yagu's Journal: slashdot censorship?

(Note: after Cmr Taco confronted my "Godwin" title, I have edited and re-worked this entry... the focus is on apparent censorship, and I should have been more sensitive to that.)

Seems some slashdot enforcers with mod points, lots of them, were diligent to keep my post completely off the radar screen.

That post sits at a net mod of -2, final tally 0. All of the down-mods are "Overrated", and it took six (at least) to keep it down modded.

I don't claim to be a great poster, and don't care what other people think (too much). But, the post in question seemingly is innocuous enough, certainly if it were to be correctly down-modded, I would have expected to see more of "troll" or "flamebait", but there were none. So, how does this happen?

The post got a quick -2 mods immediately after submitting -- that's right, it was rated "Overrated" before is had even been rated... WTF?

This has happened before, I suspect it's some idiot insider with unlimited discretionary modding priveleges (something which I have NOT received not for almost 30 months, WTF? (a different discussion -- they actually have a "reason" for that)).

I just would appreciate more candor around some of the crap sometime. I won't stop posting, and I still don't care what others think, but it'd be nice to see some backbone and hear from and why some of my posts have to be nuked off the radar screen.

Editors

[Short Circuit]

Editors can do that. It happened to me a couple weeks ago.

I think they do it to dump flamewars to the tail ends of discussions. (Comments replying to comments under your threshhold get thrown to the bottom of the page, at least in the default view.)

I've noticed this too...

[JWtW]

Not that I'm stalking, but you were my first friend here on /., so your posts stand out to me. From what I've read, you post only when you have something insightful, or interesting to add to the topic. Your comments almost always generate plenty of good discussion, which, by that single fact, should give positive moderation. It does seem that as of late, your posts bounce up and down between insightful/interesting, and overrated, which really doesn't make sense. I've never seen you participate in a flamewa

Re:I've noticed this too...

[yagu]

Hello JWtW, I appreciate the sentiment... based on a number of "avenues" of inquiry it seems there are indeed behaviors on /. and a bit of insiderism. It annoys me, but as I stated, I'm going to keep going -- it's not exactly what I'd bargained for (free speech), but I still find it a forum worth participating in.

I'm probably most disappointed in /. and it's banner of free speech, yet the most broken part of the free speech is their moderation system -- it's not bad, but it's still broken and has been fo

Heh.

[morgan_greywolf]

The overrated mods are, of course, to prevent them from being metamodded. See http://www.slashnet.org/forums/Slashdot-20001005. h tml [slashnet.org] for an interesting discussion of the loophole. Overrated/underrated mods are not subject to metamod. But maybe you knew that.

I wouldn't go around criticising that too much. I have/used to use an account with 5 digits, and the last time I made a big deal about it, I had that account banned from the moderation pool and a few of my posts started getting bitchslapped for appare