To tell you the truth, it was turning into a cesspool before Dice. Probably started around the time when the politics section was created. When I go and look at stories back in 2004, it was not uncommon to see some of the top experts in obscure fields chiming-in, making insightful and nuanced observations about the topic, and getting +5 for the effort. It was truly awesome. Over the years, that dissolved into a "me-too" rant and ditto-fest, where mindless, feel-good but completely inaccurate comments were +5. Anything challenging the group-think was -1 Troll, no matter how accurate, which gradually pushed all the experts away.
My editorial style mostly comes from what I saw was horribly wrong with summaries over there... Far too many were superficial, inaccurate, one-side pablum, which resulted in the vast majority of comments being readers trying (much like Sisyphus) to correct the misinformation or slant of the summary on each story. Which is why it irks me when people (namely: editors at SoylentNews) use the number of comments that an article gets as if it's a series of up-votes, or otherwise valuable and necessary.
My editorial style mostly comes from what I saw was horribly wrong with summaries over there... Far too many were superficial, inaccurate, one-side pablum, which resulted in the vast majority of comments being readers trying (much like Sisyphus) to correct the misinformation or slant of the summary on each story. Which is why it irks me when people (namely: editors at SoylentNews) use the number of comments that an article gets as if it's a series of up-votes, or otherwise valuable and necessary.