Slashdot, a user-generated news, analysis, peer question and professional insight community. Tech professionals moderate the site which averages more than 5,300 comments daily and 3.7 million unique visitors each month.
As I said before, we don't have a really good idea on the number of unique IPIDs visiting the site, but we do have solid numbers for our daily comment counts. Here's the graph as generated by slashcode for a biweekly period:
(due to a quirk in slashcode, the graphs don't update until 48 hours later; our comment count for 04/01 was 712 comments total).
Taking in account averages, we're roughly getting a little less than 10% of Slashdot's comment counts, with a considerably smaller user base. As I said, the OkCupid story made me take notice. Here's the comment counts at various scores between the two sites
| SoylentNews | Slashdot.org | --------------------------------------- Score -1 | 130 | 1017 | Score 0 | 130 | 1005 | Score 1 | 109 | 696 | Score 2 | 74 | 586 | Score 3 | 12 | 96 | Score 4 | 4 | 64 | Score 5 | 1 | 46 | ---------------------------------------Furthermore, I took a look at UIDs on the other site, the vast majority of comments came from 6/7 digit UID posters. Looking at CmdrTaco's Retirement Post as well as posts detailing the history of the other site most of the low UIDs are still around, and are simply in perma-lurk mode.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 02 2014, @10:54PM
On a technical level in a discussion forum you need defenses against trolls and deliberate sabotage. The /. moderation system and meta-moderation systems do a pretty good job at that, I feel. There's the other aspect of the S/N ratio, though, that comes down to how many lame/insulting/poorly thought-out comments vs. high quality ones. Without affective ties, shared experience, shared values, and all the other components of human socialization that work to keep us civil and engaged in the real world it's difficult to get a handle on it. For example in the early days of Usenet flamewars would rage and rage for months; the vi vs. emacs holy war is legendary. Slashdot's culture grew organically--it was not planned--but once it had achieved critical mass it became reasonably good at resisting shills and even learned how to incorporate the occasional silliness and missteps into memes and inside jokes that made it stronger. We all know many of them here, such as goatse or hot grits, or the Soviet Russia jokes and the "you insensitive clod!" punchlines. So the efforts we all make now, early on, to encourage the development of such a culture by helping each other out and encouraging good behavior will pay massive dividends on a practical level for years.
So, I think what you're considering with revamping interviews could be a really excellent plank in that platform. I would be particularly interested in interviews of other members of the site, because I know many of them work in areas that are fascinating. For example in one of the stories today about the best first programming language one guy self-identified as a neuroscientist; Last September at the NY Maker's Faire I heard a lecture by a DARPA team that's working on neural interfaces and since then I've been fascinated by its applications and the potential for neural augmentation, and it would be great to put questions to somebody with subject matter expertise about it. Perhaps a good starting point would be to survey the community, bubble up a half-dozen topics/areas people are curious about, and see if there are any takers who can speak to them. I think that sets the process up for more success than the way Slashdot would do it, which was to randomly materialize someone on the home page that people weren't prepared to put questions to.
And it seems like doing this stuff is not about re-coding the moderation system, but about putting a slightly different English on the ball.
Anyway, from what I've seen so far, we're in good shape on all these fronts.