Journal jeffasselin's Journal: What's wrong with the moderation system? 1
I haven't received mod points in at least 1 month. I've had Excellent karma for 6 months or more, and used to receive mod points about every other day, and do some metamoderation at about the same frequency. I don't have the time to spend hours reading lots of posts, but I found I had a good balance and could usually spend my mod points on good discussions within a day or two. I've been metamoderated as "bad" no more than 2 or 3 times in that period.
Well, I first thought, maybe it's only me. But I don't so anymore. I read a few journal entries lately of people who seem to see the same pattern. But what's more, I just came in tonight and saw the "Is Bluetooth dead" story. Not really exciting, as the story sounds a bit trollish by itself, but still there were some good comments about this fact and some information that was worth spending a few mod points on. The problem? There were 131 posts at that time, after 15-20 minutes. And NONE of them was above 2 (excluding bonus points from friends). Even now there are 5 posts at 3+.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I look at the front page and most articles have 8 to 15 posts at 3+, some few higher but they have a lot more posts. I used to see most articles at 40-50 posts at +3 out of 300 regularly. And this seems to be a tendancy. What reasons could cause this?
1- There are less mod points given out, or not enough in proportion to the number of posts
2- The posts are mostly crap and no ones is moderating them up (reading through the +1-2 posts there are many good ones that never got any moderation, despite being posted early)
3- People are using their mod points elsewhere. Journal entries? Non-front page articles? A cursory examination of other channels doesn't show this. So it leaves journal entries. Many are interesting, but trolls don't tend to go for that audience, so there is little reason not to read everything, and if you read at 0 and mod down a troll to -1 it's going to be fine, you don't need that much mod power.
4- The stories are not very interesting and people don't bother using mod points on dull stuff.
5- I'm stupid and there's something I'm not getting here.
Although it may in part be some 3 and 4, I think it's mostly #1. I'd really like to have someone else's take on this.
I'm a moron (Score:2)