As you sew, so shall you reap

I have been moderating slashdot on and off and trying to do it within the guidelines and avoid any bias. I always browse at -1 when I do that and I have started doing that all the time. I decided to browse at 2 today and is that nice! I may not be a good moderator, but the combined effect seems to work to weed out the time wasting products. I think I understand something more about the moderation. The obvious advantage is that for moderating at -1, we all get the benefit of the selection process and if you just love ascii goatsee art then by all means feel free to read at -1

I think that all together the method they use could be applied to the information on the net and if it were slash rated as I browse, I could limit my results to what is considered current and useful by most programmers. It seems that the people who make a valid attempt at being fair out number the flame baiters and trolls. Maybe not by much but still it does make a difference and it would be nice to have a common system to rate all the internet content for a google to slash sub set. I find that I can waste quite a bit of time by getting dragged in to sites that seem to be open source and have relevant information when they are actually just jerking around with the search engine. It would be nice if google would have an edit button that allowed me to rate their links as being the most useful as paired with a particular search. Obviously it would require some selection process that favored real people and not bots or anonymous users trying to screw with the statistics.

The rating system that slashdot uses could be modified to include other categories such as risk. The process of creating new risk is ongoing and so it would seem that if you are testing your security and want to visit dangerous sites, then it would help there also.