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After my last SN post the topic of moderation was brought up. Since its been quite awhile since we last openly discussed the state of moderation, I want to give the community a venue to discuss their feelings on it, and if the system needs further refinement. As a reminder, here's a review for how the system is currently setup:
- 5 mod points are handed out to at 00:10 UTC to users with positive karma
- ACs start at +0, users with karma less than 40 post at +1, users above that can post at +2
- You need 10 karma to mark some spam or troll
- Under normal circumstances, the staff do *not* have unlimited mod points, but can (and have) banned abusers of the moderation system
Please also review our SoylentNews Moderation Guidelines.
As always, we are willing to make changes to the system, but please post examples *with* links to any cases of suspected mod abuse. It's a lot easier to justify changing the system when evidence is in black and white. I also recommend that users make serious proposals on changes we can make. I'm not going to color the discussion with my own opinions, but as always, I will respond inline with comments when this goes live, and post a follow up article a few days after this one
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(Score: 2, Disagree) by engblom on Wednesday May 20 2015, @10:16AM
I want to be able to form an own opinion rather than getting just one side. For getting just "one side", the article is enough, or any blog linking to an article. My opinion is that visitors should learn as much as possible by reading the comments.
Currently, an interesting post might get several times both up and down modded, ending up too low to be visible while an half offtopic post might get higher if it got one single up-mod.
My propose is to not allow down-modding, only up-modding. This means those comments (made by trolls) that nobody found interesting will remain low in points as nobody mods them up and can be easily filtered out. The comments supported by the majority get highest points and can be easily found.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marneus68 on Wednesday May 20 2015, @10:27AM
While I see where you're coming from, I'm not sure this is a viable proposal. It looks good on paper, but it doesn't take time in consideration.
A better, more researched and in-depth comment, taking much more time to be written, will inevitably end up lower on the scale your propose since the article itself will be further in the site history. As the conversation goes by and better arguments and comments are brought up, less and less people will still be active in the thread, thus making your system a bad way to promote the best comment. It will only end up promoting the first few interesting ones on top of the last best.
(Score: 2) by engblom on Wednesday May 20 2015, @10:40AM
Isn't what you describe a problem existing already now? I mean if discussions have begun on a topic, the almost only way to get your response visible is to reply to another comment rather than posting a new comment. I have several times seen comments being offtopic to comment threads.
My proposal does not solve this particular problem, but it does not make it worse. It however helps in getting more of the interesting juice visible.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Wednesday May 20 2015, @11:25AM
People who get the earlier comments in will naturally receive more moderation simply because more people will see what they say with less competition for the reader's mod points. That's perfectly natural and I wouldn't say it was a "problem", more a "home truth".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday May 20 2015, @11:33AM
I disagree. That way, any post with just 4 proponents will get highest rating, even if it is offensive,racist,brainless shit only supported by these 5 people and no-one else
Even without these extreme cases, I think there are enough cases where a comment is halfway ok, marked hyper-clever by a minority having a lower perspective, and can't be corrected anymore.
I agree that the focus should be on promotion rather than demotion, but with our system of awarding 5 mod-points to each user every night there are really enough mod points going around to compensate for some down-mods.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2015, @05:07PM
promotion rather than demotion
How about promotion costs 1 mod point and demotion costs 2 mod points?
Instead of someone subtracting five points from a side they disagree with, they can either subtract only two or add five points to "their side".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2015, @05:15PM
There is a mod for that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by moondrake on Wednesday May 20 2015, @11:54AM
There should not be "sides" at all in down-modding. The comment is either troll/flamebait or you mod disagree, which does not lower the score.
Of course, some posts make a flamebait remark and then say something insightful, which makes it hard to evaluate and causes conflicting mods. And everyone is susceptible to let personal opinion cloud judgment. But these things are not solved by only allowing upmodding.
What you propose might work, but only if one increases the max number of points to 20 or so, and sets a threshold at 10. However, this means that topics that attract little interest have no posts above 10, which I find unsatisfactory compared to a 6 pt system that we have now. When we leave the scale as it is now and disallow downmods, it means that 2 or 3 people with very extreme opinions and modpoints (everybody has those) can dominate most discussions (high-modded post amplify themselves by initiating more discussion, so a racist +5 comment easily turns into a flame/troll fest. With the current system, such problems are only visible when there is a significant minority opinion, e.g. AGW). Increasing the amount of such post is not something that I believe you want to see.
(Score: 2) by GeminiDomino on Wednesday May 20 2015, @03:00PM
There should not be "sides" at all in down-modding. The comment is either troll/flamebait or you mod disagree, which does not lower the score.
Counterpoint: political hand-grenades. Any political faction has its own dogma that *someone* will always post at least once, regardless of how old, irrelevant, or debunked it may be. Suddenly, you have "sides"
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2015, @06:02PM
Correct. For example, "[Niggers/Mooslums/Bitches/SJWs/Fags/etc] aren't human" is a common one. It may be factually invalid and inflammatory, but its still a widely-held opinion.
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Friday May 29 2015, @11:42AM
It does not matter if the opinion is widely held. Even if you hold that opinion, you need to be an utter moron to not realize they are inflammatory. Therefore its still flamebait.
There might be dogmas or stupid statements that are not inflammatory though. Perhaps in addition to disagree we need a "Silly" mod. I do think btw that Mods such as "disagree" should require at least one reply to point out why you disagree.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 20 2015, @02:12PM
In theory, I could see how downmodding could be used to kinda censor a particular opinion. In practice, what I've been seeing on SoylentNews is that "-1 Troll", "-1 Flamebait", and "-1 Overrated" are in fact being used the way they were intended, and the stuff getting modded into oblivion are those posts that truly deserve it.
You are of course welcome to browse the comments with a threshold of -1 to see exactly what you might be missing if only "one side" is presented.
Also, sometimes there really isn't another side of the issue. For example, if the question was whether astronauts had landed on the moon, the nutjobs who say they didn't should not be given equal time or equal standing.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by albert on Thursday May 21 2015, @04:52AM
The solution is non-linear mod points. Count the up mods and down mods separately. Before subtracting to find the result, apply non-linear functions such that the strength of up mods grows faster than the strength of down mods. Problem solved!
There are numerous functions that can do the job. Examples:
* Take the square of the up mods.
* Take the inverse tangent of the down mods.
* Take the log of the down mods.
* Take the factorial of the up mods.
Apply any one or two of those and the problem goes away. Choosing the easy one for example:
score = up*up-down