Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

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One website that I think has nailed comment moderation is the website Tweakers.net. A Dutch tech website and forum.

On Tweakers you (as a user) can apply for mod rights and it allows you to rate each comment from -1 to +3.

+3 = must-read

+2 = informative

+1 = on-topic

0 = off topic

-1 = spam / insult

There's an alogrithm that gives your rating more weight if they (retroactively) allign with what the supermods (employees of the site) rate comments.

On Tweakers you almost never read insults and "and my axe" repititive comments because they are hidden by default, and the +2 and +3 comments automatically get places at the top.

This has so much over a simple +1 / -1 system. I wish more website would think about their comments systems and how they can achieve a good incentive and moderation structure for informative comments to be lifted up and unwanted ones down.

Tweakers is Dutch but to get an idea here's a news thread with a lot of comments:

https://tweakers.net/nieuws/166988/

Similar to the excellent Slashdot moderation system. Moreover on Slashdot you couldn't just moderate at will, occasionally you would find yourself with 5 moderation points to spend upvoting or downvoting 5 comments.

Even more occasionally you would find yourself with some 'meta-moderation' points - where it displays some moderation decisions and asks whether you agree/disagree that this was good moderation

Slashdot's moderation has still yet to be beaten IMO, when up/downvoting a post you had to specify why you were doing so from a defined list, including things like Funny, Informative, Flamebait, and Trolling. Then as mentioned meta-moderation would occasionally ask a user to review those votes, asking the question "Was this post funny" for example. User's who's moderation points were upheld in meta-moderation would be more likely to get given more than someone who flung them out at random.

The real genius of the system though was the amount of configurability attached to those topics. Each user could define what those categories meant to them, so if you only wanted the serious stuff you could say Funny didn't get a +1 boost when displaying comments, and give it a -1 instead. Or -5 if you really hated Slashdot humour. In the other direction lovers of a good flame war could boost comments flagged as flamebait up in the sorting order. This also extended to relationships, where you could flag people as either friends or foes, allowing you to make sure you always saw comments from people who's comments you enjoyed, and squash anything by people you just didn't like.

All of that was an absolute nightmare for performance I'm sure, which is probably why we don't see it these days, but it was a thing of beauty.

Another great thing about the Slashdot moderation system was the "overrated" and "underrated" tags. A comment could get moderated as "-1 Flamebait" then get moderated as "+1 Underrated" all the way up to "+5 Flamebait". My personal favourite quirk of the system.

Slashdot's mod system was ... reasonably good at deprecating garbage. It did poorly at elevating true quality, however. The mod activity was too thin and non-convergent (each moderation moved. by a full point on a +5 -- (-2) scale).

I'd been on the site since before registration and moderation existed, and had a very low UID, back when that ... still really didn't matter.

Kuro5hin's "mean of moderation" system converged (within a five point scale, much like Amazon star ratings), though in practice people vastly overaward high scores.

Explicit scoring systems are difficult to design. They also leak insane amounts of personal information.

While the Tweakers system might be nicer in some ways, I think the problem of new comments having no visibility still applies to the site in practice. Maybe that's less of an issue because it's a news site, but still.

Sidenote: what's ironic in your linked post is that the only comment with a +3 rating is factually incorrect. The author claims that there is no currently known quantum algorithm that breaks ECDSA.

I think Slashdot works something like that (or at least did, haven’t been there in a while)

It did but Funny often floated to the top... same old jokes. Very Reddity before Reddit was a thing.

I think you could filter though to hide all 'Funny' and only show 'Informative' or something like that. Never did make an account.

It did, but it gained enough traction and turned into something that could be gamed. Reddit is going that way, too.

HN is my replacement for /.

Yes. Mine too. Interesting to consider what a less gameable version might look like

I think the actual values of the upvotes should be hidden, but the different upvote types should just be names - informative vs funny, vs analytic, etc...

I enjoyed the say Slashdot did it.

I really like https://shacknews.com/chatty. I've been going there for years.

I even 'rebuilt' it tried to sell it as a service once (http://xcursi.com - warning, the cert is expired and I've been too lazy to replace it).

Well that famous tech website had a similar, more granular way of voting (which made sense I guess 10 years ago), but I think I like this way better

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