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Ubuntu switches search back to GoogleUbuntu switches search back to GooglePosted Apr 9, 2010 18:53 UTC (Fri) by PO8 (guest, #41661)In reply to: Ubuntu switches search back to Google by wingo Parent article: Ubuntu switches search back to Google
Yeah, and what's with "the absence of editorial deletions"? I, for one, am getting a bit tired of trash (see e.g. this off-topic rant) being allowed to persist in the comments lately. I'm a paying customer and would like to remain so; I strongly urge our esteemed editor to maintain at least nominal standards of professionalism in the comments, lest they descend into the mess that drove me out of /. . I understand that these are judgment calls, and that it's always easier to leave well enough alone. However, a major duty of an editor is to exercise editorial judgment. Compare and contrast the comment that started this thread with Leslie Hawthorn's comments in her LWN interview on gender in open source…there's more than a little irony there IMHO.
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Editorial deletions Posted Apr 9, 2010 18:57 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] But do you really want us to start deleting comments from LWN? That's really only something we do in cases of overt spam. Trying to shape the conversation by pruning comments is a most slippery slope; I think it rarely leads to good things.
Getting off-topic Posted Apr 9, 2010 22:32 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]
I am one of the people in this ruckus. Perhaps an explanation is in order, which you may take as an apology if you want.
Off-topic remarks are annoying. The original post was a mildly sexist joke which was still on-topic. It prompted a completely off-topic politically correct rant, and that provoked my completely off-topic rant about being adults and not on slashdot.
Where does one draw the line? The joke was at least related to the topic, and easily ignored. The complaint was 100% off-topic and reeked of political correctness run amuck. We readers have to carry part of the load for lwn's tone. I thought about it for a bit before responding, finally deciding that just as one can't help but make noise in shushing someone noisy in a library, one can't help but make an off-topic post to tell someone new to stop making off-topic posts. The next one to complain and suggest our grumpy editor start deleting posts made the same decision.
I have no idea how I would respond on a different day. I hope our editor is never forced to delete posts simply for being politically incorrect.
Getting off-topic Posted Apr 11, 2010 8:09 UTC (Sun) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
You know, I also hope that Jon is never "forced to delete posts" by the all-powerful forces of political correctness.
But I'm not too worried, since they don't, well, *exist*. And even if they did, I trust our editor's ability to judge how to best exercise his, well, editorial powers -- is there some reason you don't? (Though you do seem comfortable assuming that external pressure is the only reason he would ever decide to delete sexist posts; on this point I am less convinced, and anyway isn't it rude to threaten him like that? I mean by implying that if he ever took a more actively anti-sexist stance then everyone would think he was a wimp.)
I'm sorry if you didn't notice, but sexist behavior is a fairly topical issue right now, and anyway, being "on topic" is not more important than treating other humans with respect. But it doesn't even matter, because you agree with wingo that "carry[ing] part of the load for lwn's tone" is in any case a good enough reason to make an off-topic post. So if you want to criticize wingo's doing that, I think you need to do more than just complain it was off-topic, or you just look like you're applying a double-standard.
I understand that fundamentally your argument is that the sexist joke was no big deal, and anyone who thinks otherwise is some mindless political correctness spouting drone. I disagree with both claims, wonder whether you actually have any support for either, and suggest that whether you found the joke "easily ignored" is not actually the final word on its importance.
Getting off-topic Posted Apr 15, 2010 13:03 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
Me, I didn't think that wingo's comment was "politically correct". It was very welcome and if there hadn't been such a comment already, I would have wrote one.
Maybe, in your part of the world, "critic of sexism" is "politically correct" and thus to be avoided -- in my part, it ain't so. (I'm not from the USA, to make that clear.) We criticize sexistic remarks because we want women to feel welcome in our circles, not because it is "politically correct" (whatever that means today and for you, I don't care).
And if you think such comments would not deter women, you might want to come out of your closet into the big blue room.
Editorial deletions Posted Apr 9, 2010 23:25 UTC (Fri) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]
I think there's a huge disconnect between the quality of LWN's content and the quality of the comments. There seem to be some highly opinionated curmudgeonly people here who really have the capability of destroying conversations, and it's a real disappointment to me.
I subscribe to LWN because its articles are valuable to me as a professional programmer, and I think the editors should try to bring the quality level of the comments up to the standards one finds in professional venues.
If it were up to me, I would:
1) Require that everyone who wishes to comment supply their real name. Have the real name attached to every post and police the use of aliases.
2) Provide a publicly viewable comment history for every member, indexable by real name and user name.
3) Allow people to edit or delete posted comments for a period of time. Give people a chance to fix their own enraged-posting mistakes.
4) Draft explicit guidelines for posting, requiring people be on-topic and avoid personal insults.
5) Delete all posts that violate the guidelines.
Of course it's you're site. But I think you overstate the 'slippery slope' or 'anti-censorship' argument. LWN is hardly the only place on the internet that blowhards can make themselves heard.
Editorial deletions Posted Apr 10, 2010 12:32 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Real names are, I think, a waste of time. What really matters is *reputations*, and a comment history would provide that, perhaps in combination with an easily-visible 'number of comments' counter (so you can tell if someone is a drive-by without needing to dig down to their comment history).
If someone doesn't care that his reputation makes him out to be a destroyer of conversations, I can't see how having his real name attached would change things.
Editorial deletions Posted Apr 10, 2010 15:04 UTC (Sat) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
See Slashdot for an example of how reputation systems tend to promote groupthink and uninformed speculation. (That said, without moderation the comments would surely be even worse.)
Editorial deletions Posted Apr 11, 2010 9:28 UTC (Sun) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]
I'm not quite sure that Slashdot's system is the best. There's a vast diversity in moderation systems, and not all of them necessarily seem to promote groupthink. Reddit's, for example, seems to function much better than Slashdot's.
Editorial deletions Posted Apr 11, 2010 4:40 UTC (Sun) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]
Some of the most toxic people here are regulars. But they use ungoogleable pseudonyms as their usernames, which suggests that they have some shame. My thinking is that if people know that a google search will bring up their LWN rants for future employers, etc. they might think twice.
But really, I'm thinking that the potential role of the LWN comment section should be a professional discussion forum for our industry. If nothing else, using real names helps set the tone, and emphasizes the idea that isn't just another internet grandstanding platform.
Shaping the conversation Posted Apr 16, 2010 8:31 UTC (Fri) by biged (subscriber, #50106) [Link]
Seconded: the comment stream should be a professional forum.
I notice that the comment page requests us to be polite, respectful, and informative: these are the values of the site, and comments should conform to those values.
I filled in the user survey, and hated having to note that I was considering not renewing. In fact I hope to remain a subscriber - the articles are excellent, as are the best comments - but if I have to wade through flame wars, if I can't shape what I see and if the editors can't help me, if I stop reading because it's not worth it, then at some point I'll stop paying.
Personally, I read the RSS feed, and that works well if the noise level is tolerably low. Previously I read the comments in context, but that works best if I wait for a week or ten days, which is not a good bargain.
So, two ideas, not new:
Keep the noise level down: by suitable in-band prompting, private messaging or selective defacement.
Help the subscriber to read the comment stream in context: Support a kill-file, have a per-user RSS feed to allow per-article feeds, have a per-user per-article last-read date to offer a per-user page of articles with new comments.
Shaping the conversation Posted Apr 16, 2010 9:22 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
are you aware of the page http://lwn.net/Comments/unread that gives you per-user lists of new comments (grouped by articles)? it sounds like it's close to one of the things you are asking for.
Shaping the conversation Posted Apr 16, 2010 9:27 UTC (Fri) by biged (subscriber, #50106) [Link]
Entirely unaware: thanks for pointing it out!
Shaping the conversation Posted Apr 19, 2010 12:41 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
This really needs to be easier to find - even knowing that it exists I had a hard time finding it every time until I'd memorised it. It really doesn't help that the URL is case sensitive.
Shaping the conversation Posted Apr 16, 2010 17:05 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] FWIW, we have per-article RSS feeds now. They're in the metadata headers, so your browser should make it easy to subscribe to them.Stay tuned for other stuff...
Shaping the conversation Posted Apr 16, 2010 17:17 UTC (Fri) by biged (subscriber, #50106) [Link]
Thanks! For Chrome I needed the extension "RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)", and now I see the RSS icon for article pages.
(For the personal new-comments page, I see it's mentioned in the FAQ, which of course I hadn't read.)
Editorial deletions Posted Apr 16, 2010 8:17 UTC (Fri) by branden (subscriber, #7029) [Link] Jordan, you made one of the most ornery, curmudgeonly, off-topic comments on LWN I've ever seen. Or rather, you made such a comment sandwiched in between two paragraphs of on-topic bread.It was funny as hell and I love ya for it. Wheat that good is worth sifting through some chaff for, even chaff that includes moronic and hackneyed semi-jokes like muwlgr's.
Editorial deletions Posted Apr 17, 2010 16:32 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
I half-agree on 1. That is it'd be nice if people could supply a more descriptive name (potentially their "real" one) and have it shown with their username, if they wish. I don't think it should be required - doubt such a policy is workable, never mind about desirable.
I disagree with Nix below that "real" names don't matter. A "real" name can definitely make it easier to recognise people.
+1 on 2 and 3.
0 to -1 on 4. I don't think there's any point having LWN waste energy formulating policies. I don't think there's any point in anything beyond guidelines like:
"Try add value with your comments. Try be polite, especially in the face of disagreement or perceived insults."
Completely disagree on 5, except to the extent required by court orders (or other similarly hard-to-not-comply-with orders).
Editorial deletions Posted Apr 10, 2010 18:08 UTC (Sat) by PO8 (guest, #41661) [Link]
I do not want you to delete comments to "shape the conversation". I want you to delete comments that are inappropriate for a public forum because they are offensive to reasonable readers, and thus are not part of a civilized conversation. I am also good with you deleting comments that are wildly off-topic, and thus do not contribute to the conversation at all. Setting a fairly high bar in both of these areas is OK, but I think blatant and gratuitous sexism, or a rant about the health care system attached to an article on an OS release, must clear that bar. I do not believe that there is a "slippery slope" here; if that is what you are concerned about, write a couple of paragraphs of explicit and detailed editorial policy on comments (such as many print periodicals have) and set it in stone.
Honestly, if I had posted either of the examples under discussion, I would both expect and hope that they would be deleted. You would be doing me a favor by helping to protect my reputation, and yourself a favor by helping to protect the reputation of LWN.
IMHO (having been involved with open source since before the beginning, and in my capacity as a college CS professor who deals with open source newbies on a regular basis) the "Wild West" nature of open source conversations is not helping us. I think it is a big part of what drives away women, people of under-represented ethnicities, older adults, and frankly a lot of really deep thinkers with a lot to contribute to our work. I would like to think of LWN as, among other things, a haven for those people. The comments should be an accompaniment to the measured and thoughtful LWN articles; failing that, they should at least not be an embarrassment and a source of discomfort and dismay.
Editorial deletions Posted Apr 11, 2010 22:52 UTC (Sun) by fyodor (guest, #3481) [Link]
I disagree completely with PO8's argument that LWN should censor all the jokes that he finds offensive. Frankly, I found all the whining from the political correctness brigade far more annoying than the one-line joke itself.
That being said, I'd welcome a community moderation system which hides downvoted posts, while allowing people to view them if desired. This can help highlight exceptional posts too. I'm not holding them up as shining examples, but Slashdot, Digg, and Youtube all have systems like this. I'd downvote this whole thread (including the original sexist joke), and certainly the healthcare rant PO8 mentioned too.
Editorial deletions Posted Apr 15, 2010 20:27 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]
I've read that Boing Boing skated this slippery slope by introducing editorial *defacement* but not editorial *deletion*. What they actually did, at least at first, was that an editor would push the "remove vowels" button on the offensive post, which would make it look silly and would clearly show everyone that the social consensus regarded the post as unacceptable, but would not actually remove it.
Apparently, that was a big success for that crowd. People hated getting devowelized and started modifying their behavior to avoid it.
I would suggest "remove the vowels" for lwn.net, but what about some sort of "fold it out of sight by default"? I guess the important part is a consensus among the community that this thing should be ignored and not responded to, and ideally not seen at all unless you are morbidly curious. If this consensus is visible to the original poster as well then this might motivate them to change.
Just brainstorming. I think you'd probably better do *something* before too long, because status quo probably won't continue to work, and it might be easier to manage before it gets bad than after.
Heck, maybe you should just try what worked for Boing Boing. Editors get a button that removes the vowels. :-)
Trolls Posted Apr 16, 2010 18:23 UTC (Fri) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] Trolls will always be with us, but we can at least train people not to feed them. What I want on each LWN comment is a "get back under your bridge, troll" button (icon of a little bridge with a green arrow pointing underneath) that would fold the poster's comments, and the comments of everyone who replied, for a week. (Anyone running LWN Comment Improvement?
Ubuntu switches search back to Google Posted Apr 16, 2010 13:49 UTC (Fri) by ccurtis (guest, #49713) [Link]
At least in the U.S, if you operate a website where people can post comments and you edit (delete) those comments, you implicitly assume liability for them. That is, by exercising editorial control over the words of others, you become responsible for all of them. This responsibility is certainly, I expect, not something any editor here wants.
I haven't heard of any court cases for "community moderation" but I expect it to be treated more like graffiti and less like a published newspaper. TED seems to have a reasonable moderation system where comments that are voted below some threshold aren't expanded by default. Personally, I think I would like to see the entire thread from that point forward be abridged, excepting perhaps comments modded above some threshold.
[N.B. I am not a lawyer and do not claim to have kept up with legal precedents in this area.]
Oh, why not ... Posted Apr 16, 2010 14:12 UTC (Fri) by ccurtis (guest, #49713) [Link]
So it looks like my information is dated. It appears that traditional editing functions such as deleting posts does not induce liability for other comments, if this page is to be believed:
http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/immunity-online-pu...
... at least for now.
According to their summary sheets, editors ARE NOT responsible if they:
* Screen objectionable content prior to publication.
However, editors ARE RESPONSIBLE if they:
* Edit content that materially alters its meaning.
Of course, this is U.S. law any may vary by jurisdiction, yadda yadda.
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