dant's Journal: Why I'm not participating in the 'Blackout'

A few reasons:

• First and foremost, I think the whole thing is a huge overreaction to what Taco said. He's a technical guy, quoting stats about what to him is a technical problem (ad revenue), and some folks took it as a personal attack of some sort. I doubt very much that it was intended as such; get over it.
• Who is this supposed to hurt? If your contention is that comments are what makes Slashdot great (and I'd 50% agree with you), then you're effectively trying to rob all your fellow Slashdot readers of the experience for a week. At best, this seems likely to just make more people more angry than they already are. What's the point of that?
• The whole thing stems, IMHO from an 'us-vs.-them' mentality that, in turn, grew from all the griping about the moderation system. And the griping about the moderation just pisses me off. There's nothing wrong with the moderation system. If there is a cabal of moderators, I'm somehow not privy to it despite moderating on a regular basis.

  The only thing that's wrong is that Slashdot doesn't have a good 'meta' section like some other sites do. That means that any discussion of the moderation system in a post to a story about robots or something is, in fact, off-topic. And then complaints about being modded as off-topic are also off-topic. Check out the numbers on why your post was modded down--it's always 'Off-topic'. This isn't a conspiracy, it's just reading the rules.

  And while I agree that the lack of a 'meta' forum is a problem, this 'blackout' isn't a solution to it.

So there you have it. I'm not normally a frequent poster, but I'll be sure to take the extra time to post this week if I have something to say.

Sombody's got to keep things running while you guys are off sulking.

Ummm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Replies to off-topic threads are not offtopic. They are on the topic of the thread.

Slashdot moderation should be treated like usenet and anyone who mods me offtopic for replying to something offtopic will see the back of my hand in metamod.

Re:Ummm...

[dant]

Interesting! I hadn't ever thought of it that way. I always considered 'off-topic' to mean 'off the topic of the posted story'. I took a look at the Moderator Guidelines, but it doesn't clarify how it should be used.

But having thought about it a bit, I still tend to disagree. While usenet is a great model (and I can't wait for the day I can read Slashdot via NNTP), things that work well there don't necessarily work well on Slashdot--at least, not yet.

The problem with your approach is that /. is missing a key feature of most usenet readers: you can't kill a subthread easily. So what good does it do to flag the post that starts a big off-topic thread if the rest of the thread is still there taking up space? The moderation would be practically useless in that case; the big off-topic thread would be there intermingled with all the on-topic stuff.

If readers could easily kill subthreads, I'd agree with you. Let's hope we get that someday.

(Incidentally, I've never had a moderation meta-modded as 'unfair', so I suspect most people agree with me. But I could just be lucky--I make vastly more positive moderations than negative ones.)

Thanks for the post; you'd get +1 (Interesting) if I had any mod points at the moment. :-)

Right on . . .

[cjpez]

Just don't talk about you-know-what. :P