The evolution of /. over the last few months with a lot of the ajax, the firehose, the meta tagging etc. is making the /. experience quite a bit better again. My guess is, that digg forced a lot of that. Another case study in why competition is needed to keep our species on it's toes.

It seems lately (over the last few weeks) I've had to give out more "unfair" metamoderations than there used to be. Mmmmhh...

* maybe there are more readers moderating with an agenda, rather than readers in the pursuit of intelligent discourse

* maybe /. is just (d)evolving into something more akin to the Fox news for nerds rather than early adopters of funky offbeat technology?

* maybe it's me - becoming more cynical maybe?

Who knows ...

metamoderation seems to be a daily thing for me now - is that normal, or because I do that on a very regular basis? I haven't figured out, if metamoderation is more or less "valuable" in /. terms.

Today received my first invitation to meta moderate. And this despite not having used my moderator points a couple of times.

The Toronto Star reports: Look, over in the back corner of the office. It's a goof! It's a computer nerd! No, it's Geekman. Meet the digital age superhero action figure trying to squeeze out some space on toy store shelves next to Spiderman, Superman and Batman.

it seems the time between getting mod points is shrinking - all very nice, however I really dislike reading at -1 !!! But here I go again at -1 ...

here we go ...

Just finished my second time moderating - it was a bit less painful, since I worried a bit less about finding the 5 "perfect" places to use the 5 moderator points. Kept reading at -1, so I got to see everything. Bumped intp a little less total crap this time, but that may have been coincidence.

Well, after my first round of moderating, I found out, that it actually wasn't that much fun. 5 points is not really a lot to work with, so I ended up probably spending too much time on finding good comments, which had been underappreciated so far. That is actually a lot like real work! In addition, if one reads at the suggested -1 threshold, one realizes how much totally idiotic crap there is in the comments, including one or more lunatics, who seem to have some sort of beef with /., and therefore feel obliged to get even by filling the commentary with total junk comments.

Reading the commentary at 0 would have filtered most of those, unless I found them first. But I figured, I should follow the "rules" at least once, even if it was a bit painful.

about three and a half months after registering. So I'll have 2 days to use them. And I'll have to browse at -1; that will mean sifting through some junk. I hope there will be better topics over the next 2 days, than the current one's.

After lurking as an AC on /. for close to a year, I've finally gotten an account. Not sure how much blogging I'll do here, or if I'll start commenting yet. Having an opinion is one thing, but having a need for the world to know about it, are entirely different things. On the other hand, at one point in my youth, I aspired to be a journalist, before eventually landing on Computer Science.

As a result, this whole blogging thing is fascinating to me. While (as with everything in life) there's tons of irrelevant junk in blogs out there, the genuine nuggets are really something to behold.

I have to admit, the /. moderation system has me really intrigued, and it seems to work really rather well. A really fascinating exercise in community creation and maintenance. The success of /. in terms of readership and the (in)famous /. effect on websites seems unrivaled. Are us geeks the only one's, or just the first one's to develop such critical mass in a community?

However, I think the key success of /. is the carefully controlled selection of front page entries. They are mostly relevant, and mostly very timely. Lots of credit to the editors.

Let the fun begin...