TechnoLust's Journal: Proof Moderators are mostly stupid sheep

Read this comment which was made by a bot according to Jeffy124 and pay special attention to the moderations.
Insightful=1, Interesting=3, Funny=2, Overrated=2
So, we have 4 people that modded up unreadable gibberish made by a bot. And 4 people (I'm assuming the 2 funny's knew it was a bot, and found it humorous.) recognized it was not an intelligent post. So that means the 50% modded up computer generated gibberish.

Why? Well, let's give 3 of them the benefit of a doubt about them being devoid of any intellect. Let's assume they only moderated up because they are sheep. (Of course IMO, that makes them unfit to moderate in the first place.) But still that leaves one person that had to have modded it up because he actually thought it was intelligent! I can almost imagine the thought process behind this decision. [Well, it contains a lot of big words relating to the topic. It's long. I don't understand it. It must be over my head and therefore Insightful.]

I don't know what else to say. Is it just stupidity, or has the English on /. become so atrocious, that this post is actually acceptable?

thoughts....

[jeffy124]

i made a post in my journal thread discussing the over/underrated stuff CT brought up.

I basically suggested that moderators shouldnt moderate discussions where they dont understand the topic, as that can result in poor moderation (ie, offtopics for informative posts, informatives/interestings for trolls). Something like this would probably go into the moderator guidelines (i know, i know, it wouldnt get read anyway)

I also suggested that in order to determine how much a certain moderation is used, one would have to take a large sample of posts and their moderations as raw data. Analyze it by seeing what percentage of different mods there are, take things like default scores, multiple moderations, etc. I think a good number of moderators mod posts that have already been moderated. This can lead to stuff like the one you mentioned, or lead to -1: Troll for insightful comments if the first moderator fell into the category mentioned above.

Not only that, it has friends

[John Harrison]

I have listed myself as a fan of the bot, but I was surprised to see that it has friends [slashdot.org] of its own!

While we're on the subject, how come there isn't a easy way of seeing the friends, fans, foes, and freaks of any given user? Worse yet, when I look at my own f/f/f/f pages (try it) [slashdot.org]all the links point back to me. I have to type in the URL by hand to get to anyone else.

Am I just missing something or is this a messed up as I think it is?

Re:Not only that, it has friends

[eugene ts wong]

I was also very surprised to see that it had friends. I had to think for a second, to make sure that I was really looking at what I thought I was looking at.

I became one of its fans, because I wanted to be able to track it to see how it is doing. I wonder if it will improve so much that it can troll like the rest of us! ;^)

RTFM babe

[Elkobim]

You're using the wrong link for checking your friends. Read this [slashdot.org].

Re:RTFM babe

[John Harrison]

I followed those links and got the same results. How about you?

Weird.. very

[Elkobim]

It used to work once. I never noticed it because usually I manually type the URLs of people in order to find their friends. It appears that the links of other people [slashdot.org] do work correctly - only the self lists have wrong links.

Sorry for sending you to the FAQs, then. :)

They're not stupid sheep.

[eugene ts wong]

I believe that the moderators are just trying to be funny, sarcastic or play a joke. For readers who look at the moderations before the message, they'll get a bit surprised. You'd have to be pretty stupid to moderate something like that up.

If you really believe that moderators are just stupid sheep, then trying gathering more statistics. Try starting your posts on topic, then back it up with something completely unrelated or change topics mid-paragraph. Don't troll or flame, though. Some of them might mod you up out of pity, thus proving themselves to be stupid sheep, but other than that, I don't think that you'll get too many responses. I'd be interested in hearing any results that you may have.

I saw that post also

[gmhowell]

And was stymied by the moderation. Then I thought about it. There are a number of more generous interpretations. First, those who marked it 'interesting' could know it was a 'bot and marked the excercise itself interesting or something along those lines. The person with 'insightful' could have just not cared, or been trying to make a point.

In any event, if I don't understand it, or if the grammar/logic is that bad, I won't mod it unless it is obvious the writer is a non-native English speaker. Then I'll try to muddle through it.

Oh wait, that was before I gave up modding:)

Re:I saw that post also

[daoine]

I love the bot. I think it's hysterical.

While I was a little surprised at the moderations, most of them make sense. This is well in to the bot's posting, so people were starting to figure out it was a bot (thus the interesting mods)

In addition, I'd be curious to see the order of moderation...which came first? Was it first modded interesting because it *almost* made sense that one time, and then funny once people saw a bots post modded up?

I think a lot of moderators are sheep in that they'll mod posts that are already modded...but the context of moderations may make sense, even if it was a bot...