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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: 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.