For some unknown reason, my body decided to become conscious at around 0400 this morning. I decided that sleep in the very near future was hopeless, and stumbled across the room to Argo to surf a bit.

What I found was a piece of history being made. (At least it qualifies as something resembling "history" in the minds of a bunch geeks who have nothing better to do than sit around and debate endlessly on concepts such as karma, thresholds, and the essence of a perfect troll.)

A full-fledged moderation war surrounding a single comment was in full swing. Holy bleep! Hundreds of moderation points spent on moderating the results of a rather silly "research" project, whose subject, ironically enough, was the moderation system of slashdot. I would normally dismiss the content of this post as more random silliness (actually, I still do). Offtopic? Yes. Interesting? Yes. Funny? Certainly.

But it got crazier when I started reading the replies. Along with the usual slashdot stream of idiocy (which one always expects when reading at -1), there were many intriguing posts debating the merits and flaws of the "research". And all of them had a score of (-1, Offtopic). Hundreds upon hundreds of posts, all uniformly scored down to -1. Something fishy going on.

Scrolling down in the thread, accussations of "bitchslapping" against /. editorial staff started to appear. Some people claimed to have posted comments, and instantly see them be zapped to -1 within a minute.

At this point, I became curious, and added my own little contribution as an experiment to see if it would be modded down immediately (in the case of my trivial post, being modded down was well deserved, unlike the people who actually posted something thoughtful and got a -1 anyway). It was not. It stayed there for several minutes at a score of 2.

I went back to sleep for a few minutes before getting ready to go to work.

The moderation war continued throughout the day. The totals on the post which started it all continued to escalate. I checked a few times from work, and saw that my post along and other recent ones had all been given the -1 treatment. So be it.

Upon arriving home this evening, I checked again. The relatively new slashdot messaging feature allowed me to see exactly when the moderations had occurred:

Friday January 18, @08:48
Friday January 18, @08:49
Friday January 18, @09:43

The close temporal proximity of first 2 offtopic moderations somewhat confirmed what several other posters had been saying. Since no normal user is allowed to use more than 1 mod point on a single post, combined with the large number of people reporting this pattern, it does seem likely that someone with "super-moderator" ability is at work here. Some moderators are created more equal than others.

The discussion on the front page k5 article has also been interesting, especially when one member of the slashdot crew came and gave his 2 cents.

Quite the drama going on. I suppose that to complete this, I should put forth some sort of commentary stating my opinion on the matter. So I shall, although I doubt there's much I can say that hasn't already been stated by the numerous (-1, Offtopic) debates.

Yes, I think that it has largely turned into a war between censorship-paranoid readers (it's no secret we've got plenty of those), and /. staff who understandably want to keep the discussion... well... on-topic. I buy into the theory that most of the recent negative moderations are being done by /. staff. Who else is going to have the power to systematically moderate every post a 2-day-old thead down to oblivion? (I could see a few users doing it, but that many hundreds of mod points being poured into scoring hundreds upon hundreds of posts to -1? It's a stretch.)

The ones pushing it up are users with moderator privileges who have spotted this (that number is obviously increasing as the word spreads), and are spending their points in symbolic protest. A civil war.

If you step back and think about it for a minute, the entire thing is really quite silly. But we humans thrive on controversy, so I don't see it stopping.

Conclusion: It's their website. They can do with it what they want. CmdrTaco and crew worked hard to make it, and they obviously take a lot of shit for it.

OTOH, with this event, I think a lot of people, myself included, have lost a huge dose of trust in the /. moderation system. I've set my threshold back to -1. I'll read the mess, trolls and all (or at least scan them), or nothing at all. At least for a while.

And yes, I think this degree of interest does merit a front page discussion, so that people can talk about it on-topic. But, as somebody pointed out, that doesn't appear likely to happen. A bad sign.

Now, I've missed the first few minutes of Buffy as I sat and rambled endlessly about this. Enough! Time to relax and chill. Peace.