Slashdot Mirror
"Show Us the Code" Breaks Its Silence
DigDuality writes with an explanation of the silence of the Show Us the Code initiative. The push he began — to gather influential sponsors demanding that Steve Ballmer reveal what Linux code he believed to be infringing Microsoft patents — was discussed here last February. "Show Us the Code has been silent since March 23. May came and went — the deadline allotted for calling Ballmer's bluff — but the site gave no update. I now explain the silence. After a scheduled interview with Forbes columnist Dan Lyons didn't happen, and my place of employment falsely accused me of representing that they endorsed my own political goals, I decided it was best to shut my mouth so I would be able to keep paying my bills. I'm glad to see Linus now publicly echoing the sentiments that this site espoused. Maybe someone already accustomed to the limelight will have better luck in challenging Microsoft's FUD machine."
see subject.
You get that too?
Sure, we're all guilty of some occasional borderline trolling, but I genuinely fail to understand the motivation of someone who ceaselessly downmods and harasses random slashdot users they decide they don't like.
Shit, I automatically +5 my foes'/freaks' comments.
I was exposed to that too, recently. Judging from the pattern of downmods, i.e. always 5 points spread on my 5 recent posts, regardless of topic and all mods occuring in bursts within some minutes from each other, I assume that is someone spending all his mod points at once on his favourite foe, who happens to be my humble persona.
What makes me wonder though, is that some other posters seem to be subject to similar recent activity, which would indicate some larger scale effort ... or the cowards have some sort of seasonal migration they all instinctively partake in. Maybe someone can attach a GPS trasmitter to one of them and we can watch their trek through sewers for our edification. There is a PhD in this for someone with selfless dedication to science...
IMHO, Slashdot badly needs a way to metamod overrated, redundant, and other such downmods.
That and the mods need to learn the actual meaning of the word troll. But... I'll take babysteps.
Possibly that's the case already. Even though the goofus(es) have been at it for a while, my "karma" seems largely unaffected, which I think would not be otherwise the case given the relative numbers of mod points in play.
Assuming of course that they do not maintain multiple accounts just for the purpose of bombing. Some people can be quite vindictive ... and have no life. An ugly combination.
As a aside I find the whole moderation system here overly complicated. There should be really only one category of "downmod" and that is "Outright vandal, GNAA style", subject to corroboration by multiple downmods from multiple IP addresses. The mod points for this should simply regenerate over time if the account itself is not used for pranks. That way the complete nonsense is removed and the rest ... people should participate in the discussion rather then sniping with mod points from the peanut gallery. Slashdot has a thread indentation system so its easy to simply scroll by the parts one finds off-topic or uninteresting. As to emphasis, the simplest, fully transparent and accountable method is simply to rank posts based on the number of replies to them.
I myself nearly never mod anything since usually the GNAA and "First psot" types are nuked by the subscription crowd by the time I get there. After the hooligans are gone, if I find something objectionable I simply respond and tell the poster why, otherwise what's the use? If everyone just modded, the discussion threads might as well be reduced to two posts: "Me like article" and "Me no like article" where the apes could go "expressing" themselves "eloquently" with "Ufg heairy thumb up!" and "Ugh hairy thumb down!".
Or to look at it another way, the moderation system as it stands is a rather childlish re-implementation of the high-school popularity contests, rather then something which facilitates discussion.