuff. If we just downmod people we disagree with this whole site becomes an echo chamber of whatever the predominate pre-held opinion is. We should never encourage people to mod IN ANY DIRECTION (up or down) simply because of agreement or the lack thereof. Mod based on the informative nature, the insightful nature, the funny nature, etc. of the post. NOT HOW MUCH IT COMPLIES WITH YOUR WORLDVIEW!
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Interesting)
Add a disagree mod.
I disagree. (You see what I did there.)
If you disagree, respond and explain why.
I strongly believe however that there should be a "-1, Factually Incorrect" mod. There are simply too many cases of someone posting something like "You can't install your own apps on MacOS X," or "Restriction on drones are prohibited by the Constitution," or "Android has 95% of the smartphone market," or "Abandonware is not legally copyrighted anymore," or "Hitler was a religious Catholic." And many of these comments are rated up - leave aside my somewhat joking political examples - because the comment sounds informative but mods don't know any better. The comment is usually followed by a stream of "OMG you are demonstrably, factually wrong" posts but often those are invisible to those browsing at higher mod levels and the net effect is to present a demonstrably incorrect statement as true.
These statements aren't necessarily trolls (again, except maybe the political ones) or flame bait, and they aren't just overrated. They are simply wrong in some way that could be factually demonstrated or logically proven. There really does need to be some mod for "your factual claim is provably incorrect." Preferably followed up by some comments citing counterclaims to the contrary.
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Insightful)
"-1 Factually Incorrect" would be massively abused. Want to talk about the gender pay gap? -1 Factually Incorrect. Global warming is/isn't real? -1 Factually Incorrect. Renewables can provide base load. -1 Factually Incorrect. Nuclear is safe. -1 Factually Incorrect.
If something is factually incorrect, just post a response explaining why. Responding is always better than moderation, because then your response can be evaluated and moderated on its merits and people have a counter view to judge the parent comment by.
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Insightful)
We have disagree, it is called "overrated."
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Insightful)
I will give the Slashdot community credit in one area: it is possible to express an unpopular perspective without being moderated into oblivion. State your perspective clearly, and you may even be moderated up. That's difficult to find elsewhere.
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Insightful)
You could improve the mod system a bit by having it detect "controversial" comments - those with many both up and down mods (just find the statistical outliers). Those should always be kept visible. We need downmods to self-police garbage posts, GNAA posts, APK, and so on. But we need someway to prevent a comment being censored if 10 people mod it up and 12 people mod it down - any such comment is interesting and should be kept visible, rather than becoming a scale of the political leanings of the mods. Maybe mark it in some way and disable further moderation.
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, if enough people flag a post as garbage:
Run an automated check vs a list of common garbage posts; if there is a high % of match (like a plagiarism detector), remove the post or remove the content of the post.
If it is not on the list of common garbage posts but it has a large number of flags, perhaps it can be reviewed by either moderators or employees to determine if it should be added to the garbage list.
My thought is that if less eyeballs will see the garbage posts they lose their ability to troll and the quantity of them will decrease.
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Interesting)
"controversial" comments
The comments are a symptom. One easily ameliorated by the existing comment moderation system once the cause is addressed.
The real place "controversy" needs to be addressed is the stories. No amount of comment moderation will suffice to deal with the squabbles created by mdsolar's anti-nook crap, global warming click bait and gamer gate grievance mongering, among many other sad themes that have damaged Slashdot. That stuff needs to stop so the malcontents that live for it go away and let the place heal.
And no, just turning over story selection to the (existing) crowd will not work. They'll squander their employers time indulging their favorite cause and keep feeding in the same click bait. What is needed is a few people with good judgement and some patience to allow time for recovery.
As I write this it occurred to me to survey the last few days worth of stories. Except for the Clinton coin toss mistake — which promptly descended into a giant flame fest — it looks pretty good. Keep that up, add some more Linux/BSD/MCU/etc. related stories and something good could happen.
If I'm right and there really has been an editorial change, keep it to yourselves. Talking about it will just produce a giant sh*t storm.
Re:The moderationg system needs an overhaul. (Score:5, Insightful)
You must really hate mobile users with a band cap if you want all comments shown by default.
Downmodding serves a purpose, and abuse is corrected by the "intelligence of the herd." Besides, if you want all comments shown by default, you should also be browsing at -1. There's absolutely nothing to prevent the individual user making that choice - but it should remain a choice.
As for identifying moderators - your " If somebody's deemed responsible enough to moderate, then they should be willing to have their name attached to any and all moderation they do - by the same logic, you should have to be logged in to post any comment. Furthermore, by that logic, nicks or nyms shouldn't be allowed, but almost everyone hides behind a nym. And you're posting AC - hypocrite much?
"When it comes to abusive moderation, even one incident is one too many." - come off it. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and really, I've been mod-bombed, and you don't see me getting upset about it. It's just people expressing an opinion, not deciding as to whether to launch WW3.
Posting limits need to STAY. The quickest way to get fewer active users s to allow anyone to crap-flood. 30 posts in 4 hours and 50 posts a day is usually enough. Yes, it's frustrating to hit those limits when you have several heated discussions going on, but let's keep some perspective here - it's only the internet.
Moderation needs to STAY. It's one of the ways to keep users engaged.
Several of your points are so obviously detrimental that it's obvious you're just trolling.
Re:The moderationg system needs an overhaul. (Score:5, Insightful)
Think carefully about the AC's motivations. He's not offering to help you or Slashdot.
Re:The moderationg system needs an overhaul. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason for two decades of success on a fickle internet.
Re:The moderationg system needs an overhaul. (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. A higher moderation cap is fine, and better backend tools to block persistent spam-trolls would be nice. And obviously we want unicode. But let's not go too far and end up with a WSYWIG interface or whatnot. ;) If I post a piece of C++ code or whatnot in a conversation about C++, it should post without complaining. The "basic nature" of the comment system is fine, it just has long-overdue "maintenance" to conduct.
On the other hand, I'm not a fan of the profile design of "modern" Slashdot. First off, it's archaic, with blanks for things like AIM handles and the like. The boxes on the right display information but don't have easy links to change it, you have to browse through an overly elaborate profile menu. And on smartphones it prioritizes a bunch of silly "awards" taking up the whole profile space, rather than one one generally most wants to see, their comment history so that they can keep up with discussions that they've been involved in. Remember, the key design feature people want in mobile versions is they behave like the normal website, just to display properly. The last thing people want is functionality-limited, strange-behaving interfaces. And if the user wants the full version, it should be easy to click over to it, and it should remember the user's choice.
As for stories, the biggest complaints people have are 1) the story is inappropriate (not something Slashdotters are generally interested in, something that seems like shameless advertising disguised as a story, etc); 2) the source is unpopular (such as Forbes); and 3) it's a duplicate. Rather than having people complain about this in the comments, it'd be nice if you had a simple way people could report stories that could lead to timely corrections. Story removal should be done in analogous to removing a symlink - the story's webpage should still exist, with all of the comments, but it shouldn't appear linked from the front page.
There are some squabbles that you're just not going to win at. For example, people who yell at each other as being "SJWs" or "MRAs" and blame all of the world's evils on the other group. Stopping that sort of thing isn't really your job. But stopping people like the APK spammer - people who nobody want around - yeah, feel free to do that. :)
As for your core business, advertising - people generally are fine with it so long as you "play by the rules". That is, stop the malware, don't allow anything that relies on deception, anything offensive, popover ads, etc. A button over the ad to block further from a certain source that the user doesn't like would be nice. And of course you should allow people to subscribe to an ad-free service by paying a small regular fee. Another example of "not playing by the rules" that you should avoid would be secretly inserting sponsored stories and disguising them as news. People really don't like that sort of thing. But legitimate advertising, even targeted advertising... hey, you have a business to run and sites cost money, we understand.
Be good to us, we'll be good to you. :)
Re:The moderationg system needs an overhaul. (Score:5, Insightful)
More: a lot of the Slashdot crowd is hardcore on privacy issues. So you should make it a policy to not retain any more information than is necessary to operate the site - for example, no IP logs or anything like that (except to the point needed for spam fighting). As for data gathering for advertising purposes, that's going to be a controversial one - as an ad company, you probably have interest in that, but a lot of Slashdotters are going to be uncomfortable with that. If you do plan to pursue that route, may I suggest a middle ground? Make it optional, enable it by default if you must, but make it easy for those who care to shut it off.
(I'm not among those who care, but I know there are plenty of people here who do)
Re:The moderationg system needs an overhaul. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The moderationg system needs an overhaul. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The moderationg system needs an overhaul. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's absolutely no reason for higher mod scores except to have a "popularity contest," and that's not what good moderation is about
Actually, being able to easily see the best comments in a 1000-comment thread would be useful. Other commenting platforms have this feature and it works really well. One thing it does is make the time and subthread of posting completely irrelevant. Currently, +5 posts at the bottom of a story are read far less often than those at the top, I believe.
The key point is the 'popularity contest' and 'best' part of it. If the moderation process is unable to provide accurate ratings, the final 'ranking' will be inaccurate and unusable. Otherwise, it makes sense to include a 'sort by highest rated (post/thread)' functionality.
Re:The moderationg system needs an overhaul. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, clearly labeled slashvertisements are fine by me too. But no ads disguised as regular stories.
Re:The moderationg system needs an overhaul. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no doubt that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Used to be. Can you return it to that?
Re:There's no doubt that... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The topic selection. Far too much gunk
2. The comments. Every single thread devolves into many, many political bullshit rants. Democrat idiots, Republican assholes, liberal, conservative, Socialist, Communist, Fundies blah blah......
#1 you can maybe fix
#2 not so much
News for nerds, stuff that matters.
Re:There's no doubt that... (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, what I see i: 2. The comments. Every single thread devolves into many, many political bullshit rants. Democrat idiots, Republican assholes, liberal, conservative, Socialist, Communist, Fundies blah blah...... #1 you can maybe fix #2 not so much
One of the aspects of this that I've actually seen some partial results for: The current thread layout tends to make it difficult to get beyond the first or sometimes second reply's threads, which fill up many screens, and it's hard to wade through it all to find the non-BS sections of the message trees. It could be a lot more useful if the Nth top-level replies were easier to find, and then also look at the 2nd-level replies to each. I don't think I've seen any really great solutions to this, though I've seen a few that seem to work a bit better than what /. does. Anyway, the problem can be seen in a lot of discussions by starting at the bottom, and noting that most of the messages there have few ratings or replies, meaning that hardly anyone has read them.
Of course, it's possible that something like this is available in the New! Improved! /. UI, and I just haven't recognized it. If so, maybe some more documentation is in order. It's also possible that just adding several more selectable numbers in addition to rating, depth, karma, etc., and provide some easily-accessible config settings so we can tweak them all until we
each find a setting combo that we like.
Re:There's no doubt that... (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, "rote talking-point exchanges." My kingdom for an Edit button.
Re:There's no doubt that... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason why there isn't an edit button.
A very good one too:
You don't get to post an inflammatory comment, and then change it after the fact, making your esteemed opponent appear like an asshole for replying in kind. And similar other variations, where people change what they said, and not just fixing typos.
If (and I still don't think it's a good idea) implementing an edit button, at least make it only possible to submit an edit until someone either replied or voted on the comment.
Re:There's no doubt that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unicode support. This has been an open sore for years.
More generally, at the risk of sounding snarky, copy some of the stuff Soylent News has done, e.g. ability to moderate individual posts rather than having to scroll to the bottom and moderate all, ability to moderate in a discussion you've contributed to, etc. Soylent was forked to fix various Slashdot problems, and they've done a pretty good job of addressing the major issues.
Re:There's no doubt that... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can already moderate individual posts.
Permitting moderation AND posting in the same story is not a good idea.
The only change I see necessary is that metamoderation needs to be restored to its original purpose/function. The "new" metamoderation never made any sense whatsoever.
I'd like to explore ways of helping Slashdot. (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree with that. Unfortunately, there are people who use Slashdot comments as a way of acting out their anger and wasting everyone's time. I have some ideas about how to help improve that situation.
I'd like to help Slashdot, as a volunteer.
Slashdot has a higher percentage of stories interesting to me than any other site I've been able to find. To choose stories interesting to technically-knowledgeable people, it is necessary to understand their sub-culture. Dice Holdings didn't seem to have anyone who even began to understand that culture.
I've seen ads on Slashdot from IBM, for example. The person who wrote those ads obviously didn't understand how to get technically-knowledgeable people interested. One opportunity for Slashdot managers is to help technology companies improve the quality of their advertising. Too often ads are designed and written by departments that have no one interested in the product. Better ads would draw more customers and would make Slashdot more popular with advertisers.
I was an advertising copywriter for technology ad agencies in Los Angeles. This is an ad I wrote to get business: Professional writing is more than just writing. [futurepower.net] (That sentence is a Service Mark.)
Let me know if there is some way to have a discussion about how I might be able to help.
Stop Auto-Refresh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stop Auto-Refresh. (Score:4, Informative)
good start whipslash (Score:5, Insightful)
whipslash, you are doing yeoman's work...
I know absolutely nothing about the company that just bought slashdot, nothing, but judging by your comments on this post you understand the slashdot system and are trying to fix it by tweaking things like firehose weighting...I'm glad you're not trying to re-invent the site.
I've relied on slashdot for *no bullshit* and "see-it-here-first" techie news...what they call "stuff that matters"
More than anything, slashdot for me has been educational. I learn about the issue reading through the comments. Haha, yeah lol, there are trolls and idiots but I just ignored that...the good comments here can be from phd's researching the topic or the engineers who actually code the AI gadget in the article under discussion!
I've been reading since 2001, but didn't even log in to comment until 2006, because I honestly didn't think I had anything to contribute because the level of discussion was so high and relevant. True story!
As long as slashdot has the user-base and maximizes the capabilities of the slashdot CMS to foster productive discussion this will be one of the best techie news sites anywhere!
Start with removing the malware from SourceForge (Score:5, Informative)
SourceForge still packages malware in its users distributables. Fix that first.
Re:Start with removing the malware from SourceForg (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Start with removing the malware from SourceForg (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Start with removing the malware from SourceForg (Score:5, Informative)
Not enough content (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not enough content (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not enough content (Score:5, Insightful)
Should we weight firehose voting more heavily so that highly voted stories make the front page regardless of an editor?
What I'd like is an option in preferences to have the highest firehose voted stories included on the front page. I already get preview stories highlighted in red, maybe have the five highest ranked firehose stories highlighted in yellow.
The temptation will be to push them as a default option, but resist that temptation. Advertise it like the firehose is advertised (and there ought to be a link on the footer all the time) but don't make it the default for established users and only make it the default for new users if adoption and feedback are consistently positive.
Re:Not enough content (Score:5)
--Sounds good to me. I've been here since like 1998 and only started getting into the Firehose when I added it to the right-side bar last year or so. Making people more aware of it is probably a good idea.
Re:Not enough content (Score:4, Interesting)
Try a few things out and see what sticks or what people respond to. At worst, something doesn't gain traction and you move on to something else instead.
Re:Not enough content (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not enough content (Score:5, Funny)
Second that. Sometimes it's 3 or 4 hours between new stories on the front page - on a work day!
If you were working you wouldn't notice.
HTTPS support (Score:5, Insightful)
Because seriously.
Re:HTTPS support (Score:5, Informative)
Re:HTTPS support (Score:5, Insightful)
Two simple suggestions. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Two simple suggestions. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Two simple suggestions. (Score:5, Interesting)
This.
You have a wonderful feeback loop on slashdot. Editors post an article about foobar. The article gets 437 comments; so clearly the community is interested in foobar, and might want to see more of them. Conversely, if only 23 comments are posted, maybe foobar just isn't a thing.
Of course you need to actually *read* some of the comments. If there are 437 comments, but 400 of them are "foobar sucks" and "why won't foobar die", maybe you *shouldn't* post more stories.
And, if an article gets pitifully few comments: look at the headline and description. Maybe it just wasn't written well enough to make people click. Hopefully you're already tracking editors by watching how many popular and how many stupid topics they post.
Re:Two simple suggestions. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Two simple suggestions. (Score:5, Insightful)
Trolls have always been an integral part of slashdot, and part of the "uncensored" appeal of the site.
Agree 100%. To this day I still laugh at myself when I get suckered into a goatse/rosebud/tubgirl click. If ye can't handle the gutter, read at +2 or higher.
To reference back to an old post of mine from 2003 ''Reading
make nobeta the default (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:make nobeta the default (Score:5, Funny)
A 7 digit UID is now a loyal old fart? This site has changed. (Do we still do my UID is lower than your's any more?)
You betcha we still do. Mind you I'm scared of waking up the really low UIDs
Then don't walk on our graves.
What I want (Score:5, Funny)
Give me more ways to make people understand just how wrong they are when I write a reply that contradicts everything they said. Some way to really make them realize their stupidity and experience terrible shame because of it.
I think that would help your bottom line quite a lot, since that seems to be what the majority of people come to slashdot to do.
(Yes, this post is a troll. I won't apologize though, as that would violate slashdot tradition.)
Re:What I want (Score:5, Funny)
Bring back Rob Malda (Score:5, Insightful)
He used to work on this site, would sometimes post stories as "Cmdr Taco".
Oh, yeah, and started the friggin' thing.
It'd be like Apple bringing Steve Jobs back, only not as expensive.,
Re:Bring back Rob Malda (Score:5, Interesting)
Cap on comment scores (Score:5, Insightful)
Take Off and Nuke the Whole Site From Orbit (Score:4, Funny)
It's the only way to be sure.
Re:Take Off and Nuke the Whole Site From Orbit (Score:5, Funny)
A few ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
Random list (Score:5, Interesting)
* Editors who can spell correctly and understand english grammar.
* Some form of control over dupes, perhaps a commitment along the lines of "we won't repeat stories within 2 weeks of each other". This isn't about updates to previous stories, but ones where they are effectively the same posted back to back.
* Fix the mobile interface or get rid of it. As an example of busted - the "top commented" story does not display on my iPad4. I literally cannot see the most active content on the site when I visit using it (it's up to date and using Chrome).
* Expand the friends/foes list limit. I've got a hell of a lot of trolls permanently downmodded from over the years and am capped out. Either this, or find another way to control trolls. I realize this doesn't affect ACs at all.
* Consider rewarding users with good karma with less delay between posts. I write pretty darn fast and have wandered away from more than a few good posts due to the speed limit.
* Come to think of it, I've never noticed a place to report bugs or a bug tracker. Is there one? I haven't gone looking.
Re:Random list (Score:5, Interesting)
Fix the summaries (Score:5, Insightful)
I also hate summaries along the lines of "Researcher discovers exploit in ABC using TSR algorithms tweaked with RNG enhancements. This can lead to new discoveries in FNG with QRZ and CDR possibilities". Then the summary never tells us what any of those acronyms mean.
Finally, remember this is news for nerds. Keep the BS articles (I'm looking at you Forbes) to a minimum.
Easiest things to do. (Score:5, Interesting)
1. WRT Unicode, the biggest problem is "smart quotes." The quickest solution to get rid of this annoyance is to use a regex to replace smart quotes with regular quotes. The rest can wait for more testing before rolling it out.
2. The current comment score cap works. It's less likely to promote group think as it can quickly be knocked back down or up without having an unreasonable distance to cover. People who worry about comment scores need to get over it - it's just a number. And if you're not browsing at -1, you're missing some good stuff that's gotten buried by the echo chamber. "It ain't broke, don't fix it."
3. Direct messaging? Are you kidding me? Promote use of journals more if you want to encourage inter-personal communications that might be off-topic in a discussion elsewhere. People can also put their email, skype, etc info in their profile if they really need interpersonal communications that are not public.
4. Reducing time between comments? That's only a concern if you have crap karma, and it's easy to go from zero to excellent in a few days, so anyone making any real contributions will quickly find this is not a problem.
5. Fix the color scheme that makes it almost impossible to see the link to the source of the article in the title bar. Go back to putting the link at the top or bottom of the story if it isn't already embedded.
6. Fix the mobile app on android. If you don't know what I'm referring to, try it for a while. You'll get the idea.
7. Do NOT allow inline display of images. Those of us who have already learned not to click on goat.se links don't need to be forced to see it again and again.
8. Get rid of the page between when you click on a link in your message list, and the actual message display. It's redundant.
9. It's not hard to allow people to append to their comments, with a time-stamped notice along the lines of "EDITED: 2016-12-24@whenever added the following" and then the new text. This way, nobody can change their original post, but they CAN correct it in the original place.
10. Increase the .sig length - even tweets are longer. People often use sigs to quickly identify other users (nobody looks at the user name).
Bring back something like freshmeat? (Score:5, Interesting)
I miss the old days where there was a side bar freshmeat feed of new SourceForge releases. Could we possible increase the SlashDot / SourceForge links this way? A running feed of releases would be nice, and it would help bring us back to our FOSS roots.
Also, in the scientific community (I'm in the cancer simulation field), "grand challenges" are popping up, where there would be a dataset or two, and a challenge to create an analysis or modeling tool for those data. Some really amazing creativity can emerge from those challenges.
It would be interesting if such a thing could be done here, similarly to the "ask slashdot" articles, but then linking to a development space on SourceForge to keep it going. I would love to engage the developer community here on our data standards and other cancer projects, and I hope they'd like to pitch in.
Thanks -- Paul
PS: Please consider stopping the SourceForge spam. I'm not sure I need any more "SourceForge Resources" emails on "Flash Storage for Dummies" and business intelligence / analytics / etc.
Nothing Special... (Score:5, Funny)
Put the "read more" link back, better mobile site (Score:4, Informative)
Put the "read more" link back after the story summary. Also put the comment count down there again. See soylent news for an example of how it use to be.
Also a couple of years ago slashdot had a wonderful mobile site that looked very much like the desktop site, but was extremely functional (commenting, moderating, filtering comments, everything). The latest mobile site is useless as far as I'm concerned. In fact I the desktop site is more usable on a phone than the current mobile site. Slashdot is not Ars Technica. Slashdot *is* the comments. The stories are just there to spur discussion.
Some input (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot was "News for Nerds"
Lately though, half the posts are some SJW topic.
Bring back the tech.
First fix (Score:5, Funny)
I wanted to use this opportunity to get a discussion going on how we can improve Slashdot moving forward.
Let's start by banning the phrase "moving forward" unless you're talking about physical motion in a forward direction. Without a time machine there is no other direction for the "movement" of which you speak.
Re:First fix (Score:5, Funny)
How about a search function that works? (Score:5, Insightful)
Polls on the sidebar (Score:5, Insightful)
Polls belong on the sidebar. But don't believe just me. Go back and look at all the prior discussions about it.
Actually just go back and look at /. history. Whenever the old management did something contentious there was always a lot of vocal and well reasoned arguments as to why what they did was BS. The trouble was that nobody at /. actually listened.
Can we get an explanation on who gets mod points? (Score:5, Insightful)
There also have been times when people have been given differing numbers of mod points. It used to be that people would only get 5. Then some people started getting 10. Some people claimed they got as many as 15. I never heard an explanation for that, either.
Science Coverage is Not Thoughtful (Score:5, Informative)
Modern aggregator sites today are increasingly realizing that there are two types of stories: those stories which exploit the users by feeding their worldviews back to them (directly termed "exploitation") and those stories which encourage users to learn new ideas which might challenge their preconceived notions ("exploration"). Slashdot has since the beginning focused entirely upon exploitation, which satisfies the user base, but also makes the tech community more insulated from competing views. This is most obvious with regards to what is happening at the geographical center of the tech world, in the Mission in San Francisco (where there have been some high-profile incidents with regards to gentrification and overall disrespect for the native culture), but the effects of such policies are also -- perhaps more importantly -- observable in the world of science.
Why not try a bit harder to educate the tech community on some of the most vocal critics of both science and tech? There is a rather long list of such critics to work with, some of them have very impressive CV's, and some of the claims they've made have been really quite extraordinary.
Martín López Corredoira is an astrophysicist, philosopher and academic whistleblower. He has published more than 50 cosmology and astrophysical papers on subjects like the structure of the Milky Way, stellar populations, and observational astronomy topics which required analytical calculations, computer simulations, statistics, photometrical and spectroscopical observations and analysis. He wrote in The Twilight of the Scientific Age
"A superficial view may lead us to think that we live in the golden age of science but the fact is that the present-day results of science are mostly mean, unimportant, or just technical applications of ideas conceived in the past."
"There are several reasons to write about this topic. First of all, because I feel that things are not as they seem, and the apparent success of scientific research in our societies, announced with a lot of ballyhoo by the mass media, does not reflect the real state of things."
"Science is not a direct means for reaching the truth. Science works with hypotheses rather than with truths. This fact, although recognized, is usually forgotten. It gives rise to the creation of certain key groups within science which think that their hypotheses are indubitably solid truths, and think that the hypotheses of other minority groups are just extravagant or crackpot ideas
all through history, and even now, there have been many instances of discussion about how to interpret aspects of nature, with various possible options without a clear answer, in which a group of scientists have opted to claim their position is the good or orthodox one while other positions are heresies."
Or, how about Jeff Schmidt, who published a scathing critique of the physics graduate program titled Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives?
"My thesis is that the criteria by which individuals are deemed qualified or unqualified to become professionals involve not just technical knowledge as is generally assumed, but also attitude -- in particular, attitude toward working within an assigned political and ideological framework."
"At the end of the week the entire physics faculty gathers in a closed meeting to decide the fate of the students. Strange as it may s
IPv6 support (Score:5, Insightful)
Four technical interests (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll add my +1 for putting Slashdot on IPv6 quickly, and then Sourceforge too when you have time. Virtually all ISPs, colos and hosting providers offer IPv6 already, and all the well known CDNs have done so for many years. With IPv6 uptake at 10% and growing ever faster, it's beginning to look bad for a tech site not to have IPv6 enabled. (It works perfectly, seamlessly and effortlessly, by the way.)
While many good ideas have been suggested in this thread, 4 of them stand out for me as very clear technical interests for many techies:
The huge interest in security and privacy among Slashdot readers make the first two items of special importance. It's no longer an innocent world of academics and enthusiasts like yesteryear, and readers need to protect themselves and the companies from which the site is often read with link encryption and effective script restrictions.
It's no surprise that use of NoScript is huge among the technical readership, nor that the JS orgy of forbes.com was despised so much.
My best wishes for this new era of Slashdot. I'm looking forward to another (almost) two decades of interesting technical discussion. :-)
Primary news source (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know if you are interested in this but...
During the 2nd war in Iraq, one of the most interesting accounts was a lone blogger in Baghdad who made nightly posts about what was going on and his views on the situation. He wasn't a journalist or anything, just a guy in an apartment watching missiles destroy buildings in his city. Sadly, he wasn't allowed to continue his reporting after the fall of the regime.
Since we're nerds, it should be possible to get interesting views from conflict areas around the globe in an anonymous manner. Perhaps partner with WikiLeaks to get anonymous interviews and points of view from these areas.
They say that the first casualty of war is the truth, but we're now living in an age where the average reader can dig down to find original sources for some of the media bias and spin.
I would love to read the (anonymous) views of a Chinese engineer, or Indian customer support person, or a Cuban hacker, or Ukranian spammer.
I would find it much more interesting than a talking-head video of some software package founder.
If you're interested in being a primary news source, having the occasional "scoop" where the MSM refers to Slashdot as the breaking story, and have the courage for a high-level of journalistic integrity, then you could do this. Let WikiLeaks handle the anonymity and authentication, you just post the interviews.
It's not for the faint of heart, but it's something you could do.
Reposting my comment from the original article... (Score:5, Insightful)
Being one of the greybeards who still reads Slashdot, I'll add a few:
- Add the ability to edit comments until they are moderated or have a reply
- Stop linking to Forbes articles and posting Slashvertisements
- Stop running articles about Martin Shkreli or other things that have nothing to do with "News for nerds"
- For the love of all things absurd, please add CowboyNeal back as the final poll option
- If you need money to operate the site, try asking for it from readers. That way you can reduce or eliminate advertising useless junk that nobody wants
Re:Reposting my comment from the original article. (Score:5, Insightful)
- Add the ability to edit comments until they are moderated or have a reply
This would have to be done carefully, i.e. you can't post an edit after someone has clicked the reply button (not actually posted the reply). And the person replying would need to be notified if the post had been changed since the page was loaded.
Earlier in this discussion someone suggested to allow appending comments to your own post with a timestamp, but not editing the original text. That might be a better approach.
Firehose stories on front page (Score:5)
Ignore 99.9% of the recommendations (Score:5, Insightful)
I just waded through this whole mess of comments. 99.9% of them are stupid ideas. By far the most important way to KEEP slashdot good is DON'T FUCK WITH IT. It doesn't NEED "fixing", and these ideas would ruin it.
Metamoderation (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, you're shown a set of posts that have been moderated and asked if they're good posts or bad posts, with no idea of how they were originally rated. You have no context, no way of knowing if you're being asked to judge an upmod or a downmod (For all I know, you're being asked to judge all the mods a post received in one lump.) and no way to tell what effect your decision will have.
It's been years, now, since I've even bothered with metamodding, but if you went back to the old style where people knew just what moderations they were checking, I'd gladly start doing it again, and I doubt I'm the only person here who feels that way. Metamoderation used to serve an important function here, and I'd like to see that come back.
Put the users first (Score:5, Insightful)
1. It's nice to see you're already communicating with the users. It's something I could never get previous leadership to do. Keep it up! You won't be able to bring them everything on their wishlist -- but don't let that stop you from telling them what you are bringing them, and why the other stuff got pushed lower on the priority list. They're reasonable folks; as long as you're working with them, they'll be on your side.
2. Small changes are better than big ones. Don't push ahead with a massive, grand plan and assume the community will jump on board (like video and beta). If they tell you they don't want it, they don't actually want it. When in doubt, trust Tim L. and Tim V. Nobody cares about the site and its users as much as those two.
3. Build for the community you have, not for the one you want. Don't chase the hockey stick. It's not going to happen. But there's still a path for evolving Slashdot to support an incredibly broad tech/geek community.
4. Nobody should make decisions about the site without being an active user.
5. Ask the community for help more often. The biggest area that needs it right now is submissions. They're the base from which all content flows, and they've been slowly drying up. Submission needs to feel less like screaming into the abyss. Consider reviving the IRC channel to give people direct, instant access to editorial. Try to find ways to solicit particular submissions from known experts. (For example, a submission about a new C++ release from an actual C++ engineer is worth its weight in gold.
6. Reward readers for doing things that benefit the site. Used a mod point? +1 subscriber (ad-free) page. Got a score:5 comment? +10 pages. Accepted submission? +10 pages. Or more. Be generous; these are your most valuable users.
7. Empower and invest in editorial. It is literally their job to know and understand the community, so they shouldn't lose fights centering on the community.
8. Ads have been in a bad place for a couple of years. Pulling it back will cost you revenue in the short term, but may ensure the site's sustainability in the long term.
9. Slashdot's founder, Rob Malda, still cares deeply about Slashdot. I'm sure he'd be willing to offer some advice.
You've been saying a lot of the right things about Slashdot an SourceForge. I sincerely hope you make it all happen.
Best of luck,
Jeff
Re:No more paid posts by Nervals Lobster (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No more paid posts by Nervals Lobster (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ossified community (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thank you for asking (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Some of this has already been said, but my top (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging by the number of AC comments modded up to +5, I think that's throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I haven't seen much of a difference in quality between AC and logged-in comments. Both have trolls. Both have thoughtful insight. I'm not sure the ratio is much different.
HTTPS though, yeah. Agreed on that.
Re:Some of this has already been said, but my top (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:three things: (Score:4, Insightful)
Better would be to allow people to comment in a discussion they've modded, so they can explain why, or if the discussion later on takes a more interesting turn.
Re:Do not reward "karma" with more points (Score:5, Interesting)
How do you feel about logarithmic scaling instead of absolute caps? Both for rating comments and for karma? The system would track the actual numbers, but normally we would only see the rounded exponent.
If you like the idea, then we have to argue whether the base should be 2, 10, or e. Even the natural log comes out in the wash?
Re:Create an "Devil's Advocate" moderation (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Enforce login to post (Score:5, Insightful)
Anonymous posting has become a haven of trolls, far from it's original goal of protecting people when discussing work conditions and the like.
Allowing anyone to post as anonymous without login simply paves the way for endless trolling. The value of the comment section has diminished greatly over the years because of stupid comments.
Enforcing authenticated login, federated from elsewhere to tender to the laziest if need be, would at least allow for some accountability by weeding out repeat abusers of the comments section.
Logged-in, members could still post with anonymity to allow a return of the original intentions.
NO NO AND NO
Anonymous is a defining feature. There are tools to tune out trolls and spam and they work (they may need fine tuning but are otherwise powerful). Do not be lazy, use them. Without the freedom to post in a TRULY anonymous fashion then speech is stifled and groupthink, echo chamber like discussion worsens. I want to be challenged by viewpoints that do not met my expectations and may run afoul of social, governmental or employment considerations. I want to be able to post them should the desire arise as well.
To repeat.. the coward should remain among us with no blocking or authentication at all.
Re:Editing Comments (Score:5, Insightful)
Please! Don't do it! I beg of you! Say NO! to editing of comments! EVER! A person can post a response and or correction. Editing will ruin everything! Comments set in stone is Slashdot's saving grace, that and the archives. Don't ever let them be edited... And resist the temptation for unicode also. You don't need the hassles.