On the Matter of Slashdot Story Selection

Conspiracy theories again run rampant as users accuse Slashdot Editors of being in cahoots with scam artists. Sounds like just a normal day at the office for me. Except that I've decided to say a few words on Slashdot article selection process and users who try to abuse it. Read on for my rant.

Let's talk about Beatles Beatles. For the uninitiated he's just some dude who submits a lot of stories. He actually happens to get a lot of them accepted. We have a number of users like this. Looking at the hall of fame shows you a number of the most successful ones. Now the motivation for getting a Slashdot story accepted (besides fame, glory and sexy women who start IMing you naked pictures of themselves mere seconds after a story goes live)is a return link to the website of your choosing. Your creds. Your 'Reward' for sharing a cool URL with a half a million Slashdot readers.

It's not hard to figure out what sorts of stories Slashdot likes. We have a format, and a subject matter. A persistent user can simply start spamming the bin with a submission about everything he finds that comes even close. If he does it enough, he'll get a few through. Especially if he manages to get something reasonable in at 11pm when there's little else to choose from.

Now there is no conspiracy. There is some Roland guy who's last name i can't spell who submits stuff all the time and people thought for awhile he was Timothy. Lately there is a Beatles Beatles user who conspiracy theorists now think is Scuttlemonkey. We don't know these people. They are not aliases for us. They aren't paying us. 3 months from now it will be somebody else.

Now these submitters each have their problems. In Roland's case, he likes to link to his personal blog where he writes mediocre summaries of stories that add nothing to the original. In BBs case, he just cuts and pastes paragraphs from linked pages. Both use their return link to link a web page which is, in my opinion, pretty worthless.

Now technically speaking, we could add a nofollow to their URLs. Or strip them entirely. But that puts me into the position of editing not just the submission, but the submittor, and i really don't think that this is "Right".

Part of the Slashdot Editor's job is to make a submission "Presentable". Usually this means moving a few URLs around. I'd guess a good half of story submissions use the word 'here' or 'article' or something equally stupid as their anchor text. I prefer relevant words to be linked. There are other minor things tho, like taking off extra intros like "Hi guys I read Slashdot every day and thought you would like this". We want the Slashdot story to be mostly distilled down to the essentials. Just the key 3-4 sentences.

Should part of this process be checking the URL of the submitter to make sure that it is legitimate? Does that really matter? Should we add a nofollow tag to those URLs?

My opinion is no. Those URLs are what you get for submitting a story to Slashdot. We selected it. The submission braved the Gauntlet. A hundred submissions died, and this one made the cut. I don't think it's fair that we strip creds from someone just because they choose to squander that URL on something stupid. Who am I to judge that after all?

Now the real problem with this is what it does to the discussion. Last night a nice story was posted. It came from one of our "Problem" users. And dozens of comments were posted about this user. The conspiracy theories. The hostility. Now a lot of this is normal Slashdot Forum Faire. Thats fine. But the problem is that often when this occurs, it swamps out the real discussion. The messenger becomes the story.

I think this sucks.

The story is not about Roland or Beatles Beatles or whatever other random user is submitting a lot of stuff this week. I encourage moderators to use their points to mod these discussions down when they see them. As a moderator, your job ought to be to steer the discussion on-topic. The submitter is almost never the topic!

The catch-22 kills me. I might have a URL in the bin worth sharing. Something a half a million of you might enjoy. But because a user with a "Reputation" submitted it, I know that posting it will spawn a giant forum cesspool. I could strip attribution and take away incentive for a user to submit. Or just throw away the article and forget it. Or I could post the story and watch as half of the discussion is simply about the submitter and not the URL that i wanted to share in the first place.

Damned if I do, damned if I don't, right? I'm seriously looking for feedback here. What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?

And moderators, use those offtopic mods to steer the discussion towards the subject of the article, not the flavor of the month conspiracy theory about story selection.

As a side note, I'm really going to try to write more articles addressing Slashdot matters on to Slashdot. But please understand that doing so is tremendously time consuming- this article will generate hundreds of pieces of mail and forum posts that I want to read and reply to. But there are only so many hours in the day. I would like to request that the forum try to stay on-topic here. Let's talk specifically about the issues i addressed above. We can talk about digg or moderation or whatever issues are of most interest next week.

Update a dozen or so users have made the same point: Simply wait for the same story to come from another user. If that was possible, I would do so. I'm really talking here about stories that are submitted just by one person. Part of why these users are successful is that they submit enough stories that they get a handful that only THEY submitted. I can't simply wait for someone else. That will never come!

update Allright it's been about 300 hours. I've read every comment posted so far, and replied to many. Even managed to whore myself a couple dozen upmods ;) I think we will add a nofollow to the submittor link. Several users raised good points and they ultimately convinced me that since the focus of the story is the submission, not the submittor, any link that detracts from the focus is less relevant. This will probably reduce some kinds of abuse in the future, but of course not all.

There's a lot of really good discussion in there. Some really good feedback. I haven't touched my inbox yet, but I see a lot of messages in there as well that I'll try to get to. I'll try to post again in another week or 2 on some other subject matter. If you have ideas on what that should be, you're welcome to email and suggest topics. We'll try to make it, if not regular, a frequent thing on Slashdot.

A simple suggestion:

[TripMaster Monkey (862126)]

Institute a cap on the total number of stories a given submitter can get accepted (per day, week, month...whatever). A cap doesn't hurt legitimate submitters, while limiting the payoff for linkwhores.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[CmdrTaco (1)]

But if the link is good, why NOT share it with the audience? I believe my first priority is to the readers here. If they would enjoy a link, why should the fact that it came from a user with a negative repution make me not choose the link?

Re:A simple suggestion:

[RevDobbs (313888)]

So a better solution might be to cap the number of submissions, not "accepted" submissions.

If you only have a change to submit three stories a day, you know damn well that you're going to submit only the best. And if someone can come up with three great, published submissions a day, then let them whore their blog all they want: then they truly deserive it.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[TripMaster Monkey (862126)]

Very well...then you can simply change my suggestion to: institute a cap on the total number of stories a given submitter can get attribution for (per day, week, month...whatever). If a linkwhore wants to spam the queue with stories, fine, but they may not try so hard if they find that their attribution gets stripped out after x amount of stories accepted in Y amount of time.

And yes, you may argue that this will stop the linkwhore from sharing all these interesting stories with us, but the fact here is that the linkwhore isn't making anything here...he's just pointing out something that already exists, and that other readers, readers without agendas, can just as easily find and submit. Sure, the linkwhore might not try so hard to submit interesting stories, but the upside is that everyone else will try harder, because the odds of them geting something accepted just went up. I'm pretty confident that the balance of Slashdot's readership can take up the slack if the linkwhores are put out of business.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[D-Cypell (446534)]

Taco, why not implement the ability for users to configure whether they see stories submitted by 'foes' on the front page (and perhaps move stories submitted by 'friends' TO the front page)?

Clearly, some people will say, "Yeah get rid of user X stories" and other will say "No, I want to read them". The answer is configuration, and you already have the infrastructure in the foes/friends system.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[timster (32400)]

We had that schism already. The problem is that Slashdot is popular because of the balance of content it offers, and that balance is carefully designed by the editors. If you turn that over to the most active and vocal users, the site would be less likely to attract the (essentially more profitable) casual readers.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[jamie (78724)]

The problem with doing this for submitters is that there are too many of them. Think of the "long tail" graph. For the year 2005 we have 9 submitters who got a story accepted more than 3 times a month. After those 9 we have 4405 more submitters making up the "tail." And of those, 3558 (86%) only got 1 story accepted the entire year.

The only part of that graph that it would be useful to track a submitter's "reputation" is for those top 9 or so, the top 0.22%. And my guess is that the only tags readers would apply to them are negative: "I don't like this guy." But we already know they are decent at submitting stories to Slashdot, because they have done it successfully 3 times a month. So what does this tell us except that we (the editors) think they write interesting stuff, but some of the readers don't like them? And we know that already.

Anyway, those readers who dislike Beatles-Beatles don't really dislike the user account submitting the stories, you dislike the URL he/she links to. So what's to stop him/her from creating a new user account and linking to the same URL with slightly different text? Or a slightly different URL?

Moderation works for users because the bulk of it is positive: our posters work hard to build up a good rep as someone who has something to say, with the reward being that they get to speak a little "louder." As far as I can tell what you propose for submitters would work the other direction. I'm not saying a successful reputation system for this can't possibly be built. I just don't think this is the right direction to go in to build it. And it would be a lot of work and I question whether it would ultimately be worth it.

(BTW: Beatles-Beatles is not in that top 9, he/she had fewer than 2 stories a month accepted for 2005.)

Re:A simple suggestion:

[CmdrTaco (1)]

I would hazard that we get about 50-100 unique "Stories" per day (not submissions, unique stories... 50 submissions might link the same story).

I would guess that most days a couple dozen stories are postable. We probably get 30-50 submissions to those stories that are usable.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[Daniel Dvorkin (106857)]

I've juried story submissions, in a rather different context, and I can tell you what any editor, of any type, can tell you: 90+% of submissions are crap. (Yet another example of Sturgeon's Law in action.) They're either subliterate and unreadable, wacko rantings, or just plain boring, often some combination of all three. Crap. The number of people who make submissions that are even worth considering for the first cut is very, very small, and it's not surprising that people who make a lot of successful submissions are (almost tautologically) those who have figured out how to write submissions worth reading.

Re:There is an issue here you didn't address.

[Xandu (99419)]

It's possible that **BeatlesBeatles free time (to spend submitting slashdot stories) and ScuttleMonkey's shift at manning the slashdot submission bin happen to line up. (I couldn't really check, as I don't know what **BeatlesBeatles uid/exact username is)

Re:A simple suggestion:

[CmdrTaco (1)]

This is a very perfect example of an arms race situation. I can't ban them, they'll get a new account/ip etc. And it doesn't solve the problem. We deal with the same issues in the moderation system.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[broller (74249)]

We deal with the same issues in the moderation system.

Hey now, let's keep this on topic. You can talk about moderation next week. ;)

Why let trolls and cranks influence the site?

[Concern (819622)]

Just pust what's good. Don't let this issue influence your judgement about what to show.

As far as I can see, the conspiracy theories about various /. personalities - be they you, Katz, Michael, or the plethora of submitters - run in a smooth continuum through moderation system whiners and /.-herd posters all the way down to ordinary FP and OT trolls.

Some people are just brats. They said something and it got modded down, or they submitted a story and it got ignored and (gasp) some other submission got in that looked similar, and then they decide to hate /. personally, rather than simply move on. It can manifest in all kinds of ways, overt or quite subtle, and this is one of them.

That said, I'm certain that it's possible to trick, scam or abuse slashdot's editors with story submissions. I've certainly seen some questionable writeups go by over the years. It doesn't take anything away from the site, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

For the most part, the system works. Stories come and go, the comments are generally good, and moderation doesn't always do what we wish, but nothing else really compares to the results. If occasionally something looks questionable people will question it, just as always.

It can be alarming how sophisticated some haters can be, but frankly I haven't seen anything here that even deserves your response. It's good to clear the air, but anyway, I wouldn't worry about it.

If you want a project, think about an interesting way to reorganize, prefilter and/or score story submissions...

Maybe I'm new around here...

[th1ckasabr1ck (752151)]

... but it seems to me that people complain far more often about advertisements thinly disguised as stories than they do about lots of submissions coming from the same user(s).

Re:Maybe I'm new around here...

[Bonker (243350)]

Slashdot could do with a fair bit of editorial rearrangement for new products or services.

Make a 'new products' category to stick all those 'This is cool, but it sounds like Logitech paid for the ad' stories. Similar for new services. If a company is cool or scary enough to rate its own story section on slashdot, then you can post under those categories... Like for google. Otherwise, let users filter them out.

digg yourself

[0110011001110101 (881374)]

create a /. staging area, where us, the real users, can rate stories, and let us decide what makes it to the front page... The the RPs and BBs of the world will only show up when their linkback page is actually relevent and useful...

Link to the original article

[dannytaggart (835766)]

Why not simply link to the original article, instead of these cut-and-paste pages?

Re:Link to the original article

[CmdrTaco (1)]

I often do try to follow links back to the source article. If meta links don't add anything, i'd prefer to remove them and link more directly to the original. If however the meta link adds substantial commentary, i like to read them.

our search system needs a lot of work. Our source code is available. If someone wants to help, that'd be swell. We have some dupe checking code. It works often. Of course it can never be perfect. We post a lot of stories about certain topics, some closely related. It gets messy fast.

And the no-follow thing seems awkward to me. It seems like i'm saying a URL is not worthy. Now sometimes that may be true, but where's the line? If i think your vanity domain name is ugly because I hate orange? Scammers? It's a spectrum of judgement that i'd prefer to simply ignore.

simple

[lubricated (49106)]

be more transparent. There are alot of things you could to help your cause. Showing rejected story list may be nice. I trully doubt only one user posted that story. If it's true that he was the only one to catch it then if people knew it they might be more ok with it.
That's one way to be more transparent, you may have to be creative to think of others.

One more thing.
Denying that what happened was suspicious is calling your community stupid.
Also try having the editors perticipate in a conversation about them and directly answer some of the comments(not sure if this hasn't happened, but it didn't when I was looking at it.).

No bother, I just stopped Submitting

[redelm (54142)]

I put some of what I consider quality in my Submissions. They get posted on K5 everytime. But at /. , it appears the editors aren't very careful readers, and quantity matters.

Since I'm not willing to grind out quantity, I just stop submitting.

Ask us again

[192939495969798999 (58312)]

The most critical thing I can see is that these type of questions aren't asked that often. I would like to see a once per week, or at a minimum once per month, question from the editors like, "how are we doing, what changes, etc." It doesn't mean you have to implement them, but we'd like to know that you at least halfway care what the readers think. When you take out a story from someone with a rep, that can be considered censorship, so print that pig and watch the fur + mod points fly. That's what the internet is for. However, you can go out of your way to make sure that people starting to earn a bad rep get steered clear of that, by telling them early and often when things are going south. If they continue to be jerks, or post ad after ad, that's when it's time to step in. The New York Times doesn't run ads masquerading as articles. I'm not saying this is the NYT, but you can understand our frustration as readers to click a link and get an online store.

Simple solution

[wampus (1932)]

Make the link point to the user's slashdot profile page.

Stripping Attribution

[sparkhead (589134)]

"I could strip attribution and take away incentive for a user to submit. "

If their incentive to submit is attribution, they shouldn't be submitting.

Take Fark.com for example. The submitters get no recognition (on the main part of the site) when an article is greenlit. They may chime in the thread with comments, but other than that, nothing. And they get a counter in their profile on how many articles they've gotten greenlit.

Their incentive for submitting is an interesting story that's funny and may spark discussion.

While the humor angle isn't applicable for the most part here, the discussion part is. Submit something because you think it's interesting, you think your fellow nerds will think it's interesting, and it will generate an interesting discussion.

Submitting just to gain attribution is the wrong reason to do it.

The reward for having a story accepted...

[pnuema (523776)]

...is not getting to place a link to the site of your chosing. The reward for having a story accepted is to have a story accepted. If you are submitting stories for any other reason, then your motivation is wrong. Add the no follow tag, and end the debate for good.

Roland

[Lord Byron II (671689)]

The reason I can't stand Roland is because his postings suck. They "feel" like they're trying to get me to click the link to his blog and I don't like that feeling. His posts are closer to ads for his blog than summaries of the relevant stories. Which brings me to my second complaint:

Slashads, which seem to be getting through at a more regular rate. Again, I don't want to be advertised to by the story submission (especially when that person is not paying /. for the privilege).

A couple of suggestions: first, every article about a product needs to have at least two links. One to the product and a second to an un-biased review of the product. A link to the product alone is a Slashad for the product and a link to the review alone is a Slashad for the review site. Only once an article has a few links does it get away from the Slashad realm and into the useful realm.

Second, to put it bluntly, the editors need to do their jobs. I would much rather see a few high quality stories than many useless ones. Taco said it himself, if the submission bin is empty, a story has a greater chance of being accepted. No! Good stories should be accepted and bad stories rejected. Period. End of line. It is the editor's job to find the good stories, fix the links, and check the grammar (!).

It's all about the PageRank

[meringuoid (568297)]

... and what they do with it.

I thought the hue and cry after Roland Piquepaille was unnecessary. So he was trying to drive traffic to his blog and maybe become known as some kind of net pundit. That, it seemed to me, was fair enough. Isn't that essentially what we're all doing, sounding off here on the topic of the day?

But this Beatles guy isn't doing that. He's using his links back from /. to drive up the PageRank of his link farm, with the apparent overall aim of trying to push spam sites up Google, for money. This, as far as I and, it seems, a large number of /.'ers are concerned, is not fair play. It simply isn't cricket, and we don't like to see our community effectively supporting spam.

That's what gets me upset about **Beatles-Beatles, that didn't worry me about Roland. This kind of link farming and search engine spamming spoils the net for all of us, and a major geek centre like this one should be firmly against that.

Re:It's all about the PageRank

[robbo (4388)]

Simple solution: the submitter URL in the story should point to their slashdot user page (for *all* slashdot stories, btw). They can post their home page url in their user page, if they like, but it will be minimum two clicks away from the front page. They get the reward of recognition, but its diluted. This might reduce the incentive for people like BB to submit a lot of stories, and will hopefully reduce the jealous ranting in the discussions.

Nofollow Karma

[Milo Fungus (232863)]

Why not make the "nofollow" a matter of karma? Those with por karma have a nofollow added to their link, just as their comments are started at score 0 or -1.

You could even get tricky and make a separate karma just for story submission, with some sort of moderation system. This moderation could be done by the editors themselves, or it could be opened up to the readership. I've read dozens of comments over the years where the submitter wished they could moderate the story. Perhaps it's time to add that functionality to slashcode.

Re:Nofollow Karma

[b1t r0t (216468)]

Why not make the "nofollow" a matter of karma? Those with por karma have a nofollow added to their link, just as their comments are started at score 0 or -1.

Although you haven't been able to see the effects for a long time since they hid karma behind a vague description, you do realize that getting a submission posted is worth 3 karma points, right?

I don't see why links for the submitter's name shouldn't always be nofollow links. The submitter's home web site is not the subject of the article, so there's no reason Google should be able to associate it with the article. Hey, if he's got a worthwhile page on george-harrison.info that's worth linking to as the point of the article, I've got no problem with that. It's just the automatic link to the same site attached to his name that is the problem here.

Also, web site links in the headers of posted replies should be nofollow links as well. The whole point of this BeatlesBeatles controversy is a link to his web site which is not part of the topic. The same should apply not just to "george-harrison.info", but also to "(http://www.ourmedia.org/user/38299 [ourmedia.org])" (<--hey, check it out, a nofollow link, CmdrTaco is censoring me! Help help, I'm bein' opressed!) and other such links in the comment headers and signatures. Okay, so he's got his link on the front page, but the idea is the same. Links to a submitter's / comment poster's websites are off-topic, and should be rel=nofollow. If nofollow is good enough for comment text, it should be good enough for home page links, too.

The same should probably apply to links in signature lines as well.

So for some strange reason, we can't post links in comments without getting a nofollow slapped on it, but we can set our homepage and it won't get a nofollow, and every time we post a message, we're doing the same thing as BeatlesBeatles! Oh man, I feel so dirty. Oh wait, I don't have a home page set up. But look at the HTML source to any message you've posted and you'll see what I mean.

Same thing you do with "unpresentable" stories.

[SharpFang (651121)]

Just replace the article text. Leave the attribution and attribution link (under the nickname, rarely followed by users) but rewrite the summary and skip the middleman, linking directly to the article. So Roland posts in his blog a piece of some other site and links to it. Write "[Roland] wrote about [this cool site], which is about..." instead of "[Roland] wrote: I've put a short blurb [in my blog] about that cool site..." He gets the nickname attribution link. Not all the slashdot effect hits.

Dear God, Rob! What _WERE_ you thinking?!

[Slartibartfast (3395)]

Sheesh. Here you dare to submit your own story, which asks legitimate questions, and even asks for feedback. The hubris!

You're lucky that the feedback has (as far as I read) thus far only accused you of

- Cronyism
- Faking user identities
- Taking kickbacks for posting stories
- General stupidity.

OKAY, FOLKS. TIME TO WAKE UP.

Let's take 'em, here:
Cronyism/faking poster names. IF ROB WANTED TO POST FAKE USERNAMES, DON'T YOU THINK HE MIGHT TRY TO COVER HIS TRACKS A LITTLE BETTER? Occam's razor kinda dictates that this Beatles Beatles guy is legit, 'cause Rob could cough up as many accounts as he wanted if here were attempting to run a propaganda site.

Kickbacks for stories. Ummmm... duh. Let's face it: we read Slashdot (or, at least, *I* read Slashdot -- and have for years; check my user number) because we enjoy the stories, and the commentary. If we EVER found ANY conclusive evidence that Rob was taking kickbacks from advertisers, I think it would be safe to say the site would be abandoned wholesale. Instead, just like UFO abduction stories, people love to discuss potential cabals and conspiracies, but offer no proof whatsoever. PUT UP OR SHUT UP.

General stupidity. Okay, maybe this one's valid, maybe it isn't. But, akin to Howard Stern's take on similar situations, IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, STOP READING. I can think of no better vote. No, you DON'T own the site. Rob does. (Or the media conglomarate. Not sure. Doesn't matter.) But we, the users, in a very real sense do dictate the site's future. If we stopped reading, it would go away. So, if you're so pissed, STOP READING. If you think the stories that are posted are stupid, STOP READING. There are plenty of other sites that are spawned in Slashdot's image, that offer different editorial direction and/or mechanisms. Feel free to avail yourselves of them. And, while we're at it, if it's not to the point where you want to wholesale abandon the site, you can -- gasp -- get mod points to change the feel of a story's discussion. Use 'em.

In the meantime, I think Rob and the crew -- with the odd exception (see: magnetic longevity rings) -- try hard, and succeed most of the time. Certainly enough that Slasdhot's one of the sites I refresh the most. I, personally, will continue reading, as long as CmdrTaco and Hemos are associated with the site. They ain't perfect, but they do a damn good job, and have done it long enough and well enough to show it ain't a fluke.

Party on Way^H^H^H^H Rob.
Party on Hemos.

Next story, please

[socratic method (15936)]

This is clearly a shameless slashvertisement for /.

Next!

nofollow

[Mr_Silver (213637)]

My opinion is no. Those URLs are what you get for submitting a story to Slashdot. We selected it. The submission braved the Gauntlet. A hundred submissions died, and this one made the cut. I don't think it's fair that we strip creds from someone just because they choose to squander that URL on something stupid. Who am I to judge that after all?

Let them keep the link but use nofollow. They'll still get the "cred" of it being there, it'll still drive people to visit their site out of interest but the search engines will ignore it and so those who try to post articles to boost their pagerank will be left out.

Everyone is a winner. Except the pagerank scammers, but we don't care about them.

I like this idea of Taco posting stuff about Slashdot every month. Next time I'd like to know how they handle dupes and what they intend on doing/implementing to reduce the number.

Stop posting news that doesn't matter

[Von Rex (114907)]

Most people here don't give a damn about the URL behind the submitter's name. People who make big deals about that usually get marked off-topic anyway. But what I find very concerning is the general lack of quality of the stories submitted lately.

This is one of my favorite sites and has been for years. I'm here every day. But lately my interest in this site is waning. Here are the recent trends in story selection I find most annoying.

1. Informercials disguised as stories. Particularly those for products which are not innovations in the first place. Most particularly for products which do not yet even exist. It makes me want to scream at your editors to RTFA before they publish it to half a million people. Often the first page of the comments for such stories are filled with +5 comments saying "This should not have been a story because there's nothing interesting or innovative here". You should take that as an indication that your editors screwed up, rather than trying to defend their story choices.
   
   
2. Minor gaming stories that should not be on the front page. There's a gaming section of this site. Minor stories, like interviews with game company staffers no one has heard of, should go there rather than the main page. If you noticed, most of the gaming stories lately have about 20 comments on them, and most of them trolls. This should be an indication to you that your recent practice of promoting gaming press releases over substantial tech stories is not an interest shared by most of your readers.
   
   
3. There seem to be certain subjects which automatically get promoted to front page stories by the editors. For example, anything remotely to do with Star Wars or Blizzard. This has always happened to some degree, partly as a geek culture, tongue-in-cheek type of thing, but lately there's been too much of it. It's noise, not signal.

Look at what's on the top of each page. "News that matters". Lately you've been sliding away from that slogan. And that's the real threat to this site.

Fix the underlying problem

[tm2b (42473)]

It seems to me that the responses inside the story discussion only happen because there's no other place for the disatisfied to direct their concerns.

Slashdot really needs to have a place where the admins can have an ongoing conversation with the users. This is basic Cluetrain stuff, it's somewhat appalling that Slashdot hasn't "gotten" it.

Hell, even if you guys don't even read it, it would at least provide a place for complaints to go instead of swamping story discussions.

Re:I disagree

[pezpunk (205653)]

this is the most ridiculously flawed logic i've ever heard. if something is worth defending, it's obviously broken? you're assuming that all criticism is always valid. in my experience good systems are often compromises, and pleasing everyone is impossible.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[Oculus Habent (562837)]

That's a horrible precedent, though. If you become a popular submitter it is because you submit relevant stories. You end up in a cycle where a submitter becomes popular, someone complains, and you blackball him because of it.

Why should you punish your best submitters, even if they are doing it for their own benefit (URL on a popular site)?

I do think that using Slashdot as a forum to talking about slashdot is a great way to generate discussion and help people understand what's happening.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[falcon5768 (629591)]

the problem is, there is no way anyone on this site SHOULD become popular. If people are becoming popular its because the editors are too lazy to pick the first one and edit it, and go for someones who they can trust. There are millions of users on this site, there is no reason a handful of them should become as well know as they have. We have one guy already this month who for 7 straight storys had HIS pcked over others who submitted them first. THATS a problem.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[Captain Splendid (673276)]

Uhh, did I miss something? Isn't this what modding, metamodding, friends and foes lists are for? With just five minutes' tweaking, /. gets a lot more readable.

IMHO, things are just fine. The problem here isn't crappy links/submitters, it's the OT discussion about that that's the problem, and quite frankly, that happens (in wildly divergent ways) in pretty much all threads.

Quit yer bitching, and go mess around with your preferences, for I do not have enough cheese to go with all this whine!

No more popular submitters please

[gad_zuki! (70830)]

>If you become a popular submitter it is because you submit relevant stories.

I don't even like the idea of a popular submitter. There are enough people here submitting stuff that we don't even need them. Limiting submissions to 1 or 2 a day is probably the best way to go. Why?

1. Now that we know that people can just write scripts and submit unlimited stories thats a -disincentive- to submit. Why should I get off my ass, write a summary, check my links, spelling, etc when Beatles Beatles will just mass post the very same CNET article except with a worse summary.

2. Unlimited submissions in general is just a bad idea. There really should be a limit for the sake of community spirit.

Metafilter had this exact same problem. Users would post to the front page multiple times daily to the point it would just get ridiculous and 3 or 4 voices were dominating the site. Matt changed the site so you could only post once a day to the front page. The quality of the site went up dramatically. Same when he implemented ask.metafilter.com. You could ask a question daily (or more than daily) and the questions became very "chatty" and silly. Then he limited the questions to once a week, so most people think before wasting their once a week question.

Essentially, limiting the submission system will produce a more varied information ecology, encourage nobodies without scripting systems to submit, and get rid of the "search engine optimization" spammers.

Not to mention, I dont think nofollow will even make a difference to these people. Some will do this just for the challenge or just to see page hits on their ad-ridden sites.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[Lifewish (724999)]

No one should benefit personally in a community driven environment.

And here I thought that the entire point of a community driven environment was that everyone benefited personally. How naive of me.

Seriously though, this is bollocks. Even the GPL, the most community-driven statement ever drafted, is fine with people benefiting personally from GPLed code.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[shinma (106792)]

The thing here is, Beatles Beatles, or whoever it'll be next, aren't "known troublemakers." The conspiracy theorists in the forums are the ones making trouble. Why should someone be punished for being a troublemaker when they are doing the thing that keeps the site alive?

What you're saying is, essentially, that a prolific submitter should have a halflife. Planned obsolescence. Once a submitter's name becomes "known," the editors should no longer accept their submissions, regardless of their quality?

That's not an appropriate or acceptable solution. Submissions are the lifeblood of sites like this, and to institute such a policy would discourage members of the community from submitting stories.

Bullshit

[Lord Apathy (584315)]

So what if the fellow is building a reputation or trying to build a reputation. What matters is the quality of the story and the quality of the write up that he submitted with it. Nothing past that matters. Your job as editor in chief of this here boat is the weed out the crap that goes on the front page. Not to police the reputation of the writers and users that submit the stories. We will do that ourselves.

If you ask me who submitted the article should be anonymous to the person who approves it. Once that is done the user id of the one who submitted the article can get tacked on. Who cares if someone is trying to build a reputation here? What matters is the quality of the articles on the front page.

Mod Article Down (-1 Troll) :)

[by Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should start a feedback score for an article

E.g.

Dupe
Advert
Biased
Boring

People who submit too many times will have a lower score and a past history editors can look up.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[croddy (659025)]

I'd rather live without a good story completely than having it ruined by a discussion about the submitter.

The solution to that is to mod down the idiots ranting and raving about Beatles-Beatles and his website. It's not to reject interesting stories just because some people are so stupid that they see the name of a submitter and become instantly filled with hate.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[baadger (764884)]

I've been visiting Slashdot for about 3 years now and _I didn't know_ the submitter username linked to a page of their choosing until just now. I always assumed they were links to the submitters user profile and thus never clicked or even hovered my rodent over them.

I'm not sure if i'm making a point here, perhaps that submitter link just isn't very significant?

Re:Mix It Up!!!

[CmdrTaco (1)]

You'd be seriously surprised. I think you guys are underestimating the number of quality submissions we get. We might get 50 submissions to a breaking news piece, but something even SLIGHTLY more obscure may arrive only once.

So you may be seriously surprised... but it's true. When someone submits 15 different URLs in 3 days, they are going to be the only submittor for 2 or 3 of them.

Re:whatever

[CmdrTaco (1)]

I truthfully don't pay a lot of attention to the name of the submittor. I've deleted like 80 submissions this morning. I couldn't tell you the names of any of them. The only reason I "Care" who a submittor is, is that there are a few users who, if i post their story, I get hatemail from readers who angrily complain that I am obviously under their employ!

Re:Submitters don't need a link back

[TheLetterPsy (792255)]

First, I'd like to say that I appreciate you taking the time to address this issue, as it has been taking over more and more of /. discussions.

What I find disappointing, however, is that during your entire rant, you fail to address why, if BeatlesBeatles' submissions were actually so great, why were they not picked up by other editors? Why is it that it is just ScuttleMonkey accepting?

Although the true conspiracy theorists would just attribute a different ed posting a BeatlesBeatles to that same ed being 'in' on the conspiracy -- you have to admit that we are of a rather skeptical and scientific mind. By this I mean we see patterns such as these and feel compelled to think that there is something 'fishy' going on.

Yours is a difficult position. Though I think story moderation may be one area for you to explore. That might even take care of the dupes, too!!

Apart from BeatlesBeatles and ScuttleMonkey -- keep up the good work.

Re:One critical flaw in /.'s selection process

[CmdrTaco (1)]

This has long been a struggle for us. It's addressed extensively in the FAQ as well, but the fact is that it's not a scalable solution. There are 2 issues, the first is simply finding the time to give 300-400 people some piece of feedback every day. Even if it takes 15 seconds to write a sentance, you still have to multiply that by 300-400, and suddenly your day just got a couple hours shorter.

The other part is that feedback begets feedback. If i tell you why, you might disagree. That ends up in my inbox, and suddenly i have to spend 5 minutes writing an email explaining why. Again, suddenly my day gets a couple hours shorter.

Thats one thing that a lot of people just don't understand- when you're talking about ANYTHING regarding submissions, you have to multiply it by hundreds. Anything regarding comments, by thousands. And anything regarding page views, multiply by millions. Manpower and CPU are harder to deal with when you start dealing with those numbers, and we are limited on both.