Well put. It'll be interesting to see how pg and team handle something that every other site has failed miserably with.

I've got high hopes.

Not every site. The Ars Technica forums have maintained a surprisingly high level of quality discussion over the years. Ars uses human moderators who read every post and enforce the rules.

There's also Metafilter. Or more spcifically, ask Metafilter which maintains one of the highest quality, large communities I've managed to find online.

http://ask.metafilter.com/

The $5 price of admission seems to be beyond most 1337 hax0rz with funy p!cs and LOLZ.

Maybe there should be some kind of validation before you can start posting and taking part in the discussions.

A smart way of doing this would be to let potential new users write a bit about themselves, and let existing users vote on whether or not they should be allowed to post based on their introduction of themselves.

Another way would be to let new users have a quota of comments that could be raised if the initial comments were voted up.

Slashdot implemented something in something similar long time ago (I guess they still do it) and I don't know why nobody ripped that off. To start moderating your account need pass a certain threshold of "oldness".

I think the moderation is even more important because when people start modding down valid coments or modding up stupidity that's what make me want to leave. That's when I got annoyed with Digg +-2 years ago and Reddit +-1 year ago.

I've been wondering that too. Slashdot has gone through all of the problems that face digg, reddit, etc. And they have found some pretty good solutions through trial and error. They are even well documented here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml

Generally I am amazed that moderation systems are not better than they are, especially since the stakes seem to be so high in this niche right now.

Actually, instead of that, why not just assess their voting habits and allow posting at a certain threshold? Those users that continually upvote stories and comments that are considered "low quality" are held, be they new/old whatever. Get too low, and you can't vote either.

The only issue is you need to be very specific in how you choose to asses what is "high" vs. what is "low" quality. Too rigid and you basically encourage group-think, too lax; anarchy.

(Note: I would keep "karma" in place since it would help to distract from the "real" karma system.)

Insightful isn't a type of person, it's a type of idea.

Every person is a set of ideas.

I think he's intending to show how the system might actually work.