Coventry's Journal: UserIDs & karma

Ok, so, every once in awhile I post. I have pretty damn good karma, because I don't post unless I have something to say, and apparently that something is considered interesting by moderators.

It also helps that my UID is so low.

UIDs are sequential (correct me if I'm wrong), and I often find myself correcting some silly rabbit of a user who is widly mislead... users with huge UIDs.

This isn't genitailia, its an indicator of how recently you found slashdot and bothered to sign up - and indicator of when you 'got a clue'. Claiming to be a know-it-all uber linux/Open-source geek and having a UID in the 600k+ range means one of a couple of things:

1) you're 13-17, and think you're hot stuff
2) you've got a new UID because your old had bad karma, or you forgot the pasword.
3) you're a troll.

Now, some of these people post a lot, like autopr0n and pr0ntab, but one has to wonder if thats because they have nothing better to do than post, or if they are posting simply to advertise their sites.

Most of the higher-UID users don't post a lot. Now, I hate elitism when its used against me, but I'm honest enough to admit that when I see a high UID attached to a stupid post, my first reaction is along the lines of 'back in the day when only people in the know were here, slashdot was so much better...' - but I'm also smart enough to realize that that sort of thought is complete crap, your memory always plays tricks on you, and you always think what you had before in the distant past was better then it actually was. For example, have you ever gone back to a restraunt you haven't visited in years, only to find it wasn't as good as you remembered?

Anyway, I frequently see newbies (which to me, can be anyone with a UID > 200k) post utter crap.

I'd love it if slashdot had an up-and-comming listing for users - allowing you to see high UID users who get good karma. Even just a way to tell the difference between fresh good karma and stale, 2-year-old-posts karma being abused for its +1 bonus would help.

Maybe make Karma cost to use? Ie, if you have 'excellent' karma, and that means you have +20 or so mod points on your posts, you have to loose one in order to post with the +1. If the post gets modded up one more point, you break even. If it gets modded more, you come out with more Karma then you started.

Then again, I also think that getting a 5 on a post should be damn hard - that the higher a post is moderated, the more moderation it takes to get up to the next level. Thus, a +1 takes one positive moderation, a +2 takes two additional, so three so far, and a +3 would require 3 more, for a total of 6, and the coveted +4 (for a newb to get a score of 5) would require four additional 4 more moderators to give a post the thumbs up - bring the total to 10 mods to get a post to a score of 5. For users with good Karma, it might only take 6, which is a fair trade off.
Modding down a crap-post should be easier though, 1 moderation less (with a min of 1) then it takes to get to the current level. Thus, a post with a score of 5 would require 3 negative mods to get to four, two to get down to 3, one more to get down to 2, and one more to get down to 1, and one to get down to 0. thus, a previously 5 rated post without a karma bonus would take only 7 negative mods to return to its status of 1.
Hrm, that gets ugly to calculate, maybe negative mods should just have a higher value for thier effect, like 1.2, and use the same scale as before for raising a post up.
On a related note, there needs to be a way to mark the parent of a post (when you moderate a reply) as being wrong or correct - a way to renforce or counter the parent post. Thus, a parent with a score of 4 that is glaringly wrong and has 20 replies correcting it, will see its score drop as individual corrections each get +1 or +2s over time, without direct moderation on the parent post.

food for thought, ramblings of a bored mind.
back to work.