4 ms·

I browse slashdot at +4 and I think the comments are pretty good/insightful. They are a bit too slow on the news sometimes, though.

• JadeNB 17y ago
  It seems to me that this solution also “doesn't scale”, though not necessarily in the sense of the grandparent: For there to be a sufficient supply of +4 posts that you can read, someone has to be going through, reading them, and promoting them above the dreck. Thus, only a limited number of people can pursue your strategy before it stops working.
  • illumin8 17y ago
    Easy fix for this: If you have Slashdot mod points, browse at 0; if you don't and just want to read good comments, browse at +3 or 4.
    • JadeNB 17y ago
      This is an excellent point. I gave up on Slashdot as a comment site a long time ago, and now satisfy my commenting craving on Reddit and HN, where, effectively, you always have mod points; so I forgot that it didn't work that way elsewhere. Thanks!
  • AlisdairO 17y ago
    That's pretty much the premise that sites like reddit and HN operate on at the link level, too - most people only read the first page or two, but some people are interested/obsessed enough to go through the dreck and flag up what's interesting. It seems to scale reasonably well so far.
    • count 17y ago
      s/interested\/obsessed/bored/ I get to page 5 or 6 on reddit, just because I get bored, and read fairly fast...
  • sjs382 17y ago
    Agreed. What I do works for me and I'm glad there are others with the time/patience/masochistic-tendencies to view and moderate things to make them more pleasant for me. :)
  • notauser 17y ago
    I browse /. at +5 (and see only very good comments) except for the once a month or so when I get given mod points. 15 minutes a month of moderation per person seems to be sustainable/scalable, because it's been working for ages and I have noticed no real change in Slashdot's +5 comment quality. Where that fails with HN is that we have infinite mod points all the time, which: - Encourages point inflation as the community grows. - Discourages people from taking moderation seriously as if it was a big deal you wouldn't be able to do it all the time.
    • JadeNB 17y ago
      > Discourages people from taking moderation seriously as if it was a big deal you wouldn't be able to do it all the time. I'm not sure I agree with this. I really like the HN system whereby upvotes are free, but downvotes are restricted. (Well, I assume that's the way it is --at least, it's easy for me to see how to do one, but not the other.) This makes it easy for me to give a post a tiny bump up, so that I don't think much of it, but emphasises the cost of giving it the equivalent tiny bump down; and isn't that a good attitude to instill in a commenting community? Certainly I think the culture here is notably friendlier than just about anywhere public-facing site (LtU (http://lambdatheultimate.org http://lambdatheultimate.org) being perhaps a notable exception). EDIT: I saw a mention of Metafilter elsewhere. I forgot it as an example of another site with a novel approach to the commenting problem; namely, make commenting not free by imposing a small, one-time cost.
• bootload 17y ago
  "... Back in the day slashdot was great for quality comments. Then they grew and added a karma system which... didn't really help, just buried the dreck for a time. Now it's mostly a mess. .." This tends to be perception only. I'd agree with @sjs382, a +3 browser here and I was surprised at the improvement in discussion from what I remembered. #2774