Slashdot, a user-generated news, analysis, peer question and professional insight community. Tech professionals moderate the site which averages more than 5,300 comments daily and 3.7 million unique visitors each month.
As I said before, we don't have a really good idea on the number of unique IPIDs visiting the site, but we do have solid numbers for our daily comment counts. Here's the graph as generated by slashcode for a biweekly period:
(due to a quirk in slashcode, the graphs don't update until 48 hours later; our comment count for 04/01 was 712 comments total).
Taking in account averages, we're roughly getting a little less than 10% of Slashdot's comment counts, with a considerably smaller user base. As I said, the OkCupid story made me take notice. Here's the comment counts at various scores between the two sites
| SoylentNews | Slashdot.org | --------------------------------------- Score -1 | 130 | 1017 | Score 0 | 130 | 1005 | Score 1 | 109 | 696 | Score 2 | 74 | 586 | Score 3 | 12 | 96 | Score 4 | 4 | 64 | Score 5 | 1 | 46 | ---------------------------------------Furthermore, I took a look at UIDs on the other site, the vast majority of comments came from 6/7 digit UID posters. Looking at CmdrTaco's Retirement Post as well as posts detailing the history of the other site most of the low UIDs are still around, and are simply in perma-lurk mode.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday April 05 2014, @02:27PM
Well if there was a way for the AC poster to have their past history in some way traceable, so we could spot the shills and trolls? Well that would frankly remove every objection i have to AC posts honestly.
This is what I personally have against ACs...it allows shills and trolls to actively derail threads with ZERO risk or way to trace that "yes it is this particular AC" that is doing the damage. Again for a good example look at what happened in the run up to the Win 8 release, Slash was crapflodded by ACs which were ALL staying "on message" and pushing the same bullet points over and over AND OVER and doing everything they could to derail any criticism of Windows 8. Again it was pretty obvious that this wasn't the usual fanboi bullshit as not only were they too on message but the language they used was too scripted and marketing heavy, words like "vertical integration" and "product synergy" and "enhanced user experience" which lets be honest nobody outside an ad agency ever uses in conversation.
But if there was a way to look at an AC's history, so we could say "lets see...posts only on articles about X, stays on message pumping up X, tries to derail criticism of X...yep we have a shill here!" and the same thing when it comes to trolls, like the lovely stalker i had for over a year? I would have ZERO problem with ACs. As i pointed out its not like there is any checking of the info a particular user puts in their profile and Ethanol is a perfect example of how accounts don't mean they don't troll, but at least if we could connect a person to their posts, be it account or IP or whatever? at least we would be able to spot those that are actively trying to be disruptive and derail conversations or push an agenda.
If you want to see why having some sort of way to connect a user to a post is important you might try seeing if the "I was a professional troll" article is still floating around the net, as it was written by a guy working for a shilling post company. it details how he was sent in to actively derail conversation and to incite a "left versus right" mentality in articles that weren't in the best interests of his clients. Its sad that such things are a serious issue now but they are and having a way to at least try to keep every thread from becoming propaganda would be of the good IMHO.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.