Does the topic speak to you? Does the topic instigate a flutter of mental excitement, or stir a sense of conflict within or without, or plant a seed of doubt or confusion? Is there value to be found in discussing it with others, whether they share a similar technical perspective or otherwise? Are we better for having seen of it and heard of it and spoken of it? If you answered yes to any of these, it is on-topic.
Truthfully I can’t stand this question. The answers that result almost invariably miss the forest for the trees. We think of sites like lobsters, or hacker news, or /r/programming, or slashdot, as places where “topical” things are “aggregated.” This is a mistake. No one visits a technical subreddit, or a technical forum, or a technical link aggregator, for the link itself. A reddit or hacker news or slashdot or digg without comments is pointless. We aren’t there merely to consume articles within a bubble of our own solitude. We’re there for a familiar community with which we can explore, investigate, interrogate the world around and within us as we collectively and individually come to define ourselves, our community, and more generally, work to simultaneously forge and dismantle the zeitgeist.
Such is the purpose of lobsters, and of hacker news, and of reddit and digg and slashdot and tumblr and youtube and vimeo and myspace and geocities and bbs’s and usenets and the global internetwork. At least as I see it. In my eyes “content aggregators” are merely the latest in a long line of communication mechanisms whereby culture is cultivated, is inseminated and nurtured and grown and laid to rest as needed. The “topicalness” of such an aggregator is not to be found in its content, but its community. (And while such a community might be composed primarily of some “topical” group, it certainly shouldn’t be unnecessarily limited to such a school of people; but such is a story for another time)
It is for this reason that I really don’t like up/downvotes, or flagging, or really any ranking or moderation system that seeks to lay claim to the “worthiness” of a particular thing to grace the presence, and hold the attention of, the audience. Such ranking systems –whether their data points are “decentralized” amongst the “majority” opinion, or else carefully “curated” by some small elite– ultimately implement a centralized control over the narrative that the entirety of the community is then subject to. And it seems such systems invariably tend to regress toward righteous censorship and circlejerking.
To me, the act of “moderation” is a purely internal process; one that must be carried out entirely on one’s own volition. Any ranking must absolutely not be merely the product of some moderator or programmer or other person, but instead be purely the result of the user’s own interpretation of the data, and the user’s own trust of others' judgement.
Sidenote:
In this vein, lobster’s concepts of “tagging” and of “flagging” are both useful, but incomplete in my opinion, as is the notion of an up/downvote. I think all such behaviours should be publicly tied to one’s username and act as a “voting record” of sorts. Armed with this data, the user can both implement his/her own rankings and assign trust ratings to the tagging/flagging/voting habits of others. Armed with such a public ledger, I believe the notion of what is “on” or “off-topic” would be a non-problem, solved a priori by the users themselves, as would several other common issues that plague online communities.
I fundamentally disagree with you. The work the community puts into deciding what is “on topic” and “off topic” is useful for delaying eternal september. Hacker News suffered from the problem that you described (people putting up things that are just interesting, rather than on topic), and that’s why it’s full of drivel today, because the community drifted too much.
There are also many incredibly successful communities where moderators have been very influential, like MeFi. lobsters is not one of them–there is a log of all moderation actions taken, and they are mostly retagging.
For aggregator sites, the question should really be “will I find this interesting” rather than “is this article worthy”.
I realize this is a debate in itself, and completely ignores the value of comments.
How about if instead of each post having a single score, there was a correlation matrix which recorded how often you voted the same way as each other user. For each article, you could calculate a (bayseian?) probability that I’ll find an article interesting based on who’s voted for it so far and what my correlations are to them. Each ‘cell’ in the matrix could be an accumulator of how many times two user’s votes agreed and disagreed with each other.
Now this matrix would get pretty big, scaling as N_users2 and with random memory access all over the place. But for a relatively small community like Lobsters it shouldn’t be too bad, and it would be pretty easy to implement as an automatically growing triangular matrix. There’s a lot of writes every time you vote, but then again you could queue these and catch up, its not that essential for the calculations to be exactly up to date.
Anyway, would be interesting to try something along these lines … hmmm, these meta threads do seem to inspire ramblers :-)
I agree. But this is precisely the reason why aspensmonter’s proposal is interesting. Each member of the community could define what other members he trusts, and this will create its own “ranked” view of the stories and comments. Of course, it’s easier said than done, but the idea is interesting.
Thought I appreciate the irony of stating this in a comment, the primary way I and I imagine a large number of users interact with the site it not through comments but as a collective filtering mechanism, where the upvoting/downvoting and curating is a large part of the value which we get by interacting with the site. Pushing the onus to have every user filter every article is both impractical and I think misses the point of allowing us to efficiently collaborate around judging what is worthy of being read.
I mostly agree, with one difference: yes, an efficient filtering and curation mechanism has to be collective, but I’d like to be able to signal the system when I agree or disagree with another member, in order to create my own “weighting” of other people votes.
@aspensmonter wrote:
Armed with this data, the user can both implement his/her own rankings and assign trust ratings to the tagging/flagging/voting habits of others.
The important part being “assign trust ratings […] to the voting habits of others”.
I strongly disagree with your sidenote about a voting record if it is public and users' votes/flags are in any way retrievable. I think people should be able to read without having their reading choices published and judged. Libraries keep patron records private because the thought of their surveillance causes patrons to limit what they read.
If it were private and the system found users with similar voting patterns to you to train a model for your homepage, fine (though I think we’ll need quite a bit more activity before useful recommendations fall out of such a system).
I agree that “people should be able to read without having their reading choices published and judged”.
I disagree that people should be able to upvote or downvote a story or a comment without their vote being public. Why? Because their votes affect what I see. Any kind of “censorship” (yes, I know, the word is too strong in this context) must result from a public decision, in my opinion. This is the reason why individual votes are public in most parliaments.
To conclude, I don’t think the comparison with libraries is relevant. Nobody says the reading history must be public. We’re just talking about the voting history. And patrons don’t vote in libraries.
Thanks for explaining your disagreement, I hadn’t thought of it from that perspective. I guess I want people to be able to exercise private opinions for votes/tags/flags (especially if that trains a filter). Because so much of it comes down to matters of taste, opening it for discussion creates a lot of useless noise, and it may show up in unexpected future contexts (eg. justify your old votes on “culture” pieces about sensitive topics).
I share your concerns about votes/flags staying public forever. That’s an excellent argument in favor of protecting anonymity of votes/flags.
But I’m also concerned by the fact that a group of people can strongly influence what content are promoted/censored using votes/flags, in an anonymous way. If people have this power, then I want to know who they are. This same principle applies for example to journalists in a newspaper.
This leads us to another question: why are we voting on stories or comments after all? why not just read and comment without voting?
I can only see two purposes for votes:
The first one is the traditional purpose of voting, which is to “extract” a majority from a group people that potentially disagree. This is very useful in politics, to make decisions on controversial subjects. But I don’t see why a site like Lobsters needs to define a majority opinion on every story and comment. In my opinion, these votes must be public to make people responsible about what they promote or censor.
The other purpose is to use these votes to help the computer in understanding what I’m interested in, or not. This “votes” must stay privates and are not supposed to have any effect on other members.
Conclusion: I would prefer to have no vote at all than anonymous votes that influences the content presented to me.
To me, the act of “moderation” is a purely internal process; one that must be carried out entirely on one’s own volition. Any ranking must absolutely not be merely the product of some moderator or programmer or other person, but instead be purely the result of the user’s own interpretation of the data, and the user’s own trust of others' judgement.
I very much agree with that. It would solve a lot of issues with up/downvotes battles. Are you aware of any real website having implemented something similar?
Does the topic speak to you? Does the topic instigate a flutter of mental excitement, or stir a sense of conflict within or without, or plant a seed of doubt or confusion? Is there value to be found in discussing it with others, whether they share a similar technical perspective or otherwise? Are we better for having seen of it and heard of it and spoken of it? If you answered yes to any of these, it is on-topic.
Truthfully I can’t stand this question. The answers that result almost invariably miss the forest for the trees. We think of sites like lobsters, or hacker news, or /r/programming, or slashdot, as places where “topical” things are “aggregated.” This is a mistake. No one visits a technical subreddit, or a technical forum, or a technical link aggregator, for the link itself. A reddit or hacker news or slashdot or digg without comments is pointless. We aren’t there merely to consume articles within a bubble of our own solitude. We’re there for a familiar community with which we can explore, investigate, interrogate the world around and within us as we collectively and individually come to define ourselves, our community, and more generally, work to simultaneously forge and dismantle the zeitgeist.
Such is the purpose of lobsters, and of hacker news, and of reddit and digg and slashdot and tumblr and youtube and vimeo and myspace and geocities and bbs’s and usenets and the global internetwork. At least as I see it. In my eyes “content aggregators” are merely the latest in a long line of communication mechanisms whereby culture is cultivated, is inseminated and nurtured and grown and laid to rest as needed. The “topicalness” of such an aggregator is not to be found in its content, but its community. (And while such a community might be composed primarily of some “topical” group, it certainly shouldn’t be unnecessarily limited to such a school of people; but such is a story for another time)
It is for this reason that I really don’t like up/downvotes, or flagging, or really any ranking or moderation system that seeks to lay claim to the “worthiness” of a particular thing to grace the presence, and hold the attention of, the audience. Such ranking systems –whether their data points are “decentralized” amongst the “majority” opinion, or else carefully “curated” by some small elite– ultimately implement a centralized control over the narrative that the entirety of the community is then subject to. And it seems such systems invariably tend to regress toward righteous censorship and circlejerking.
To me, the act of “moderation” is a purely internal process; one that must be carried out entirely on one’s own volition. Any ranking must absolutely not be merely the product of some moderator or programmer or other person, but instead be purely the result of the user’s own interpretation of the data, and the user’s own trust of others' judgement.
Sidenote:
In this vein, lobster’s concepts of “tagging” and of “flagging” are both useful, but incomplete in my opinion, as is the notion of an up/downvote. I think all such behaviours should be publicly tied to one’s username and act as a “voting record” of sorts. Armed with this data, the user can both implement his/her own rankings and assign trust ratings to the tagging/flagging/voting habits of others. Armed with such a public ledger, I believe the notion of what is “on” or “off-topic” would be a non-problem, solved a priori by the users themselves, as would several other common issues that plague online communities.
But I ramble. Signing off for now :-)
I fundamentally disagree with you. The work the community puts into deciding what is “on topic” and “off topic” is useful for delaying eternal september. Hacker News suffered from the problem that you described (people putting up things that are just interesting, rather than on topic), and that’s why it’s full of drivel today, because the community drifted too much.
There are also many incredibly successful communities where moderators have been very influential, like MeFi. lobsters is not one of them–there is a log of all moderation actions taken, and they are mostly retagging.
There isn’t one true way to build a community.
For aggregator sites, the question should really be “will I find this interesting” rather than “is this article worthy”. I realize this is a debate in itself, and completely ignores the value of comments.
How about if instead of each post having a single score, there was a correlation matrix which recorded how often you voted the same way as each other user. For each article, you could calculate a (bayseian?) probability that I’ll find an article interesting based on who’s voted for it so far and what my correlations are to them. Each ‘cell’ in the matrix could be an accumulator of how many times two user’s votes agreed and disagreed with each other.
Now this matrix would get pretty big, scaling as N_users2 and with random memory access all over the place. But for a relatively small community like Lobsters it shouldn’t be too bad, and it would be pretty easy to implement as an automatically growing triangular matrix. There’s a lot of writes every time you vote, but then again you could queue these and catch up, its not that essential for the calculations to be exactly up to date.
Anyway, would be interesting to try something along these lines … hmmm, these meta threads do seem to inspire ramblers :-)
I agree. But this is precisely the reason why aspensmonter’s proposal is interesting. Each member of the community could define what other members he trusts, and this will create its own “ranked” view of the stories and comments. Of course, it’s easier said than done, but the idea is interesting.
Thought I appreciate the irony of stating this in a comment, the primary way I and I imagine a large number of users interact with the site it not through comments but as a collective filtering mechanism, where the upvoting/downvoting and curating is a large part of the value which we get by interacting with the site. Pushing the onus to have every user filter every article is both impractical and I think misses the point of allowing us to efficiently collaborate around judging what is worthy of being read.
I mostly agree, with one difference: yes, an efficient filtering and curation mechanism has to be collective, but I’d like to be able to signal the system when I agree or disagree with another member, in order to create my own “weighting” of other people votes.
@aspensmonter wrote:
The important part being “assign trust ratings […] to the voting habits of others”.
I strongly disagree with your sidenote about a voting record if it is public and users' votes/flags are in any way retrievable. I think people should be able to read without having their reading choices published and judged. Libraries keep patron records private because the thought of their surveillance causes patrons to limit what they read.
If it were private and the system found users with similar voting patterns to you to train a model for your homepage, fine (though I think we’ll need quite a bit more activity before useful recommendations fall out of such a system).
I agree that “people should be able to read without having their reading choices published and judged”.
I disagree that people should be able to upvote or downvote a story or a comment without their vote being public. Why? Because their votes affect what I see. Any kind of “censorship” (yes, I know, the word is too strong in this context) must result from a public decision, in my opinion. This is the reason why individual votes are public in most parliaments.
To conclude, I don’t think the comparison with libraries is relevant. Nobody says the reading history must be public. We’re just talking about the voting history. And patrons don’t vote in libraries.
But maybe I’m missing something :)
Thanks for explaining your disagreement, I hadn’t thought of it from that perspective. I guess I want people to be able to exercise private opinions for votes/tags/flags (especially if that trains a filter). Because so much of it comes down to matters of taste, opening it for discussion creates a lot of useless noise, and it may show up in unexpected future contexts (eg. justify your old votes on “culture” pieces about sensitive topics).
I share your concerns about votes/flags staying public forever. That’s an excellent argument in favor of protecting anonymity of votes/flags.
But I’m also concerned by the fact that a group of people can strongly influence what content are promoted/censored using votes/flags, in an anonymous way. If people have this power, then I want to know who they are. This same principle applies for example to journalists in a newspaper.
This leads us to another question: why are we voting on stories or comments after all? why not just read and comment without voting?
I can only see two purposes for votes:
The first one is the traditional purpose of voting, which is to “extract” a majority from a group people that potentially disagree. This is very useful in politics, to make decisions on controversial subjects. But I don’t see why a site like Lobsters needs to define a majority opinion on every story and comment. In my opinion, these votes must be public to make people responsible about what they promote or censor.
The other purpose is to use these votes to help the computer in understanding what I’m interested in, or not. This “votes” must stay privates and are not supposed to have any effect on other members.
Conclusion: I would prefer to have no vote at all than anonymous votes that influences the content presented to me.
I very much agree with that. It would solve a lot of issues with up/downvotes battles. Are you aware of any real website having implemented something similar?