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LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
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I did not read that article, but the comments on El Reg are often the best part.:) I don't have any interest in the comments on the comments.
 

jtr1962

Storage? I am Storage!
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I personally think comment rating is one of the dumbest recent trends. I also consistently find on Yahoo news that the most intelligent comments get the most down votes. It's almost as if people don't want to think, and don't want to be shown that their opinions are wrong because they're based on "facts" which are wrong.
 

jtr1962

Storage? I am Storage!
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And we are surprised about this? :lol: I'd have thought an intelligent comment on anything having anything at all to do with Yahoo would be like a well-tailored three piece suit on the surf beach.
It's actually even worse that. It's more like an intelligent comment on Yahoo is like royalty visiting a trailer park. I read through the comments there, especially anything having to do with politics or global warming, and find myself wondering if it's possible to have a negative IQ, meaning not only are you stupid, but your stupidity makes everyone else around you more stupid. Really, it's painful reading some of the stuff there. It makes me wonder if evolution stopped a million years ago for some large portion of the population.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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I am omnipresent
... on the other hand, Slashdot's moderation system is awesome for both efficiency and accuracy.
At any given time, around 10% of active users, people who log in and post at least occasionally, are gifted with moderation points, usually 15 at a time. Those users are deputized as moderators. They can choose to add one of a half-dozen positive moderations to a comment (Insightful, Funny, Informative etc.) or one of a couple negative mods (Off-Topic, Flamebait). If they post in a thread where they moderated, their moderations are un-done. Users only get to keep their mod points for three days. They can't be hoarded.

That means that good stuff rises to the top and the more active a discussion is, the more the readership will flag comments as worthwhile.
Users with a history of positive moderations get a bonus point applied to their comment automatically. Users with a poor history have a -1 or -2 comment rank applied so that their comments are simply invisible to the majority of Slashdot users.

Any user can also elect to Meta-moderate, examining a few random comments that have had moderation applied and opining as to the fairness or correctness of that moderation. This means that someone posting an unpopular but possibly valid opinion has a recourse that's controlled by the user base, not just site admins.

The end result is that Slashdot has a very high signal to noise ratio. It still has tons of trolls, but it's very easy to filter and get a lot of good information in the discussions.

Anyway, yeah, comment ranking can work if the people who set it up aren't morons.
 

Tannin

Storage? I am Storage!
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Yeah, the symmetry.

Correct!

The article claims that their "study" shows that people vote like sheep and comments with up-votes get more up-votes, while posts with down-votes gather more down-votes. Be that as it may (and frankly, who the hell cares?) all by itself, without prompting or conspiracy or (so far as I know) any communication at all, the normally acrimonious and divisive Register readership has united in a common cause. Something quite magical has happened: El Reg readers are working together to respond to every "yes" vote with a "no" vote, and every "no" vote with a "yes" vote. No-one told them to, it just struck enough people as funny to happen all by itself. Enjoy it while you can, cause this an event unique in recorded history. (Excepting possibly a famous talk given by a chap to a big crowd a couple of thousand years ago on a beach when the caterers screwed up. You know the one; he persuaded them all to share stuff. Loaves and fishes, apparently.)
 

timwhit

Hairy Aussie
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Jan 23, 2002
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Chicago, IL
I agree that Slashdot's moderation system is the only one I've found that works well. It also include meta-moderation to moderate the moderators.
 
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