Feb. 6, 2002

ONLINE FORUM SLASHDOT A MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS

I've been looking for a suitable occasion to write about the online forum Slashdot, so I was pleased last week to discover a discussion of an experimental admissions program being tried at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs, Colo., and eight other schools. Slashdot.org's Web site - www.slashdot.org - proclaims it is "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."

CmdrTaco, who started the site in college and now runs it for Andover.net (www.andover.net), picks a dozen or so interesting ideas every day from among hundreds of suggestions, posts them, and people respond. Lots of people - thousands every day.

On Tuesday, a Slashdot regular whose online nickname is Hemos started the Legos topic by posting a reader's summary of a Denver Post story. As the reader described the program, not very accurately, "Colorado College, in an effort to attract minority and disadvantaged students, is dumping college-admission exams in favor of a Lego-building test, but only for a handful of applicants." Hemos added, "Bet I could have gotten a better scholarship if they would have let me build a space station."

By late Wednesday, there were 459 posts on the topic. Helped along by frequent admonitions to read the whole article, they gradually adjusted their perception of the test, which observes a group of students doing a task - as it happens, duplicating a robot figure built of Legos - and ranks them on their ability to think strategically about the task and to exercise leadership in the group. One writer had participated in a similar workshop and described the best strategy.

You can read a Slashdot topic "flat," meaning in strict chronological order. Or you can read it "threaded," which sorts so that a response to an earlier post immediately follows it. Threading breaks the main topic into clusters of related messages, neatly organized into an outline. You could use it to write a pretty good term paper.

Subthreads in the Legos discussion addressed, among other things, the methods used to increase minority admissions, types of intelligence and the flaws of test-taking as a measure of ability. Behold the marketplace of ideas flourishing in a cyberspace terrarium.

The Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek observed that a free market, among its other functions, is a mechanism that allows a society to collect and disseminate information about the best use of its scarce resources. People's decisions on when to buy and sell, and at what price, summarize what they know in ways other people can act on. Prices convey information.

Prices need a currency of some sort, and the currency on Slashdot is "moderation points."

Every post has a score, from -1 to 5. Most of them start either at 0, if the author is not identified - those appear in the thread as written by "anonymous coward" - or 1, if the author is a registered user.

A person who has moderation points to distribute can mark a post up - for being insightful, informative or funny, for instance - or down.

Who gets moderation points? The software distributes them a few at a time to people who are regular readers, who have been so for a while, and whose comments are generally positively regarded by other moderators.

And once the discussion has been going for a while, and the best stuff has been moderated up, you can set a threshold so you see only posts of, say, 2 or higher. In the Legos discussion, there were 109 of those by Wednesday afternoon, a manageable number to scan for an overview of informed Slashdot opinion on the topic. Eight had made it all the way up to score 5.

This information economy is regulated. For a check on moderators who might want to help their friends and abuse their enemies, personal or ideological, there is meta-moderation; people who offer to meta-moderate get a sampling of posts and the way they were moderated and judge whether the moderator did a good job. They don't know who the moderator is, but the system does.

Every registered user earns karma; positive if your posts are moderated up or the meta-moderators approve of how you've spent your points, negative otherwise. You're eligible to be a moderator as long as your karma isn't negative. It's all explained in the FAQ (frequently asked questions) by CmdrTaco, who is Rob Malda when he's at home in Holland, Mich.

On Thursday, Andover.net announced it will be acquired by VA Linux for $968 million. Slashdot's traffic is a valuable part of the deal.

(789 words)