I am no longer a

I am no longer a fan of kuro5hin. While there are some things i admire about their mod­er­a­tion sys­tem i think the flaws are out­weigh the ben­e­fits. I do like the total democ­racy in how the sto­ries are voted on, and where they should go, i do not think this democ­racy needs to be car­ried on into the com­ment voting.

How the com­ment vot­ing works now, if 1 per­son rates a com­ment a 5 that com­ment is a 5, while on slash for exam­ple, indi­vid­u­als can only make incre­men­tal changes. Also on slash the peo­ple that can even make incre­men­tal changes are peo­ple that have shown they are respon­si­ble, and con­tribut­ing to the community.

let’s take an exam­ple, assume the peo­ple that con­tribute to the com­mu­nity a lot, the mod­er­a­tors (slash) and trusted users (scoop) are non-racist, and not against gay peo­ple, but that both com­mu­ni­ties have a few peo­ple that are racist and hate gay peo­ple, i’ll call them the rab­ble. You have a com­ment that pro­motes racial or sex­ual tolerance.

here is what might hap­pen on slash: a mod­er­a­tor would rate the com­ment up, if it was good, or leave it +1 if it’s just so so. the rab­ble would get upset, and may reply to the com­ment say­ing gays suck or some­thing. those com­ments would get –1 and be hid­den by the moderators.

on scoop: the com­ment itself would get rated 1 by the rab­ble, a trusted user at that point has no recourse beyond what any­one else would have. he can rate it a 5, which aver­ages out to a 3. a 3 is a poor score on scoop how­ever. Or, as often hap­pens, per­haps the other per­son doesn’t feel the com­ment deserves a 5. If they rate it as they actu­ally think it deserves maybe it only gets a 4 etc. So with scoop you have to con­stantly be adjust­ing your rat­ings in rela­tion to what other peo­ple have rated pre­vi­ously. the­o­ret­i­cally this shouldn’t hap­pen because the aver­age of many raters should bal­ance out, but in prac­tice most com­ments don’t get rated at all, and the ones that do don’t get rated by more than 5–10 people.

now lets look at a bad comment

on slash: it would get rated down by the mod­er­a­tors to –1 and never seen again.

on scoop: it may get rated to 0 imme­di­ately by a trusted user (although with the retal­i­a­tion that is so easy in the sys­tem peo­ple don’t like to be the first to rate a 0) or another bad per­son may rate it a 5 right away, if this hap­pens 5! trusted users have to agree that it is a bad com­ment before it will be hid­den. and this exam­ple is only if no one else comes along and rates it high, or even rates it a 1, because for hid­den com­ments a 1 helps. Another thing this doesn’t take into account are the trusted users that are non­stan­dard in their vot­ing, if a com­ment doesn’t fit their view of what should be rated 0 they rate a 5, which again takes 5 more 0 rat­ings to coun­ter­act. Also, when the com­ment gets higher than 1 you have to go out in the story and find it, so 5 more trusted users have to run across it in nor­mal brows­ing, whereas for the trusted users who like the com­ments most don’t the <1 comments are accumulated for them. This happens all the time.

Any­way, that was long. Basi­cally i don’t feel wel­come there any­more, and i know when i post things on metafil­ter peo­ple are prob­a­bly read­ing it hat­ing me, but they can’t throw it in my face. I don’t need the con­stant reminder that there are so many hate­ful peo­ple out there.