[saurik]

I had down voted you (and thereby might be the person whom you are referring to who did so) as you are making an anecdotal statement that is sufficiently far-fetched as to be ludicrous. Now, in your follow-up, you seem to be lumping me (the person who downmodded you) into the category of "moderators", which is technically fine but then useless: I am another member of this site, just like you; the mechanisms here are then no different than they are on almost any other system that ha peer moderation. If you are using Slashdot, reddit, Digg, DISQUS... virtually any modern forum solution, there is a downvote feature, and it works virtually the same way. Yet, now your new comment (which I also "downmodded") seems to be ignorant of this mechanisms on all of these sites, disregards the list of sites procided by DanBC, and continues to not list any other sites thaw here moderation was not a common topic; you seriously just look like you've never used any other websites at this point.

[vacri]

No different from other peer moderation? And you downmod me? Using your first example, Slashdot, there is exactly the thing I am talking about: a reason for the mod. You seem to be more ignorant of the topic than you accuse me of being.

Similarly, you say I disregard a list of sites when I mention three of the four in my response about my personal experience being part of web communities (and seriously, 'as good as 4chan' is hardly an argument for content quality, particularly on a site where the users pride themselves on intellect and quality).

[saurik]

The reasons on Slashdot are both coarse (no detail: just a few adjectives; on the negative side, we have flame air, troll, offtopic, redundant, and overrated... I am not even certain which one I would have picked for "poster is arguing an anecdote without even providing his single datapoint), transient (when I spent years on Slashdot, and maybe currently still, you could only see one of these adjectives, even if a bunch of people downvoted you), and anonymous (your decisions could be meta-moderated, but the meta-moderation did not disclose who you were).

Your issues with not knowing who downvoted you for what reasons seem nearly identical to Slashdot, then (modulo I guess being marked "troll" when you were really downvoted for something more readily corrected). You had previously mad it clear that you cared deeply about the moderators being anonymous, and boy if Slashdot didn't maintain that.

Regardless: you have still, to this point, not stated even a single other web community you were a part of, only that they existed. The conversation becomes interesting an useful when you can point at actual examples (as it has now for Slashdot).

To look at this from another analogy, imagine it you claimed that you had never seen a bank that charged fees. Someone else responds saying they had never seen a bank that didn't charge fees and then lists ten banks that charge fees. You then respond with simply "I don't agree those are banks" but don't provide a list of banks that don't charge fees. I fail to see how you can claim you are then being helpful in that conversation.