Slashdot, karma, Abusive users and Twitter
There's a new book "Character Limit" out about Elon's assumption of Twitter, and that prompted some musing about the early days of the web, Slashdot, and Google.
When I know I’ll have a long drive ahead of me, I’ll often pickup an audiobook or two to engage me while I roll along the interstate. I alternate between Fiction and Non-Fiction. I had just wrapped up the second book in Matthew Mather’s1 Aeon trilogy and next in the queue was Kate Conger and Ryan Macs “Character Limit”. This book about the time leading up and subsequent to Elon Musk’s assumption of twitter was one I was both looking forward to and dreading.
If you step back a few decades, I worked for the early tech news site http://slashdot.org which was started as a site called Chips and Dips “by Rob “Cmdrtaco” Malda and Jeff “Hemos” Bates. This river-of-news site became very popular, and became the center point for a thriving community of technology obsessed folks.
It was very much the vanguard for the kinds of sites that dominate the web today. Their experiments with user generated content, wikis and even social networking (for the user community on Slashdot) on the site showed a creativity that was breathtakingly forward looking.
Remember this was the late nineties, there was no Facebook, Friendster, myspace or even Wikipedia yet operating.
In the late 90s, Rob turned on commenting, which led to vast, and sometimes entertaining2, abuse. That led to moderation by us editors, (though later mostly by Rob Rozeboom, who personally moderated some 300,000 comments over the next many years) and the introduction of user accounts. This led to a concept of assigning a “karma” score for those users and then opening up moderation of the comments to the larger community of Slashdot users.
This moderation would affect the users’ karma and their ability to have their posts surfaced for all users. This user moderation begat meta-moderation where a certain class of user would be able to pass judgment on not just a fellow user's comments, but on their moderation decisions.
This begat, briefly, meta-meta-moderation, but given the damage to the space time continuum, we’ve all agreed to let that one lie. The user community at Slashdot was mostly pretty great in my opinion, but the abuse community at Slashdot often gave one pause, and sometimes made you doubt about the viability of the human race going forward.
Anyhow, one aspect of the user accounts at Slashdot that Rob always regretted was exposing the karma number to the users. It made the site and gaming the site about that number. Slashdot would end up removing the ability to see the user’s karma number, and would replace it with a gentler “excellent” or something.
Comments were given a numeric score from -1 to -5 , with default score thresholding happening at 1 for non-logged in users. Logged in users could choose to see (and judge, if moderating) at whatever level they liked.
As sites like Digg, Reddit, Twitter and Facebook , all of which welcomed user generated content, emerged, I felt I could start a timer for when they would discover the need for moderation. They would all go through slashdot’s journey unbidden. Some would emerge successfully, and others, not so much. History, indeed may not have repeated exactly, but it sure did rhyme.
I was listening to Character Limit;s masterful summarization of the journey Twitter went through as “the worlds town square”. I have to tell you that I literally gasped multiple times as Twitter would come under attack from their users. Or how they would tie themselves in familiar knots trying to preserve expression in the face of lawsuits, regulator oversight and the passions of its users, executive leadership and employees.
Slashdot never rose to the level of global intrigue that Twitter did, to be sure, but the problems Twitter faced were so familiar to me. I wouldn’t call it triggering, as I think that’s just too hyperbolic, but I had some familiar wincing during my listen.
An anodyne example: Sometime before Elon’s acquisition was made final, then CEO Parag Agrawal wanted to deploy to the users a karma system, with user moderation. And the book implied they were going to expose the number to the users. Which is what made me again question people’s ability to learn from history. Cliff Lampe and Nate Oostendorp wrote two seriously great papers3 on the various systems they had deployed. It’s all right there for the reading.
I think Agrawal would have learned quickly, had he the opportunity to deploy his system. He seems like a decent dude who was in a very unsteady job during his short run as CEO. But given the incoming bull in the twitter china shop that was Musk, he didn’t really have the chance to find out. I had already stopped posting much on twitter before then, as I really didn’t like how it made me feel much less its impact on the United States during Trump’s presidency.
I actually don’t want to “ruin” the book for you, so I won’t talk much more about this, go read/listen to it! It’s super.
Funnily4, the first or second Saturday after I started at Google, I was sitting down for breakfast with my then 3 year old daughter when I got a call on my cell from the then head of PR/Communications telling me that Sergey wanted me to address a story5 on Slashdot.
It would become a habit, when a story hit Slashdot, I’d get a text or email from the founders or their folks in comms and I’d try to address whatever controversy was going on that day. I sort of think this was part of what lead to me launching Developer relations at Google, but that’s a different post.
Anyhow, forgive the old man musing about his former career, but as to why I’ve been thinking about abusive users and communities, it will become clear soon.
Sadly, Mathew Maher died in a car accident, right as he was hitting his stride in fiction, too. Damn shame.
Though mostly not entertaining at all, which would sometimes lead to a call to the feds, or even a few visits from the Secret Service…..
Slash(dot) and Burn (What a title!) and the less jazzily titled Three Recommender Approaches to Interface Controls Reduction
To me.
Which I did, of course. It was probably the story referencing the Playboy interview with the founders, but I can’t remember, honestly.