[Asrg] Re: 0 General: Forum

[Jim Witte <jswitte at bloomington.in.us>]

> 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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