Now I don't know much about these "modstormers" or what drives them to do that, nor do I know for sure what drives the Diary posters to post about it, but I do know that it all seems to detract from the weblog experience.
The first cause for me to say that it is annoying is that it results in diary entries by the victims full of bitching and complaining about the abuse.
Those complaints are legitimate enough, that is, people aren't "wrong" to be unhappy about it regardless of whether its an ego thing (all their friend's unrated comments are now 1s and great 5-rated comments dropped to 4s or 3s -- not to even mention trusted-user-status). Although I think posting diary entries may be a bit overboard, as it's a relatively small thing (an e-mail to the site admins who can deal with that if they care about it and do look into those kind of abuses would be more appropriate), but users upset at modstorming they see going around can post diaries, and they do, which wastes the time of other users who read those postings.
The second reason that I say its annoying is because it hurts the moderation system's quality, for those that choose to go by scores, good comments might get buried at the end merely because they weren't rated before or whatnot, either way: the rating of comments are rendered less "accurate" because of a single user's sudden urge to make a run on the system; even though the sorting is not actually important, after all -- while an article is 'fresh', the ratings are under the possible review of anyone who comes in (ratings in general are unreliable and often dependent on groupthink -- many simply ignore them), and in-fact, ratings are often unreliable measures of quality at random intervals without any directed "large-scale attack" using the moderation system, people have been seen to rate 1 because they don't like someone or are religiously opposed to the argument of the post they're rating (it's only human).
Storming has the largest effect on sorting of previously-unrated comments posted by a user, particularly in places no longer viewed, this can cause hurt egos (resulting from the "your comments button" showing a bunch of 1.0 / 1s), and hostility between users can be caused by this while at the same time resulting in yet more of it which is not good either.
Hearing of this happening on K5 simply alarms me . Sounds like something that would happen on slashdot. I think the purpose of weblogs is to provide for interesting discussion, not to provide users with a place to waste time modstorming or participating in moderation wars - while it may be possible to integrate games into a weblog; I feel that moderation should not be a game.
I propose a "work-around"/"counterweight" to this problem that I perceive, yes I admit this would be a superficial technical solution to a social problem, but nevertheless:
If the problem is modstorming, then limit the scope of moderation based on time.
Ok, enough with the hypothetical stuff, here's my view of a counterweighted system:
------------------------------
-
When a comment is posted, a timer since the post time starts.
-
Every time a new person (one who hasn't ever modded it before) moderates a comment,
that timer restarts.
-
When there have been 24 hours since the last
moderation (or since the posting if no
moderations), the comment's rating is set
in dry mud, no more moderations can be
added or changed, except a rating on a
hidden comment by a trusted user (that act
would reset the counter too).
The net effect is that unless a comment is actively being rated, the rating becomes permanent. In this matter modstormers can't have the blast they'd like to, it would ruin their fun a bit.
The downside is that this would assume comments that should be rated are rated so fairly quickly, ie: within 24 hours of their posting. In my experience, this is typical, although for some weblogs it may not be.
This would also prevent people from giving a comment a rating and changing it later: the rating becomes permanent after a while, just like a story vote. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, though.
Thoughts? Did I post this to the wrong site? Am I trying to reinvent the wheel? Is this just impossible? :)
