digitaldust

Robin Hamman sent on this paper this morning. Interesting in depth statistical review of Slashdot’s moderation system. Some previous knowledge of it is useful before reading.

Slashdot’s moderation system is not what I would think of as pure moderation it is more of a rating system. Slashdot don’t delete.

A few pull quotes…

Part of Slashdot’s ethos is that posts are never deleted from the site.

Of users who commented 41% moderated.
Of moderators 68% commented while 32% lurked.

Of users who commented 31% also meta moderated.
Of users who meta-moderated 66% also commented.

Only 28% of comments received one or more moderation action.

The median half-life of a conversation on Slashdot was 174 minutes (the time taken to receive half the total comments on a story). The median to get 90% of comments was about 18 hours.

90% of anonymous posts either stayed at the same rating (zero) or went down.

Most importantly the design recommendations that come at the end are worth reading.

• Worth thinking about how quick you want the community to self-moderate or self select.
• It seems that, in the case of Slashdot, the time taken for moderation/rating to be effective is longer than the half-life of the conversation.
• Nearly 3 / 4 of the postings don�t get moderated or rated at all

Slash(dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space