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from the I'm-so-meta-even-this-acronym dept.
jcd writes:
"I'm rather excited to get going with Soylent and to watch it grow. Nay, help it grow. I have lurked in /. for more than a decade (note: I'm not the same username over there, I know, how sneaky), and always wished I could have been involved with the beginning. So this is a great opportunity, and I joined as soon as I saw what Soylent was doing. Not to mention the fact that I felt right at home with the old style. It's very comfortable.
So here's a question for everyone. Are we going to be the same as slashdot? A clone that focuses as entirely as possible on tech related news? Or will we branch out to other topics? I'm interested to see either way. I posted a comment to this effect in one of our two existing polls, and it may be a community-wide assumption, but I do think it merits a discussion."
(Score: 4, Informative) by mcgrew on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:09PM
Depends on what you want to add. I think part of the reason K5 died was it had other than nerd stuff, and the normals started posting (and it's happening at slashdot).
I'd like to see soylent nerd-friendly and normal-hostile. I absolutely HATE seeing comments that are uninformed, ignorant, sometimes even stupid, and written by semiliterates. Those people aren't us.
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:40PM
It may be hard, occasionally, to distinguish the semi-literate from the non English-as-mother-tongue folks. I would hope we don't mistake someone making a their/there/they're error for someone with no valid ideas.
On Slashdot, uninformed, ignorant, and stupid, are names too often (and too quickly) applied to people with which one simply disagrees. It seems far more often the case, that a pejorative will be flung into the conversation than a link or two to an educational source.
If SN could find a cure for the people who believe they have to "win the internet" every time they post, it would be miles ahead.
Perhaps we should add a mod category of "bad behavior"?
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by kebes on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:56PM
The 'agree score' would be available for everyone to click on at all times (i.e. not restricted to moderators). This score would be displayed alongside each comment, but would not affect comment visibility. Thus, it would act as a signifier of how many site readers agreed with the comment, independent of the quality of the presentation style.
Since this 'agree score' doesn't affect comment visibility, you might wonder why bother having it at all? My suspicion is that by providing an agree/disagree button, it would reinforce the idea that the usual mod-score is not related to agreement. This would (hopefully) make moderators more focused in giving mod-points. Additionally, everyone loves giving their opinion, so it's a simple way to engage the community in commenting (it's a simple way to agree with someone without posting a 'yeah I agree' in reply). Displaying the final 'agreement percentage' could then of course provide some useful information to other readers.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:17PM
Yes, the pacifier buttons.
You're starting to see those Thumbs up / Thumbs down buttons a lot. It gives people a way to feel involved without having to take the time to post a constructive rebuttal, agreement or counterpoint.
I Don't know how I feel about that, but it MIGHT soak up a lot of "Me too" posts or name calling flames.
I still think we need a "bad behavior" mod to stamp out the name calling and flaming.
There are better ways to make a point than flinging invectives.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 2, Funny) by mtrycz on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:19PM
So much +1!
(Score: 4, Funny) by Kell on Thursday February 20 2014, @09:08PM
Don't you mean +1 agree/+1 quality?
Scientists point out problems. Engineers fix them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lennier on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:56PM
This is a great idea, and I second this entirely. Wish I could mod you up for this post - but I'd rather have an Agree button.
Look, I enjoy using Facebook despite loathing the company, and a big part of that enjoyment is that I can click 'Like' as a very simple way of sending 1 bit of positive feedback to the author of the post I enjoyed. There are a lot of things that are evil about Facebook the company as a totalitarian privacy-devouring world-consuming financial-speculation bubble behemoth: but the Like button isn't one of them.
Slashdot was a very early implementation of crowd moderation and the strength of Soylent right now is that it's a small and passionate community of early adopters, so we have room to experiment. Let's try this thing. Separate 'Agree' vs 'Quality' ratings.
Delenda est Beta
(Score: 2, Informative) by umafuckitt on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:01PM
This is similar to how the new technocrat.net is doing it.
(Score: 1) by dmc on Friday February 21 2014, @03:10AM
mod parent up. While in some sense technocrat.net might be a competitor to SN (as both competitors to /.Beta), it seems SN has achieved critical mass already and I doubt anything will stop it. While technocrat.net seems to need more commenters. And clearly Bruce Perens' quality/comportment idea exploration is quite similar if not exactly what we are discussing in this subthread. I'd almost say you don't need to experiment with it here (anytime soon), but rather use technocrat.net as the place to explore that side of moderation. Likewise technocrat is an interesting alternate implementation. I.e. while here the path is clearly- fork the ancient slashcode, and then improve it in obvious needed ways over time, over there it is start from scratch with RoR? and an absolutely minimalist proof of concept first. Though also I don't mean to act like I'm an expert, but that's at least a start of why you should go over there and at least check it out. (Perens I think has already tried to deploy it long ago but shut it down because it didn't get enough traction. I think if we could nudge 5-10% of the traffic here over there, we'd get a 2nd good alternative to slashdot going)
(Score: 1) by umafuckitt on Friday February 21 2014, @09:06AM
That's an interesting suggestion and I'm trying to spend a little time there and submit stories. Right now there's pretty much no comment traffic on technocrat, which is a pity. However, looking at the internet archive, it looks like there never really was any: http://web.archive.org/web/20050830003758/http://t echnocrat.net/ [archive.org] No comments, or comment counts under 10 per story, were the norm.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Angry Jesus on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:35PM
I've been thinking basically the same thing for a few years now with one difference -- the "Agree Score" should be more functional. Let people choose to hide or elevate comments with large numbers of either kind of vote (or even lots of both kinds of votes, indicating controversy). At Ars getting enough disagrees will hide a comment and I think a lot of agrees will get it promoted to a special section at the end of the article. I don't think they have a way to tune the thresholds per user though.
(Score: 1) by weilawei on Friday February 21 2014, @02:14AM
(Score: 1) by weilawei on Friday February 21 2014, @02:17AM
Replying to myself because we STILL lack an edit button. I'd like to see posts with revisions, to avoid edit trollery. Original post should've been:
+1 Agree, +1 Quality. If you have both kinds of scores (and I think it's an idea worth trying), someone will make a Greasemonkey script to reorder them/display them according to their preferred metric. Rather than futz with all that, I think it'd be nice to have both (agree, quality) scores and the option to sort/filter by either.
(Further edit: the Slow Down Cowboy message makes correcting your posts really hard.)
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:58PM
+1 Agree. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @07:28AM
I wish there were a "disagree" button to tell you how much I disagree.
But wait, then I'd need a button to say "I agree with the second part only, while the first makes me indifferent".
You know what? I will use comments instead of a flat +1/-1, and if I just agree and have nothing to add, I will add nothing, as honest as that.
Having a head count on comments puts value on popularity.
Now, go. Back. To. Facebook. (interleaved with Castlevania IV whip sound effect)
(Sorry for the sarcasm :] )
Anonymous neagix
(Score: 1) by Thexalon on Friday February 21 2014, @11:01AM
I actually proposed that exact idea back in a forum post [dev.soylentnews.org] before we had a functioning site. I called it the "hear-hear" button, but the concept is the same.
The key reason to do this: Two posts that each have 3-5 moderators behind it may appear to be on equal footing, when in fact the real vote might be closer to 10,000 to 4. That doesn't mean the minority viewpoint isn't heard, because this wouldn't affect visibility, but it does mean that casual readers can get an idea of what the masses really think. Of course, if somebody really cared they could use various technical means to make a post appear more popular than it really was, but I think it would be a worthwhile and fairly low-cost experiment.
Every task is easy if somebody else is doing it.
(Score: 1) by neagix on Friday February 21 2014, @03:04PM
I am sorry but I am biased to think that popularity shouldn't be something we should care about. Popular != Valuable. We don't want to be popular, we want to be opinionated geeks, and to be right. That's at least my perspective
(Score: 1) by Common Joe on Saturday February 22 2014, @02:16AM
Your idea has a lot of merit, but I think there are privacy issues here to think about. Sure, as soon as one post to SoylentNews, your opinion is now made public, but having a like / dislike button (agree / disagree) reeks of Facebook and it reeks of information gathering. I mean, unless anyone can vote any number of times (and ballot stuff), it becomes a requirement to information gather. There is no other way: login and vote.
I'm not saying the purpose of SoylentNews is information gathering. That was never the goal of this project. Still that's what this idea will lead to and I think the community will ultimately reject that and it drive away some people.
Even if that were implemented, I'd stay. I don't often click those like or dislike buttons on Facebook. (Hell, I barely log in to Facebook at and the only reason I have an account it to help keep up with my friends and family in other countries.) It wouldn't be a requirement.
I'm not giving my explicit like or dislike here. I write this merely as food for thought.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:03PM
It may be hard, occasionally, to distinguish the semi-literate from the non English-as-mother-tongue folks. I would hope we don't mistake someone making a their/there/they're error for someone with no valid ideas.
That's a very good reason to point out to the aliterate and the ESL student as well. The internet is an awful place to learn written English. I don't know the stats for other English speaking countries, but although less than 1% of Americans are illiterate, 97% of them are aliterate. Teaching is never a bad thing, especially if you can make it humorous. Or humourous if you're British.
But there are commenters who make those mistakes, are corrected, yet continue. Those people are just stupid. I mean, it isn't like they can't check it out with an authority, like maybe a dictionary or something.
On Slashdot, uninformed, ignorant, and stupid, are names too often (and too quickly) applied to people with which one simply disagrees. It seems far more often the case, that a pejorative will be flung into the conversation than a link or two to an educational source.
If SN could find a cure for the people who believe they have to "win the internet" every time they post, it would be miles ahead.
Perhaps we should add a mod category of "bad behavior"?
Agreed completely... except doesn't "troll" cover "bad behavior"?
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday February 21 2014, @01:06AM
Yes and No. Troll seems to acquired a lot of baggage, and has assumed a separate category all its own. In fact, the wiki definition [wikipedia.org] seems to grow every year to include yet more things that someone somewhere objects to.
In fact modding someone troll has come to mean modding them "disagree".
One may troll politely, not calling anyone names, simply stating an unpopular view.
(And occasionally that's not always bad, people need to know their beliefs are not universally held).
But hurling insults and calling people morons or idiots just seems unnecessary, and modding them troll can't be distinguished from modding them "disagree".
There seems great reluctance to add new mod values, both here and on Slashdot. So when I suggest doing so, I may be trolling, but I'm not misbehaving. (At least not egregiously).
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 21 2014, @11:56AM
In fact, the wiki definition seems to grow every year to include yet more things that someone somewhere objects to.
Well, at slashdot I'd go by their FAQ definition, here I'll go with the Soylent FAQ definition (which I think is identical).
One may troll politely, not calling anyone names, simply stating an unpopular view.
As to "unpopular view", well, that depends. In many cases you're right. In a story at a nerd site about space exploration a comment that says money for space exploration should go to the poor is certainly a troll, no matter how polite. Same with logging on to an AARP messageboard and advocating the end of Social Security or Medicare, or logging on to a Christian messageboard with a statement about what great ideas Richard Dawkins has, or an athiest site saying "repent before you wind up in hell".
Just being abusive is flamebait. Some comments are both flamebait AND troll.
As to "disagree" equaling "troll", I consider that an abuse of moderation. If you simply disagree, don't moderate, comment. If someone is wrong, correct them (politely if possible).
There seems great reluctance to add new mod values, both here and on Slashdot. So when I suggest doing so, I may be trolling, but I'm not misbehaving.
I don't see it as trolling OR misbehaving. It's your honest opinion and you shouldn't be afraid to voice it.
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 1) by M. Baranczak on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:26PM
The people who make this error are almost always native English speakers. If you learn English a little later in life, like I did, you learn the spoken and written language at the same time. When you do that, it's bloody obvious that "they're" and "their" are different words.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Sir Garlon on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:44PM
When you say "normal-hostile," do you mean hostile to banality [thefreedictionary.com]? If so, then I pledge my invisible sword to your cause!
Policing comments is the moderators' job. So nipping that crap in the bud is up to you, me, and all of us.
Though, come to think of it, new moderation options could help. The closest thing we have now is "overrated," which is not quite the same thing. I'd like to see a more explicit mod option to the effect, "I've heard that before and it was shallow then."
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight who is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:14PM
Yes, that was exactly what I meant.
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 1) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday February 21 2014, @01:43AM
Back in the /. days, I've seen a number of arguments over what exactly "redundant" was appropriate for. (Most frequently because a first post or the first instance of an "obligatory webcomic" was modded down as redundant.) Some people interpret "redundant" relative to comments in the current discussion only (in which case the first post can never be redundant), some to comments+TFS, or comments+TFS+TFA (either of these consider that the first post may be redundant), and some take it even farther, to the point that anything that everyone on /. has heard plenty of times may be modded redundant, because it does and should go without saying. The third interpretation, while AFAICT a minority (at least on /.), does give the "redundant" mod substantial overlap with what you're after.
That said, I'd welcome a -1 Banal mod -- not only would it likely reduce the frequency of that tired argument of what "redundant" means, it would be handy for moderating the argument out of sight when it does occur.
userscript: Expand/Collapse buttons on every comment [userscripts.org]
(Score: 1) by hubie on Friday February 21 2014, @11:21AM
I would like to see "-1 Wrong" for those comments that are flat-out wrong. It would probably get used in the wrong way, but there are cases when someone makes their argument and they are just wrong, like arguing from the standpoint of violating physical law, or claiming A when a dozen people point out that it is actually !A.
(Score: 1) by cybro on Thursday February 20 2014, @09:42PM
>"and the normals started posting"
>"I'd like to see soylent nerd-friendly and normal-hostile"
I understand the sentiment but I don't think that will happen. It sounds like you'd prefer 4chan or something.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:51PM
I've never been to 4chan, because I've heard of it. I looked at reddit - once. When I say "discourage normals," I'm talking about modding idiotic statements down like they used to do at slashdot. Let them lurk, in fact encourage it, they might learn something. But don't encourage them to comment.
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 1) by Jerry Smith on Friday February 21 2014, @03:21AM
That's always the end of fun.
What always annoyed me that whenever something was afoot, like plans to build a space station or explore Mars or build nanobots or other fun stuff, there were always people pushing their "we can't spend money on science as long as there is hunger in $Bananistan" agenda.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 21 2014, @11:42AM
That's one of my pet peeves as well. At a nerd site that's nothing short of one of the three big guys Bilbo turned to stone and should be modded as such.
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 1) by JeanCroix on Friday February 21 2014, @10:05AM
Honestly, it's never been the same since that one September back in '93...