Hey! Thanks to the whole Reddit mess, I’ve discovered the fediverse and its increidible wonders and I’m lovin’ it :D
I’ve seen another post about karma, and after reading the comments, I can see there is a strong opinion against it (which I do share). I’d love to hear your opinions, what other method/s would you guys implement? If any ofc
Why did Slashdot go down the tubes? Nothing to do with moderation, just management screwups similar to the ones Reddit has had a few times. Slashdot was sort of a 1990’s version of Reddit. It was sold a few different times and the new owners tended to try to impose unpopular changes. Those did usually get rolled back.
Re the moderation system itself, I suspect it went through a lot of iterations. Slashdot was die-hard about free speech so had tons of trolls and spammers, but made the karma system work well enough that you could keep away from the trolling unless you chose to browse at -1. I think -2 was added sometime later when -1 was seen as not low enough. Generally you could do ok by browsing at +3. They asked for mods to browse at -1 so that you could upvote stuff that was downvoted wrongly.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot#Peer_moderation
It says they killed off anonymous posting in 2019, oh well. I had always thought that was a good feature despite the crap that got posted that way.