JDWTopGuy's Journal: Unfair moderation system changes

By now, you've probably heard about the change to the Slashdot moderation system that removes the karma benefit from the "Funny" moderation.

I already have excellent karma, thanks (mostly) to comments that were moderated "Funny". That's mostly what I post, funny comments. Or at least weak attempts at being funny. (At least I stopped with the soviet russian beowulf clusters are belong to natalie portman type stuff)

The real problem with this change is that now you can lose karma on a comment that has a positive moderation. If your comment gets moderated to +5, Funny, but then your foes hit you with a few "Overrated" moderations, you wind up losing karma even though your comment's final score is positive.

This makes it quite easy to do a karma-removal attack on somebody. Just find a comment of theirs that has been moderated "Funny" and moderate it "Overrated" as many times as you can.

Therefore, the only way to ensure proper karma kickback for a funny comment is, if a comment has already been moderated "Funny" once, then use "Underrated" instead of funny. This has the side effect of not being meta-moderated. Thus, it screws up the Slashdot moderation system, screwing the people who made the unjustified change in the moderation system.

The only way to deal with this without changing things back to the way they used to be is to not remove karma until the comment has been moderated below the starting score. It's not a foolproof system, but it should help limit the amount of damage that can be done by a moderator with a vendetta against you.

If the karma system is going to be mangled like this, they might as well just dump it. (Maybe we should all hit CmdrTaco's comments with "Overrated" moderations... [evil laughter])

P.S. My distributed.net stats.

Overrated...

[shepd]

Has always been a problem. Many people have asked Malda to do something about it, but he won't.

The only way to fix overrated is to make it part of metamoderation, and put the "scores" at the time of being modded overrated along with it.

ie: Do you believe this comment is overrated? (Context: +2 Funny, +1 Insightful)

Either that or simply remove it. Neither will ever happen, though.

Re:Overrated...

[JDWTopGuy]

Yes, I read about this in somebody's journal a while back. It's pretty stupid, essentially a huge loophole in the slashdot modding system.

You do have a good solution, but I imagine they aren't saving the moderation history in such a way that is conducive to this. Plus as you said, they're not exactly that worried about it, apparently. Taco can probably edit comment scores anyway, his own user bio says he has "secret powers".

I just added him to my foes list, BTW. Kinda cool, it's like being in somebody els

Can you explain what's so important about karma?

[Farley Mullet]

And why it's such a crisis when posters might be unfairly denied their move from "Positive" to "Good" or whatever?