Actually, Slashdot's quality of moderation and posts is very, very good, not to mention having maintained a consistent quality over the years. In comparison, every other "upvote/downvote" system has succumbed to the Digg phenomena sooner or later.
It's still one of the rare sites where, years later, I go back and see the same quality of posts (which honestly isn't that bad), and the caliber is kept high enough that my brain doesn't bleed internally.
While I agree the moderation is better than Digg and Reddit, etc I think Slashdot can be a pretty harsh/negative environment because the culture accepts (and even likes to see) gladiatorial intellectual commenting. Things like, "Actually, if you had ever even seen the abc variation of blah blah expression you would know that it isn't nearly the same, there is a full .00002 measurable difference" etc.
I'd like to see HN get past this sort of bullying and trend more towards helpful/intelligent.
Maybe only let the person who's being replied moderate a comment.
And up-arrow means "This is insightful and I'm glad you took the time to talk to me, you've made me a better person and I would like to continue having this conversation with you" while down-arrow could mean "I wish to stop talking right now, you're boring and I wouldn't have a beer with you".
I mean, when everyone has the chance to judge what everybody says, you're favoring group-thinking. It's a meritocracy. Which isn't something bad, but if it's not your objective, then drop it. It's a pipe dream to still deny comments are up/down votted based on quality instead of agreement or agenda. It's written on the rules, yet it's simply not followed. I wish people could simply accept that this has been tried, many many times, on a lot of websites, and the reality is that it doesn't work. There are the rules and there is how people actually act.
It's like how project management with Scrum is done. Or rather, what it is up against. Like the person who gave me the course on Scrum said: You can make the client write his requirements with the blood of his first born male, he'll still want to change. It's just how things work. Instead of trying to swim against the tide, fighting its force, we should accept and work with it.
I think designing a system where "helpful" is the ultimate goal might be worthy pursuing. Or maybe Yahoo Answers or Stack Overflow -like systems are the best we can do.
