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.