ubrayj02's Journal: Slashdot fucking sucks

Slashdot sucks, and I'll tell you why. Moderation on this site does not work. Posts that are +5 tend to be "funny", good put downs, or rambling narratives. (at least that's how I feel about it).

Moderation is a great idea. But once the number of posts to a story moves past the 200 mark, it becomes impossible to read and judge what deserves to be modded up. The sheer number of posts makes it expensive in terms of the time required to read them. And reading upwards of 200 posts mentally wears down anyone's mind, especially the sort of crap that gets posted every day on slashdot.

I believe that what is needed is a way for moderators to more easily view posts. In my opinion there are a couple of ways to make moderation an easier, more efficient process.

The first that comes to mind is the use of some form of color coding. Reading on a computer screen is a very line-by-line, "serial", process. Whereas reading a physical page, like that of a newspaper, can occur quickly, and in a sense in a page-at-once, or a "parallel" fashion. Newspapers usuallly break their pages up into subtly distinguished "areas", with bold headings, which make it easy to glance at a page and home in on what you might be interested in. A typical web-page at slashdot, or any other webpage, offers a very limited sort of visual sorting, and heavily relies on the viewer's capacity to read every line of text placed before them, and then to decide what is appropriate. Physical constraints limit a web-page from doing what newspapers do. Newspapers use different areas of a page to delineate different portions of information.

I believe that web-sites, and especially slashdot, would benefit from an appeal to readers instinct to visually group things - and use fields of color to mark separations that might occur in a newspaper. I think that this sort of color coding would be especially useful for moderators. If every ranking a post could have would correspond to a color, or if the number of replies to a post gave it a certain shade, it would make reading through 400 posts easier. A moderator could focus in on all the +2 posts quickly, and be able to visually sort a page without having to read every article.

This color coding doesn't have to be garish, or ugly. All I'm really thinking about as I write this is color coding a part of the little bar of color that has the title of a person's post.

Additionally, moderators should have the ability to selectively view posts that are at a certain level of moderation. For example, a moderators might might to view all +1 posts, with at least three replies. Or a moderator might want to view all "Funny" posts, or all "Off-topic" posts, because they want to get rid of crap they dopn't like, or give credit to an opinion that they feel is being undervalued. As things stand now, it is practically impossible for moderators to find posts that they do find comparatively "Interesting" because it is such a fight just read posts.

So there are my two suggestions. First, some sort of color coding to visually separate text fields, and posts. And second, giving moderators the ability to filter posts, and view them according to Score, and number of replies. Hopefully these two things will allow moderation to function to make slashdot filter for ideas, and not a water cannon for cheap come-backs and lame jokes.