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Comment by ghssds | Hacker News Reader

Slashdot refused to moderate comments in an effective manner. Comment section was always full of bad memes that became stale:

* Lot of rickrolling. but replace Rick Astley by Goatse, Tubgirl, or LemonParty.

* Frist post

* BSD is dying

* GNAA

* Nathalie Portman

* Robotic Overlord

* In Soviet Russia

* Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these memes

* etc.

Then it becames fixated on SCO and basically became Darl McBride News, for years...

However, what was interresting was their qualified upvote system. You did not simply upvote or downvote, but needed to add a qualifier to it: +1 Informative, +1 Insightful, +1 Interesting, +1 Funny, -1 Troll, -1 Offtopic, -1 Flamebeat. I never seen such a system elsewhere.

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You forgot Cowboy Neal, you insensitive clod!

> However, what was interresting was their qualified upvote system

In the abstract, this seemed like a brilliant idea, and I don't understand why nobody else tries it, and I still don't see a good argument against it.

But in their specific implementation, if you deem that "funny" can redeem a post in and of itself (and you allow an open community to judge humour), well, you get what you measure. (And nowadays, "troll" is basically understood to mean the same thing as "flamebait", because nobody trolls the old-fashioned way — it's increasingly hard to distinguish yourself from people who are actually that clueless, and too many clueless people around to make it worthwhile to fake more.)

I used to be a meta moderator there. But you're right, you need to have a strong "hand" or the communities like that fall apart.

Their original owners also sold the site.

Sensiblee*ection used a similar voting system. They probably borrowed it from Slashdot, but added more qualifiers.

slashdot stopped allowing easy new user sign ups a while back. Now its the same folks over and over, very predictable. A number of those old memes have died out, mostly. They really limited ascii art which helped too. There do seem to be a lot of trolls/psyops in the comments.

jesus this takes me back

slides a bowl of grits down the front of his pants

... something something Natalie Portman...

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