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posted by janrinok on Tuesday December 30 2014, @05:32PM   Printer-friendly

The full site update and post is coming up this weekend (barring unforeseen complications) but this is deserving of its own news update being as we had so many weigh in on it alone. While most of you really dug or were neutral on the idea, there were a few criticisms and most of them had some degree of validity. Most specifically the one that said you can see cause and effect more clearly if you change less at once. We absolutely cannot argue with that, so there's been a change to the Experiment.

The Spam moderation and abuse checking mechanism thereof are still going in. The Disagree moderation is still going in and Overrated is still going away. Moderation and posting in the same discussion in any order is still going in. What's not going in is moving all the current downmods to +0 mods. We're going to hold off testing that until we see if this solves most of the problems or not.

Because of another criticism, we'll also be changing how mod points are given out for the duration of the experiment. You may or may not have noticed but we already tested that over Christmas day and the day after by giving everyone who'd been registered a month or more and had "willing to moderate" checked mod points. The dataset is pretty small to infer much from but for the most part the people who said "give us more points and we can self correct" were correct within that two-day span. Not all the bad downmods were corrected by any means but quite a lot of them were. If we can keep this level or better of self-correction-of-jackassery going, I don't see much need for more drastic changes to the moderation system or even for meta-moderation really.

On a personal side note, I dig the fact that basically every comment out of the 150 that the Experiment post got was positive, constructive, or some combination of the two. Calling us bloody idiots is all good from a free speech angle but pretty much every one of our naysayers stepped up and added useful criticism as well. This makes me proud as hell to work for a project with a community that much better than the other site. Hats off to you guys.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 30 2014, @08:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 30 2014, @08:28PM (#130309)

    The good thing about underrated is that sometimes (often?) it's more wrong to pick just one. Sometimes it's a mixture of insightful, informative, and interesting, and I'm loathe to pick one of them since the other two are just as important.

    Perhaps you should be able to spread your one mod point across multiple upmods.

  • (Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday December 31 2014, @09:28AM

    by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 31 2014, @09:28AM (#130474)

    Originally 'umdereated' and 'overrated' were a way to moderate a comment without fear of being nuked by metamoderation. You could change the score but no descriptive term was attached.

    I still maintain that there needs to be official properly-trained moderators leading by example. Principles are all well and good but if I get modded down unfairly because I'm on the wrong side of a popular issue I'm likely to pay it forward. At least that's what my history with Slashdot has taught me.

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    • (Score: 2) by Popeidol on Thursday January 01 2015, @07:51AM

      by Popeidol (35) on Thursday January 01 2015, @07:51AM (#130719) Journal

      What you're describing there is essentially meta-moderation - everybody moderates and joins in the discussion, and a smaller group gives the occasional nudge to keep things on the right track.

      I'm wary about being more heavy handed than that. Once you start separating the community into groups with different amounts of power, it can lead to a lot of animosity. if somebody mods your comment badly, it's nice if you can write it off as 'some guy on the internet is an idiot' rather than 'the guys with power over me are idiots'.

      • (Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday January 01 2015, @10:03PM

        by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 01 2015, @10:03PM (#130854)
        Funny, I see the problem coming from the opposite end. When people follow popular trends, like hating anything Microsoft, then the Group-Think is formed. When mod-point equipped people come along with a more objective tone they keep the balance in place.
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