dsandler.org

Bah. Just posted a comment to this reddit thread about e-voting and noticed that my comment started at +0 instead of +1; on a hunch, I logged out and reloaded the page, and, sure enough, I’m banned from reddit again.

Apparently there’s only one thing that is currently theorized to merit the reddit death penalty, and I swear, I didn’t do it! (I even own a copy of Hackers and Painters…)

Update 10/10: Un-banned. See comments.

I noticed this afternoon that I’ve been silently banned from my favorite shiny-things-on-the-intertubes website, reddit.

Last night I came across something that I thought the programming.reddit.com crowd would enjoy: The Future of Vim on the Mac, a survey of the fractured state of the Mac OS X Vim port. There are lots of OS X geeks and vim geeks on Reddit, so it seemed a natural thing to post. +1 Informative.

This morning I went to check programming.reddit (to see if my article had spurred any discussion), and didn’t see it in the first couple of pages of “hot” stories. Not so hot a topic, I guess. I went to my list of links and comments to see what the score was: zero. OK, nobody cares.

On a whim I decided to dig through the list of all programming articles by date to see what other stuff came up around the same time. After all, if my story lost the popularity contest, it lost to something else, right?

It’s not there.

I skimmed back about 10 pages before satisfying myself that it was simply nowhere to be found. So I deleted the link from Reddit and re-posted it. About an hour later, its score is still at 0 (didn’t these things originally start at +1?) and it’s still not anywhere on the site. Not hot, not new, “rising” or “all.” Zilch.

As you can see, I posted a handful of other links (submitted both to programming and reddit proper) to see if I could get anything to show. The answer, friends, is no.

Any other members of the reddit silent minority out there? No? Just me?

Redditors: Go do your civic duty and upvote a few non-spam articles right now. Don’t let a decent article die because a misanthrope or spambot automatically downvoted it!

This reddit.com thread has enlightened me to the simple effectiveness of the Slashdot comment moderation system. For all its troubles, it’s still the best out there, and here’s why: Moderations are all positive, except for inappropriate or abuse flags, like troll/spam/offtopic/redundant. This tends to discourage downmodding comments which are on-topic but with which you disagree. Contrast Digg and Reddit: people seem to use the -1 button (down-arrow in Reddit, thumbs-down in Digg) to bury comments they disagree with.

The way I see it, if you can cause others’ arguments to disappear from conversations just by the vehemence of your disapproval, you ruin any chance at meaningful discourse. Because Digg and Reddit allow you to mod down for any reason, users feel freer to mod down for the wrong reasons.

(I’m still not entirely sure where I fall on the whole “everyone gets mod powers” vs. “only the karmic get mod points, and then only sparingly” debate. Thoughts?)