I bet FT can give some good slashdot.org stories
Well, it's hard to compare /. to either usenet or to a 'regular' web-based forum such as CP or CW because /. is a self-moderated forum. For those who don't know, here's how it works. Each post gets a score. If the poster was a /. member, the post starts out with a score of 1 or 2 depending on how 'good' of a poster posted it. If the poster isn't logged in (known as an Anonymous Coward or AC), it starts out at 0. From there certain randomly chosen members (moderators) get to grade the post up or down. Most posts stay right where they started out at, but if a particularly good comment is made it will get moderated up. And if an off-topic, trollish or flame-inducing post is made, it will (usually) get modded down. The max score is 5 and the min is -1. You can choose to filter posts that score below a certain number. For example, I always browse at +1 and sort by score so that I see the best posts first. This filters out all the crapflooding, goat sex links, ASCII art, penis birds, etc. Well, there's a lot more to it than that, but that's the basic idea. With such a large readership, there had to be a way to filter out as much of the noise as possible, and this system does a reasonable job.
While there are flamewars on slashdot, they are very short-lived. The /. readership are incredibly knowledgable about the topics that tend to get posted there and the readership is huge*. So there is very little tolerance for BS and people who don't know what they're talking about. For any given story, the odds are excellent that there is a /. reader who happens to be an expert on that particular subject. The rule I try to remember when posting on /. is that no matter what it is that I'm about to say, somebody there knows more about it than I do. If somebody starts spewing nonsense, they will get a) modded into oblivion or b) shouted down by people who know much more than the original poster or c) both. When people at /. break out the flamethrowers, somebody usually had it coming. So it's a little Darwinistic, but for the most part that's a Good Thing (tm) because the good comments survive while the bad ones hit the evolutionary scrap heap.
* The number of slashdot members is well over half a million. My member ID is over 20,000 and I'm considered one of the /. FOGs.
