Slashdot Article Summaries?
[Update: this post has been superseded by Collaborative 'summary of useful points' for Reddit/Hacker News kinds of posts]
There is, of course, nothing stopping people now from adding comments to the discussion that contain this 'best of' information, but I think the way things are set up at the moment is not as conducive as it could be to doing so. Perhaps the simplest way of doing it would be to have separate types of comments for these 'best of' type summaries, simply so you could jump straight to them.
Creating these summaries would be a bit of work, so there is an incentive issue here. Slashdot employees would have a pay incentive. But I think you'd also want to slashdot readers doing it, and for them the notoriety incentive could work -- by gaining a reputation for creating good summaries. It's fairly obvious there's a parallel here with blogging.
Blogs like Terra Nova (discussing academic aspects of MMORPG's) have an exceptionally high quality of commentary, with no moderation or limitations on who can post. It makes for very thoughtful reading and because of it, I have become deeply fascinated by the field. (Even though i wouldn't ever actually play them. I object to the costs more than anything!)
ReplyDeleteWhat i'm wondering is, would a huge readership still result in "me too!" posts, or does setting a high standard early on scare those people off.
Hey Michael,
ReplyDeleteInteresting thought. My guess is that the kind of comments reflects the kind content that is posted there and thus the kind of readership that it gets. Part of this would, I imagine, be the "culture" of the posting/commenting... e.g. if people are always civil, then I would expect that it's less likely that new people coming along will start up flame wars.
James.