Journal ThisIsFred's Journal: When Metamoderators Attack! 1
I recently had to make a couple of choices in metamoderation that I didn't want to make. Both were politically-charged comments, one I agreed with, one I did not. Fortunately, I don't use moderation as a tool to supress the viewpoints of those which I do not agree. However, the moderators did, and it left me with a bit of a dilemma when I metamoderated.
One post was moderated mostly informative, and it was, even though I felt the information was mostly false. I chose to metamoderate as "unfair", not because I disagreed with the content, but because it was simply off-topic. The problem here is that someone examining the rating would most likely come to the conclusion that I made my choice based on my own personal beliefs. The parent to the post was also off-topic, and instigated the political (and off-topic) rant below it. It's a shame that I couldn't metamoderate the parent as well.
The other post (under a different article) was moderated as flamebait. I agreed with some of the content in the post. The post didn't use strong language, the poster didn't engage in ad hominem attacks, and it didn't appear to be specifically crafted to incite anger. It therefore wasn't flamebait by reasonable definition. I metamoderated this one as "unfair" as well, not because I wanted to show support for the poster's political views, but because he was wildly off-topic. Again, this could be interpreted as a showing of support for the poster's viewpoint, which it was definitely not. As with the previous example, a parent poster was responsible for derailing the discussion, but I couldn't metamoderate that post.
The reason why this concerns me is that some moderators are doing a poor job, and I'm not able to give constructive feedback. I understand that the mechanism is supposed to give less moderation points to those that don't moderate fairly, with the hope of diluting bad moderation, but is this system effective when an article has been incorrectly moderated when it has already reached the maximum moderation allowed?
This is a good place to bring up the problem I have with "redundant" moderation. This has to be the most abused of all. It takes time to search the articles and properly apply this one, and moderators just don't do the work. I cringe when I see a string of redundant moderations on the metamoderation page, because more than one of these wastes a lot of my time. Perhaps metamoderation could be in groups of 3 or 5, instead of 10.
I'm crossing my fingers anyway.
You can reply AND metamoderate (Score:2)
Yes, both giving and meta-moderating "Redundant" is a chore, because you have to read everything before the post. I do it, but not everybody bothers.
(Don't get me started on Over-/Underrated. That is not even M2d, and would even be seriously hard to M2 because you'd have to see the discussion AS IT WAS when the Over-/Under