thoughton:digitallife Humour on SlashDot

Humour on SlashDot

After years of reading SlashDot, I have finally taken the plunge and registered for an account there! The reason? The decrease in what usenet geeks call the "signal-to-noise" ratio. In the (possibly rose-tinted) past SlashDot comments were invariably insightful and technically impressive, but recently the surge in irrelevant comments has been quite irritating.

After thinking about it for a few minutes, it occured to me that given SlashDot's unique moderation system there might be some kind of preference where I could filter out the frivolous comments. But only if I registered. And, lo and behold, after registering and checking the user preferences section I found exactly what I was after! Once you log in, you can go to the Preferences:Comments page, and change the "Reason Modifier" for "Funny" to "-6". This will moderate all "Funny" comments down by 6, and thus guaranteeing they fall below my threshold of 2 (and guaranteeing I never have to read another inane joke about Beowolf clusters).

To illustrate my point about the number of wannabe comedians, this story about the recently-discovered giant apes in the Congo has 172 comments with no humour filtering. With humour filtering that number drops to 132. In my humble opinion having 1 in 4 comments making some kind of joke is far too much. And most of the jokes aren't even funny!!! I wouldn't object so much if the humour moderation was a bit more discerning, but when a one-line comment such as "An ape capable of killing lions ran away after a peek--that must have been one ugly face!" rececives the maximum +5 moderation for humour, I find I lose a lot faith in the collective sense of humour of SlashDot moderators. Apologies to whoever posted that comment, but this feeble joke would barely crack a smile if you told it in real life, why is it so funny on SlashDot?

Posted on 11 October 2004, to Bereft of Reason | Internet