I'm now very likely to make the "unfunny" metamod choice. IMO the quality of discourse on /. has been sliding the last few months, partly due to an increase in sophomoric attempts to be clever. Perhaps that can be corrected. Anyway, I'm tired of the inappropriate use of

• In Soviet Russia....
• ... you insensitive clod
• ... 3. profit!
• all your [whatever] are belong to [whoever]
• etc, etc

<bombast>I'll continue to ignore the appropriate use of these formulae most of the time, and on rare occasion I even find one of these jokes funny and metamod it so. But IMNSHO "funny" on a place like slashdot means witty, and the witless use of formulaic japes is not to be tolerated.</bombast>

Something still has to make me spray coffee out my nose onto keyboard before I'll metamod it as "funny". And generally speaking, I need to be scrubbing coffee-stained snot from the monitor before I'll use up a mod point on a "funny".

I'm now reading /. at the 2+ level most of the time, but I've also been tweaking my custom bonus points to assure that anything that has gotten a point for "insightful" or "informative" is boosted above my threshhold. My working hypothesis is that there is no good way to read slashdot, but that some variant of this approach is less bad than all other known approaches.

It's been a little over 6 months since my last entry to this journal, so an update is in order.

I scan the slashdot offerings at least once a day, along with the NYT headlines, usually as I have my first cup of coffee. Depending on what I find and what else is going on, I may come back to slashdot a few times as the day goes on.

I almost always have metamod status now. It's a chore that can take less than 5 minutes to sometimes 15 minutes. I usually do metamodding once a day only-- there's more to my life than slashdot.

Here are some of my metamod rules:

1. Never do "unfunny", unless it's grossly obscene. I've got a more highly developed sense of humor than most slashdotters, but it's not my job to try to upgrade the humor of geek culture.
2. Rarely do "funny". If it hasn't made me blow my coffee out my nose, just don't rate the "funny/unfunny" at all.
3. "Interesting" and "insightful": Judge these as I am now, then try to judge them as I would have when I was fifteen, then go with the most positive of those separate judgments. So usually I score these as "Fair" though sometimes I don't score them at all. When I score an "interesting" or "insightful" as unfair, it's usually because I see the post as a troll or flamebait. Or sometimes because it's an unthinking bleat of flock noise that only serves to help keep all the sheep together, making the same stupid sheep noises.
4. "Troll" and "flamebait": These can require a lot of time and no little effort to metamod. Often I need to look at the post in context and read the threads that led to it.

Something that has occurred to me is whether discourse on slashdot would be improved if a "-1 Personal Attack" option was added to the moderation choices.

I'm getting moderator status about once a week, which is good since I don't have time for much more than that. When I'm setting out to moderate, I read at the -1 level, and that can really slow me down. But it seems to me that one of the better uses of my mod points is to correct the misuse of "flamebait", "troll", and "over-rated" by people who are pushing their own private agenda. For instance, there are people on slashdot who work in Redmond and given the opportunity will mod down any criticism of Microsoft out of a Louis L'Amour cowboy sense of "riding for the brand" infantile loyalty to their employer. And there are those whose use of mod points is too much influenced by an over reaction to the MSer's fudding around. The metamod system should weed these assholes out, over time, but correcting some of the specific damage they have done seems to me to be worth the effort.

It isn't just MSer's and the ones they have antagonized, either. There are other sharp divisions of prejudice on slashdot-- the MS thing is just the most obvious one.

Waht else? Erm, I currently read /. at the +1 level, but lately I've been wondering about whether I'd be happier using a higher level. I think I'll try the +2 level for awhile-- then maybe I can cover more ground with less frustration with the chatter. I'm not opposed to the chatter-- /. is a social phemomenon-- but I don't have all day to mosey through all the sidebars and cocktail conversations.

Well, I've finished my morning coffee and should get to work. Until next time, then...

A couple of interesting things happened in the last 24 hours:

First, I got a karma boost. From "good" to "excellent". So maybe now I won't have that nightmare about coming back as a cockroach any more. Ha ha.

Second, I acquired another fan. That makes three. But I still wonder if I should count either of the other two. One befriended me before I ever made a comment or did a journal entry or anything. I don't think he was just hitting on a newbie; I think he was clueless and fumblefingered and prolly made me his friend w/o even knowing he'd done so, or how to undo it. The other older fan prolly was hitting on me, maybe I looked succulent. No thanks, and mind the thorns.

A /. friendship seems a rather trivial thing: the rite of annulment is easily done.

My "Journal Topic" for all my journal entries to date has been "User Journal", which is dumb. I need to look into how to use this field in a relevant way, and whether I can go back to my old entries and change their topics.

Twenty years ago, I would have taken the time to learn all the ins and outs of /. usage, and done so with great gusto. But that was back in the days when I thought that learning new interfaces was an investment that would pay off in the future-- before it became obvious that the future would be mostly more new interfaces. Now my strategy is usually a minimalist one of attempting to identify the smallest subset of commands and things I need to know just to get by.

I've just completed my seventh round of moderation since I was first given moderator points about a month ago. So I'm being tapped for this about once every 4.5 days.

I would rather it was once every 7 days.

This is the 146th day of mysticgoat on slashdot.

I've now been moderator five times in the last three weeks. That rate is a bit much both in terms of the work moderation requires and the size of the pool of potential moderators, but my baseline is so short that this could be just a random fluke in a generally agreeable process.

Work of moderation, for me, involves more time on reading /. than I really want to spend. It is a chore. I feel obligated to log on more frequently and to read posts below my usual cut-off point. The hardest part is dealing with commets from an insightful troll or a piece that is bothe interesting and also full of flamebait.

If I keep getting selected for moderator duty at the current rate of more than once a week, that would be a strong indication that the moderator pool is much too small for /. to remain healthy.

My moderation has been metamoderated numerous times, and always judged "fair".

Karma still good. I still think that the current karma rating system sucks.

Just completed my first ever bit as a ./ moderator.

I felt an obligation to read slashdot more often, so I could award points early enough to be effective (I see little value in modding day old comments that no one is likely to read). I felt an obligation to read comments below 2 points, which is my usual cut-off. It took more than one day for me to give away the five mod points. I am happy enough to go back to my more abbreviated scans of slashdot.

It seems an okay system. I suspect that it has a centrist bias so that the bell curve of slashdot's diversity will become more peaked as the extremes leave for more supportive pastures. That is to say, I think the mod system probably discourages participation by the outliers so that the standard deviation grows more narrow. By which I mean, I think the mod system tends to make emphasize group conformity and discourage a diversity of opinion. That is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if it is balancing tendencies toward too much diversity, which can be destructive to the group.

I continue to miss the numeric karma scores. I think the natural desire to see one's score go up and to avoid things that could cause one's score to sink tended to get people to work a little harder at writing quality posts.

This brief stint at moderation also motivated me to go through my preferences and change a couple of things.

...And I'm no richer than I was before. And I'm not all that much smarter either. And my love life still sucks.

Actually it's 10 weeks and 3 days. And I've posted 23 comments, sent in no articles, not been given an opportunity to mod (that I know of anyway) and still have two fans (they must be weird) and one foe (definitely weird).

Oh! And my karma is "positive". Whatever that means.

It might mean that slashdot's karma scoring system is busted and nobody knows how to fix it and they won't own up to their mistakes. Whoever they are. That's typical behavior for the species-- the USA Veterans Administration agency can be used for the prototype. Sure way to get fame and a shot at a promotion is to sell some novel idea (it doesn't have to be a better idea, just a new one with new buzzwords). And when it croaks because nobody bothered to engineer it for life beyond the sales room, declare it as having been useful at its time, but gosh we just got to move beyond it. And bury the carcass downwind of you and your bosses.

I miss those karma points. I never got very many-- but I miss them all the same.

Still there are a couple of fun things here to play with. This public journal is silly-fun. And some of the articles posted are interesting things I would never come across otherwise. Slashdot is good, it just doesn't do much for your sex appeal.

Enough of this early morning pre-caffeine ranting. Time to write write write another chapter in next decade's greatest saga!

Sixth week on /.

Their karma is still busted. It's one of those between-the-ears things.

Group activities like slashdot are a lot like governments. They don't have to work well; they only have to work well enough that the patrons don't go elsewhere.

Five weeks on slashdot.

I've posted sixteen signed articles, and I played the AC once.

My karma is "positive".

There has definitely been a drop off in the average quality of both the articles and the commentaries in the last week. This may be a "summer silly season" phenomenon: there has also been a decline in quality of New York Times and Reuters articles.

Plan: Speed up my skimming of /. by sampling the comments before accessing the articles-- I should be able to identify and avoid many of the real dogs this way. Expect that things will start to get more interesting again in September, after people are back at work from summer holiday and schools are back in session.

On a separate topic--

A major disappointment is that /. has changed its policy on how karma gets reported: instead of showing the -10 - +50 number, a one word descriptor is used to report which of several bands one's karma lies in. Cmdr Taco says in the FAQ that this new policy was adopted because people were putting more emphasis on the karma number than /. had intended. I've written him about my disappointment with the change, and to point out that unless somehow the numeric scores were interfering with /.'s function, I didn't see where the way the readers might use those scores was really any of /.'s concern. And I invited him to be more forthcoming on the reasons for the change.

The response from CT was "I guess we disagree". Well, Doh!

I guess we'll not see anything about the reason for the change. That's too bad-- /. is an interesting experiment, but this observer feels he is being unnecessarily deprived of access to one the more interesting streams of colateral data...

But it's their marbles and their game.

I don't understand the karma to points relationship. Some of my posts have 2 points before moderation, some appear to only have one point. There should be a table around somewhere that shows the relationship of karma to points but if it is in the FAQ, I missed seeing it.

Most /. comments are criticisms of the original material, and many of these show that the commentator did not read or failed to comprehend the material. I guess that is to be expected. Probably /.'s point system encourages the people who are, um, let's say "less encumbered by experience" to attempt to demonstrate their cleverness. Sometimes this leads to dumb discussions where the original information is replaced by conjecture and preconception of what the unread or misunderstood article just must have been about. Some posts should be moderated downward with a /. equivalent of RTFM.

There is a much smaller percentage of posts that are worth reading-- legitimate attacks on the ideas of the articles, and reasonable defenses of the articles. Twice I have seen author participation in these.

In the area of Open Source and licensing issues, slashdot is easily my best source of information about what is going on. The whole subject area of intellectual property rights is downplayed in the popular press. Which is unfortunate as this is one of the key areas that will shape the emerging new age.

Slashdot remains worthwhile, but I could use a better way of avoiding the dross. I'm thinking of boosting my threshhold to scores of 2 or better.

Picked up another fan. That's two of them. He (prolly of that gender) has posted about 450 times over several years. He's taken 51 friends and only 1 foe; has 57 fans but 47 freaks. A lot of his friends and fans are the same. Mutual admiration society.

No friggin idea why this guy chooses me for a "friend".

Now done a total of 12 posts. Still only karma 3. My last posts got only a "1" score. Maybe the karmic score keeper is screwed up. Screwed the formatting on the last one and my really clever remark came out just crappy weird

Here's to looking at street lamps through the bottom of Gallo chianti bottles... <snore>

This is a stupid journal. That's okay though.

Two weeks since I started with slashdot. Posted 8 times. Karma now 3. Long way from 50, or even 5.

I've chosen no friends or foes. I have no freaks. I've got one fan, which is weird. He has posted about 1,500 times, has taken 21 friends and 1 foe, 3 fans and no freaks, and doesn't do a journal. He's young, studying electronics engineering.

Still don't know my way around much of slashdot and haven't made any use of the archives yet. Finding it easier to skip by more of the news and messages now.

Still think slashdot valuable, for same reasons as before, but need to avoid its time sinks

Just started looking at slashdot this last week. Several of the articles are interesting and a few have been useful (of value to me and providing information I'd be unlikely to receive soon from any other channel). I haven't yet had occasion to delve into the archives, but apparently they are extensive.

Other than the links to news stories, I'm generally undecided about the value of slashdot's features. I'm taking the time to read through some of the commentaries. Seems like a strange mix of college banal/naieve and deep expertise. I'll look for some description of the readership demographics. I'll also look into adjusting my "threshhold" to weed out more dross, which should allow me to scan more material.

I'm putting an hour or so into reading the FAQ, etc, this morning, and starting this journal.

The moderation structure and the technology it is birthing are very interesting. What I've read so far suggests that this is an attempt toward a self-governing anarchy using negative feedback systems to prune the outliers of some of the more disruptive behaviors. Trying to work up a better description of the process "in twenty-five words or less" is going to be an intriguing puzzle for at least a few weeks' time.

Too early to say how much of my time I want to give to slashdot, or how actively involved I want to get (I've posted 3 messages so far-- none requiring much effort).

Summary Slashdot has some definite value, but how important it might be to me is not something I can yet estimate. Investigating that will be fun, and rewarding of iteslf.