GiantBomb has a great premise. Users make edits, moderators approve or reject those edits case by case, only the best submissions make it through. That's the idea, anyway. In practice, I'm not finding that to be the case...

About a week ago, I made several edits, most notably blurbs for games I like. I like blurbs a lot. A little one or two sentence that summarizes a game. It's a challenge to fit a 50+ hour game into two sentences, but it feels good to pull it off. It feels terrible when your efforts go to waste though.

Case in point, I wrote up my own blurb for Eternal Darkness, one of my all time favorite games. I thought about the blurb for a long time, finally coming up with a 50 word description of it. I felt the description was true to the spirit of the game. I was proud of it, to be honest. I'm rarely proud of anything I write, but I took pride in my blurb. I don't remember exactly what I wrote, but it had something to do with the main character, the 1000 year struggle for humanity's fate, and the game's main object, the Tome of Eternal Darkness.

Several days later, my submission was finally approved. The system works! And then a day later, someone else's submission was accepted, completely replacing mine. Had their submission been better, the system would have worked as designed. The cream of the crop would have risen to the surface. Only the best blurb would have survived, and I'd have been happy about it, although I'd have been sad to see my blurb vanish. But no... the new blurb was worse than mine. Much worse. Worse both in context and in grammar.

It basically said "this is a zombie game where you can loose your sanity through insanity effects."

That's wonderful. A blurb about this game that's much more refined than "that insanity game," and yet that's the blurb we wind up with. THAT is insanity.

So anyway, I'm done making edits. If the moderators are just approving anything that's in their queue and aren't bothering to research or at least read the thing they're approving, then the site just plain doesn't work. There's no reason to have moderators. I don't envy them and all of the submissions they have to look at, but the site is fundamentally flawed if they don't put real effort into what they're doing.

Maybe it's just one moderator who's slacking, maybe it's the whole team, I have no way of knowing. All I know is that what I wrote is gone forever (where's the undo button?). I'm not sore about it. It's simply a big sign that says "don't bother."