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[Updated 20190129_204134 UTC. Added background on prior restrictions with respect to commenting and moderating in the same story discussion. Added background and link to explain the number of mod points going from 5 to 10. Clarified example of what happens when someone tries to perform more mods than they have mod points. --martyb]
I had some information incorrect in my prior story SoylentNews, Moderations, and You.
But, before I go into that I just want to say how impressed I am at the community's participation and discussion regarding the site. From that I see how much people value what we have here and do not want to see anything happen that would potentially degrade it. I saw a lot of passion expressed and it makes me all the more proud to be a part of what makes it happen.
I see my misunderstandings caused unnecessary anxiety in the community and for that I humbly apologize. I've learned to ask for feedback and verification before putting out a site-related story in the future (including this one!)
It was intended as a solicitation of feedback from the community. As in previous site upgrades we will put out a proposal, accept feedback, and if deemed warranted, give it a try. None of this is permanent; if it doesn't work out, it can be tweaked or rolled back.
Read on beyond the fold for corrections, history, and an expanded explanation of the current thinking.
Corrections:
First, I had the threshold for a "mod bomb" wrong. It is five (not four) downmods by one account (nick1) of another account (nick2) in one moderation period (i.e. from mod point issuance at 00:10 UTC until the next set of mod points are released 24 hours later.)
Second, there are plans to put programmatic limits that would block excess mods beyond the limits from taking effect. (This would be much like what happens when you have already used, say, 8 of the 10 mod points that are issued each day, and then attempt to moderate 3 more; the first 2 will be applied but the 3rd will just "drop on the floor" and be ignored. We may want to put up a message that a threshold has been exceeded, but I am unsure about how technically feasible that would be and how we would go about actually presenting that.)
Third, we haven't handed out moderation bans for a long while (many months, possibly even a year). Instead, knowing that #2 was planned, I understand that what has actually been happening is the excess mods got reversed and, when deemed warranted, an admin-to-user message had been sent making note of the excursion beyond the limit.
Fourth, Moderation affects the comment score as stored in the DB, but you can make changes in your user preferences to increase or decrease the apparent comment score for friends, foes, Funny, etc. I personally browse with a threshold of -1; there's lots of dreck down there but there's also an occasional mis-mod and I gladly use my mod points to try and rectify those. In case you were wondering, the admins here get the same number of mod points as everyone else: 10 points per day.
Ultimately, personal vendettas are what we are trying to deal with. Focus on the comment itself, not on who made it. If you would mod a comment differently if you did not know who posted it... you might want to ask yourself if the focus is on the wrong thing.
We are trying to catch the (fortunately) rare abuses of the moderation system. If you accidentally upmod or downmod someone beyond the guidelines, don't worry about that. We do not want to be in the position of handing out bans. It's the repeated abuses of the system which we are trying to address.
What's the point of all this, anyway?
NOTE: What follows is from my memory of things happening 20+ years ago; there may be some inaccuracies. Don't shoot me!
Background: When Slashdot first appeared (I was reading the site before they even had user accounts), it was a small community and the comments were not that numerous. I actually read all the comments on all the stories. As its popularity grew, so did the number of comments. It got to the point where one could no longer reasonably read all the comments. Some were real gems that greatly contributed to the discussion. As in any community, it was soon also visited by trolls and the like whose comments just added noise to the discussion ("frist post" anyone?). Several approaches were attempted, but challenges were discovered in their being able to scale up to the rapidly increasing number of comments. Community moderation was the ultimate solution. Let the community "police" itself. Users would upmod comments that were especially interesting or insightful to give them greater visibility and downmod comments that were less, umm, germane. They ultimately came up with a scale for ranking comments and instituted "karma" as a means of selecting who would be issued mod points.
Moderations of a user's comments affected their "karma". A "positive" moderation (Informative, Insightful, Interesting, etc.) added 1 point to a user's karma. A negative moderation (Offtopic, Troll, Flamebait, etc.) deducted 1 point from their karma. Accounts that had attained sufficient karma (and had been around for at least a month, IIRC) were, in turn, eligible to receive mod points. Unfortunately, abuses soon appeared. There were the accounts that racked up massive karma and then went on a trolling spree wreaking havoc throughout the site. That led to a "karma cap": any positive moderation beyond the cap were discarded.
So, each comment had a "score" associated with it. A logged-in user's comment started with a score of 1. If the user had garnered sufficient karma, they were eligible to use a "karma bonus" to give their comment greater visibility; those comments started with a score of 2. Comments posted by Anonymous Cowards (users who had not created an account and logged in), or by logged-in users who opted to "post anonymously", saw their comments start with a score of 0.
From that starting point, through moderation, comment scores can range from -1 up to 5, inclusive.
The point of all this is that a visitor to the site could select a comment score "threshold" and self-select what comments they wanted to see. Comments having the same score should be of approximately the same caliber. From a score of -1 (dross, a waste of your time) to +5 (crème de la crème, wow! That's amazing!).
Present Day:
SoylentNews got its start as a fork of the Open Source version of Slashcode that had been published several years prior. It was out of date and not maintained. (Translation: Did. Not. Work.) Lots of head banging and cursing was able to bring up a version of the site that ran, albeit poorly. A great deal of effort went into bug fixing, and while we were at it, extensions.
Originally, mod points were handed out based on an algorithm. A subset of the community got some mod points to use within a limited period of time; when the time was up they were gone. Some tweaking and experimentation led to SoylentNews issuing 5 mod points to everybody who was eligible to moderate. (User had an account, account had been active for at least 30 days, and the user had good enough karma.)
There were some restrictions on using mod points. For example, one could not participate in a discussion )post a comment) and then perform moderations in the same discussion. Similarly, posting a comment to a discussion after doing mods in it would cause those mods to be reversed. (My memory is cloudy on that one, but it was something along those lines.)
Things seemed to be going along pretty well until the site was hit by a slew of troll comments posted by ACs. In August of 2017, the number of mod points issued to eligible users was increased from 5 to 10:
Moderators: Starting a little after midnight UTC tonight, everyone will be getting ten points a day instead of five. The threshold for a mod-bomb, however, is going to remain at five. This change is not so you can pursue an agenda against registered users more effectively but so we can collectively handle the rather large uptick in anonymous trolling recently while still being able to have points remaining for upmodding quality comments. This is not an invitation to go wild downmodding; it's helping you to be able to stick to the "concentrate more on upmodding than downmodding" bit of the guidelines.
Mod points are currently issued at 00:10 UTC.
Some new moderations have been added to the ones we inherited: Spam, Disagree, and Touché.
Operationally, there is one important consideration that may not be obvious. One can select a moderation reason and immediately click the "Moderate" button, and thus moderate comments one-at-a-time. One can also select a moderation reason on multiple comments within a discussion and then click Moderate. In this case, several moderations are submitted at once. Here's an extreme and contrived example. I open a story and see it has 15 comments all of which are currently scored "1". (update: they need not be posted under a single nick; each comment could have been posted under a different nick) I have not moderated yet today, so I have my full complement of 10 mod points to use. I mark all 15 comments as "Funny" and click "Moderate". As I am trying to use more mod points than I have, only some of the mods take effect; 5 of those moderations just drop-on-the-floor and are ignored. No big deal. No penalties or anything; the excess is just ignored.
In short, comment scores and account karma are a means to an end, not an end in itself. As I see it, the focus should be on the discussion and what the comments bring to support it. The comment should stand on its own; who made a comment is far less important than what was said.
The intent of moderation limits (be they for mod bombing or sockpuppeting) is to restrict the amount of skewing that a personal vendetta can bring to bear. Complaining about moderation in the discussion is "Offtopic" and is often modded that way. We're still trying to find out what works best for these.
Lastly, stuff happens. I've made typos and I'm sure I have mis-modded a comment, too. In the grand scheme of things, an errant mod now and then is not going to affect things that much. So I don't get too bent out of shape should my karma drop. I trust that if my intention is genuinely for the betterment of the site, it will manifest in my comments and things will work out in the end. On occasion I post something bone-headed and get called to task on it. No biggee. I own it, accept it, and try to do better the next time.
NOTE: Spam moderations are handled a bit differently. The idea is that, when warranted, the community can bring a bigger hammer to bear on problematic comments. Commercial advertising. Exact same comment being posted verbatim multiple times. GNA posts. Penis bird. Marrying young brides. If you see one of those, go right ahead and help clean up the place for the rest of us. On the other hand, if you accidentally moderate a comment as Spam, please send an e-mail to admin (at) soylentnews.org (along with a link to that comment) and we'll undo the mod with no penalty.
So, go ahead and use those mod points and make the site better for the next person who comes along.
PS: Thanks to all of you commented in the prior story. In general, the attitude I sensed was that the community did not want to mess up what was working well, the majority was against sockpuppet activity, was against mod bans being applied willy nilly (that was abundantly clear!), and the main disagreement was as to what the exact guidelines should be.
The current thinking is that some kind of limit would be established (maybe per day and per week) where attempts to exceed that would be ignored. Say the daily limit was 4. Much like the contrived example above with an attempt to perform 15 Funny mods, any attempt to moderate beyond the daily limit would just be ignored. The moderations up to the daily limit would take effect. If you think I've been especially witty today and try to upmod 5 of my comments, I will get 4 of those and I'll just have to wait for someone else to come along, recognize my incredible sense of humor, and leave it to them to take care of that additional moderation!
I'm looking through moderations performed last year and am getting the sense that 4 per day looks good. If there were to be a weekly cap, it's not yet clear to me what that should be. Seat-of-the-pants guesstimate suggests 20 should be safe and we would probably be okay (few if any users hitting the limit) if we went with 15 per week.
(Score: -1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Monday January 28 2019, @02:58PM (10 children)
I just tweeted at The Mighty Buzzard about, why did you change your story? From, we're giving out Double Down Mods, start Down Modding Anonymous because they're doing too much "trolling." To, we gave out the Double Mods because of one guy. And this "exact" same guy now has many accounts. Uses many accounts. Makes terrible Tweets. And does too many Up Mods, that's the big problem now. And I asked, why did you change your story? That one changed big time. Very interested in, why is there a totally new story?
But don't get me wrong. As an Actor, I know better than anybody -- sometimes we have to change our story. To keep things interesting, keep folks tuning in. The set-up for the next episode. And a Witch Hunt makes a great story -- something I learned from the great Roy Cohn (RIP!!). Many reasons. You change it because you're smart. Doesn't have to be, someone forced you to lie. Like they've done to so many of my campaign guys. Nothing wrong with changing the story. And we love the story! We are with you, wherever it leads. And it's been a very successful campaign so far. Big donations coming in -- you're not doing this on the Taxpayer's Dime & Time. But don't forget, my FBI is there for you. If you need them. And when you need them.
But you're fighting a very politically correct war here. And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. But they say they don't care about their lives. You have to take out their families. Think big!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @03:21PM
-1 retarded
Learn to read.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday January 28 2019, @03:22PM (8 children)
Maybe I missed something, but where did we say we were giving out double down mods or suggesting people start downmodding anonymous because they're doing too much trolling?
There is certainly nothing in the article that I am aware of that states anything like that or makes any such suggestion.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Monday January 28 2019, @04:06PM (5 children)
You must not have read the Tweets to your last episode, Moderations & You. Very successful episode, there were hundreds of Tweets to that one. I say successful. Because so many websites, they want folks to Tweet. To put up their photos. Whatever. But you seem to want, less Tweets. Very few photos. Very different.
"When we moved up to ten points a day to give folks more ability to downmod the same exact guy's garbage and often spam posts.............." The Mighty Buzzard.
Maybe you don't know, it used to be 5. His Administration changed it to 10, they wanted folks to Down Mod much more -- as he just said. Big announcement at the time. And if you had looked at the tweets to the last episode, somebody tweeted the Link to the Announcement about that. From August of 2017 -- long time ago. Entitled, "welcome new trolls." Being sarcastic because, I wouldn't call it a welcome. It said, too much Anonymous "trolling." Maybe you weren't around or just didn't care. And don't care. You're changing a bunch of things, you don't know what happened in 2017. But it's there, I just looked at it. Thanks to whoever made the Link. And it's very easy to find by Search. You do Search, put the Title, there is the announcement. So easy. If you want to. If you actually want to, right?
It says, they thought they needed more Down Mods. Because of so many bad people going Anonymous -- they said it was people, not one guy. Now the story is, it's one "guy." Not a bunch of people. It's somebody with many accounts. Not Anonymous. Complete change to the story. And you're not aware, you say you're not aware. O. K.
By the way, 10 is double of 5. So I call it what it is, Double Down Mods. You don't call it Double Down Mods, O. K., it doesn't matter, you can call it what you want. I'll call it what it is. And, I'm sure, get so many of Down Mods. As I did just for saying, look, they changed their story totally. Anonymous went away, for whatever reason. Now you're going after the so-called "one guy." And all the Down Modders still have double the Down Mods that they used to have. It's a lot for just one guy. So there's a lot of Down Mods left over. And folks, I guess, are bored. They went after fakefuck39. Who, very bravely, continues to Tweet. When he can, I guess. And they're going after me too. So many folks don't like what I say. Or, they don't like me. Because I'm very very rich. They're not. They're haters. They're losers. And they're very envious. They put "Offtopic" when I tweet about the topic. They put "redundant" when I put one Tweet. And they love sending someone's Tweets to, they call it "oblivion." Blocking people from tweeting. For, you said it was a month. Which was news to me. Stopping folks from looking at the list of Fans. Stopping folks from voting. Stopping folks from making Subs. Fun little powers to have, I guess. They're very appreciated -- folks are paying up. Which you, as Treasurer, know more about than anyone. Big bump to the donations. Again, congratulations. Enjoy!!!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @07:49PM
We don't tweet around here, retard. If you want to tweet, go join the bird brains on that other site you love so much.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday January 29 2019, @11:29PM (3 children)
realDonaldTrump (6614) wrote [soylentnews.org]:
Quotation marks signify an exact quotation of what was said.
Here is what was actually posted on 2017.08.25 18:26 https://soylentnews.org/meta/article.pl?sid=17/08/25/2248202 [soylentnews.org]:
I fail to see what you claim was stated in that story. In fact, I see what was actually posted got seriously twisted to say something else in your rendition of it.
Nowhere did it suggest "downmod the same exact guy's garbage". What it does clearly say, and I'll quote it in bold to make it absolutely clear:
The focus and intent was "to have points remaining for upmodding quality comments".
BTW, I had actually forgotten about that story; thank you for bringing it to my attention. (NB: It would have been helpful to include a link to the story (which you already had in hand) rather than a snarky suggestion to search for it. Now, if I wanted someone to take action on something, and I already had information that would be helpful, I would make darn sure to include it in my request.)
When I read the story, I recognized it was an important part of the site's history and have updated this story to include it. It provides background on how moderation evolved into what it is today.
Separately, I don't remember which discussion it was, but about a week ago I saw a comment of yours about spam mods.
I logged onto our servers and made a query of the database looking at all moderation activity pertaining to your account. It was that investigation which led me to discover the sockpuppet modding. Which, by the way, is a new issue, above and beyond the now-basically-solved AC trolling that the additional mod points were intended to address.
So anyway, I found 22 of your comments that had been modded spam. Of these, all but 3 had already been reversed. I personally reviewed the remaining 3 and after confirmation by another member of staff, reversed those spam mods for you.
Next. Yes, I was mistaken on our handling of mod-bombs and I acknowledged and apologized for it in this very story. (I updated the prior story, as well.) It has been something like close to a year(?) since a moderation ban had been issued for mod-bombing. What it was changed to was (1) reverse the errant moderation, and (2) maybe send an admin-to-user message with a suggestion to avoid doing that again. (3) No bans.
Lastly, You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar [phrases.org.uk]. So far, I have always tried to take the upper road and ignore disparagement, snark, and outright antagonism..
So, should you have any further issue with moderation, here's a simple request that you can copy: "Hey, it seems one of my comments was mis-modded; would you please look into it? Here's the link: https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?sid=29810&cid=793052 [soylentnews.org]
I have strived to remain polite and professional; I kindly ask you to do the same.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday January 30 2019, @09:18AM (2 children)
I said, why don't you read the Tweets to your other story. Can we call it a story? The Moderations & You. And I did the quote of Mighty Buzzard from those Tweets. I guess you haven't looked at them yet. Which, if you wanted to know what folks had to say, that's too bad. Because how can you know what they say if you don't read what they say, right?
The "............" means, leaving out. You want the exact, it was the exact. But here's the exact without the leaving out. "When we moved up to ten points a day to give folks more ability to downmod the same exact guy's garbage and often spam posts, I did say in the announcement that the cut-off for a mod bomb would still be five." The Mighty Buzzard. And I left out the part about Cut Off. Because I don't care about that, I wasn't tweeting about that.
And you found the Welcome New Trolls, that's great. And that's the announcement that Mighty Buzzard was talking about. It says, Down Mod the Anonymous people. As anyone can see. And now he is saying, it was one guy. Not people. A guy with accounts. Not Anonymous. Very different story. I asked about that. He won't say why he changed the story. And you're not saying either. You're calling me a liar. So "polite." So "professional." I didn't call you liars. And I didn't lie. I will never lie to you. I asked, the Administration totally changed its story, why? But there's no answer. Not even, "oh, it's a secret."
And thank you for looking at the Spam Mods. But it sounds like, you didn't look at everybody's. And you didn't look at, should there be Spam Mods at all. It sounds like you only looked at the ones on my tweets. I've always said, the Spam mod punishes a lot. Puts a lot of power in the hands of the administrators. Who -- as you know -- can do what they want. And I guess, they had looked at some of the many Spam Mods I got. But not all of them -- until you just did. Finding those were wrong. That's great. But I'm not self centered. People think I'm self centered, I don't know why. I'm the least self centered person. I do speak up for myself. But I wasn't just thinking of myself. I was thinking of everybody. And I speak up for others. Because a lot of folks get Spam Mods. The purpose of which, you say it blocks somebody from tweeting for a month. And so many are unfair, I tweet about that a lot. But out of the 22 Spam Mods I got, 3 had never been looked at. For me, for somebody who speaks up for himself. Ethanol-fueled, very popular guy. Very famous, loved by the Administration and by many people. But, he got Spam Mods. And was blocked for a long time because of it. Nobody noticed for a long time. And eventually the Administration did notice. And took away the bad, the unfair Spam Mods so Ethanol-fueled could tweet again. What about somebody -- the Anonymous or the account -- that makes a couple of tweets and gets hit by the Spam Modders? That person, possibly gets blocked for a month. Right? And maybe the Administration never looks at it. I don't think that person will come back. I don't think so. I don't think so.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday February 01 2019, @03:13AM (1 child)
Cool Hand Luke put it succinctly [wikipedia.org]: "What we've got here is failure to communicate" =)
It all started with a genuine question in a prior comment of mine. [soylentnews.org] titled "Citation Needed":
(emphasis added)
My context for the conversation which followed was with respect to the story.
I failed to notice the change in context when you referenced a comment in a story instead of a story itself. So I searched, as you suggested, found the story -- https://soylentnews.org/meta/article.pl?sid=17/08/25/2248202 [soylentnews.org] -- and still failed to find the text you quoted.
I wish I could say hilarity ensued [tvtropes.org], but that was certainly not the case. Had you provided a link to the comment you were quoting -- e.g. https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?sid=29773&cid=792184 [soylentnews.org] -- I would have seen the change in context, followed along, and there would have been no misunderstanding.
If you, or anybody else, have any questions on how to go about creating a link on this site; the syntax is:
would be rendered as:
Here is a link [google.com] to a popular search engine.
Notice, too, that I admitted right up front "Maybe I missed something". A simple link pointing to the story or comment being referenced would have sufficed... no further words would have been necessary.
I apologize for my misunderstanding and the tone of my response.
P.S. It is not an excuse, but hopefully provides context. I had an Aunt pass away a week before Christmas. In the past month, two of the staff here have had a parent pass away. I encouraged them to take time off; family first. That, of course, left the rest of us to pick up the slack so we've been stretched thin during that time. Then, in the past week, a co-worker with whom I was friends had a stroke and passed away a few days later. So, let's just say that I have times when I've been 'distracted'. Lastly, dealing with mod bombs and spams and the like is something that TMB pretty much took upon himself. Much in the same way that I have been updating the site funding status slashbox. I am not the treasurer, but I took it upon myself to maintain that using whatever information I could glean from subscriptions. There's too much to do in maintaining this site for one person to do it all, so we each scratch the itch that interests us and that, quite amazingly, seems to cover all the bases. We each do what we can to keep the site running, bringing to bear whatever expertise and time we have available.
I've had a very full day and am struggling to stay awake. Hopefully not too many mistakes made it through!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Friday February 01 2019, @04:59AM
I'm so sorry. I saw that you were doing the Money, I called you the Treasurer. But you're not the Treasurer. It's always good to have a Treasurer. Somebody that's not part of your Family -- replaceable. So when a lot of Money goes missing he can take the fall. You don't want it to go missing, right? The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting my money. No one else.
You found the Tweet by The Mighty Buzzard. That's great. I would never do a Fake Quote.
Your Aunt. And so many other folks dieing. It's a part of Christmas, they did a study. And saw more folks dieing on Christmas than any other day. They call it the Merry Christmas Heart Attack. Otherwise known as the Merry Christmas Coronary. Could happen to me, could happen to you -- anybody. So many folks loose their lives every year. We mourn for the lives lost. We pray for the victims and we pray for their families. But we must go on. We show incredible courage in the face of grave danger. When we eat our Christmas Feast. And whenever we have a HUGE meal or go on a big shopping trip.
(Score: 3, Funny) by kazzie on Monday January 28 2019, @04:19PM (1 child)
Well, he is famous for his alternative facts...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @02:08AM
So true. He probably legit believes this is tweeting