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As promised, here's the round-table discussion post that I said on Wednesday was coming. We have a long history at SoylentNews of listening and responding to our community; I genuinely hope that never changes. I also recognize that I may have ruffled some feathers in the last few weeks with original content postings so here's the best place to get this all out.
I am mindful of the community's support and goodwill; I don't want to squander any of it. Yes, there are times where my hand may be forced (e.g., DCMA takedowns). Still, I'm always a bit hesitant whenever I post on the main site for anything that isn't site update news or similar. I may be the de facto site leader, but I want my submissions to be treated like anyone else's — I want no favoritism. The editorial team does review my stories and signs off before they go live (unless it's an "emergency" situation such as the last time we blew up the site). However, as the saying goes, the buck stops with me.
SoylentNews accepts original content. I'm also aware that I've probably submitted the most original content so far (See "Previously", below for some examples). I'm grateful for the community's apparent acceptance of my submissions and the positive responses to them. What I don't know is if there is an undercurrent of displeasure with these. Maybe everyone thinks these are all fine. Then again, maybe somebody has an issue with them. Rather than assume anything, let's get it all out in the open.
What I want to cover in this round-table discussion is original content and having images in posts as well as topics such as yesterday's Live Show on Improving Your Security -- Wednesday June 3rd, 2020.
So, contributors and commenters to SoylentNews, get that Reply button hot and let me hear your feedback. As usual, either a member of staff or I will respond to your comments below,
73 de NCommander
Previously:
(2020-06-03) Live Show on Improving Your Security -- Wednesday June 3rd, 2020
(2020-05-24) Retrotech: The Novell NetWare Experience
(2020-05-14) Exploring Windows for Workgroups 3.11 - Early 90s Networking
(2020-05-10) Examining Windows 1.0 HELLO.C - 35 Years of Backwards Compatibility
(2020-05-15) Meta: Having a Chat about SoylentNews' Internet Relay Chat
(2018-10-25) My Time as an ICANN Fellow
(2017-10-09) soylentnews.org experiencing DNSSEC issues
(2017-04-20) Soylentnews.org is Moving to Gentoo...
(2017-04-17) SN Security Updates: CAA, LogJam, HTTP Method Disable, and 3DES
(2017-03-13) Xenix 2.2.3c Restoration: Xrossing The X (Part 4)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday June 09 2020, @12:04AM (9 children)
Not really clear on what you were asking but you don't want me giving out stats on bad moderations any more than you want me giving out punishment for moderating improperly, either way puts me in a position of deciding what's good and what's not. If you were asking about posts that get downmodded and upmodded both, I'll look into it in the morning and get back to you. It's a pain in the butt query to figure out without slamming our db and my brain's better at taking that sort of abuse before it's awake enough to object.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @01:18AM (5 children)
Quite so. My apologies for being vague. What I was asking for were statistics about moderated messages.
I posited that in many cases, messages that were downmodded were also upmodded. I further speculated that the interplay of those moderations leads to a (mostly) fair assessment of comment quality.
In that context, I wondered if my initial premise was valid, and if so, how that affected total moderations.
To be specific, the data I was requesting was some or all of:
1. The average number of upmods/downmods for messages that get moderated;
2. A frequency distribution [wikipedia.org] of comment moderation scores that received moderation;
3. Ratio of upmods to downmods across comments that receive *multiple* moderations;
4. The mean and median moderation scores for comments that receive moderation;
5. The above statistics broken down by comments posted by AC vs. registered users.
Are most comments which receive a single moderation usually an upmod or a downmod?
How does the universe of *moderated* comments break down in terms of moderation score?
What's the story with comments that receive multiple moderations? Are those moderations generally split between upmods and downmods, or mostly just upmods?
And lots of other questions that didn't just pop off the top of my head.
The statistics I mentioned could give a useful window into how the moderation system is being used.
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday June 09 2020, @04:07PM (4 children)
Well, for starters, out of our million and small change comments, only 65005 have been downmodded at all. Of those, 36336 have also been upmodded. Now for your specific requests, all of which I'm excluding Spam and Disagree from and rounding to four decimal places...
AC comments only:
Registered users only:
Yup, that's all I'm doing for the morning. Had to redo the multi-mod ones from scratch because I flubbed the SQL when I went to count up the mods for registered and AC. Keep in mind that if the numbers don't precisely add up, it's because I did this while people were still posting and moderating. If they're badly off, I probably needed more coffee when I ran that query.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @05:31PM (3 children)
Thank you Buzzard!
That didn't really play out the way I expected in several respects -- which just goes to show that the exercise was useful and worthwhile.
It's interesting that despite all the complaints about downmods, Soylentils upmod significantly more than they downmod.
I won't quote the AC vs. registered user splits here (you can view them here [soylentnews.org]).
That said, I find it a little surprising that ACs are less likely to be downmodded than registered users, but not by all that much (AC: 1.2284 vs. Registered Users: 1.4192). I'd have expected the reverse.
Registered Users are less likely to be upmodded than ACs, but not by very much (AC: 1.878 vs. Registered Users: 1.7607).
So. based on a quick eyeball analysis, it seems that comments:
1. Are more likely to be upmodded than downmodded;
2. This holds true for both AC and Registered User comments;
3. ACs are slightly *more* likely to be upmodded and slightly *less* likely to be downmodded than Registered Users;
4. Registered Users get more upmods than ACs when the comment score is already at 2+;
(4) may be due to selection bias (with those who read at >= +2 seeing those comments and not those below that threshold).
I suspect that AC comments get fewer *total* moderations than registered users for the same reason.
So (at least to me) it seems that for comments *that get moderated* ACs and Registered users are treated pretty much the same, except for those comments which are already significantly upmodded.
It might be instructive to also see how the total number of comments break down (AC vs. Registered Users) and how many AC comments receive any moderation vs. how many Registered User comments receive any moderation.
Given the quick review, I conclude that the moderation system *is* working fairly well and that it would likely work better if registered users would browse at -1 when they have mod points.
Does that seem a reasonable conclusion, or am I missing something important?
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday June 09 2020, @05:41PM (2 children)
4 is most likely largely from registered users starting at 1 and nearly all of them getting an additional +1 good karma bonus unless they have it turned off.
There were 353532 AC comments when I checked 20 minutes or so ago. I'll let you do the math from the cid of this comment and the frequency distributions from there, I'm headed for a nap.
No idea on the conclusion. They might get annoyed that they had to see all the lower scored comments and be in a bad moderating mood. Only way to tell would be to try for a while and find out. But everyone who's been here a month has mod points every day, so that would effectively make all registered users browse at -1 every day until they'd used up that day's mod points.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @05:49PM (1 child)
That certainly makes sense. Especially given that the statistics you provided didn't include the karma bonus.
So about 1/3 of comments are AC. I'd have expected it would be more, but there it is.
Thanks again for providing these details Buzzard. And sweet dreams!
A reasonable point. Perhaps folks could consider doing so a couple times a week?
That said, I always read at -1 because I don't want to miss interesting stuff that doesn't get upmodded -- and to upmod those comments.
It's a small price to pay, IMHO, to highlight the good stuff.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by martyb on Tuesday June 09 2020, @09:58PM
Late to join in here, but my $0.02 is that I have *always* read comments at a threshold of -1.
Accidents do happen. I know I've mis-modded (is that a word?) a few myself. Something something being human something.
Not withstanding the foregoing, abuse can happen. I have a great deal of empathy for the "little guy (or gal!)". I've been on the short end of things enough times to know how it feels... and don't like it one bit. So if that means that when I am reading comments, I am looking at everything>em> right from the start, then so be it. If I see what I think is an incorrect moderation -- I'm on it with a quick reverse-mod to balance things out!
I wonder how many of those who complain about down-mods actually view comments at -1? Hmmm?
It bears mentioning that staff gets the same number of mod points as everyone else: 10 per day.
That said, I have little enough time to get to read comments here; I spend too much time trying to get stories pushed out to the community! Call it a labor of love, whatever. I've been with the site from before it went live... and have no plans to leave any time soon!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday June 09 2020, @04:31AM (1 child)
When you figure that query out, maybe stash it in a stored procedure for reuse?
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday June 09 2020, @11:49AM
Save useful effort for later?! He's a witch! Burn him!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @08:56AM
Just do what they do around here, set your terminal to launch the job to beat the shit out of the server at 4AM so less people notice. If possible, do it when most of the IT people are on vacation so that way why you bring everything down to its knees, it's that much easier to recover from the bonus features of your hastily written code.