Fish. Barrel. Gun. I'm all set here...

One of YouTube's latest inventions has recently gone live on the site - comment moderation, à la Slashdot. The mechanics of this are fairly simple - each comment made on a video also has little voting buttons so that site visitors can rate comments. The idea is that comments can therefore be promoted for insight or comedy, or alternatively buried if they're spam or offensive. And, so that you don't have to see these latter class of comments should you not wish to, there's a filter box at the top of the comments section that lets you see only those with a rating of more than -10 (very poor), -5 (poor), 0 (average), 5 (good) or 10 (very good).

In principle, useful. However, given that it's now possible to set the filter to "good", then go to almost any video on the entire site and see no comments whatsoever...

...well, it's already not very difficult to criticise YouTube commenters. I just can't quite fathom the site's rationale in making this easier.