Thom and I recently conducted an administrative moderation review and found a disturbing trend we're hoping to nix quickly. We found many users who would get into discussions/arguments/flamewars/whatever and begin modding down the people with whom they were arguing. More often than not, in those cases, the down mods were opinion-based rather than "rule-breaking." Most of these mods were aimed at silencing the commenter's critics. This is not something we want to encourage on OSNews. We like good, heated discussion, but we do not like it when we wash out another opinion solely because they disagree. As a result, I've just activated a new rule with moderation: once you attach a comment to a story, you can no longer moderate any comment in the same story. You shouldn't be a judge and a debater at the same time, and you can't be a commenter and a moderator at the same time either. We think this will lead to better, more impartial moderating on the part of our users.
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Member since:
2006-01-23
Member since:
2006-02-15
So, this means I can neither mod up or down any comments once I have written a comment to a story? Hmm, it sucks.. Either I have to keep myself from writing a comment so I can mod insightful comments up (and some comments down, though I do that very rarely, usually only if someone acts very bad towards other users) or I get to write a comment of my own..Why not rather make it for example a trusted user feature that you can mod posts up/down? Or base it on the percentage of posts the user has modded down, like if the percentage is very high the person is likely to misuse the feature?
Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2006-02-15
Member since:2005-07-24
Member since:2005-04-01
Trust me, there are plenty of mod points to go around. Removing yourself from the eligible moderator pool will not prevent trolls from being modded down.
And if we see a dip in moderation, we'll tweak the rules again. We're nimble like that.
Member since:
2005-07-24
I don't mean to be overly critical. But I gave up on the moderation system achieving its originally intended purpose a *long* time ago. I browse at -5 and make my own determinations as to the values of various comments. That said, the moderation system can provide useful information. For example, when a reasonable comment gets moderated into oblivion, it tells me that it really hit a nerve with some group; that they realize the truth in it, and feel threatened and angered by it. Which means that maybe it did some good. A not particularly insightful opinion which gets moderated into the stratosphere has a story to tell, as well.
Sometimes the most useful application of a system is not the one it was originally designed for.
Member since:2005-04-01
Moderation is not an exact science. There's no way to ensure that everyone is being honest, there's no way to prevent it from sometimes being a popularity contest, and there's no way to make everyone happy. I have a new moderation system in the works, but I am in no rush to roll it out.
This is a good stopgap.
Member since:2005-07-24
Have you seriously considered the question of whether or not it *should* be a popularity contest? That is the way that most people want to use it, I think. And it makes a certain sense for it to be so. Consider that the way you want things to be, you are adding quantities of two completely different units. A person casts a positive vote on a comment because he likes it. You're never going to get around that. He may like it for many different kinds of reasons. But I would wager that the most common reason is that he agrees with its position.
On the other hand, a person is only supposed to cast a negative vote it the post violates certain arbitrary rules determined not by them, but by OSNews staff, and spelled out in a document somewhere which most people probably don't care to waste time reading. That's a very different thing... a different "unit", if you will, than the "unit" for positive votes. So the moderation system is indiscriminately adding centimeters and milliliters and reporting the result as a pure number representing the score of the post.
Is it any wonder that that number turns out not to reflect anything truly meaningful?
Like I say, I don't want to seem unduly critical. And personally, I don't think the moderation system is really all that important. But I do want to point out that the current one has problems that go beyond people not using it the way you want them to. Because even if they did, you'd still be adding newtons to acres and reporting a result.
Member since:2005-04-01
Your arguing is pointless, because I already agree with you. But there's no major push because what exists today is already working well enough. On the whole, trolls are downmodded and weeded out well enough.
Like I said, I have a new mod system in beta, but until I understand exactly how to handle history, we won't see it. Think OSNews 4.2.
Member since:2005-07-24
My only comment to this would be that I hope that you don't really feel that I've been arguing with you. My last post was just something that I had been thinking for a while that I had not seen spelled out before, and this seemed a good place to express the thought.
Member since:2005-04-01
BTW, if you're interested:
http://www.osnews.com/comment-vote-review
I haven't really publicized this, and warning: it's subject to change, but if you like, feel free to play with this.
Member since:2006-01-23
Member since:2006-01-02
Member since:2005-07-06
That's fantastic!
There must be some way to get more people involved in moderation-moderating... perhaps (optionally) before submitting a comment, you have to rate a moderation aswell as the usual captcha!
I like that page though, and will endeavour to visit daily to help moderate the moderations 
Member since:
2007-02-22
Member since:2005-04-01
Yes, you can comment after you mod, but not the reverse. I could change that, but the goal is to prevent someone going back over a flamewar they helped start and modding down all the responses in anger. Trust me, it happens. I see in the database when someone went back and forth with another user, and modded the other user down each time, usually just for disagreeing.
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