Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read Slashdot nearly every day for quite a few years, stepping away at some point in the 2000s. That particular aspect of the moderation system sounds good on paper, but was rather useless in practice. Essentially, what "matters" is that people are upvoting or downvoting a particular post. Theoretically, it's good to have a bit of additional metadata telling us why they're doing it: i.e., do they find the post Funn…
>For example, it would have been perhaps useful to filter out all of the "Funny" replies on Slashdot The interface did indeed allow you to do this. At least, I remember it being there in about 2001. Additionally, the metadata on voting was particularly important for meta-moderation which other platforms don't really have. Users were (at random) shown a comment that you've voted on and your vote. They then said whethe…
It's certainly very interesting to talk about, at least for me!
Starting with the results and working backwards, I didn't find the results of moderation+metamoderation on Slashdot to be superior to subsequent sites like Reddit and HN that skipped the metamoderation portion.
Why? I think metamoderation on Slashdot was ultimately redundant. The metamoderators were also the moderators. So your moderation was being moderated by the moderators that moderated the posts. The metamoderation was not really of a higher quality than the moderation, so it didn't really add much.
Metamoderation was good at flagging grossly incompetent moderation, such as somebody seeing an ASCII swastika and upvoting it. However, as long as the community as whole is relatively healthy, that sort of poor moderation would be rendered moot anyway; such a post on Reddit would receive perhaps 98% downvotes and 2% upvotes, it's not clear to me that preventing that tiny 2% minority from voting in the future would be demonstrably better than simply drowning them out which is what happens by default anyway.
Metamoderation could perhaps be useful if the metamoderators were guaranteed to be trusted, high-quality users.
Slashdot tried to do something like that; IIRC you got the opportunity to meta-mod after you were up-modded yourself, so theoretically "better" posters were doing the meta-modding, but in practice I think this just added an extra layer of echoes to the echo chamber.