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[Update 20190127_200249 UTC: corrected number of downmods to qualify for mod bomb from 4 to 5. Clarified that no mod bans have been handed out in a long while. --martyb]
Our primary goal at SoylentNews is to provide a forum for the community; In as much as is reasonably possible, we try to take a hands-off approach.
The infrastructure provides a means by which the community can (among other things) vote on polls, publish journal articles, submit comments, and perform moderations.
There are, however, some things that require an active role by the admins.
One of these is dealing with moderation abuse, something which can come in different forms. See the FAQ for some background. Addressed there are "mod bombs" and "spam mods". A mod bomb is deemed to have happened when one user (user1) has performed 4 5 or more downmods against comments by another user (user2). Upon review, if a mod bomb has been found to occur, then the moderator (user1) gets a 1-month mod ban on the first occasion; 6 months on the second and subsequent times. Mod bans have not been issued in a LONG while; extra mods are reversed.
Sockpuppets: And now we come to the focus of this article: there is another form of moderation abuse: sockpuppet accounts. Wikipedia has a suitable description:
A sockpuppet is an online identity used for purposes of deception. The term, a reference to the manipulation of a simple hand puppet made from a sock, originally referred to a false identity assumed by a member of an Internet community who spoke to, or about, themselves while pretending to be another person.[1]
The term now includes other misleading uses of online identities, such as those created to praise, defend or support a person or organization,[2] to manipulate public opinion,[3] or to circumvent a suspension or ban from a website. A significant difference between the use of a pseudonym[4] and the creation of a sockpuppet is that the sockpuppet poses as an independent third-party unaffiliated with the puppeteer. Sockpuppets are unwelcome in many online communities and may be blocked.
Right here I'll admit that I was sorely tempted to take unilateral action. Name names. Apply mod bans. And... you get the idea. Instead, I'm trying to take the high road. So, instead, I chose to present what I found to the community, solicit input, and then see what, if anything, needs to be done.
There may well be other cases, but the one I have discovered shows this history of upmods. Out of the 100 most recent moderations performed by "user1", 80 of those have been upmods of the same user "user2". And of these, there have been 10 upmods on January 21, 10 more on January 22, and yet 10 more on January 23. (For those keeping score that is 30 points in 3 days).
I cannot imagine in any way that 30 upmods in three days by "user1" on "user2" is reasonable or desirable.
This would be purely academic except that comment moderation affects a user's karma. All registered users start with a karma of 0. Submitting a story that is accepted on the site earns 3 points. Each upmod to a comment of yours earns a point. Similarly, each downmod deducts a point from your karma. Get enough karma and when posting a comment you can give it extra visibility so that it starts at a score of 2 instead of at 1. (Comments posted anonymously or by ACs start at 0.) Get a low enough karma and you earn a "timeout" against posting comments for a month.
Inasmuch as "user1" was able to perform 80 upmods of "user2" in 19 days ("user2" had hovered near the karma cap of 50 when this all started), that means that "user2" received approximately 80 downmods from the community. Excluding the actions of our sockpuppet ("user1"), "user2" should have been in negative karma and thus in a month-long "timeout".
What I see is that the community has spoken (the comments posted by "user2" are not of the kind the community wants to see on the site) and that has been intentionally countered by the sockpuppet activity of "user1".
Rather than the admins taking a unilateral action, I am asking the community what should be done in this case (and any others like it that may come up)?
I offer a proposal that is analogous to our handling of a "mod bomb."
What is a mod bomb? Four (4) or more downmods in 24 hours by "user1" against comments posted by "user2". qualifies as a mod bomb and earns "user1" a 1-month moderation ban (initially; subsequent mod bombs earn a 6-month mod ban) It's been a long time since mod bans have been issued..
Proposed: Four (4) or more upmods in 24 hours should also be considered a mod bomb (sock bomb?) and should receive the same treatment.
The point of moderation is not to bestow karma points, it is to help improve the visibility of well-written comments and reduce the visibility of the lesser ones. The karma is simply an incentive to actually perform the moderations.
I've toyed with various values for number of upmods per unit of time (4 per day? 20 per week?) I keep coming back to the same metric we use for our existing "mod bomb" definition: 4 down mods in one 24-hour span that commences when mod points are handed out at 00:10 UTC.
So, now it's your turn. I'd appreciate your feedback and thoughts on this. If we should choose to implement it, it would probably have a soft launch with any "violations" being met with a warning.
Ultimately, it's your site. How do you want us to deal with sockpuppets?
(Score: 5, Funny) by Apparition on Friday January 25 2019, @01:11PM (26 children)
Gather the IP address(es) of the people responsible for sockpuppets, and then put in a rule that automatically redirects them to the Huffington Post.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @02:53PM (4 children)
Actually this is not an unreasonable response. It is more overt than shadow bans. While the rules can be adjusted this is a cat and mouse game, especially if the offender has any scripting skills at all.
More appropriate might be, to assemble a pool of numbskullian news sites, and pick a random one for redirect. That way the receiver of the redirect can't reasonably call it an attack.
I like that soylentnews tries to be free and anonymous at the same time (which is difficult). Invariably the sock puppets get in the way of this. And lets face it, the sock puppets are as likely to be employee's contractors for the propaganda oriented news networks as anything. So sending them back from whence they came is perfectly reasonable. Putting an auto-timout on the redirection will get the point across without too much damage.
The other option would be to add a delayed load. Of course that creates a DOS vector itself. So you'd have to run a second machine to redirect to, that it would serve no other purpose but to hold HTTP sockets open. Essentially undesirable users would experience degraded service, which of course would eventually timeout with service returning to normal after a week or so.
Better to drive up the price of being a dick, than have to become authoritarian or deceptive about it.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @07:55PM (3 children)
Send them to the green site; it is the fate worse than death.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday January 26 2019, @02:56AM (1 child)
We could at least beta test that feature... ;)
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 26 2019, @04:29AM
Fuck beta! Sorry, haven't had a good opportunity to say that in too long.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @11:33AM
How cruel!
DO IT!!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @03:28PM (4 children)
And what about all of those behind a company's reverse proxy? One bad poster at company can then cause everyone at that company to be redirected because they all come from the same IP address.
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Friday January 25 2019, @04:22PM (3 children)
The firewall at my place of employment has blocked SoylentNews for years, which is why I mostly read it on mobile devices. Considering that my employer is one of the largest in the western hemisphere, I figured that most of the other large employers have the site blocked as well.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @07:14PM
/.?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday January 25 2019, @07:14PM
I can vouch for not always true, although Infowars and -- ha-HA! -- nationalinterest.org were conditional-blocked ("political advocacy, you may proceed but action will be logged").
But Zerohedge wasn't blocked at all, and I wasn't stupid enough to try RT or Wikileaks. What kind of dipshit organization flags nationalinterest but not zerohedge?!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RandomFactor on Friday January 25 2019, @10:33PM
Mine does not ban it. Add that to the wicked cool VT100 theme and I can have it up in a browser window on my desktop and people walking by just figure it for a terminal window. Nothing that wasn't absolutely work related could ever have such a look. ]:-)
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Friday January 25 2019, @09:18PM (15 children)
Or, do nothing. Seriously, who uses comment score? This ain't reddit with thousands of comments. Who here wants to have random internet strangers censor their reading material (from 40 comments to 30)? Moderation is a pointless waste of time on this site. Spend your time on unicode support - I'd even donate money for this specific thing (in addition of my other donations for general expenses).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 26 2019, @04:33AM (4 children)
💩
The only unicode support I know we're lacking is a bug in journal titles and I plan on fixing it in the next site update.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by fakefuck39 on Saturday January 26 2019, @01:23PM (3 children)
точьно работает? 나는 말한다 many différent idiomas. when did this start working? I used to have to backslash a bunch of crap with letter codes.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 26 2019, @02:52PM (2 children)
A little over four years ago. It was the first thing of real note I coded for the site [github.com]. It isn't much used except for funky quotation marks and emdashes and the like though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by fakefuck39 on Saturday January 26 2019, @04:01PM (1 child)
holy crap it's been over 4 years since I checked. that's just ridiculous on my part. now I can finally explain to people why my new username makes fun of ugly people instead of saying I'm a troll. fuck.. that's not that new either anymore! how the time flies.
sent you guys some kching as promised good sir, and gamsa, I mean 감사! (I still think you're a hippie loser with your boat and all that, just one with good personal ethics, and you do run one of the few good sites).
fuck beta.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 26 2019, @06:29PM
Cheers, mate. I don't mind you disparaging me over my hobby. I learned to be able to laugh at myself long ago.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 26 2019, @04:35AM (9 children)
Agreed. I, and many others from what I gather, always read at -1. Getting rid of moderation and karma entirely wouldn't be a loss to me. Just add a "mark as spam", and keep the friend/enemy features for those that want to block people.
(Score: 0) by fakefuck39 on Saturday January 26 2019, @04:14PM (8 children)
I.. enjoy scrolling through the spam for some reason. Brings back fond memories of niggers eating delicious shit out of the toilet. I seriously think this is too small to care about reducing visible content. The guys in charge are fairly ethical and open minded here, but that's a retarded and boring use of time. community voting is useless - look at hacker news. any kind of voting becomes "you're not nice" and "i disagree. I actually believe the best solution is scrolling through shit you don't want to see - for this site as it currently stands. That spam thing - ripe for abuse.
now categorizing things, in much more detail than now, then letting you pick categories of comments you want - that's useful, but again, site is too small now. like friendly funny (hide), offensive funny (show), propaganda shit (hide), spam (hide) flamebait (hide), troll (show), etc. Then we meta mod those mods, and users who pick the wrong category don't get less votes for categories. But just based on points - useless.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 26 2019, @06:34PM (7 children)
We're actually planning on putting a user preference in to have Spam moderated comments default to collapsed as if you'd hit the single minus up in the top left of the comment. We police Spam mods constantly though and it's currently the only thing that will earn you a moderation ban, so I'm not worried about it being abused. I kind of like the collapse/expand based on moderation preferences idea but I don't think it'd be as useful in practice as in theory.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by fakefuck39 on Sunday January 27 2019, @01:42AM (6 children)
Cool. Don't count my suggestions as an opinion or vote though. I don't participate in moderation or use it, so I don't get a vote here. Just throwing ideas out there others who use it might like, and I'm not seeing anyone reply with agreement. It's great that you got unicode working.
An idea that would actually be useful - an android app that looks just like the site, that let's me view a week of comments offline, and caches viewing of the article linked in the original post. Can even make it pay to download - just not using the play store or google services, since a lot of us asshole trolls run google-free android. That's a big project though. I'd do it myself but us pro-big-corp shills only got money to contribute, not time. Would be soooo useful for long flights though. Internet on a plane is absolute shit. And get a passport you hippies!
Now back to svengoolie. the werewolf is on the loose.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday January 27 2019, @05:24AM (5 children)
Anyone feel like volunteering for that bit of coding? I'll do scripts, programs, SQL, even occasionally an extremely simple OS but it's against my religion to code an "app".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday January 27 2019, @06:33AM
Um, not right now, but I'll consider looking into it. The site works great on my Android thing.
For WordPress (I know, horrible sacrilege) there's a plugin (more sacrilege) called WPtouch that cleans up and simplifies sites for pads, phones, etc. Seems to work very well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @11:36AM (3 children)
What religion is that?
Does it involve a teapot?
(Score: 0) by fakefuck39 on Sunday January 27 2019, @06:52PM (1 child)
you can't drink tea on a boat silly. you'd get tea all over the place, and heating the tea is a fire hazard. you're on a boat in the middle of a lake motherfucker - what are you going to ask the fish for a fire extinguisher??? oh mon dieu.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday January 28 2019, @05:06AM
No worries. Aluminum boat.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday January 28 2019, @05:10AM
The reformed church of Volguus Zildrohar.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.