Letters to the Editor
StefanMuc
Published Letters: 79 Editor's Choice: 4
-
How to waste time trying to build working web forums
[Read the article: Salon's new letters registration policy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]All web forums suffer from the same problems. It's apparently an iron rule that each forum will try the same methods to overcome these problems, and it's only logical that each of these methods fail in the same way, every time they are tried.
Of course registration isn't going to help - within a week you'll find out that registering is trivially easy. Even trivially easy to automate.
I noticed you haven't introduced captchas yet. Presumably that's the next step you take, once you notice that, yes on salon.com too it's easy to automate registration.
Next you'll find out that user names are easy to fake - e.g. a hypothetical user "firefly" will soon find that others are using "firefly." or "firef1y" etc.
Of course, the central problem of trolling will not be impacted by these changes anyway - do you want to ban every controversial discussion? How much time do you want to spend to examine which user needs to be banned, so that he can register a new account with slightly different spelling?
There are other tired and useless methods to deal with that, too: you can now restrict posting to paying users. Pretty soon you'll notice that you're missing out on the influx of new posters, your forums will go stale. Will it help with flame wars, though? Nope - but it will become much harder to give the boot to a paying user, and people will still fight.
So what works? Leave the moderation to the users, don't censor anything, give the more interesting articles higher visibility. The only type of web forums which really focus on interesting discussions use slashcode. There may be other methods out there, but slashcode is free and it works. Check out slashdot.org, set your threshold to 2, and have a look.
Sorry, you are free to try whatever you want, it just frustrates me to these the same well-intentioned but unworkable ideas tried over and over again.
-
You don't get to be a global warming skeptic
[Read the article: Real inconvenient truths]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sorry, this is not a topic you can commment on because you have some mild interest in geology, or because you've once been told that this or that feature of a beautiful landscape have been created by the last ice age.
In order to form an opinion whether the main stream of a scientific field is wrong, you need to have detailed knowledge of that field. This is not something you can cobble together from random press releases, or novels. It takes years of study, hard work and knowledge of the available data.
Let's say a bridge was supposed to be build somewhere in your area, and the plans were already publically available. Now someone would write an article how that bridge could never be stable. You'd check his background and find that he didn't consult with any engineers or architects, that he doesn't have a background in mathematics and mechanics, doesn't have knowledge of steel types.
What would you call this guy? A bridge skeptic?
So ok, how can anyone then form an opinion about any scientific field? Clearly it's impossible to have detailed knowledge of every available field. So if we don't have detail knowledge, how can we then be sure that statements of experts in that field make any sense at all? The answer for that is the scientific method. Researchers must publish in peer-reviewed journals, other researchers read these articles and can comment on them, try to prove or disprove the theories suggested, or come up with alternative ideas. The important thing is that poking holes in existing ideas is the best way to advance a scientific career. There is not one nobel price to be had for repeating established ideas and saying "this sounds fine to me". There are plenty for taking an established and accepted theory and saying "hang on, there is a case where this theory doesn't work, but mine does!". So the very self-interest of the scientists is immediately driving progress.
So you get to be a global warming skeptic if you can show why in this particular scientific field the scientific method doesn't work when it demonstratably works in so many others. That would be real and important criticism.
-
Anonymous - do you really think that's a good idea?
[Read the article: Duke charges to be dropped?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So one group of people should press for a system where any accussation automatically leads to a conviction, and the other group should press for a system where any accussation is dismissed? The former would eliminate all false negatives, the latter all false positives, but I don't see how anything good would come from this.
Wouldn't it make more sense to try to improve the system so that women who report rape are taken seriously and can obtain psychological and medical support? So that police have personnel and equipment to investigate cases properly? And so that men who are accussed of rape are innocent until proven guilty?