opinions-slashdotModPolicy

my policy on slashdot moderation (it was posted as a comment once)

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Is there a slashdot forum for commenting on slashdot itself, b/c o.w. we'll have to continue to sneak in such discussion as a sideshow to other topics?

Anyhow, what I was going to say is:

Sure, sometimes elitists will mod down a post they don't agree with (asy, almost anything pro-Microsoft) but for the most part the things that get modded down are either stupid, inflamitory, insulting, off-topic etc...

I mod down things that are rated 5 that I don't think are worth reading, rather than just things that I think are stupid, off-topic, etc. Why? Because I have found that there are too many 5-rated posts in most stories. So many that I don't have time to read any of them for most stories. My ideal slashdot would have maybe 6 5-rated posts per story. I make it a point to mod down 5 comments that I don't think were worth my time to read, particularly in stories with lots of 5-rated comments.

If everyone stuck to a philosophy of "only mod down if the post has some sort of problem, not just because you think it is rated too highly", then the numbers of 5-rated comments would scale with the size of the community. The solution is either to increase the number of rating levels proportional to the size of the community (which we don't have control over), or to mod down when there are too many 5s. I think we should do the latter.