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from the I-love-the-smell-of-burning-trolls-in-the-morning dept.
Things finally came to a head on slashdot last night, and now anonymous posts are banned. No more anonymous nazi ASCII art, no anonymous racism, and no APK. More in this journal entry [Ed's Comment: And lots of interesting comments too ...].
It's one way to combat anonymous hate speech and forum spam.
[Editor (JR) We've looked at the site but we cannot find an announcement that anonymous posts are actually banned; it might simply be a case that the software is not working correctly, although it would seem to be an unlikely cause. Does anyone in our community have any additional information to categorically prove or disprove that anonymous comments are disabled?
Furthermore, as there are many more comments in the journal entry than there are here, I would recommend making any new comments on BarbaraHudson's journal entry rather than splitting the discussion into two.]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @08:38PM (12 children)
Slashdot has always had a lot of trolls, even 20 years ago. A variety of approaches were used to limit anonymous posting and restrict troll accounts. The trolls were sometimes funny, though there were a few highly offensive trolls. They weren't consistently spamming every article with the same nonsense, though. Some of the trolling was genuinely clever, even if it belonged at -1. Troll accounts were relegated to posting automatically at -1 and most of the trolls were content with their comments starting at -1. There were temporary IP and subnet bans when too many negative moderations were received within a short amount of time.
GNAA started using open proxies to spam articles with hundreds of anonymous posts. Editors used their unlimited mod points so all those comments were at -1, then started scanning users for open proxies when they posted comments. The current round of spam was from users abusing VPNs to evade the IP and subnet bans to post almost endless anonymous spam. That's almost certainly where all the APK spam was coming from, the stalking of a few users, and the antisemitic spam about circumcision. Slashdot tried deleting that spam but it seems like they eventually decided it wasn't worth the trouble.
Even when there were hundreds of troll accounts posting back 15-20 years ago, troll posts only seemed to account for 10-20% of the comments. There were enough users moderating, including editors, that low quality comments were quickly moderated to -1. More recently, the volume of spam comments were a much larger proportion of the total amount of comments. There just weren't enough mod points, particularly when users like APK would keep reposting comments that had been modded to -1.
It's a sad day for Slashdot. They require users to solve reCAPTCHAs during account creation. Slashdot had long argued that anonymous posting was necessary and actively defended it in their FAQ, which addresses eliminating anonymous posting:
Stories have become less technical in their subject matter and have trended toward more stories that relate to political issues. The shift probably attracted more low quality comments and lost the interest of Slashdot's original user base. The editors seem ignorant about technology, which is why the DEC logo gets (ab)used for stories that have the word "digital" in the headline, even if they have nothing to do with DEC. I'm not sorry to see the spam mostly gone, but it's a sad day, and one of the things that made Slashdot (mostly) unique is dead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @08:49PM (1 child)
The comment system over there became unusable with d2 so I'm not surprised the moderation system failed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @08:57AM
How so? By D2 do you mean the new crappy system that hides UID and is attempting to be all web 2.0 doing a really sucky job at it?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Saturday August 10 2019, @09:29PM
The thing is, the "we" who thought about it then, and the "we" who own and run the place now... not the same "we" at all, not the same goals, and frankly, not the same legal/political environment.
--
If people make you sick... perhaps you should cook them longer
--Hannibal Lecter, probably
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @10:06PM
Great, you can be spied on by Google over at Slashdot. It's ridiculous that sites can't just have their own local captchas, rather than relying on third party surveillance machines for everything.
(Score: 2) by qzm on Saturday August 10 2019, @10:27PM (2 children)
Thats now quite how I remember it, and I have been here a bit longer than that.
The big difference these days are the obviously political attempts to derail discussions by high posting obviously pure inflammatory and straw man BS.
Now, the question of 'should those topics have ever been on /.' is different, however it will be interesting to see if there is any change.
Perhaps you would like to say why you think doind a recapcha once is such a bad thing? I know its suddenly become part of the 'OMG this is so evil' worldview for a few right now, but really? try and come up with a valid reason why.
And while I certainly agree on the last bit, the current type of trolls seem to like to spread their BS over all articles.. so...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:33PM
Because I don't want to be spied on by Google, ever. I don't use any of their disservices and actively block them, so sites that use these disservices are defective by design. If they want a captcha, they should roll their own or find something they can use locally, without relying on third party surveillance monstrosities like Google.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @09:44AM
Outside of Google tracking via reCaptcha, it's purposefully designed to deliver a worse experience (as in, more captchas) to non-Chromium browsers and people not logged into Google accounts. It often also flat out doesn't work in niche or properly secured browsers at all. It also gives Google free labor since they use it to train their "AI."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:07AM (3 children)
I have a few comments to your post:
1) You are correct that the quality of the articles on Slashdot has fallen. I used to love the quality of the articles but as you say, it seems to lean way more on the political now. I am sick of the constant stream of them.
2) The signal to noise from spammers has fluctuated in the past. The past few weeks have been really bad but it's been this bad before. APK's pissing contest with Barbara Hudson seems to be the worst of it, but the Nazi stuff is annoying too.
3) I suspected something was up a week or so ago when I suddenly started receiving 15 mod points each and every day. I spent most of them modding down the APK and Nazi crap along with a few other spammers. I'd run out pretty quick but it seemed that the worst of it got modded eventually.
4) Although I have a long term user account, I most often just posted as AC since I would check in from different machines throughout the day. I doubt very much I will bother looking at the comments anymore if this continues. I'm sure it will devolve into an echo chamber.
5) Slashdot seems to be on a path of self destruction. Beta nearly killed them before. Failing to remove posts by obvious trolls like AspiePK and now disabling AC seems like nails in the coffin to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:42AM
I was just about to say FUCK BETA but you mentioned it before me...high 5 bro :)
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:45AM (1 child)
I'm going to put my dick in the mashed potatoes and suggest some unpopular views. The last time I visited Slashdot was 6 months-ish ago, and only reading 1 or 2 discussions, but from that small sample size and particular situation I determined that:
- Slashdot kicked SN's ass at posting more relevant articles, and they posted them in a timely manner. That's a big deal in today's short-attention-span world where bright autists have really good things to say but only if the article is less than a few days old and the autists are still in a motivated headspace to participate.
- The comments of Slashdot AC's were greater than or equal to the non-anonymous posters.
Yeah, yeah, I know -- "Don't be a lazy fuck and submit your stories." But that's hard to do with all this nice weed in California. Maybe it's better that I don't anyway, we might see some refugees from Slashdot or 8ch. Hopefully they will each balance each other out.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Pslytely Psycho on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:18AM
"I'm going to put my dick in the mashed potatoes"
And this is why you spend the holidays alone.......
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @10:16PM
I think it is sad but I am VERY surprised by it.
Trolls were simply not a huge issue on Slashdot. Not any more or less now than in past years. The only consistent troll to be observed was the APK troll, who while admittedly did appear to be losing their meds in recent months, was simply not visible unless you went looking for him posting at -1.
I am VERY surprised at this outcome and cannot accept the comments here alleging that Slashdot was somehow a more difficult place to post or read comments on that even most online news media comment sections. The signal to noise ratio has always been high and miles above 99% of the internet, especially the social media parts thereof.
What I do suspect to be the true cause was the increasing volume of political "debate" related to the ongoing American Kulturkampf. Heated derails are increasingly common, but again I do NOT see this as a problem exclusive to AC posting by any means. Maybe AC posters were rubbing editors up the wrong way in their responses to certain stories being posted, but the fault there lies with the choice of stories, as it always has. It's a bit disingenuous to complain that politicized trolling forced you to ban AC posting when you keep posting political story summaries that consistently go to 500+ relies.
I don't see a good reason for AC posting to die. It is part of what the internet is, and Slashcode system and website exemplify the benefits of keeping it as an option. It's the content that gets you to +5, not the username.