cjpez's Journal: Friends / Foes adversely affecting moderation?

So recently I finally gave up and starting adding people to my foes list when I encountered people whose posts I felt I'd be better off never seeing. I've been avoiding doing that because I figured, "Hey, I may not like what these people are saying now, but I just might dig it later!" Then yesterday, I was more like, "fuck that," and felt much better.

But today as I added someone else to my list, I started to think about how this might be having some kind of effect on the effectiveness (!) of user moderations in this forum. When I do get moderator points, I'll never think to moderate any of these people down, because they'll already look like -1 to me. I'm sure that other people do the reverse for people on a Friends list. Likewise, I've set a -1 moderation for anonymous posts. So when someone who uses these techniques gets moderator access (like myself), it's going to be used less effectively, because this person's already made decisions about how his/her comments are viewed. Why moderate something down if it already looks like it's been moderated down? Or why mod something up that already shows up as +5 on your screen?

Now, obviously this isn't exactly a pressing problem, and one could even argue that it doesn't even matter at all* because, after all, people no longer have to rely on moderators to filter out unwanted posts, or see posts that you'd otherwise miss. But it's still interesting. Or so says I, anyway.

* Well, obviously nothing on Slashdot really matters but you know what I mean.

Re:Now that's an idea ..

[cjpez]

Mind you, people would probably abuse it

Indeed, though it does sound like an interesting problem. On the other hand, even someone who's at the karma cap could still use excessive mod points to "dominate" discussions, as it were, and make sure that certain viewpoints were consistently modded up or down. ie: used as a karma whore account and then just used for moderation . . .

The system gets plenty of abuse anyway.

Well, that's certainly true anyway. :)

foes

[Zog]

I've actually had a few people set me up as either a friend or foe (still not sure which), and be notified when I made posts, and they would go through and moderate me down systematically.

Just go through my posts and there's a nice list of posts that were modded down 'overrated' several days after the discussions were originally started.

They eventually stopped, but the idea was that I had finally achieved a +2 initial posting, and by bringing down my karma, they brought me down to +1, so my posts were less likely to be moderated up to the point where I would be heard.

Re:foes

[cjpez]

Heh. I'm always quite amused when I get modded down "Overrated" on a post that has yet to be rated. :) I've resolved not to care about that shit, though. If it gets to the point where /.'s not fun, I'll just not go here anymore, but for now it's still a blast. I presume it'd be less of a blast if I was getting constantly modbombed, though. Ah, well, thanks for reading.

Simple

[phyxeld]

Regardless of the modifiers you've setup for friends, foes, and anonymous cowards, a post can't ever be scored below -1.

When you have moderator access, you should be browsing at "-1, Nested" anyway, so whats the problem?

Re:Simple

[cjpez]

Right, you'll be browsing at "-1, Nested" or whatever, but if you've marked people as foes and mod all foes down -6 or whatever, then when you're browsing at "-1, nested," you'll think that those posts are already at -1, when, in fact, they might not be. Likewise, any "Friend" you've got modded up +6 or whatever will already look like they're at 5, when they might actually be down at -1.

I suppose in an ideal world, if you got moderator access, you'd be a "good citizen" and turn off those insta-moderations for the course of your moderatorship(tm), but I doubt that would happen . . .

Re:Simple

[roachmotel3]

Perhaps the easy solution would be to have the system automatically turn off the insta-moderation? How hard would it be to have the system say "Oh, OK -- you have moderator points -- friend/foe designations no longer apply while you still have moderator points". Easy solution, could be implemented immediately, and it's simple ;)

-P

Re:Simple

[cjpez]

Rock.