azaris's Journal: You call this "Insightful"?

If you happen to read my posting history, you might notice I'm not big on the whole /. groupthink phenomenon. But hey, one can always skip the M$/Linux/Mac articles since they're bound to be full of inflammatory tripe and lame putdowns, right?

What annoys me is when otherwise interesting stories are ruined by inept moderating. Take for example this story. Now, I've done some investment analysis and trading as a hobby so I'm more then willing to chip in some insightful comments on topics such as this. The problem? Before the people who know what they're saying have thought out and composed their posts, the thread is full of stupid crap that gets moderated to +4 or +5 based on groupthink and tired stereotypes. Just look at all the tripe that got moderated up in this story:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118635&cid=10020259 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118635&cid=10019409 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118635&cid=10019417 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118635&cid=10019575 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118635&cid=10024789 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118635&cid=10019551 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118635&cid=10019443

Even worse, once the corrections and actually insightful posts come out, most of the moderation seems to have already happens and many interesting posts end up languishing at 0 or +1. Just look at these examples:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118635&cid=10020834 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118635&cid=10020802 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118635&cid=10022885 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118635&cid=10020193

As a workaround, I employ Friends and Foes quite liberally as means of self-moderation. Anyone posting clever and original stuff will probably make it to my Friends list, and anyone who posts tired cliches and shallow rethoric probably ends up on my Foes list. That still misses the occasional insighful AC post but at least I catch the naysayers who frequently post good stuff under a certain topic but who never get modded up or get ran over by the slashbots.