Well, apparently I’ve achieved the vaunted and much-desired “trusted user” status on DKos. That means I can rate people down, as opposed to just up. I’m probably not going to do it much, just like I rarely troll rated people when I had privs on SlashDot (back when /. was interesting…)

Daily Kos probably gets as much traffic as /. did back in the heyday, but their rating system is much different. Ratings are simply thumbs up as far as normal users are concerned, so the higher the number, the more recommended that comment is. Whereas in /., every comment was rated from 0-5. /. allowed you to quickly filter to view only comments above a specific level, which filtered out a lot of gunk but also meant that most people were actually reading less. This I think probably led to a situation where important and interesting comments were not seen by many people, and it was almost a competition for cleverness, etc. Whereas the system on DKos leads to much more of an actual dialogue.

Anyway, what lead to this was my analysis on the subject of the 46-page 2005 “torture” memo by White House “attorney” Steven Bradbury, which you can read here, if you have the stomach for it. (it’s really nasty stuff, to be honest, and I felt ill after reading it and writing about it).

Update: trusted user status is gone! Thank god, the stress was getting to me.