On the whole, yes.

In the subthread I started with my "rebuttal" to its parent who just babbled.

So far there have been 8 responses, four or five of which are calling bullshit. The thing is, the moderators paid no notice. There have also been 8 moderations. How many called bullshit (i.e. gave me a downmod)? Two. That's 25% of moderators as opposed to ~60% of posters.

What's wrong with these people? Do they read my post, mod it up without reading further, then read the responses, and slap their foreheads in frustration? It seems so, considering that one of those who replied got modded up to +3, and another to +4.

I swear, as long as you sound earnest and meticulous, then if you don't insult anyone you just get modded up.

And I won't even get started on my blatant karma whoring repost which got modded up to +5. The article didn't even get Slashdotted!

For fuck's sake.

Two comments in a row, both Informative, but this time both +4 instead of +5.

I've been modded up in the state of open source in 2003 discussion quite quickly in both of my comments. The first is just basically stream-of-consciousness crap arranged into sentences. As usual, it doesn't give you any information: it's just me pretending to give my opinion when in fact it's just regurgitated from the editor's comments and the article's topic sentence.

Again, there's the second, which is just a plain text repost of the linked article with some frilly formatting added. It's been knocked up to +4, Informative in the space of half an hour. This is really too easy. I should've snuck a Goatse link or something in.

Nobody's even bothered to reply telling me how much of a karma whore I am, as usual. Think I'll just go play Freeciv.

First, there's my first comment in the discussion, which I suppose could be considered Interesting, but Informative? It took me about 20 seconds to come up with that post, and the only information that's there can be picked up by the incomptent editor's summary. I didn't even read the article, and yet all the slashbots ate it all up. +5 in minutes. Morons. One smart guy gave me an Overrated mod, but he was drowned out by a trigger happy retard who gave me another +1 Informative.

So I tried again, a little more obvious this time and equally uninformed. I figured I'd post a rebuttal of the incoherent comment which was quite plainly a troll and yet got modded up to +5, despite making no sense. (Try reading it with the purpose of extracting information, and see how little content there is.) Peeved by this, I decided to expose the comment's bullshit with my usual lucky lack of subtlety. I posted an agonisingly detailed and insulting response, thinking that hardly anyone would notice (at the time there were already 160 comments in the discussion) and no one would care.

My mistake. Since this was a reasonably early and sensible-looking response to an early +5 comment, a good number of people looked at my comment. It immediately went up to +2, and then - after a long while - got nudged up to +3. At this point the post just bubbled up to +5, Informative without a single dissenting downvote. Somebody's called bullshit on me and no one's paid any notice. Except me.

In the meantime, the original poster's been reduced to (Score: 1, Troll), probably due to my loud screeching of "OMG Tihs guy is troll lol herez ma reasonz!"

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Update (07:10:14): Oh, wow. Somebody actually had the presence of mind to read this journal entry and figure out my harebrained scheme. Read their relatively intelligent and cool tempered comment.

adsl-068-153-245-051.sip.ard.bellsouth.net:3128

I'm successfully using it right now to read Slashdot, look at my comments, and submit comments and this journal entry.

That is all.

Sorry for the sudden, unexplained disappearance. I was banned from Fagshot in the process of testing slashbot . Then I came down with a bad case of SARS. But now I'm back, albeit more low key; a bit has happened in these last five months. I'm without purpose now that the GNAA is, for all intents and purposes, dead. All their posts get slapped down to -1 in seconds. I suppose that no one really cares about constantly mocking them anymore as a consequence. Of course, if someone is willing to tell me otherwise, I'm all ears...