Journal Dark Lord Seth's Journal: Mod system unfairness + developer apathy. 5
Hi! Welcome to Seth's wonderful little world here on Slashdot. Where news, geeks and linux-fundamentalism meet up with my warped mind and "reality distortion" field. ( Copyright Steve Jobs, or so they say... )
Anyways, on a slightly more serious note, ( Which would mean no porn, sorry. ) I recently encountered something which could be defined as a bug here on Slashdot. If my comments were modded up as Funny, my karma would not increase, most likely the same thing for all users. This seems logical enough, considering user A's sense of humour might be vastly different from user B's sense of humour. However, once something gets modded up as Funny, it can also be modded down. That, DOES cost a user karma, meaning a "5, Funny" comment could actually cost a user ( quite ) some karma. This in a whole opens the system for abuse: Mod someone up to "5, Funny", then mod bomb them down with another account to "-1, Funny" with Overrated mods, which would cost the user 6 points of karma and due to Overrated mods not being available for metamoderation, the mod-bomber would not get affected at all.
And even despite all this, why do Funny comments not gain any karma? Sure, Funny might be interpreted as relative, considering we all got a different sense of humour, but all other mods can be relative as well. Some comment might be Insightful to one, yet not at all to someone else, for example. Bundled with the fact that Overrated and Underrated do not apply to metamoderation, it's very hard for me to view the Slashdot moderation system as anything other than ineffective, unfair and just plain broken.
And I did report this as a bug, considering the OS way of things where the users are the ears and eyes and bugtesters of the developers and all that. However, the reply I got on the Slash project ( Slashdot's SF project, complete with bug report system and all, for those of you who don't know... ) was downright unprofessional. The internet is a bad medium for jokes, so I seriously hope I misunderstood that and that it actually was a joke.
Edit:
Very cute, shortly after some others and I mentioned the unfairness of the mod system in a thread on the main discussion part, all of us get comments moderated Offtopic. Not other offtopic posts, ( Because the posts were, after all, offtopic. ) but only the offtopic ones criticizing the moderation system. Cute.
Yeah (Score:2)
I know it was moderation abuse because someone was going to a lot of my old posts too and knocking them down as overrated. But I just don't worry about it too much. What does good karma really get me anyway? Nothing really. And even wi
I know that too.. (Score:2)
What is Karma important for? Having at least neutral karma is essential to be heard by most (surfing at +1). With terrible karma, starting at -1, you never bounce off the bottom
Fate has sense of irony :) (Score:2)
by - on Mon April 05, 17:30 (#8769589)
> 30% Overrated
What is the purpose of modding funny posts down as overrated? If humor is not your kind of thing, just set a negative penalty on "funny" in your preferences. You might say "but it's not THAT funny" or "it's not MY kind of humor", but if you take a good look you see that the vast majority of "funny" posts have also been modded as "overrated". Maybe Over/Underrated moderations should also be meta-moderated?
Btw, anyone knows if -1,Overr
I can't find the button (Score:1)
Funny Posts & Karma (Score:2)
Maybe this is unfair, but I think that maybe that is part of the point: to encourage people to try to be more than merely funny?!
It's usually easier to be funny than to be interesting in some other fashion. A post that is more than funny will probably attract other kinds of moderations as well.
That said, I think the moderations 'Over-' and 'Underrated' are completely silly: both as moderations as such as well