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Ok, I meant to have an open forum about moderation *way* before this point. I did read the various feedback and comments left on my journal and the last moderation, and have made some changes to the moderation system.
First, mod points now expire after eight hours. I'm willing to extend this to 12 or 16 hours after I'm sure comments will still reach +5 fairly regularly. With luck, we'll get to the point we can extend mod-points to last a full 24 hours which I suspect will end most of the complaining on them vanishing too soon.
Second, I'd like to open the floor to making a more fundamental change to the moderation system. Specifically, allowing people to post AND moderate in the same discussion. We've seen plenty of posts get up to +5, which means 3-4 people gave up their right to post to keep our comments high quality. This was brought up during our last plea for stories, and I wanted to solicit more feedback before unleashing this upon the site.
I've floated the idea on IRC, and it seems there's a fair bit of support for removing the post/moderate split, though we'd need to make some changes to prevent rampant abuse. Here's what was suggested to keep things sane:
Ok, I meant to have an open forum about moderation *way* before this point. I did read the various feedback and comments left on my journal and the last moderation, and have made some changes to the moderation system.
First, mod points now expire after eight hours. I'm willing to extend this to 12 or 16 hours after I'm sure comments will still reach +5 fairly regularly. With luck, we'll get to the point we can extend mod-points to last a full 24 hours which I suspect will end most of the complaining on them vanishing too soon.
Second, I'd like to open the floor to making a more fundamental change to the moderation system. Specifically, allowing people to post AND moderate in the same discussion. We've seen plenty of posts get up to +5, which means 3-4 people gave up their right to post to keep our comments high quality. This was brought up during our last plea for stories, and I wanted to solicit more feedback before unleashing this upon the site.
I've floated the idea on IRC, and it seems there's a fair bit of support for removing the post/moderate split, though we'd need to make some changes to prevent rampant abuse. Here's what was suggested to keep things sane:
- Mod points won't roll back after a post
- Moderators can post in the same discussion (either before or after moderating), but can not moderate replies to their posts.
I've heard various ideas such as limiting it only after mods have expended their points (this will require implementing a cooldown to prevent a user from getting points again too soon). I want to hear your feedback, and I'll roll together something for the next major update of the site. Leave your comments
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Moderation: Discussing !(post^moderate)
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Default, n.:
The hardware's, of course.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by gishzida on Tuesday April 01 2014, @08:42AM
Not so sure about this with the way some of the Moderators use their points as "I don't agree with you" Points.
Karma should not be removed after it is earned... and capping it at 50 seems to be kinda evil... Having maxed Karma points means I should not want to post anything, make replies, or submit stories-- i.e. capping Karma may put users into "cruise mode" conversely forcing users who have previously displayed good behavior by "Karma aging" is a bad idea... Honey works better than Vinegar... unless your are trying to attract fruit flies. "Karma aging" smells of Vinegar.
What to do instead?
Karma is a reward for good behavior and a measure of "goodness" rather than "talkativeness" or "present and accounted roll call"... Maybe adding karmic "achievement levels" is better... Hit 50 and it rolls to the next level like a martial arts belt ranking... as the levels go higher the number to reach the next level goes up... maybe a hexadecimal rating... so step 1 is 80 (50 in hex) , step 2 is 256 (#100), Step 3 is 512 (#400), Step 4 is 2048 (#800) etc... This is intended as a "reward" for the high karma member to keep giving... Down mods count against the total Karma but the long term effect should be that High Karma members will continue to plod onward and upward.
As to whether this ranking should be public is open to debate... but re-enforcing and rewarding good behavior is better for the site.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday April 01 2014, @08:48AM
Hrm, I hadn't considered the possibility of making karma more work like XP in games leveling. That might actually be the way to do it; you need X upmods/positive actions to level up, and at specific levels, allow people to do shit, and perhaps make it easier to go down than up (i.e. if people start trolling with their accounts).
The system was capped to prevent users from getting obscene amounts of karma, then being "immune" to down moderation. The devil is in the details as they say.
Still always moving
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday April 01 2014, @10:31AM
After writing the below, it occurred to me that a "gamification" system like that would be best as an optional "challenge" for users, rather than mandatory. As a few comments demonstrate, some people love feeling challenged and will become disappointed if they reach the top -- but what they interpret as a fun challenge will seem more like a frustrating penalty to others.
I have the bad feeling that a system like that could end up being great for a small number of power users, but harmful to the overall site.
One potential bad side-effect is that users would feel "forced" to show up every day and comment a great deal. That sounds good at first, but there's at least two unpleasant consequences:
a) Many users will react by producing a lot of shallow but acceptably positive comments just to meet the quota, so the site gets more quantity at the expense of quality.
b) Some with very limited free time, and/or that prefer to leave just periodic thought-out/longer comments, will become frustrated and give up.
In both cases, the site would eventually lose at least some of the users are primarily interested in those serious/longer comments.
I admit my other concern is a bit on the paranoid-conspiracy side... If only users with karma over a certain amount can moderate, and karma drains over time, a small group of power users that become allies/friends could actually interfere with someone's ability to reach the magic number. I don't think that most current Soylenters would do something like that, but Slashdot has run into that sort of problem before, especially when controversial topics attract 'activist' new users that decide to stick around.
Just my humble concerned opinion. :)
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday April 01 2014, @10:51AM
Very good point. This post just got put in my scratchpad of things to keep in mind on working on this. The biggest problem is just having a karma system at all acts like a challenge (when we started, there was a race between the staff to see who could hit karma cap first).
That being said, for things like earning XP, I didn't intend to have it just earned by posting; you have to post, and get modded up to get XP; you don't get points for posting low quality stuff; it has to get upvoted for it to count with stronger XP award if it gets to +2/+3/+4/+5.
This might also be the way to get metamoderation to work, and moderators can earn XP by getting their moderations voted on, and metamods get XP for metamoderating itself. I don't want to tie the metamod data into the mod algo until its transparent to the user (black boxes are bad), but having a way to get feedback is a GOOD thing.
Still always moving
(Score: 1) by Rickter on Tuesday April 01 2014, @02:45PM
Perhaps you could track & display a person's number of +5 posts next to their name, along with a percentage or ratio of upmods v downmods.
(Score: 1) by VanessaE on Tuesday April 01 2014, @05:53PM
I think the problem isn't so much whether a user has to grind to "level up", but what they get to DO when they get there. At the moment, there isn't really a whole lot to offer on this site (or the other one) because the feature set is kinda fixed to a degree. That said, I can see a few things that might work:
1. Allow editing of posts. Replied-to posts would need a metric assload of karma compared to a post with no replies.
2. Disable that G*d damned lameness filter (if we still use it, which I assume is the case) after a certain karma level is reached. Think crude ASCII-art diagrams where a discussion calls for it (but still limited in width and height).
3. Allow posting of embedded images within a reply (with the ability for any user to configure their account to reduce them to thumbnails, links, or just never show them).
4. If/when this site gets ads, allow them to be disabled for users beyond a certain karma level. The other site does something like this, but I get the impression that it's based more on the amount of time you've been there, rather than how good of a contributor you've been.
5. Everyone's always bitching about lack of Unicode support, and others have said in the past that the reason it's mostly disabled is because of trolls using right-to-left switches, non-breaking spaces, and other methods to disrupt the page layout, and so I guess it's filtered out at posting time. Whitelists are sort of a non-starter given just how big the Unicode space is, so why not just open up clear Unicode access to those who can be trusted not to abuse it?
6. Make it more difficult to mod-down someone whose karma is already sky high. I posted elsewhere that the 2-point-to-mod down idea was good, provided that moderators have enough points to ensure that good posts get adequate coverage, but maybe this should go a little further. Give users a minimum of 15 points; 1 point to mod anything up, as always. 1 to 4 points to mod down, depending on the karma of the person whose post is being modded.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday April 01 2014, @07:29PM
That may be true on the other site, where every Unicode character not on a very narrow whitelist is filtered out, but from the behaviour seen here, I think it's more of a problem with Slashcode interpreting the UTF8 byte stream differently than the browser encoded it. If using numeric entities, you can post almost unlimited Unicode (directionality markers seem to be filtered out, however).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by gishzida on Tuesday April 01 2014, @10:53AM
One added feature of this to be considered is that down mods have more effect for "up leveled" users.
Let's consider an example: "Jane Moderator" has ten points... She sees that "George Shiny-Karma" has made a bad comment... She down mods him... she does not know he is a "leveled up user" [this is a reason why public ranking might be discouraged... Karma is personal and does not need to be advertised if a person has good Karma it will probably be obvious to other members of the community]. But here is "Shiny-Karma making a bad comment-- so She gives "Shiny-Karma" a down mod... but the effect on Shiny-Karma's points is in proportion to his karmic level.. so if he has hit the 100 point level, the down mod costs 2 points rather than 1 one point... if he is above 200 points in costs him 3 points and so forth...
The idea here is that a "good" user will pay more heavily for bad behavior... but not terribly so unless the behavior continues. The net effect here is to try to suppress bad behavior at "high levels of Karma" while continuing to reward for good behavior... other added bonuses might be allowing high karmic users able to vote on the inbound article queues or other things that "proven good community member" can be "trusted" to do.
Think of this "software project" is an "open source news and idea stream". How would you want to reward "commits" and discourage code trash and commentary sludge? Rewards for good behavior should be as good as punishments are bad.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday April 01 2014, @01:05PM
The trick here is though that if we have uncapped karma, you'd still need one hell of a hit to make it work, and if someone is vidictively downmodding, it could be UGLY.
My thought here is to have a second "recent karma" value that goes from -10 to 10, and caps at 10. At 5, you get the +1 bonus, at -5, you post at 0, and each period of aging (once a week?), the value moves closer to 0. This allows a disruptive user to get squelched, and allowed someone who's been vindictively downmodded to recover without loosing months/years of progress.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by lhsi on Wednesday April 02 2014, @07:29AM
Is it possible/feasible to prevent someone from modding the same user account more than once with the same set of points? I generally prefer the idea of making downmods "cost" more, or restricting them to only one or two downmods per set of points, but limiting downmods to a user could also be considered.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Open4D on Tuesday April 01 2014, @11:27AM
Yes, to me (and others [soylentnews.org]) that is currently the biggest problem in the realm of moderation. Here's [soylentnews.org] one example and some discussion that followed, including alternative ideas for changing the moderation system.
If anything, I think changing !(post^moderate) would probably make matters worse.
NCommander said:
So this proposed change is intended to increase the number of comments? Is it a response to the perceived low number of comments? Personally I just have a quick think before moderating in any story: am I likely to want to comment on this? It's rare for me to change my mind subsequently, and thus be inconvenienced by this rule, so in my case, changing the rule wouldn't increase the number of comments very much.
I admit, I do believe the rule is a bit of a blunt instrument. Some kind of system that lets you comment and moderate the same story fairly would be a nice-to-have. But I think we'd probably need meta-moderation first.
I think [soylentnews.org] the only way we're really going to get more comments-per-story is by getting more users.
(Score: 1) by gishzida on Tuesday April 01 2014, @02:25PM
I have to agree with you... Writing a comment on a post you've already moderated or vice versa seems to be the wrong way to go... also allowing the use of mod points as "i don't agree with you points" needs to be addressed... To accept the moderator points there is a price... One is not posting on things you are judgeing and two (at least for me) biting my tongue when a yammer-head makes a statement that makes me cringe... but even yammer-heads are allowed to have opinions and so I resist the temptation to down mod... in fact I'm not sure that having down mods helps... Down mods do nothing "positive" when it is used simply for the purpose of saying I don't agree...
If we are not going to do something about moderators "editorializing" then at least make it clear and add "I Agree +1" and "I Disagree -1" to the list of moderation options. Then at least those being victimized by a disagreeable moderator will know exactly why they got down modded... I'm sorry but over-rated or redundant tells me exactly nothing as to the Moderator's thoughts.
Since the 5 point cap on a single comment is an artificial, remove comment cap and eventually the cream rises to the top.
(Score: 2) by wjwlsn on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:10PM
Lots of good comments about down-moderation issues (and potential fixes) here:
http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=923 [soylentnews.org]
I am a traveler of both time and space. Duh.