Chacham's Journal: Question: Does time effect opinions on global communities?

An observation by Donutello.

It's very interesting to see how mods go based on the time of day. Right now, about 5pm PST, most of Europe is asleep and the mods on this thread are distinctly anti-UN. Were this story posted a few hours later - when most of the US is asleep and Europeans have just woken up, the moderation would be decidedly anti-American.

No idea, whether true or not. Though it seems like a point to ponder. Does a "Global Community" neccesarily have different views based on the time?

depends

[turg]

Depends on other factors as well, like the volume of comments. e.g. on Slashdot, you might have this effect because the conversation is essentially "done" in a few hours. New threads after that time probably won't get much attention. For most online discussion forums and usenet newsgroups, a thread is active for days (and participants would typically return to the discussion once or twice per day, rather than as soon as they're notified that someone's replied to their comment)

Re:depends

[Chacham]

Good point (/distinction).

Re:depends

[huckda]

-3 redundant (self-imposed mod) for not RTFA...missed that 1st sentance =)...

but caught myself and now you get to read my apology instead of redundancy...not sure which is worse =)

Have a happy weekend!

Moderations

[FroMan]

That is a decent theory.

One kind of amusing thing that I notice is most negative moderations that I recieve are within 5-10 minutes of my posts. Most of my positive moderations are an hour or more after my posts. "+0 Funny" posts are pretty much random for moderation though.

My theory on that is libs are more knee-jerk gotta censor that before someone sees it. And conservatives tend to be more thoughtful in their evaluation. Granted take that with a grain of salt, it is only my own W.A.G.

moderation

[SolemnDragon]

Moderation is rarely if ever done by actual moderates...

That said, i would say that the slashdot groupthink kicks in. The first people to start modding set the tone for the whole thread. Yes, i think the time makes a difference- at 2 AM in the US, there aren't as many US readers. By 10 AM US, the readers are on- but the thread has 210 posts, and the moderators just aren't going to see as many of the later comments.

Editors also spin stories in subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways, though, and i don't think an

Re:moderation

[SiliconJesus]

I'd have to agree with this one, but that's what meta-moderation is for. I've meta-moderated many explicitly Anti-US statements as unfair or unfunny because - well they are, and the moderator was abusing his priveledge to inflate a topic that's totally useless (the unfortunate side effect is that meta-mod tends to lag behind moderation so far that its relatively useless - the page is gone from the frontpage before the meta-moderation takes effect and lowers the topic back down).

I myself, tend to mod up mo