Slashdot Mirror
Greece Rejects EU Terms
New submitter Thammuz writes: With almost all ballots counted, Greeks voted overwhelmingly "No" on Sunday in a bailout referendum, defying warnings from the EU that rejecting new austerity terms would set their country on a path out of the euro. Figures published by the interior ministry showed nearly 62% of those whose ballots had been counted voting "No", against 38% voting "Yes". "Today we celebrate the victory of democracy, but tomorrow all together we continue and complete a national effort for exiting this crisis," Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said in a televised address.
Why would a comment like that be modded down? It's currently at -1, without any descriptor shown.
It's on-topic. Not everyone will agree with the ideas it conveys, but it's clearly a good-faith contribution to this discussion. It isn't obviously trying to provoke people. It's not insulting anyone. It's not riddled with swearing.
It isn't a +5 comment, and maybe not even a +2 comment, but there's absolutely no reason for it to have been modded down to -1. It expresses some relevant ideas and opinions that anyone thinking about this matter should at least consider.
The moderation system here is supposed to make it easier to find content. But in this case it's clearly being used to abusively hide one point of view. Why even have a moderation system if we have to browse this site at -1 just to see good content that was incorrectly moderated down?
It saddens me to see the moderation quality here at Slashdot dropping so much. While it has never been perfect, it has generally been better than it has been lately. It's like Slashdot is falling victim to the same overzealous moderation that has ruined sites like Reddit and Hacker News, where anyone who doesn't toe the established lines of thought is attacked with unjustifiable downvoting, assuming they aren't just banned outright.
On the bright side, at least it isn't as bad as it is over at SoylentNews. They've gone utterly stupid with the moderating there, adding a bunch of pointless descriptors. It doesn't help that their community is so small, too. This results in the same people moderating day in and day out, and they tend to have rather extremist views. This causes a lot of good content to get moderated down without justification.
I hope that something is done to prevent the bad moderation problems here as of late from getting any worse. Getting rid of the downvotes without descriptors would be a good start. If somebody is downmodded, we should all at least know what the justification was.