Plastic.com
Plastic or plastic.com is a popular community-driven message board, very similar to a weblog, whose website title bills itself as a discussion site for Politics, Culture, Points of View.
| Table of contents |
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2 Content 3 Karma and moderation 4 QuickLinks 5 External links |
The site
was launched in January 2001 under Automatic Media, the web-culture conglomerate that included snarky editorial darling suck.com. In following with Automatic's model of small, low-cost boutique websites, there were only 4 members of Plastic's initial staff. Plastic won a Webby award in its first six months. When Automatic Media folded in June of that year, several of the editors remained on, working pro bono. Despite heavy server problems and downtime in the months following Automatic's collapse, Carl Steadman, one of Suck's original founders, announced his intentions to buy Plastic, and moved the entire board onto new servers. Since then, Carl has served as the primary operator of Plastic, with the aid of a group of moderators, who help choose the stories.
It does not feature any banner or pop-up ads of any kind, and is run entirely on user donations through Paypal. As it licenses the SlashCode engine, it is almost entirely member-driven. As of June 1, 2004, there are 41,710 accounts, with several thousand being active members.
Content
Although the site's topics include "etcetera", "media", "filmtv", "scitech" and "work", the topics covered on the board are primarily related to current events and politics. Plastic's content is entirely driven by user-submitted stories. A typical Plastic story selects a topic based around a story found on an external link, with the Plastic user providing a larger context for that article with supporting links and some editorial comment. The stories are often written in a way that frames a discussion for the other readers to post comments within. Readers are invited to post their comments in the stories, which can be moderated by other users. New submissions will appear in the Sumissions Queue (subQ), which is visible to all users, and can be voted on by users with 50 "karma" or higher. Each voter can give the sub 0, .5, or 1 points, and high-ranking subs will eventually become full-fledged stories that can be commented upon. In addition to voting on the submissions, users are given a 255 character text field to suggest changes to the story, post helpful links to exterior sites or previous Plastic stories, or suggest alternate headlines for the story itself. One of Plastic's editors will then properly format the story for running on "the front page". Some complain that as Plastic.com was intentionally targeted at Generation X, the moderators in the queue have a liberal bias.
Karma and moderation
Plastic's moderation system is very similar to the one seen on Slashdot. Plastic members are randomly awarded moderation points which can be given out as they see fit. In any discussion thread, a person with moderation points can mod a post up or down, based upon the content, with a descriptive tag, such as 'compelling', 'scholarly', 'astute', 'disingenuous', 'obnoxious', etc. It costs one point to mod a post up, and two to mod a post down. A given comment can have any integer score between -1 and 5 inclusive, and Plastic users can set a personal threshold where no comments with a lesser score are displayed. (For example, a person with a score threshold of 1 will not see comments with a score of -1 or 0 but will see all others.)
- 0 karma or higher is required to post comments in stories and submit stories to the subQ
- 5 karma or higher is required to post QuickLinks
- 50 karma or higher is required to vote in the subQ
QuickLinks
A member can also post QuickLinks, which appear on the sidebar. Users cannot comment on these links, but they can mod the link up or down. If a link is popular, the submitter can receive up to 1.5 karma. QuickLinks are appropriate for follow-ups or humorous stories with little discussion potential.External links