blackest_k's Journal: moderating on slashdot

after many months of meta-moderating on slashdot I finally got mod points.
It was an interesting experience.

I decided from the beginning that I wanted to moderate up comments rather than down and to choose to mod up good comments which hadn't been moderated already.
choosing not to moderate on funny.

the actual moderations turned out to be rather different from that. I did mod down 1 or 2 comments. It's a difficult job mainly because all the mods are looking to use their mod points so each time you get to a story. you find very little that is obviously worth moderating upwards. Moderating on slashdot is like cleaning toilets not a nice job but somebodys got to do it.

It appears to me that some moderations are made by following the herd ie if its already been moderated as interesting then a lot of moderators also mod it interesting also. Or it could be in the scramble to moderate a new story before the trolls flood the thread moderators are modding the same un modded comment at the same time. so a qualifies as interesting post (just) gets modded as a +5 which is a little undeserved.

Maybe moderators should be able to cancel a moderation but then again the point is to refine the threads so users don't have to read the crap that gets posted to slashdot (often literally). There may well be a good arguement for raising the 5 point maximum at least from a users point of view. ie the highest moderation a storie gets is +5 but the users can add + points for interesting and informative mods and extract this from the mire so they only read highly moderated posts which are interesting and informative instead of reading comments which are slightly interesting and informative started on +2 with karma bonus got a single point as interesting and the user given +2 dragged it up to 5

one of the hardest moderations to make is informative. Especially when the story is talking about things that a non specialist would know little about.

in the uk there was a program called call my bluff where two panels of 3 would take a barely known word and one panel would present 2 false definitions and 1 true one and a member of the other panel would try to decide which one was true not an easy task sometimes.

so to try to avoid being made to look like an idiot a moderator has to check the links given and see if there is a valid point being made. I think modding interesting can be a reasonable copout meaning it sounds good but may not be true I don't want to research this. informative hopefully means that the moderator has checked the facts.

all in all 4 days to give out positive moderations is very little time to do the job well. maybe the moderation system should be changed to giving out 5 + moderation points and say 15 negative mod points that way moderators can clear the way for other moderators to get to the good comments without swiming through the cess pool which is slashdot at 0 or -1

but when your moderating on slashdot you are reading at -1 and looking for abusive moderations some might say. your should be swimming in the cess pool
you might say...

well not really moderations get meta moderated so someone abusing the power to mod down will be caught and lose the ability to moderate. is it really necessary for every moderator to read the white noise ie firstpost goatse and other obvious crap that gets posted in every comment thread.

There is one type of moderation which I really do not like seeing and I had it applied to me once. when I posted how to process real audio streams. The information is available if you look for it and relatively simple to do once you know how. but obviously Real do not want you doing this i thought that it would get posted as informative i didnt post links to anything just described a process it got modded down! why was this because it was politically incorrect to describe how to save Real Audo streams and save them. maybe content providers would stop providing real audio streams and a secure method would replace it.

would real sue slashdot for allowing this information to become common knowledge.

the ability to save a real audio file is useful, for example I know there is an american radio station which has all 12 of the original series of the hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy and i can sit here anytime i want and listen to the streams but by saving the streams and converting to mp3 you can make a cd or load on an ipod or whatever and listen on your car stereo on long road trips instead of the alternative.

If you have any experience of bbc radio4 you probably have heard a number of radio plays and you too probably have sat in your car at journeys end listening to the end of the play.

so i think i was being informative but someone thought i was being dangerous.
not good and maybe one of the reasons there seems to be an antislashdot movement
maybe this journal entry will be considered anti slashdot but its not intended to be. just recording my experience and asking a few questions.

well final words moderating is difficult and extremely time consuming to do well. hopefully my moderations improved your experience of slashdot. someone wrote somewhere that more negative moderation occurs on slashdot than positive and after moderating I agree, there is good reason for this because honestly the good comments are floating in a sewer.