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[Asrg] Re: 0 General: Forum

2004-05-22 21:52:31
One of the key things I'd want to see in an alternative forum would be
support for expressing support for notable posts - omething like
slashcode (what /. runs on).  BB offers just polls.  Support for what I

But Oh God, not Slashcode please.. It's horribly not-up-to-spec with the current HTML/CSS specs from what I've heard, could stand a complete XML/client-side-XSLT overhaul, and I *absolutely* hate the commenting forum.

The main problem with the commenting forum is that it is linear, unlike the usenet, which is (2-level) hierarachical. Yes, I know, technically the Slashcode forum is hierarchical, but there is NO way to "collapse" a topic, and so no-one really uses it that way. What this leads to (on Slashdot) is (among other things) a great amount of redundant information/ideas.

Jim Witte
Indiana University CS

(Aside which has little or nothing to do with ASRG and everything to do with Slashdot and Slashcode [feel free to stop reading now.] If others want to continue this discussion, email me privately, or go to my Yahoo group formed for purposes of this discussion at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Slashdotreform/ )

In addition, the moderation system could be better: they keep incrementally improving it by adding "friend points", "trusted moderator points" and whatnot, but IMO the whole system needs to be based on something totally different. Not that I know what that would be, but my mind keeps coming back to the "circle-of-trust" concept employed by some cryptographic schemes. Basically, instead of having a small group of limited moderators, basically *everyone* would moderate what they thought was good, what was redundant (this could include sub-comment blocks somehow), and then some complicated algorithm would assign a weighting to each post you access, based on what posts you've liked before, whose moderated those, following this "moderation chain" back as far as you want (or as far as computationally feasible) I haven't worked the idea out fully at ALL, but another thing might be to allow posts to reference each other (as in a Wiki - I'm using Wiki loosely - referring both to "traditional" Wikis that hyperlink everything, and to "collaborative editing" projects that I've heard about), and then use a "hub/authority" algorithm based on the linking for weighting, as I'm told Google does (or did). That idea would have to change in some what for the purpose of comment moderation, as you're not going to have traditional "web hubs" that link to many, many different topics. But perhaps if the moderation weighting could be used as a "hub score". I don't know. Nor do I know if any of these ideas are even remotely computationally feasible.

(yes, they say that at any one time half the people on /. are moderators, but they are limited by karma, and you don't get to be moderator unless you have karma. That means that if you just read, and rarely post, because you figure that no-one will read your comment, or add it's discussion [due to the linear nature of the list], or just have little to say, you almost never have karma.

Of course, (some of) the crowd on /. is a tad bit juvenile also in their comments (or they are karma whoring, whatever all that entails). That probably wouldn't happen with ASRG.

I think a better system for /. would be either a Usenet-based system where people could start different threads of discussion on different aspects/implications of stories, or a Wiki-type authoring system, where instead of just repeating what someone else had said, a person could *add* something to the discussion, perhaps even in the *middle* of what someone else has already said. Aside from the problem of potentially generating very long sentences, could get rather incomprehensible. Then possibly add some "editors" who could clean up the discussion in terms of sentence-structure and flow, as a traditional copy-editor does.

Apart from the benefit of making the comment forum on /. a more "productive" place for generating ideas, overhauling it as I suggest (or in some other way, but just something different from how it is now) could quite possibly encourage the development of small to medium sized groups of people with similar interests who could actually *do* something about so many of the things talked about on /. - such as writing letters to Congresspeople, arranging meetings with Congresspeople, getting together to make well-informed recommendations to international bodies [WTO, ICANN, ICC, etc], or the like. As it is now, /. does *very* little to encourage people to actually form groups to *do* anything. (CmdrTaco - are you here?) There is NO private-messaging capability, no "special interest group" formation systems, etc. Slashdot is supposed to focus on issues that don't get covered by other media. It does. But news is only really useful if people *do* something with it, especially the kinds of things /. is concerned with (encroachment upon civil liberties, patenting madness, stupid governmental ideas, etc). But while /. does a very good job of reporting on these things, it seemingly does NOTHING to facilitate the formation of action-groups to try to affect these very issues.

Now, /. may see itself as nothing more than a journalistic avenue and not an avenue for social change, but I beg to differ. The main difference between the web and tradition print journalism is exactly the one that Slashdot has (tried) to exploit: that the web is a medium through which communities can form, and actions can be coordinated. But in it's 7 (?) year history, I have seen very little of this second function being seriously undertaken.

Jim


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