Slashdot Mirror
Paul Allen Confirmed as SpaceShipOne's Sponsor
Shafe writes "Space.com confirmed suspicions that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was the secret investor in Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne, which completed a successful supersonic flight on the same day as the centennial of flight. Allen hopes Rutan's ship will win the $10 million X-Prize to help kickstart private manned space flight."
blue42
* More moderator points are being used to mod posts down than up. Furthermore, when modding a post up, every moderator seems to follow previous moderators in their choices, even when it's not a particularly interesting or clever post slashdot.org. There are a LOT more +5 posts than +3 or +4.
* Logged in people are modded down faster than anonymous cowards. Presumably these Nazi Moderators think it's more important to burn a user's existing karma, to silence that individual for the future, than to use the moderation system for what it's meant for : identifying "good" and "bad" posts (Notice how nearly all oppressive governments in the past and present do the same thing : marking individuals as bad and untrustworthy because they have conflicting opinions, instead of engaging in a public discussion about these opinions).
* Once you have a karma of -4 or -5, your posts have a score of -1 by default. When this is the case, no-one bothers to mod you down anymore. This means a logged in user can keep on trolling as much as he (or she) likes, without risking a ban to post on slashdot. When trolling as an anonymous user, every post starts at score 0, and you will be modded down to -1 ON EVERY POST. When you are modded down a certain number of times in 24 hour, you cannot post anymore from your current IP for a day or so. So, for successful trolling, ALWAYS log in.
* A lot of the modded down posts are actually quite clever, funny, etc., and they are only modded down because they are offtopic. Now, on a news site like slashdot, where the number of different topics of discussion can be counted on 1 hand, I must say I quite like the distraction these posts offer. But no, when the topic is yet another minor version change of the Linux kernel, they only expect ooohs and aaahs about this great feat of engineering. Look at the moderation done in this thread to see what I mean.
* Digging deep into the history of slashdot, I found this poll, which clearly indicates the vast majority does NOT want the moderation we have here today. 'nuff said.
Feel free to use this information to your advantage. I thank you for your time.
Anonymous cowards are... well, cowards.
(Oh, and Linux is dying, BSD 4ever. And Macs ar for fags. Yay! GNAA)
I have had a +5 informative moderation once, but mostly I have been left with a default of +1 -- and justly so. My first post was moderated down to a -1. It was part of an off-topic thread, and I felt at the time that the moderation was unfair.
The +5 post was the first post with some links and a perspective that no one else had yet persented and it was on topic. It merited being modded up.
Do you realize that most of the moderation is done by people members of the community? -- i.e. people who have signed up and have made posts? I have gotten moderation points two times now. I don't know why. My karma is still just 1, but I have tried to be judicious in my use of the points and follow the guidelines. Yes, it is true -- Posts that I modded up were most often modded up by others. Perhaps this is because those particular posts actually merited being modded up. That might explain why a post that gets modded up at all, often gets modded up to a 5. Or maybe it is just because we are all Nazi's as you say.
My conclusion from my experience is that Slashdot's solution is the best I know of.
Slashdot's system may not be perfect. But, please take my advice -- if you find a perfect system, don't join it, you will mess it up due to one fatal flaw -- your human.