Good on them for trying. I feel like we've been trying to do this on the web since the 1990s though. Somehow it just never works.
>>And we are working to make our comment spaces more welcoming and more connected with our editorial work
Are there any sites that have really good comment spaces? How did they do it? Seems like moderation works, to a point, with a large enough user base. What else is there?
(I'll add other than HN, this is the one place I come to actually read the comments)
Everyone just ignores their accomplishments. Sites consider the solution too complicated to implement. You end up with reddit style up/down/report/gold and best/top/hot/controversial which isnt rich enough metadata to let users sort comments in powerful ways.
The answers to these problems have been around for long over a decade. Yet no one has even come close to one upping slashdots system.
You're very right that Slashdot developed an underappreciated system for community moderation. Too many people treat this like a new problem when it's one of the oldest out there (see, for example, http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem... )
That said, I've always assumed the Slashdot system was too elaborate and hard to understand for anything other than the highly technical, highly dedicated (in its heyday) Slashdot community. Maybe I'm wrong.
I think tagging your upvote/downvote with metadata describing WHY you voted that way is not complicated.
Upvote - important
Upvote - funny
Upvote - informative
Upvote - consensus
Downvote - spam
Downvote - rude
Downvote - inaccurate
Downvote - disagree
Randomly assigned metamoderation as civic duty is not too much to ask of readers and contributors.
I also think the complication should reside in the algorithm and not be handed to the userbase. If metamoderation algorithms can figure out which moderators I agree and disagree with, let me favor the data those moderators i prefer contribute to the system.
A well written algorithm will be able to figure out when a person is polluting the system with noise and trying to watch the world burn. Disagreeing with consensus moderation is different than being disruptive. That is a challenging and complicated prospect, but that complexity lies on the backend, not the user facing interface.
Sure, but commenters are going to ask questions like "who is moderating me" and "why am I allowed to moderate sometimes but not other times."
On Slashdot, the answers to these seemingly simple questions are quite complex, but generally understood and embraced by the audience. I'm not sure that would be the case on a site like the Guardian.
That said, you may be right that the benefits outweigh the confusion and that this could work fine at Guardian. (Although, even as a longtime Slashdot user, I have no idea what "upvote - consensus" means...)
The guardian comment section used to be excellent (10 or so years ago), there was a community of admittedly left-leaning commenters and the odd article would get ridicule but there was more discussion.
It started to go downhill when they changed their commenting software so that you saw far fewer comments (about 10 per page rather than 50) and for a time would only sort most-recent or least-recent.
It was then very hard to actually have a discussion.
Metafilter. Which works by charging a one-time only $5 membership and a one-week waiting period before you can post. Small enough for someone interested not to worry, large enough to make the trolls go bye-bye.
Ars unfortunately suffers from the hivemind problem. They attached voting buttons a few years back, and unpopular enough opinions will be buried under a torrent of votes and be hidden.
But the idea of promoting useful comments is a good one, so long as the promotion is a mark of insight, not agreement with the author's politics. Ars doesn't suffer much from this, but given some of the polemic I've read on Guardian, I believe they may
>>And we are working to make our comment spaces more welcoming and more connected with our editorial work
Are there any sites that have really good comment spaces? How did they do it? Seems like moderation works, to a point, with a large enough user base. What else is there?
(I'll add other than HN, this is the one place I come to actually read the comments)