Plastic.com
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In computing, 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.
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The site
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It does not feature any banner or pop-up ads of any kind, and is run entirely on user donations through Paypal. As it uses a modified version of the Slash engine, it is almost entirely member-driven. As of January 1st 2005, there are 43,956 accounts, with several thousand being active members. Plastic.com also offered email accounts, however, Plastic Mail is no longer supported.
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 Submissions 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 the moderators and Plastic members in the queue have a liberal bias, affecting the voting on submissions whose editorial content seems to skew to the right.
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 a score between -1 and 5 inclusive at half point intervals, 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.) Non-registered users may post without registering as an "Anonymous Idiot." Plastic members have the option to block Anonymous Idiot postings. Additionally, Anonymous Idiot posts start with a karma score of 0, below the default mod threshold of 1. Registered Plastic members also have the option to post as Anonymous Idiots, which they may use to make comments which are controversial or offensive without fear of losing karma. This practice is generally looked down upon.
- 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
- The members with the highest karma have access to other tools, including the list of all other users in the "Top Karma" group and a list of all members currently logged in. The "Top Karma" page states that this list is limited to the top 250 members, but in reality the list contains 548 members as of 22 April 2005. The minimum karma required to be on this list is 120. Previously the list showed the karma totals for all members on the list, but at some point this was changed so that anyone with more than 999 karma points displays only 999+.
As with the story submission queue, some Plastic members complain that many comments are moderated (especially downmods) based on political motivations, usually to aid liberal posts or downgrade conservative posts. The moderation system does not encourage this usage.
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.
Plastic Chat
Plastic has an online chat server at irc://chat.plastic.com, port 6667. It is also available through a Java client at http://chat.plastic.com/.
External links
- Plastic.com (http://www.plastic.com)
- The First Year of Plastic (http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=02/01/09/0235209) as told through a Plastic thread, and the Second (http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=03/01/11/17143507) Third (http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=04/01/12/14520599) and Fourth (http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=05/01/09/08441181) Anniversary retrospectives.
- "When The Audience is the Producer" (http://journalism.utexas.edu/onlinejournalism/audienceproducer.pdf) - a paper from the International Symposium on Online Journalism criticizing the community-weblog approaches of popular message boards, including Slashdot, Metafilter, Kuro5hin and Plastic.
- "One Plastic Day" (http://www.shift.com/print/9.4/62/1.html) - Shift Magazine's behind-the-scenes look at Plastic during the Automatic Media era, just before the company went folded.