OldMiner's Journal: My Karma Sucks because I Moderate

Slashdot's karma system has some interesting properties to it. Here's one that's particularly near to my heart: moderating will drop your karma much more often than it will raise it. As ones moderations at are meta-moderated, the results affect the moderator's karma. When you are meta-moderated down, you will lose a point of karma unless your karma is already below "badkarma" which defaults to -10. Iff your karma is below "Good" will a "Fair" or "Funny" M2 result in a karma increase, and, then, the odds of it happen decrease as you approach "Good".

So I've been doing a lot more reading, M1, and M2 and little posting. If one reads regularly and insures that "comments.pl" or "article.pl" are almost always the 'last page visited', it takes just about a week to get moderator access. (And this is perhaps part of the reason old-timers frequently say they don't get M1 anymore. Journal pages don't count unless you change your threshhold for the comments, at which point you don't see the journal entry any more.) Therefore, if one is a regular Slashdot visitor, but not a regular commenter, he will lose karma at relatively swift rate, even if he's at 50...er, I mean...the high end of "Excellent".

I've got about a 15% rate of being rated as Unfair moderating, which is something I can deal with. In my opinion, agressive M1 and M2 is exactly how one defines the community one is in, if he wishes to make a change in it. And I wouldn't mind changing some small things with Slashdot. I'm pretty quick to mod down people who post information that is redundant -- already posted by someone else, especially if it's common knowledge such as google caches or references to well known information. Or, worse, people who reiterate a blithe viewpoint already posted in the swarm of 100 or so comments pre-existing on the story. The reason stories have 400 comments, frequently, is because 200 people were too lazy to read through and see if someone already said what they wanted to. I check post dates and insure that there's at least an hour or two between the first and second redundant posting, something I imagine most of the people doing the M2 don't notice. I don't think any of my Redundant mods have been considered Fair. I also frequently mark postings which are intended to be Funny, but aren't, as "Troll" or "Offtopic". Again, M2 hits my karma a little.

There's, of course, the note that you can always moderate using only "Underrated" or "Overrated" and bypass M2 altogether. Doing so, I feel, is dumb. If you don't like someone's post, it's a good idea to tell them why. Further, it intentionally avoids the M2 system which is designed to let you know how the rest of the community views the situation. Not that it's hard to fix your karma. Of course, I've used both at appropriate times. Overrated when someone made a comment which was "Interesting", but completely wrong, as pointed out by one of the children of the comment (with refrences, no less). I've voted a post as "Underrated" which wasn't particularly interesting, but was modded as "Redundant" when it wasn't.

I've found, like I did a long time ago, that it's pretty easy to get modded up. So every now and again I need to post at 1 and get modded up to 5 to fix that problem of my ever-dropping karma. At least, if I want to keep that karma bonus on the occasion it's needed in a 200 comment article and I actually want to have a discussion. Posting well-researched or informed comments is still a nearly sure-fire way to get modded up. Posting an uninformed, cocksure opinion early in an article that experesses a popular opinion, unfortunately, still works as well, and takes a lot less work.

So when finals are over, I'll be posting a little more often, primarily to fix my karma. Cuz, you know, my karma sucks because I moderate.