Moderation 101
Have you ever been to [link|http://slashdot.org?|http://slashdot.org?] Any article may get several hundres replies and replies to replies. And there may be several dozen articles posted per day. Unless you are a speed-reading savant, or a bored high-school/college student, you can't possibly read everything. So how do you narrow it down? Moderation.
Several hundred people every day are assigned "moderation points" and they can rate any given post as particularly worthwhile, or not. Users can then choose to only see highly-ranked posts. By limiting moderation points to frequent visitors, the system attempts to filter out one-hit-wonders who just want to game the system. Of course bored high-school/college students just see that as a challenge ...
It's sort of like finding a movie reviewer you like. You can't see everything, so you find someone whose opinion you trust and go by their recommendations. Except that the sheer volume of new material on the net means the criticism had to be distributed. Figuring out how to distribute the load in a useful way is, to some strange people, fascinating.
