Journal rho's Journal: Measuring your cred via UID number length 6
While perusing the JOE v3.0 story, I began to notice a trend. When the comment indicated a fanatical, purblind ideology, the poster's UID was >5 digits. When the comment was reasoned, meaningful, and even if contrary to consensus had good reason for being that way, the UID was 4 digits, often less.
(This has the potential to be a masturbatory ego-fest, so I'll note that while I have a 4-digit UID, I don't post comments, and don't consider my input to be particularly scintillating. I'm talking about the other 4-digiters.)
Too much can be made of the length of your UID, but as I continue to read Slashdot I notice this more and more often. I also see fewer low-number-UIDs posting, period, while I see the comment totals increasing. This sounds like a writeup for No Duh! magazine, the journal of the obvious for the pedantic; but there it is.
We hear quite a bit about how Slashcode does this, or does that to prevent spammers, trolls and assholes from clogging up the works. There are a dozen dozens of Slash-alike codebases to do similar things. So far, I've seen none that actively work to elevate the discussion. It's not enough to just get a lot of comments. It's the quality of the comments that really make the difference.
(The best I've seen is probably photo.net, and their end-of-article comments. They generally tend to be pure opinion, often contrary to the article, but that's good.)
Of course, we'll never see a Perl script that uses regular expressions to strip out the shitty comments and leave the insightful ones. As far as I can see, all the community-moderated codebases simply enforce groupthink. To date, there is nothing quite as useful or as important as a real, live editor, who promotes good words and good thinking and deletes (yes, deletes) the crap. Perhaps it is time to reintroduce the classic newsman's editor to the Web--a singular vision that makes a site worthy to read rather than simply engaging in wankery of the most pointless kind.
posting? (Score:1)
Well, that must have been how I found you to friend you. Not sure what comment it was, but looking over your history it appears you chime in now and then with the timely great comment, supporting your own hypothesis if limited only by attempting to not toot your own horn.
I'd suggest you perhaps post more, but I'd take quality over quantity.
Everything2 (Score:1)
You just stated part of the reasons I love Everything2 [everything2.org]. But it's nearly impossible to actively edit a fast paced discussion. This is only compounded when proper editing requires a great deal of knowledge of the material at hand, and there's almost no way one single person can be well read on all the subjects posted to Slashdot. Once more, for the posters' burden, it's difficult to make a properly formatted, referenced, and on-topic reply to an article unless you had previous experience in the area. And
Re:Everything2 (Score:2)
Mebbe. As my hippie friends would say, "I know where you're at, maaan."
I'm not sure what the value of a fast-paced discussion is. I mean, we've already got IRC. The pressure of a fast-paced discussion, it seems, only causes ignorant tripe to be posted more quickly than some other guy's ignorant tripe, and the overall quality goes pffft. Is it fun? Sure. I used to love making like Muhammed Ali, jabbing and moving in a rhetorical mano-a-mano with some random schlub... but semantic wankery is only amusing fo
As for this 5-digit UID... (Score:2)
I agree, though, that the lower UIDs tend to post more interestin
Re:As for this 5-digit UID... (Score:1)
Re:As for this 5-digit UID... (Score:2)
Cheers,
Ethelred