Journal: Metamoderation sucks.

I'm disappointed with the metamoderation system. I lost three points since it came into effect. Meta is a big concept and often it results in cool output from a design perspective, but it's not necessarily cool in every application. For example, let's think of Freudian psychology. A lot of the bullshit part of the Freudian psyche is in the super-ego. Well, the super-ego is way Meta, but it's where a lot of the hang ups about conforming to norms come in and screw people up.
          If Slashdot was a 3D modeling package, I'd say a Meta level would be essential, but that's not what it's all about. It's a forum for discussion. In that kind of environment, the Meta thing becomes the conformity police. The stated policy is that it should be used to mod up the posts that didn't get noticed, but I've seen it work exactly the opposite way in practice.
        I posted about building one's own racks and gave real life examples of racks that I had built and was modded up a point. Then in metamoderation I got modded down TWO points. It was like --oh look, this nail is sticking up, let's hammer it down. That's total fascist super ego crap. Since then I've been modded down again in meta twice.
          I've seen sigs saying how proud people were of their metamoderation on the down side and I'm not surprised. I understand the desire to cut down on the trolls, but I don't think this is the appropriate way to do it. From my observation, the vast majority of the really obnoxious trolls are almost always in the first quarter of the posts. Perhaps limiting the metamoderation to the earlier posts would help.