ubuntu's Journal: This Is Depressing.

It's depressing posting at zero. Even if I post insightful stuff, nobody sees it! Why do I bother logging in? Amazing that I *lost* karma for being +5 funny. Slashdot is BROKEN and I've received no response yet from Cowboy Neal. Oh well, hopefully somebody with mod points is reading at zero, but I doubt it. The Slashdot moderation system doesn't scale well -- when you have 1000+ posts to read at -1, I'd bet that only 5% of the mods actually bother. Which leads to the poor moderation here -- a large number of insightful posts are ignored, while other mediocre posts hit +5 since it's a lot easier to jump on the bandwagon and bump whatever the other mods gave the nod previously than to dredge through all those 0 and -1 posts for underappreciated quality.

The problem is that quality posts are buried at 0 and 1 and are completely overlooked by lazy mods.

Slashdot needs something new. Perhaps a random moderation system, maybe where moderators don't get to pick which posts they will moderate up or down (this loophole obviously leads to biased moderation, moderation of friends, etc.), but instead, they get 20 mod points and a list of 20 random posts to moderate up or down (like metamoderation, except that the posts include non-moderated posts). If the masses went for it, it would lead to fairer moderation and would give the bottom-dwellers (like unfairly punished me) a chance for their good posts to be recognized as such.

But then it's more like work and less like fun, and so it probably won't work. Everybody likes moderating up opinions they strongly agree with (unfairly biased or not), and if they aren't moderating politically, they won't moderate.

A second idea is that a certain number of points HAVE to be used for 0 level posts -- these are what should be moderated anyway, rather than using your points to push +4's up to +5, which doesn't really help anybody, as by the time something's +4, we all KNOW it's a good post.