Journal fm6's Journal: Grow up, Cliff 14
Here's a really weird "offtopic" mod. Here's another one. They're both in stories edited by Cliff. Do you suppose I pissed him off by pointing out yet another totally lame Ask Slashdot?
Edited to add: more on this breaking controversy in the comments below and in Cliff's Journal.
For the record... (Score:2)
Grow up, fm6.
Growupedness (Score:2)
Why am I so willing to take your word for it? Because you do deserve a certain presumption of honesty. And because I know how appearances can deceive. As witness all the posts in the Firefly story that "prove" that I'm an employee of Fox. Now that is an offensive accusation!
I still don't see how you can say my suggestion on the Filesystem issue were offtopic. How can a post that describes a possible solution to the problem submitted be "offtopic"?
And I still think Infinite Moderator Points for editors is a Very Bad Thing. Even if editors never abuse this authority, just the fact that they have it sends exactly the wrong message.
Re:Growupedness (Score:2)
I never moderated any of your posts in either topic. If you feel that you have been moderated unfairly, then more than likely the moderators will be penalized when they hit meta-moderation.
To think that have something against you just because you were hit by two odd moderations in stories that I posted is kind of a stretch, don't you think? There are thousands of moderators on Slashdot. Occam's razor can produce a lot more likely scenarios than me invoking my oh-so-godlike editor powers to mod you into oblivion. For the record. I don't do that. I rarely moderate. When I moderate, I tend to moderate up not down because there are plenty of other moderators to pick up the slack.
My thoughts on this "controversy" of editors having infinite mod points:
Yes, it does tend to breed mistrust on the readership, but only because the readership lets this be so; someone out there has to have the points to deal with the trolls, the redundant comments, the crapflodders, and the plain idiots that post if not hurtful and untrue things, crap like pornography in articles. Is this the Slashdot that you want to show to your friends? Right now the moderation system just doesn't have the amount of points to keep it all clean, and if we inject more points, that paves the way to other sorts of abuses. We tread a fine line, here. It may be broken but I posit that it's better than nothing, otherwise Slashdot would be USENET. Have you seen USENET lately? Aside from porn, there's not much USE left in it!
A few other interesting facts:
Is this a conversation? (Score:2)
The question isn't whether we're going to deal with all the idiots who post crap. The question is, what's the best way. to do this. You have to look at costs versus benefits. For example, I would really like to see an end to AC posts, since ACs are responsible for most of the abuse. But the Slashdot team takes the attitude that anonymous comments are too important too discard.
Now, that's just a matter of prioritization. I don't agree with your choices, but I do understand that you have to make them.
But when you choose to go around "fixing" post scores, what kind of choice is that? You can't hope to find more than a small fraction of the crap. Whatever you do, the main resource has to be the volunteer, 5-point at a time moderators. Keeping these folks happy and involved is more important than anything.
But when you second guess them with your IMPs, you're being damned rude to these same volunteers. Worse, it screws up the very sense of consensus that makes Slashdot so interesting.
The bottom line is that the Slashdot community is a kind of democracy. Now democracies are made up of people, and people do stupid things. But that's just something you have to live with, because insisting that everything be Just So destroys trust. And without mutual trust, you can't have democracy.
And yes, you are on my friend list. Doesn't mean I like you, just means I think you sometimes say interesting things. When you're not getting all defensive, that is.
A Conversation of Two Hemispheres.... (Score:2)
Wow! I say interesting things? Gotta keep my head from inflating.
Move it, move it, move it (Score:2)
Example: that stupid little pissing contest we had a while back, when a bunch of moderators insisted on modding up a totally offtopic post, and the editors insisted on on matching them mod-for-mod. What did that accomplish, except to raise tempers and destroy reputations? Is one popular offtopic post worth that much trouble?
Mind you, I'm not suggesting you tolerate off-topic posts. Not unless you want to transform Slashdot into a spam repository! But you just have to accept that the volunteer moderators are not always going to do the right thing. Any more than you do.
And if you do want the moderators to do a better job, you really should do something about those convoluted, hard-to-read moderator guidelines. You can't really blame moderators for having bad priorities when you don't do a good job of spelling the priorities out.
Dude, my hands are tied. (Score:2)
Again, I have no authority and would be quite happy with doing away with IMP (as long as something was put into place that would control the bad apples) -- you'd be surprised the amount of people there are trying to abuse the system (and not solely for this reason), and I think IMP was implemented because it was the easiest way to deal with the problem, as there just aren't enough points in the system to handle what we already get. Injecting more points into the system just opens up other abuse issues...that suggestion has already been made.
I seem to be unclear today (Score:2)
And when moderators screw up, concentrate on educating them and maybe banishing them. You can even undo moderations that were done for the wrong reasons. But please don't jump in as super-moderators. That makes the work of the volunteer moderators meaningless.
And most of all, you need to rewrite the moderator guidelines so they cannot be misunderstood. Maybe even hire a tech writer to do it.
Re:A Conversation of Two Hemispheres.... (Score:1)
Cliff, you have a good point there. Too much bitching, and not enough solving. It's a lot easier to criticize a problem than it is to solve it. Let me go out on a limb then and propose some ideas. They are not a solution but I believe they would all be improvements.
The changes made in the last month have been a huge improvement. I realize that implementing any of the things above takes time, but given the changes that have come recently, I'm content to sit back and hope things continue to improve.
-s.
No, I am not trying to confuse you. (Score:2)
Totally Lame Ask Slashdot (Score:1)
Re:Totally Lame Ask Slashdot (Score:1)
Delamed (Score:2)
I've had 20 or so submissions rejected. Each one is a complete mystery too me, especially since I always try to pick topics that I know the editors are interested in. But what's the point in worrying about it? No way you can get the editors to properly justify all the thousands of rejections they have to do. And it distracts from a more important issue:
Namely, Cliff keeps accepting Ask Slashdots that should not be accepted. It doesn't matter whether or not they are displacing "better" submission. Slashdot should not be a forum for dispensing legal advice -- it can only cause grief for the submitter, and maybe legal problems for OSDN. Nor should Slashdot try to answer simple newbie questions, a service already well covered by other sites and by Usenet. It's a total mystery to me as to why Cliff keeps accepting questions like this.
I used to enjoy answering newbie questions online, but got tired of answering the same questions over and over. I used to be excited about abuzz.com, which had some clever software for archiving and retrieving old technical discussion. Alas, the NY Times bought it and turned it into a gossip site. I don't want the same thing to happen to Slashdot! I want the questions to remain fresh and interesting.