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Welcome, new trolls! We're pleased as punch to have you aboard, unfortunately as you may have noticed our moderators are unable to give you the moderations you've been working so hard for. Since we can't really do much about people not moderating more, we're going to be giving out more points so that the ones that do can give you the attention you so desperately crave.
Moderators: Starting a little after midnight UTC tonight, everyone will be getting ten points a day instead of five. The threshold for a mod-bomb, however, is going to remain at five. This change is not so you can pursue an agenda against registered users more effectively but so we can collectively handle the rather large uptick in anonymous trolling recently while still being able to have points remaining for upmodding quality comments. This is not an invitation to go wild downmodding; it's helping you to be able to stick to the "concentrate more on upmodding than downmodding" bit of the guidelines.
Also, this is not a heavily thought-out or permanent change. It is a quick, dirty adjustment that will be reviewed, tweaked, and likely changed before year's end. Questions? Comments?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 26 2017, @01:56AM (2 children)
If modding a comment didn't trigger a reload of the thread, I'd do it more often.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 26 2017, @02:18AM (1 child)
You can queue up multiple moderations for an article and then hit any moderate button and all of them will be applied, if you have the points.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Saturday August 26 2017, @03:39AM
What annoyed me was when it would go back to the top of the page and I'd lose my place. Thanks for fixing that!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26 2017, @02:11AM
Niggery Uzzard sure is full of himself tonight. Has he been sucking his own cock again?
(Score: 2) by J053 on Saturday August 26 2017, @02:37AM (1 child)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday August 26 2017, @03:42AM
The few times I've been modded Troll, I was absolutely serious, with no intent to troll.
I'd guess that's so with about half of the posts that get so modded.
One man's troll is another man's garden gnome.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Informative) by coolgopher on Saturday August 26 2017, @03:21AM (1 child)
The Moderation box still says we get 5 points per day. If the 10-point idea sticks around, someone should probably fix up the text there :)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 26 2017, @10:31AM
Good catch.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26 2017, @04:01AM (10 children)
Is anyone here thinking about setting up a reputation system? I've wondered for a while if that could improve internet discussions. Maybe based on hidden variable Bayesian networks, or some other modern technique to allow for different attitudes while still aiming for quality. Straight up/down voting seems so one dimensional.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 26 2017, @05:05AM (5 children)
The problem with that is it's vulnerable to abuse in the long term. Registration is free and it's not hard to see someone with an axe to grind making a dozen burner accounts and Bayesian-poisoning a target to hell and gone.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26 2017, @06:05AM (1 child)
It would have to be resistant to that, so accounts with little history don't carry much weight.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26 2017, @09:30AM
Doesn't work - the attacker just makes noisier sock puppets, or lets them sleep longer before using.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday August 26 2017, @08:49PM (2 children)
This is primarily the reason metamoderation was never deployed to production. M2 (as Slashdot implemented it) was fixed almost two years ago, but I thought the concept was fundamentally flawed based on our experience with how people moderate on SN.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday August 27 2017, @12:56AM
I meta-modded a few times back when it was new, then decreed it a waste of time and never did it again.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27 2017, @02:37PM
The /. version had issues. I think adding an incorrect good or incorrect bad mod option that has no points associated with it could possibly be used to help evaluate whether people are too often modding things wrongly.
But, that would be a tremendous pain to get working right and shy of having people actually looking at the moderation that's being done, it's probably always going to be a problem.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tibman on Saturday August 26 2017, @05:05AM
Could we call it something cool like.. Karma?
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday August 26 2017, @07:22AM (2 children)
I would suggest singular value decomposition. (Sorry, but I'm using a bunch of linear algebra lingo in this post.)
Consider a model of users' opinions of post quality versus the posts. If somehow each user were to completely record mods for every post ever, it'd be a rectangular grid with a lot of numbers (rows being users, let's say, columns being posts, and individual cells being the opinion value for a particular user and post). One can approximate that grid as a numerical matrix of the form U*D*V, where U and V are orthogonal matrices with respect to the far left for U and far right for V. D is a diagonal matrix of weights or "singular values". When D has the same rank as your original matrix, then the approximation is perfect, up to round off error.
But since you don't want the full information, you can throw away all but a fixed number of the highest weight singular values and keep only the parts of U and V that multiply by those weights.
Basically, it's very close to an eigenvalue/eigenvector approach which it reduces to, when the matrix is square (V would be matrix of eigenvectors, D matrix of eigenvalues, and U the adjoint of V).
Anyway, this method also lends itself to filling in huge gaps since in the real world, we're not going to mod every post possible. But one can calculate U,D,V triples that approximate moderately well the mods that have been made.
Pros:
1) allows for several independent modding dimensions rather than the one of the current system.
2) can impute a mod for any user or post with sufficient mods (say 5-10 mods made by the user or put on a post).
3) Given a user, can estimate a mod for any post with one or more mods.
4) Insensitive to usual mod bombing and such. Even a large number of users with the same opinion would just look like a single dimension to the algorithm. Mod poisoning is harder.
5) iterative method so it can be updated with more recent changes in opinion.
Cons:
1) Complicated algorithm with significant overhead and some unknown interactions.
2) I can't figure out a way to do imputation in real time. I'm thinking the U, D, V matrices get computed every fixed unit of time (say once a day, for example, with the previous day's U, D, V matrices used as initial guesses). You'd also want the number of mods to be limited in some way to reduce computational effort.
3) Dimensions don't have specific meaning (they're just dimensions along which the mod matrix would be best approximated with a fixed low rank matrix) while the dimension of the current mod system does.
4) For stuff, you haven't explicitly modded, you would see drift in the mod estimates with each update.
5) Each page load would including mod calculations on each post specific to the user making the page request. Could be a lot of overhead to page generation and loading.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 26 2017, @10:34AM
Damnit, don't make me read stuff like that before I'm done with my first cup of coffee. Put it in a spoiler tag next time and give me some warning.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday August 27 2017, @12:59AM
Mod: Pi (my brain hurts)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Sulla on Saturday August 26 2017, @05:41AM (2 children)
Unfortunately you just laid out the ground rules for the contest of having the most upmods to downmods, so while everyone else is doing their job at stopping trolls I will be modding mildly interesting posts up to get a better score.
Sharks with lasers? +5 insightful never seen that comment before.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 26 2017, @10:36AM
That's actually fine by me. It'd make the whole range of comment-scored filters more useful than they currently are.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday August 26 2017, @07:05PM
Maybe +5 Inciteful...
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Saturday August 26 2017, @12:47PM
Just set at +1 and enjoy.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by linkdude64 on Saturday August 26 2017, @04:43PM (2 children)
Disagree is likely the most under-utilized of the bunch.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday August 28 2017, @11:59AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday August 29 2017, @12:01AM
I agree.