While I was browsing Slashdot during lunch on Friday, I was surprised to see drop-list boxes suddenly appear at the end of comments I was viewing. A quick scan for further information revealed that apparently I had been selected to be a Slashdot moderator!
So what, right? After all they’re automatically and randomly selected, it only lasts three days, and you only get five points to spend adjusting comment scores. It’s not like the site admins themselves personally anointed me and invited me to their country club. :-P
What was actually interesting about it was the effect that it had on my own reading habits. Normally I just skim along looking at the highly-ranked comments that display automatically, and any with titles that contain something that catches my eye. Continuing to do that didn’t really give me any opportunities to spend points though, since most of them were already highly ranked and the few other threads that I delved into just weren’t very interesting. I obviously had to start reading more threads if I was going to find anything to moderate.
At first I got all idealistic and figured hey, I’ll check out all of the later, neglected threads where somebody may have posted something extremely important but was ignored since most people have moved on. Of course, there were a few problems with that… One is that there are a *lot* of such comments, often in isolation, and it’s not obvious from the subject alone whether it’ll be worth checking out. Also, they often didn’t really have anything interesting to say after all. There’s probably a point at which everything worth saying has already been said, and beyond that it’s just bitches, whines, complaints, and such.
So next I started delving into the longer threads near the middle of the comments, where I encountered the next problem: decision paralysis. Sure, there were plenty of on-topic comments to choose from, but does this one really count as ‘insightful’ enough? Sure, this guy posted a bit of useful information, but with people posting so furiously there’s a lot of overlap, and maybe someone else has posted even more and really deserves the points. Or maybe not. And this post looks interesting, but it’s not really my area of expertise, so how do I know for sure? For all I know someone else is going to come along and post “No, you’re full of shit because…”
So, instead, I went to the shorter, 3-5 comment threads near the middle of the pack and spent points on posts in those instead. That seemed like a reasonable compromise between finding neglected posts and trying to avoid redundant information or overly long, meandering threads.
And now all my points are gone and I never did get those women…