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moderationmoderationPosted Nov 20, 2003 4:14 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (guest, #421)In reply to: On comment abuse by proski Parent article: On comment abuse
If a story has 40 comments, few people will read comment number 30. [...] But if the best comments were brought to the forefront by the moderators... Except that if you look at Slashdot, that's exactly the opposite of what a moderation system often does. The first comments that have even a sliver of information or thought, and responses thereto, are invariably the highest moderated. This encourages people to quickly post superficially thoughtful comments and thereby worsens the problem. I don't have a good solution, but adding the ability to filter non-subscriber posts would be an interesting experiment.
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moderation Posted Nov 20, 2003 7:15 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Slashdot has a problem of deficit moderation. Moderation points are rare, so "smart" moderators try to use them wisely. Moderating a comment up makes more difference than moderating a comment down, especially if the comment has a high score. If I was to choose between moving some stupid comment from 5 to 4 and moving a good comment from 2 to 3, I'd choose the later. That's why most comments are moderated up, not down.Of course, no all moderators are good. Some spend their points on the first comments. That's why relatively good comments in the beginning are moderated up. Also, the first comments are judged against the background of really stupid trolls and "first posts", something that can be significantly reduced if anonymous posts are not allowed. I believe Slashdot is a bad example. It's a site designed to attract crowds of zealots, so it encourages quick posts. It the goal was meaningful discussion, the system would have been changed. Kuro5hin actually changed its moderation system recently to prevent certain kinds of abuse. That site cares about quality of comments and thus protects the best comment authors from harassment.
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