Journal sllort's Journal: Slashdot Math Returns! 14
Remember everybody's favorite signature? Slashdot Math: 50+1-1 = 49. Taco was so incensed about that he decided to hide Karma from everyone so they couldn't criticize his math skills. This was a good idea, and one he should have stuck with.
Recently, Slashteam decided that printing moderation totals was a bad idea. It's part of a continuing development trend of hiding the Slash backend from the users (not a bad idea). Maybe Krow has been playing an audio version of Chromatic's O'Reilly article to Taco while he sleeps. Maybe Taco's pride has finally yielded enough that he's willing to listen to someone else. Who knows. For whatever reason, someone's trying to make it harder to game the Slash system by removing anything that could be construed as "points" (I'm wondering how they plan to make it impossible to count your friends, but that's another story).
Personally, I like to think that Trollback was responsible. But that's just ego talking.
In any event, moderation totals are now shown as percentages in an attempt to hide the number of times a post has been moderated. While it's pretty simple to reverse-engineer this number, you now need a calculator, which raises the bar a bit.
The funny thing, however, is that Taco has once again exposed his math skills to the world. So, once again, we get to put "Slashdot Math" in our
Slashdot Math: 30+40+10 = 100
Enjoy,
-s.
Update: As many have pointed out in the comments, it is true that this change has a few side affects. One is that editors can now disguise their modbombing activity a little easier. The second is that by activating a division-based mod system, SlashTeam has proven that all its protestations about K5's moderation not scaling are a bogus. Of course, if you haven't accepted the fact that modbombing and handwaving are a way of life around here, you're blind, and you don't read my journal.
Here's a thought how trollback might use this (Score:1)
A simple "Just heard on talk radio....." might just pick up the rating of troll, earning say 1 confusion point, whereas a treatise on why sci-fi is only written for gay nerds (if that isn't an oxymoron) might pickup troll, offtopic, funny, insightful, and interesting for a total of 5 confusion points.
The theory being that the more subtle a troll, the less a moderator is going to be able to choose the right mod option.
You could also have a multiplier based on the relative percentage of troll to other ratings, for example where 10% troll is better than 50% troll (because a smaller proportion of moderators spot it).
Anything would be better than no Trollback.
Re:Here's a thought how trollback might use this (Score:2)
(I figure comments in reply to comments that originally referred to a journal entry are so off topic, that they can hardly become any MORE off topic.)
Re:Clearly it is to cover up modbombing. (Score:1)
Damn, wish I had thought of that. [slashdot.org]
Re:Clearly it is to cover up modbombing. (Score:1)
47% Troll, 49% Insightful, 1% Underrated.
The degree of precision would imply 100 moderations. Since the total number of moderations must be an integer, and each moderation is worth one point, my non-mathematical mind suspects that one can reliably count the moderations from the percentages given in many cases.
Re:Clearly it is to cover up modbombing. (Score:1)
No credit for me... (Score:1)
Rob has been saying that making the karma number public was a mistake for far longer than I have. It'd be nice if he'd agree post regular meta-discussions, though. I'll happily take some credit for that, if it ever happens.
I don't believe it (Score:2)
been providing me with kinda good news all the
days. I just don't go read comments that often any
more (especially since -1 can be hard to parse on
my lynx).