OSNews

Crawl back under the rock you've been living under for 2 years, you turd!

Seriously, though, welcome to OSNews.

It's just a bit hard to believe that someone could read the crap we sometimes spew here for 2 whole years without commenting. ;-)

-Steve

Lurking at times is its own reward. Better to be silent and thought an idiot than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt. (Not that I think trpn is an idiot. In this case the post was self referential.)

LOL yea although sometimes I do get abit worried about Linux unix posts I make due to the abuse of the system by some members of the community. But usable someone will come along and bump your post back up so it can be viewed.

Rants are quite common here but I hope to see a good level of even keal by the community when it comes to modding posts by the community.

Also most comments on page 12 don't have a chance of being upped no matter how good they are unless a admin bumps it which is good.

Nice to see some stats regarding whats happening I hope it becomes a regular feature (once a year) or as a link somewhere on the site.

Hahaha, I was about to ask the same thing. As a matter of fact I was in the habit of rarely logging-in at all. Maybe I had better re-think that.....

Trust is very aware of negative votes and only discards in a manner consistent with up-votes. So trolls or not, these people participate and ARE up-voted.



It was up-voted 51 times by 51 users. That's all the stat indicates.



But it worked. Spam was filtered by users, not admins, who only took a few minutes to do so.

That was my point, and that was kaiwais point. The userbase has hit a critical mass of imbeciles where the most inane things get up modded. And by inane I am not talking about stuff I don't agree with, I am talking about stuff that contributes nothing but derails the conversation. I very rarely agree with steve bergman about things except on a very high level, but he is one of the main reasons I stay on this site, and I have enjoyed the numerous discussions i have had with him both in the comments section and the PMs. I won't name names, but a significant portion of the people there do the exact opposite.



The stats indicate the way people use the mod system. The highest rated comment ever was a flame.



Agreed. A good mod system means that the cream rises and the chaff falls. Spam is chaff, so it should fall.

BUT the whole point of something falling is to increase the signal to noise ratio, the fact that it got voted down 26 more times past the point of invisibility means that people don't really trust the visibility threshold that much.



I agree with you that kaiwai threw a tantrum about the mod system, the little number next to your name in an online forum is not the sort of thing that really matters. But that does not mean the moderation system isn't broken. The problem with any sort of system like this is that it attracts a certain kind of person who treats it like a game (aka the karma whore). This kind of person rarely has anything of value to contribute, and only really does what they do to get points, even though the points don't really have any sort of value.

I understand you guys don't want to moderate, but by making this system you have accomplished what happened on digg and slashdot, which is attracting karma whores who have driven away most of the good aspect of the community. Compare digg to lifehacker, one has a complex mod system, the other has none to speak of + anonymous commenting. The quality of the digg community is absolutely abysmal, the quality of the lifehacker community is one of the best I have seen.

Honestly, I would say go back to the +5/-5 days. It wouldn't fix it, but at least it would limit the gaming aspect that attracts the karma whores. At the end of the day, I would rather have to read a spam message here and there then have the community overrun by people who just want to manipulate the echo chamber into giving them a good score.

Edited 2008-10-20 17:19 UTC

Why are the ratings important? (I am not asking argumentatively in case someone reads something into my tone accidentally)

I don't really pay attention to the ratings. I see a title that is interesting, I read the article and comment on it. The ratings don't really sway me one way or another.

At least I don't think they do.

But could someone mod me up a few?

Your posts, Google_Ninja, are *always* of notable quality. (Even though we disagree upon some significant points.) Your average score should be about 5 in my opinion. I don't pay a whole lot of attention to any statistics that OSNews provides, because those statistics have such little relevance to the real world. I browse at -5 and *try* to pay attention to what everyone is saying. Cyclops, of all people, sometimes makes some very insiteful comments.

Edited 2008-10-20 16:50 UTC

see here http://osnews.com/thread?334273

Cyclops is one of the people I didn't want to name. He is not stupid, and does occasionally contribute to unix/linux discussions in a constructive way. On the other hand, I would say at least 90% of his comments are there to totally derail constructive dialog (at least back when he was active). If the system trusts someone like him more then, for example, someone like SReilly who is not on that list, there is a problem with the system.

And there is your problem.

It's not the system that trusts him. It's you.

Ok, granted that my view is going to be subjective. You wrote not that long ago that pointless "+1, Insightful" comments will be deleted. In my opinion, some of the big offenders of that kind of silliness are in the most trusted users on the site, and I think that illustrates a failure in the system. Do you agree with that?

He's got you there, Thom. You can't turn the moderation over to the users, publicize the "fact", and then go right back to arbitrary, dictatorial moderation whenever you feel like it. And that is what you, Thom, do. And you really need to stop it. For the good of OSNews.

He hasn't got me at all. "+1, informative" comments fall squarely within the definition of spam, and as such, I remove them. As simple as that. Read the OSNews forum rules, and they're pretty clear.

As for dictatorial moderation - get over it already, dude. The stats don't lie: the OSNews staff doesn't affect moderation IN ANY WAY. There is no dictatorial moderation - only in your head.

"""
There is no dictatorial moderation - only in your head.
"""

You responded with lightning speed to that. I wonder why you felt the need? I suspect that you recognized the truth in my observations. You do moderate in a dictatorial fashion, or at least you threaten to. I'm not certain that you actually do it. And I'm not sure threatening vs doing makes a difference.

Nice that you think of me.

The harsh reality is that any moderation system is subject to abuse; unfairness; Suggest any method and it suffers from its own pros and cons and hopefully the system chosen should have more pro's than cons...something that all osnews *posters* should be familiar with.

Woooo! I win! Suck on THAT! I guess I can stop commenting now?
Seriously though, I agree that comment is WAY over-rated and I guess that says something about the value of the vote system.
She deserved it, by the way.

Amen.

OSN's average comment is still an order of magnitude above digg's.

Ain't that the truth. With Digg, if you don't follow the popular trend you get dugg down. On OSNews, they debate it without modding down, or at least that's the way it seems to me.

Indeed. Slashdot's as well. OSNews is the only tech news aggregator I bother reading anymore, simply because I -can't- not read the comments. I want to know what people think about a topic, see if there's any aspects of it I didn't think of, maybe learn something new.

While I do agree that the quality of commentary on OSNews has declined over the past years, probably due to increasing popularity, it does remain light years heard of pretty much anything else you will find on the Internet. (Personally, I blame anonymity, but that's another story.)

And, I will confess, that the moderation system, and a desire to maintain a high 'average' has caused me to hesitate to comment on more than one occasion, especially lately. I haven't made a comment since Eugenia quit OSNews. For better or worse, I usually don't bother speaking up unless I think I have something -really- worth saying. More of a pity, I think, than a blessing, but I'm a bit biased to seeing my opinion as being AWESOME.

I had the same question, so I figured it out by guessing the ID of the last user via URL. It's just under 9,000.

No, it's not. It's WAY more.

Here's a taste.

http://osnews.com/user/uid:15000

I understand the reason behind this restriction, but would also like in favor of removing it.

Often for example, somebody adds valuable insights to another's post, or gives important corrections. I would like to give an up-vote for somebody doing this to my comments.

Another case is where people uses comments to ask questions and are not able to reward answering comments.

So there are several reasons of voting on comments which are part of your discussion not connected to your opinion at all.

I agree, please remove this pointless restriction.
So many times I've made a post, read some more comments and said to myself "Hey, this is a good point, I should mod this up" (not necessarily something I agree with, but a good point anyway), and found out that I cant since I already commented.
There's no correlation between making a comment and not being able to distinguish a good point from a bad one.

It's not pointless, as it serves a to prevent a previously very common form of abuse: post a comment in a thread, possibly inflammatory, and then moderate all those who agree/disagree with you. This abuse is now over.

Of course you can possibly still do it the other way 'round, but the point here is that trolls generally post first, and most often an opinion that hasn't been posted before in the thread (else it wouldn't be trolling).

This "feature", while understandably annoying, serves a very good purpose.

and then moderate all those who agree/disagree with you.

Is that a real concern? Each person can still only vote once per comment, and each member has a limited number of votes allowed.

Personally, I'd be more likely to vote Up someone who took the time to reply to my comment, even if they were disagreeing.

Ok, you got it. You should now be able to vote up people after you've commented.

Score inflation, here we come! Scores will, in the future, have even less meaning than they do today. Hurray?

You are micromanaging, Adam. And badly.

Edited 2008-10-20 18:42 UTC

You have singlehandedly reminded me why I stopped listening to users regarding moderation. This is my last post of the thread.

You are presenting the perfect example of why we ought to just cease all discussion of moderation, because after people call for change, no change is ever the right chance. We have the benefit of hundreds of thousands of data points to make decisions. You have your own subjective experience, and yet, you stand in judgment as though your opinion is based on something other than the imaginary idea that everyone always behaves as you would.

As much as I value many of our users - and I REALLY do, users like you are why I continue to visit the site multi-times daily myself - you have all made a great case for hiding all evidence of moderation other than the vote box. The score means nothing. Zero, zilch, nada. Nobody cares. The mod system works as we intended it to - crap is modded down. That's all that matters. I don't know why you're so attached to the number, score inflation or not.

Aawwhh... please. Adam is working hard to get it right, and asking for small changes and then complain about "micromanaging" when you get the small changes just isn't fair.

And to you, Adam. Thank you.

I'm glad for that, only for when I want to check root-level comments for new threads.

I would still keep some kind of restriction though, like not being able to moderate replies to your own comment.

Wouldn't it be possible to limit it by threads within topics? You cannot mod anybody in a thread you're participating in, but you can mod in other threads in the same topic. Surely that would be the best balance.

What is preventing a person from getting more than one osnews login and use one to start flames and the other to fuel them? What's preventing people from teaming up to do this?



I disagree, it serves no practical purpose. You're just making things more frustrating for serious users while the bad apples can get around the restriction easily.

"You're just making things more frustrating for serious users while the bad apples can get around the restriction easily."

You mean like laws and every day life? Kind of like the gun laws..you know..the ones that outlaw having automatic weapons so only military and outlaws have them? Same thing my friend, whether on-line or off. The bad apples get around all restrictions, while the law abiding citizens get screwed. Is the way of life sadly.

They had a lot of laws in the USSR and East Germany. Would you welcome those too?



Maybe accepting status quo isn't the right thing.

Are you seriously comparing the OSNews moderation to World War II Germany? Are you doing that with a straight face?

With as straight a face as the guy who just compared the moderation rules to gun laws.
And no, I did not compare it to WW2 Germany, I compared it to cold war East Germany and the USSR.

Edited 2008-10-21 13:02 UTC

How about I alter it so that you can only dole out up mods after posting, and only downmodding is revoked after posting?

You either trust your readers or you don't. You are are following the wrong path.

Well then, we don't.

The truth is, I trust almost all of our readers, but we do this specifically to prevent gaming the system. Frankly, we've spent WAY too much time talking about a system that works well enough. I'm very tempted to hide ALL responses and scores and just have it be visible or not. Perhaps that will get people less worked up.

Agreed.

Additionally, many times the comment I'd like to vote for (or against) is located in a completely different thread and has no relationship to my comment.

Great idea! It gives me an easy way to say thanks without actually having to write a reply. But it's not a must have...

If there's one feature that you should never ever cut it's the preview.
It has prevented me from posting stupid comments so many times

http://osnews.com/brows_stats.php

Not exactly the stats hmm...

Edited 2008-10-20 19:22 UTC

I'd like to know what you think it would prove? (Or how it would prove useful)

That sort of information could probably be really badly mis-represented.

Why does it have to be a proof of anything? I'm just naturally curious.

Well, I'm only saying that to play devil's advocate; people may want to wield such information to justify their own point: stats can be bent just about any way.

I was about to comment that the stats are boring. I agree, why not ad stats for os/browser/country...

Like I said in the item, you shouldn't look at individual comments. You are actually quite high up in the trust ratings, and having two of your comments moderated down doesn't change a thing about that.

Don't stand to close to the painting. Take a few steps back, and see the bigger picture.

there has definitely been abuse of the system. i've felt picked on at times, as well. you have to expect that, to some degree. but, that being said, kaiwai has been regularly antagonistic for as long as i can remember. he's might as well be daring the mod-abusers to downmod him!

i'm not condoning the bury-brigade... but, it's pretty clear why kaiwai was singled out.

it really had gotten to the point that he just seemed like a schoolyard bully half of the time.

i have, on a number of occasions, considered leaving osnews (not that i post extremely often), but when it really comes down to it... the alternatives are certainly worse.

it makes me miss the old BBS's of the 90s, where it actually felt like you were getting to know the people you were conversing with.

Online communities come and go. It's the way things roll. This site hemorrhaging users you find to bring valuable contributions may or may not be the case for anyone else. Regardless, you seem to think it's the moderation system or the trolls causing the problem(s). I'd suggest that it's just the normal life cycle of a user driven site. People come for various reasons, people go for various reasons. I've been part of online communities where we actually met up with each other and had parties and barbeques. Sadly, that community has splintered and is no more.

People find other things to do, even at the expense of their online time.

yeah, I think I will be joining you on some other site too.

this one has died a death since Thom took control.

bye all

I wonder if we could remove the 'dialogue' from the comments and instead make them all separate and then sort those by their ratings (i.e. better ones go on top). When there's a "reply" button there are certainly going to be endless wars.

Well, you can already eliminate the dialogue flow by using the flat layout, which I am using. Sorting them won't do much good though, as you'll get the junk overrated by karma rapists right at the top!

Back in the day, I was strongly in favour of a community-moderated system, but everybody can make mistakes. Today, I would rather deal with the occasional flame, spam or troll than irrational fanboys, which are doing the same thing anyway while getting recognition by the system!

Fortunately, once in a while, there's a gem or two popping among the load of manure in the comments section, which keeps me here. Yet, it's still getting closer to become OSSNews everyday, which is sad since there's no more room for serious debate or insightful information...

Automatic? You mean word filters and such things? Maybe here on OSnews the terminology used tends to be so technological (and is in English only, mostly) that it could prevent some of the worst shortcomings of automatic filters. But still, as far as I know, automatic censorship programs never work too well, especially in multicultural and heterogenous discussion environments. They are sometimes too strict, sometimes don't notice even most obvious cases of offensive behavior. Most typically they only censor certain words supposedly considered offensive. How could that kind of simplistic filtering prevent subtle offensive behavior where the offender may use very polite terms but still behave in a completely unfair and offensive way towards someone else?

What is offensive, obscene or otherwise unacceptable behavior is not so much about the words used only, and it depends on the context and changing human values. Computer programs, even the most advanced AI programs, have no real idea of things like the meaning of subtle cultural contexts in ethics, or ethics in general (well, sometimes I wonder if many people have much better clue about such things either, but that is another matter...).

Nice try, but the stats show that pretty much never happens.

Unfortunately, I can't answer you because you will delete my account if I do.

That is an absolute blatant troll, and really should be modded down. But nice job totally avoiding the question.

I've never deleted an account in my life, and I can count the number of accounts that have been banned without the user requesting it on my fingers.

Maybe you can tell me who deleted the agrouf account and why?

It's not deleted, it's suspended. Anyone can go back and see his comments, etc.

And no, I will not disclose who or why. He's one of a few, and unless you are him, there may be more to the story that you don't know.

I know him and his comments have been deleted and no explanation has been given at all. Just after you posted a comment which you didn't agree with, although many people modded it up. And his account was suspended without explanation either.

Edited 2008-10-23 18:47 UTC

Sorry, it wasn't me. There goes that theory.

Exactly.