OSNews

The problem is that being a trusted user does not necessarily mean you are impartial or unbiased. Quite often it just means you are really good at saying what everyone else wants to hear.

Meh, you're right. I just don't really like the new rule.. But well, it's your site, I'm just visiting

Or have enough diplomatic skill to say the things that people *don't* want to hear without angering them. ;-)

Trust me, there are plenty of mod points to go around. Removing yourself from the eligible moderator pool will not prevent trolls from being modded down.

And if we see a dip in moderation, we'll tweak the rules again. We're nimble like that.

Moderation is not an exact science. There's no way to ensure that everyone is being honest, there's no way to prevent it from sometimes being a popularity contest, and there's no way to make everyone happy. I have a new moderation system in the works, but I am in no rush to roll it out.

This is a good stopgap.

Have you seriously considered the question of whether or not it *should* be a popularity contest? That is the way that most people want to use it, I think. And it makes a certain sense for it to be so. Consider that the way you want things to be, you are adding quantities of two completely different units. A person casts a positive vote on a comment because he likes it. You're never going to get around that. He may like it for many different kinds of reasons. But I would wager that the most common reason is that he agrees with its position.

On the other hand, a person is only supposed to cast a negative vote it the post violates certain arbitrary rules determined not by them, but by OSNews staff, and spelled out in a document somewhere which most people probably don't care to waste time reading. That's a very different thing... a different "unit", if you will, than the "unit" for positive votes. So the moderation system is indiscriminately adding centimeters and milliliters and reporting the result as a pure number representing the score of the post.

Is it any wonder that that number turns out not to reflect anything truly meaningful?

Like I say, I don't want to seem unduly critical. And personally, I don't think the moderation system is really all that important. But I do want to point out that the current one has problems that go beyond people not using it the way you want them to. Because even if they did, you'd still be adding newtons to acres and reporting a result.

Your arguing is pointless, because I already agree with you. But there's no major push because what exists today is already working well enough. On the whole, trolls are downmodded and weeded out well enough.

Like I said, I have a new mod system in beta, but until I understand exactly how to handle history, we won't see it. Think OSNews 4.2.

My only comment to this would be that I hope that you don't really feel that I've been arguing with you. My last post was just something that I had been thinking for a while that I had not seen spelled out before, and this seemed a good place to express the thought.

BTW, if you're interested:

http://www.osnews.com/comment-vote-review

I haven't really publicized this, and warning: it's subject to change, but if you like, feel free to play with this.

That's good and hopefully, people will participate fairly there also.

I like it. Is it still the intention, though, to keep moderation anonymous?

Thanks,
PA

That's fantastic!

There must be some way to get more people involved in moderation-moderating... perhaps (optionally) before submitting a comment, you have to rate a moderation aswell as the usual captcha!

I like that page though, and will endeavour to visit daily to help moderate the moderations

Yes, you can comment after you mod, but not the reverse. I could change that, but the goal is to prevent someone going back over a flamewar they helped start and modding down all the responses in anger. Trust me, it happens. I see in the database when someone went back and forth with another user, and modded the other user down each time, usually just for disagreeing.