Signal 11's Farewell Speech
2000 10 02
I
signed up for
slashdot.org slightly over three years ago. Since that time I've
seen it go from an
obscure "
news for nerds" website to being immensely
popular with
IT professionals. I was here before
Linux was hyped. When
Voices from the Hellmouth
appeared on the front page, like most everybody else at the time, I was stunned into
silence. Not only because this was the first time
Katz had posted something that
didn't stroke his
ego, but also because it was a document that stood on its own. One
could hear and feel the words because they were true; Like many on
Slashdot I had
gone through the now well-known
geek/
outcast stage during my schooling. Although by
now it has been dragged through the
media and featured so many times that many
people's
stomachs turn just mentioning it, but it was important at the time. It was
definitely a turning point for the entire
community. It was also the first time that
Slashdot had featured an
article of such far-reaching proportions. It was not
Slashdot's daily bread and butter, which consisted mainly of short
opinion pieces, a
"
ask the experts"-styled column and, of course, the daily links.
Slashdot at the time, to me was an
experiment which was always on the
verge of
exploding. The scores of posts from users, the quick corrections as the
authors
realized (once again) that they had posted too soon, the
inevitable technical
difficulties - through all of this it seemed that the thing that kept the site from
melting down was the fact that one could login to Slashdot and see what other people
had to say. Whether it was
Microsoft's latest underhanded tactic or a
cool hack of a
random piece of
hardware, Slashdot had it covered... and more
importantly, had the
opinions of other
like-minded people for one to read.
During all of that you had me. Like a fair number of other
geeks, my
job was boring
and
unchallenging. And like most people in
tech support and
web design, you get a lot
of dow
ntime too. One can only
surf the web for so long before you've seen
everything
and been
everywhere. Whatever the four-color
glossies say, the interactive world out
here is tiring, both mentally and physically. The natural solution, to me, was to lay
on the refresh button of my browser and start posting to Slashdot. On practically
every article that I could come up with an opinion on, I posted to. Some of them were
fine works of literary art. Others were little more than
OOG_THE_CAVEMAN posts,
except without the
capitalization.
In the middle of all this commotion a seemingly
unsolvable problem appeared: Slashdot
was becoming more popular. Doesn't seem like much of a
problem, really, until you
realize one of the first laws of the internet: "
In any large gathering, the majority
of people are idiots". Like
Usenet, a
subculture rapidly formed whose only
objective,
it seemed, was to crash the system by overloading it with stupidity. We tried
ignoring it. Then we denounced it. Finally, we
moderated it.
I probably narrowly missed being one of the "first 200" moderators. I'm glad I missed
being selected because "
Version 1.0" fared about as well as one could expect. Not
only did it start on fire, but it also set a lot of other people on fire. Mass
flaming ensued. A lot of normally well-tempered slashdotters suddenly had picked up
their
pitchfork and were threatening to
lynch Rob. Oh, and the
trolls? They were
right there, continuing their
stupid commentary and replying with silly comments…
completely unaware that they had caused the Slashdot crew to silently
segfault, and
probably a lot of the readership in the
process.
"
Version 2.0", implemented maybe two months later, was pressed into service because
the popularity of Slashdot (and hence the number of stupid people) had reached a
level which was overwhelming even the 200 moderators (although about 1/3rd of them
were axed after poorly moderating). The
New Deal Moderation System™ was unveiled.
Virtually anyone could
participate. It was based on how often you used Slashdot and
it was hoped (although never said out loud) that the trolls would be moderated away
and we could be done for them and restore Slashdot to it's pre-popularity
era where
the comments were real comments, the articles were real articles, and the trolls from
alpha centauri were real trolls from alpha
centauri (with a tip of the hat to
Douglas
Adams).
Well, shortly after this I decided to
test the system
myself, and
conducted a
small-scale
experiment by posting a variety of opinions and seeing how people
reacted. I discovered that people responded more to
emotionally charged statements
and persuasive writing than informational writing. Not surprising, but I had expected
it to not do as well for the technically minded Slashdot audience, who prided
themselves on being able to spot
FUD from a mile away. Apparently only
Microsoft FUD
could be easily spotted. I promptly let word of this leak out on my own little
Slashdot
homepage and waited for the flames to roll by.
Version 2.0, for a while, functioned
quite well. In fact, the trolls
vanished into
the
Sea of Negative One for some time. Then, one fine
afternoon - I think it was a
Thursday - the moderation system suddenly became
useless again, and an entire brigade
of the bastards charged the
forums, upsetting furniture and leaving the place
smelling rather nasty. Within a couple
weeks Metamoderation was unveiled. "Moderate
the Moderators" was the motto, and it failed almost overnight. Actually, it did fail
overnight, because I remember a storm rolling by that night - it had moved due North
from Michigan. Quite odd for a
storm. It seems the trolls had organized.
Slashdot continued to grow at an unabashed rate,
Napster started to become popular,
Slashot was acquired by
Andover.net causing an
exodus of a fair number of
slashdotters, and the entire system seemed to bog down under the load. All the while
the trolls continued, at a
distance, to take aim and fire tear gas into the crowds.
I continued my
daily postings, bored as I was at my
job, and by this time was known
well enough that I decided not to let slip that I was Signal 11 in my casual
conversations with other
people in the
technical field. I had, by this time, noticed
that a distinct culture (and even a few subcultures) had formed around Slashdot and
the trolls had seemed to take lessons from my short-lived experiment in the
moderation system to heart and begin, as they called it,
karma whoring. For the
longest time, I just ignored this - I was interested in getting quality conversation
out of my posts, they seemed intent on getting any
conversation.
Unfortunately, as of late, that culture has disintegrated.
Rob Malda, Slashdot
God
put in a
karma cap. In a brief
e-mail exchange with him, he noted that this was done
specifically because of me, and that the
karma cap would probably be lifted in the
future - for everyone else. It seems my lasting legacy on Slashdot is in the
moderation system. Even now, it is still the most controversial feature on Slashdot.
I have long advocated changing the system. When Malda's solution to unfair moderation
was the "
bitchslap" - a practice whereby someone's karma is set to
-50, and their
default posting score to -1, was first used, I
spoke with some of the people who it
had happened to. People accused me of being the cause. After a lot of research and
talking to Rob, I managed to get a couple of those accounts placed back at 0
karma
and they were able to post again and be seen. Nobody really bothered to
thank me.
The moderation system on
Slashdot has, is, and will continue to be abused for the
foreseeable future. Slashdot's biggest
commodity and
feature - the users' comments,
have been buried under the
noise.
I'm sorry to say that I think now is the time to
move on. The
moderation system here
is broken, and nobody seems interested in
fixing it. We'll see if there are other
weblogs out there that I can contribute to in a meaningful
fashion.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.