macdaddy's Journal: Do you use Slashdot's relationship options?

Do you sort through the masses on Slashdot by defining friends and foes ? I've been on Slashdot for going on 8 years now. In all that time I've never ceased to be amazed at the amount of utter trash and nonsense on these discussion boards. I was quite pleased to see the ability to define relationships added to Slashcode, what 2 years ago? 2 sounds about right. In the beginning though I more or less ignored Slashcode relationships. I started using them eventually to define a handful of complete and total idiots as foes. Since then my lists have grown considerably. As of this writing I have:

Friends : 86

Foes : 47

I also have a sizeable number of fans and even some freaks :

Fans : 64

Freaks : 24

Apparently others and finding the service useful as well. There's nothing like a good debate of some controversial topics to give the nutcases a chance to shine, and us a chance to add them to our foe list. In case you weren't aware of this already, you can effectively block your foes and freaks by giving them score of -6 in your personal preferences (Preferences, Comments section, options listed under "People Modifier")

My questions for the Slashdot community in general follow:

How many people actually use the relationship features found in Slashcode?

Which do you use more, the friend or foe option?

How many of each do you have?

Does a person's foe or foe of a friend rating affect whether or not you read that person's comment? ie, do you skip it?

Have you ever reassigned a foe to neutral or friend? I've removed one foe rating and gave that person a neutral.

***UPDATE*** After careful consideration I've decided that an additional relationship option should be added to the current friend/foe/neutral options. I believe there should be an "Idiot" option. I've encountered a few people over the years that I simply have no desire to ever hear from again. Their posts are irrational, illogical and irrelvant. Since I can control how the score of a person's post is affected with my personal preferences, I'd like to be able to -5 an Idiots post while not necessarily doing the same to my Foes. That would be a nice option.

Informal Survey Results

[Shadow Wrought]

We'll take them one by one:

How many people actually use the relationship features found in Slashcode?

Well, I do, and it would appear that many of the users do as well.

Which do you use more, the friend or foe option?

I use the Friend option way more. (About 30-1;-)

How many of each do you have?

I have 30 Friends, 23 Fans, 1 Foe and 1 Freak.

Does a person's foe or foe of a friend rating affect whether or not you read that person's comment? ie, do you skip it?

I usually just read the comments.

Make that 87

[macdaddy]

Nice post. I try not to let emotions guide my friend or foe giving. I have people with a completely contradictory belief system (for example) than me that I have listed as friends. I did this simply because they weren't zealots/bigots trying to convert everything they spoke with. I blacklist a lot of people that blindly follow their arguement, hoping for eventual fruition. If you can't make a logical arguement then what's the point of arguing? :-) I do add people with noticeably good posts or who just

Re:Make that 87

[MysteriousPreacher]

I noticed you added me as a friend, I'm curious as to whether there was a particular post that you liked?

When I noticed you did this, I popped over to your journal and read this interesting question and added you as a friend.

Always interesting to see someone using their journal for something worthwhile.

My relationships

[MysteriousPreacher]

I use it quite a bit. I tend to chose more friends that foes.

I find it most useful to mark people as friends if they make a particularly good comment. I like to look out for them in future.

I tend to view with a threshold of 0 so I do mark a few people as foes if they're trolls.

I've 11 friends, 2 foes, 1 freak and 4 fans.

Re Friends & Foes

[ediron2]

• How many people actually use the relationship features found in Slashcode?

  I haven't *refined* my use, but I do use it. Regrettably, I doubt Slashcode will ever sustain the sort of complexity that I can imagine/desire (tools to acquire/share/manage rankings, a mechanism to identify areas of expertise to 'bookmark' wizards and avoid pontificating inexperts... the latter happens a *lot* on nasa-related stuff for example. In short, I'd like a framework like the one that Ender and his sister had)

• Which do y

Re: my friends and foes on /.

[chongo]

• How many people actually use the relationship features found in Slashcode?

I do not know how many people use the system, sorry.

I suspect I make much more use of the friend/foe system than most people. I noticed that many of my friends have few friends themselves.

• Which do you use more, the friend or foe option?

Overall I have more foes. On the other hand, my friends list is more dynamic as people switch between friend and neutral. My friends list is dynamic whwereas my foes list tends to just gro

Foe?

[JaxWeb]

I have a question: Why am I on your foes list?

To answer your question: I tend to add people who are either funny, insightful or share my opinions (to know I'm not alone) to my friends list, mostly so I can see the posts of their friends.

Re:Foe?

[macdaddy]

Good question. Let me see if I can figure out why. I add people as I read the various articles. I don't make notes about why. If my gut says friend or foe, that's what I go with. Let me see if I can figure it out. BTW, do you happen to know which day I added you? That would help.

Re:Foe?

[JaxWeb]

I found the e-mail alert, and it said 14.01.2005. Around that time, I posted a few things:

What I think about Apple [slashdot.org] - which some people got offended by. If that was it, then look at my follow up post [slashdot.org], making clear what I meant.

A small post about the English spelling of meter/metre [slashdot.org], which I doubt would've offended anyone, so I guess that isn't it.

A post saying Calculus is harder than Linux [slashdot.org]. If this is the one, then bare in mind what a large topic Calculus is (i.e. there is more to it than what you learn

Re:Foe?

[macdaddy]

It could have been the first one, myself being an Apple nut and all. ;-) Odds are I probably just skimmed the comment, saw "Apple" and "dicks", added you to my list and moved on. There are a number of article and thread types that are great for weeding out wackjobs and nutbags from the sensible and rational people. Religious, firearm, and Apple topics are some of my favorite, followed closey by poltical topics. That's probably what did it. I wish Slashcode had the ability to track the comment # associa

Re:Foe?

[JaxWeb]

Ah okay that'd explain it :) I didn't make myself very clear in that post, so the reaction I got was quite negative.

I've also added you to my Friend's list, since I am keen to see what you have to say in future. This conversation was good too. It's nice to be reminded that there are rational and reasonable people in this world (and partially on Slashdot!).

Yeah, I'd really like to know why I added people to my Friends list, especially when I see a lot of posts by them that I don't think are very interestin

Re:Foe?

[macdaddy]

I've had negative meta-mods before. They always annoy me because I have yet to have a meta-moderator that didn't moderate with nothing but pure emotional bias. I usually moderate the controversial threads when I can (assuming I can resist the urge to jump in and contribute). If I find a comment that's well-written, logical, etc but completely contrary to my own views or the opinions of the majority I'll still give it a positive mod. It is someone's opinion after all. That usually gets me the negative m

Re:Foe?

[macdaddy]

I don't see any articles you've contributed to since at least Jan 9 that I've either read or contributed to myself. Maybe you were a foe of a friend at one point and I took that at face value?

Should point out

[macdaddy]

I should point out that I have also been known to add a person to my foe list when they make me a foe. A good example of this is with hackstraw [slashdot.org]. Hackstraw doesn't like that I'm trying to get some help with getting a free Mini Mac by asking for help in my sig. So he made me his foe. It's a shame really because after reading some of his comments I would have made him a friend. Who knows. Perhaps I'll make him a friend in the end anyway. I've done that before too. ie, people list me as a foe so I list

FoF

[LPetrazickis]

Which do you use more, the friend or foe option?

Friend option. It's the easiest way to keep track of people's journals.

How many of each do you have?

274 friends, 136 fans, 26 foes, 10 freaks.

Does a person's foe or foe of a friend rating affect whether or not you read that person's comment? ie, do you skip it?

I read at +3 and let the filtering do its work.
Have you ever reassigned a foe to neutral or friend? I've removed one foe rating and gave that person a neutral.

Sure. 200 is the max num

yeah

[hackstraw]

I use the relationship options some. I've got 19 friends, 35 fans, 31 foes, and 21 freaks. So I'm loved more than I love and I hate more than I'm hated :)

I've been reading /. since Taco was still in college at Hope and he first had a little personal homepage that was called "chips and dips" that had silly stuff like him playing around with new HTML things like mouseovers and news about the Afterstep window manager that I used at the time, including a mixer dock app that Taco hacked from a Biff app or som

Re:yeah

[macdaddy]

I see. So basically what you're saying is you have no idea if the program is legitimate or not but you're not going to take any chances so you're gonna call me a spammer and be done with it. Nevermind the fact that I am in fact an avid anti-spammer and have made more than a little money fighting spam. Nevermind the fact that the only people who are on the loosing end in this endeavor are the companies thinking they are getting legitimate marketing leads. What this company is doing is in fact legal. The