[mbreese]

Slashdot was user-moderated, so you just needed enough people to find something +1 Funny or +1 Interesting. And rick rolls were always +5 Funny. The fun really started with the meta-moderation though. I’m still not sure how that experiment turned out.

It’s strange to think how changes in moderation and up-voting have led us from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit (and HN).

[chipotle_coyote]

As someone who was a pretty early Slashdot user -- apparently, my user number there is 3616 -- I think the meta-moderation mostly worked. That's not a universally shared opinion. :) But I thought that the discussion level was consistently decent throughout the 2000s, and I think the moderation system definitely helped there. On the other hand, the multiple layers of user moderation require at least a handful of users to be regular "comment gardeners," which probably requires a fairly large user base to be viable.

(I drifted away sometime around when they were bought by Dice; I can't swear there's a causal connection, but it seemed to me the site kind of lost its mojo through the 2010s.)