chrisv's Journal: Whee. What's up with this one?

I've seen other journal entries about this, and I've seen enough sigs with this thread in it. This thread (which has to be browsed at -1 to be worth reading), attached to the story about Oracle being breakable, describes someone's attempt at trying to figure out what is up with the moderation system. It appears that almost 800 people spent moderator points on this discussion, given the moderation totals listed at the top. I could perhaps see a few "Offtopic" ratings given to it, considering that it had absolutely nothing to do with the story in question, but 350 of them?

Among other things, the entire thread was slapped with a -1 it seems, most of which seeming to be without much of a good explanation. I've seen a lot of stuff go around through here (I can't particularly say I was the greatest poster at times either -- see all of my older posts -- but that was a few years ago too. I sincerely hope I've matured at least somewhat since then), and much of that has been crap. But a lot of it has been fairly insightful stuff, even if it's stuff that likely the editors don't want seen for one reason or another. That's the only reason for an entire thread, as such, to have been moderated into oblivion, as far as I can tell.

This is probably asking for a serious bitchslapping from the slashdot editors, but so be it. I was reading through a story earlier, when I spotted someone spamming the article. I pondered trying to do something about it, and even modded a few of the comments down myself (which, come to think of it, were a perfectly good waste of mod points, even if I wasn't going to use them by tomorrow night). I spotted someone else earlier today (don't remember who, or under what thread) that made a comment about a new moderation type - "Crapflooding".

Moving on to other topics though, if a post like such becomes as popular as it did (even for moderation), perhaps something else ought to be done with it besides for modding it into oblivion. If slashdot is going to try promoting itself as an open news site, which allows freedom of expression, then perhaps they shouldn't try nuking things into oblivion which make perfectly good sense for people to see. Maybe it should have been turned into a story instead?