Chacham's Journal: Moderating

Just read Cmdr Taco's journal on modding. I have an interesting idea for him. He complains that too many people are getting +5. I agree. But I think I have a solution. It will also address the problem of posts with too little comments modded at all.

The modding system is not to give out points. Rather it is to rank comments so people can read more or less. But, even if every comment is great, some only want to read the greatest of those. But if every comment is bad, sometimes people want to read the best of the worst.

Thus, I'd say that better suit a curve, rather than straight points.

Perhaps, people should not have a point applied to their posts per moderatrion. Instead, moderators should be able to moderate what they think about a message, and then a curve should rank them all. Something like:

5: 1%-2%
4: 1%-10%
3: 1%-30%
2: 1%-50%
1: 1%-95%
0: 1%-100%

So, this would remove the need for "redundant", "underrated", and "overrated". Either you say you like it, or that is is flaimbait.

Now, I'd even go further and do the same with negatives, and make a negative 1-5. The most modded down gets further negative.

This may make only four mods. Two postive, and two negative. The two positive would be, "Interesting" and "Funny". The two negatives could be "flaimbait" and "off-topic". The reason for two postives is because some care for funny and some don't, and similar on the negatives.

As for processing on the system. The curve only really needs to be generated every 5-10 minutes for stories that had more than x mods. This would even allow for a seaparate curve for those who care for funny, and those who don't.

Finally, this would eliminate the need for meta-moderation, as one or two mods would mean nothing. Just hand out a lot more mod points to more people, and let many people decide together what is best, instead of having one moderator immediately affect a comment.

So, besides that I ramble to much, what do you think?

Ever been to k5?

[FortKnox]

Ever been to Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org]??

That's how the moderation system works there (in fact, everyone can moderate every comment once, so the average moderation is the score the comment gets).

Re:Ever been to k5?

[Chacham]

No, never really looked at it. Though giving everyone a chance to mod *every* comment may be bad, because it doesn't allow people to mod some as exceptional. I'd think it'd only work if people ranlked comments, or if only some people could mod some comments.

Similar

[gmhowell]

I was thinking about something similar to this. Seems like you've given it more thought than I:) There's not much reason to give a comment more negative values. If '1' is the middle, there are four above, and two below. Maybe add a '-2'. It really depends on where you want the center of the average to lie.

Re:Similar

[Chacham]

A curve is a curve. Why not? It may be fun to see what is ranked by x amount of people as bad, as opposed to another comment where even more people decided to mod it as worse.

One question

[AntiFreeze]

Of course, the question this begs is how will it affect one's karma? One could say karma is useless now because of the lack of numbers and because anyone can get high karma from posting just a few mildly insightful or funny comments.

The nice thing about karma was that it separated the users from the trolls. Between moderation of your comments, stories you had posted, and metamoderation done on your moderations, your karma was a pretty accurate description of who you were on slashdot. [Yes, there were problems, and those who fooled the system, but they weren't rampant.]

With the new moderation system, as with your system, karma is useless. I, for one, would like to find a system which brings back karma in some useful manner. Hell, mixing a user's karma with the score of the post is probably telling about that post's quality, with or without your curve in place.

So all in all, I like your curve idea, but I'm interested in how you might manipulate it to modify karma, or if you think karma at this point is useless and should just be scrapped altogether.

Re:One question

[Chacham]

Interesting point. I understand, since I like karma too. :-)

Just make it in relation to the amount of times a person has posted, and where in the curve the person resides. I don't know exact numbers, but I think it ought to be easily doable.

Possibly, make it a google thing. More friends with karma means more karma for you.