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Welcome, new trolls! We're pleased as punch to have you aboard, unfortunately as you may have noticed our moderators are unable to give you the moderations you've been working so hard for. Since we can't really do much about people not moderating more, we're going to be giving out more points so that the ones that do can give you the attention you so desperately crave.
Moderators: Starting a little after midnight UTC tonight, everyone will be getting ten points a day instead of five. The threshold for a mod-bomb, however, is going to remain at five. This change is not so you can pursue an agenda against registered users more effectively but so we can collectively handle the rather large uptick in anonymous trolling recently while still being able to have points remaining for upmodding quality comments. This is not an invitation to go wild downmodding; it's helping you to be able to stick to the "concentrate more on upmodding than downmodding" bit of the guidelines.
Also, this is not a heavily thought-out or permanent change. It is a quick, dirty adjustment that will be reviewed, tweaked, and likely changed before year's end. Questions? Comments?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday August 26 2017, @03:34AM (12 children)
Am I doing it wrong? Cuz I have SN permanently set to threshold 0, and while there's some crap it's nothing I can't skim over.
At 5 points, I often run out before I'm done modding up, so dunno why I'd waste 'em modding down the less than spectacularly egregious. So I'm sure I'll find use for 10. A few years back the Green Site lost its mind and gave me permanent mod points (I'd spend 'em all and instantly get 15 more; this went on for about six months) and ya know what? I still managed to spend most of 'em.
What the heck is a mod bomb?
As to a penalty for modding down -- with 10 points it might be practical to make a downmod use up two modpoints instead of just one. That would ensure it's no worse than before, at least, since in effect the max downmod points would be 5 per day.
I do like the daily renew; that way they're handy just about any time I want them!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26 2017, @04:50AM
Mod bombing is why I refuse to log in. Basically. You can't mod the same person more than 5 times in a day. That's finally an actual rule rather than a non-rule that the people running the site like to enforce.
And as of the last time I logged in. There's no feedback given before they ban the account's ability to moderate.
It's there primarily to protect buzzy against all the well justified mods he'd get.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 26 2017, @10:23AM (10 children)
A mod bomb is spending your mod points on a vendetta rather than for their intended purpose; using five (or more now) points out of one batch to downmod one person. We're looking at programmatically eliminating them but I don't expect much in the way of site updates soon.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday August 26 2017, @02:16PM
Ah. Well, I suppose a solution might be something like you can only mod down the same poster N-many times in a given period, say a week. I don't think that should be too tight, tho, because once in a while the same spammer might need repeated smiting.
I've occasionally found myself spending all my mod points on one poster (usually when someone is bringing depth to a side of an argument that otherwise is seldom seen), but always to mod up. Would that be a Mod Hot Air Balloon? :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26 2017, @02:53PM (8 children)
Which is deeply problematic because there's at least a half dozen posters here that just troll. Expecting people to let things slide to avoid the arbitrary ban is ridiculous.
I don't bother logging in any more and definitely not modding because of the unwarranted interference. If the first 5 troll posts I see are from the same person, they're the one that should be penalized not me.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 26 2017, @07:24PM (6 children)
If you're using all your points to mod down trolls, you're doing moderation wrong to begin with. The idea is to get everything worth seeing above zero not to get everything crappy down to -1.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26 2017, @11:20PM (5 children)
Perhaps, but modding troll posts as troll posts is legitimate regardless of how many times you do it. Referring to it as a vendetta just because somebody chooses to mod one person's troll posts is a bit weak.
Ultimately, things like this make people not want to spend the time moderating as it becomes a chore having to remember whom you've been modding.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 27 2017, @12:37AM (4 children)
Well, see, you've got a choice... You can either have arbitrary rules that apply equally to everyone and a guarantee of no favoritism or you can have rules that get interpreted by the person implementing them. We've chosen the former but I'll be happy to sort through anyone who wants me to's moderations and reverse every one I disagree with. Who wants to go first?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27 2017, @04:51AM (3 children)
It would be equally equal if we could just mod whomever we wanted based on the criteria. Half the time I wasn't even paying attention to whom I was modding or how many times. If somebody is such an asshole that they get all the down mods for being of topic or trolling, then so be it.
Similarly I fail to see why it's ok to spend all positive points on the same person.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 27 2017, @10:36AM (2 children)
Because promoting crap inserts a small amount of noise. Demoting intelligent stuff you disagree with removes signal. The goal is to be able to set your preferences to where you get all the signal with as little noise as possible and lowering the signal threshold to pick up wrongly demoted content adds back in a whole hell of a lot more noise than one person could ever wrongly mod up in a day.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27 2017, @02:28PM (1 child)
And yet the mod bomb rule doesn't actually address that at all. I can think of a handful of posters that never contribute anything of value and by value, I'm using an extremely lax definition. Not even bad jokes or obvious insights, but pure trolling.
And yes, the goal is to improve the SNR, but there are a handful of posters here that basically don't ever contribute anything that isn't a troll comment and there shouldn't be a penalty associated with moderating things that aren't even in English into oblivion as part of that effort.
Plus, some of us don't even look at the author until after we've made a decision about whether or not something should be modded. In which case, we might not even know how many times we've modded them and how recently.
The ACs can be a problem, but it's mostly people who sign in under their own name that cause me not to bother logging in anymore. At least with ACs they're easy enough to just ignore if they're behaving badly. The named accounts are virtually impossible to chase off. Which may or may not be a bad thing depending upon your view point, but they are definitely a bigger problem in my experience.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 27 2017, @05:09PM
Actually, the mod bomb rule addresses that quite directly. Truthfully, it doesn't go far enough given the goals of moderation. If you're spending five points on downmodding (even to different people), you're doing far, far less to help the signal-to-noise ratio than you would by promoting five comments you find worthy of reading. The goal is for people to be able to browse at >= 1 and still have plenty of comments worth reading, not to be able to browse at zero without seeing things that annoy you.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Monday August 28 2017, @08:59AM
And don't confuse posting blunt views that you disagree with for trolling. People have mentioned TMB by name already, so let's take him as an example - occasionally he posts arguments which I fervently disagree with - yet I still give him +1 interesting moderations for them, as he's expanding the discussion. I also reply to tell him where I disagree with him, and I'm sure he thinks I'm as wrong as I do him. Often we'll find common ground. That's what mature discussion is for.
Don't debase your opponent if you can instead debate him.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves