Degradation

I thought that the section of chapter seven devoted to "Degredation" was interesting, because it's something I've put some thought into myself. (Not because I'm on Slashdot most every day for quite some time, of course not...)

The idea of meta-moderation seems brilliantly novel at first. The idea of a constantly-shifting mod base is very democratic. I've had bad experiences on forums where the moderators are petty tyrants, ruling over their small virtual hills. I didn't know Slashdot in the early days, it was already huge when I was establishing an online identity, but I've been in on the ground floor of a few forums and I've seen how some trend toward totalitarianism. Slashdot's system makes so much sense looking backward - but then, why do most similar forums never implement it? (Probably the time/money cost of writing the scripts to handle karma, mod point assignment, etc.) But once you've seen the Slashdot method for moderation, you wonder why anyone would ever leave the control of a forum in the hands of one or two people.

After long periods on Slashdot, I sometimes find myself looking for the +5 Insightful toggle when I read something interesting - like the reading assignment for this evening. Alas, I looked at the space above the insightful bits and was disappointed. I think I have some mod points on /. right now, maybe I can fill out some form to attach one to Natural-Born Cyborgs.