Funny that you mentioned Slashdot as a paragon of intelligent community. I recently stopped going to /. all together because the signal-to-noise ratio got too low. You can't talk about anything there without getting past a bunch of 'first post' and GNAA comments, and once you find a decent thread of discussion, it is inevitably hijacked by some amateur Grammar Nazi pointing out the difference between its and it's (since the person who misused it obviously did it on purpose... definitely couldn't be a typo).
You could say "just browse at 4 and higher," but then you miss a lot of good stuff that was downmodded for political reasons, or was too far down the page to ever get upmodded to begin with. This gives more weight to early comments than later ones, and hence everything must be hastily done, and hence there will be a typo which will bring out the Grammar Nazis, etc.
Slashdot has a lot of problems. The only reason it hasn't become a Digg or Reddit is because human moderators actually screen the stuff that gets posted, rather than rely on the (lack of) wisdom of the crowds. Content-wise, Digg and Reddit tread a lot of the same territory as Fark nowdays, only on Fark the main point is writing a funny headline or photoshopping a funny image, not the story itself.
I think YC News works because it is small, and I think it stays small because it is focused. So thank you all for keeping it focused.
I've been reading /. for ages and ages. For me the key to avoiding the frippery that can consume the site is to turn off .sigs, and to use the new-style commenting to adjust my comment thresholds. I have threads which are not highly-modded show up as just a "X comments here" note. Generally even if something is downmodded for being unpopular it will still get a lot of replies, so you can use the to keep an eye out for downmodded but still worthwhile posts. The Slashdotter Firefox extension is helpful too.
I don't really have an answer to the 'early posts are more important' problem though. That's been bugging me too.
I stopped reading /. in November. You're right, these problems have been around forever, but until lately I had no alternative. I have always been mostly interested in the stories they ran on software and renewable energy stuff, but have found several blogs and YC News (and now the Arc Forums) to be much more satisfying of my software reading needs. As for renewable energy, most of the /. stories just got so outlandish and pie in the sky that it just wasn't worth reading about.
The problems I have described above were those that made me want to leave /. to begin with, but I couldn't really get out until I found an alternative of some sort. And like I said, I didn't read at a certain threshold, so I got to see the stuff even if it was downmodded (and got to see some good stuff too that was downmodded).
You could say "just browse at 4 and higher," but then you miss a lot of good stuff that was downmodded for political reasons, or was too far down the page to ever get upmodded to begin with. This gives more weight to early comments than later ones, and hence everything must be hastily done, and hence there will be a typo which will bring out the Grammar Nazis, etc.
Slashdot has a lot of problems. The only reason it hasn't become a Digg or Reddit is because human moderators actually screen the stuff that gets posted, rather than rely on the (lack of) wisdom of the crowds. Content-wise, Digg and Reddit tread a lot of the same territory as Fark nowdays, only on Fark the main point is writing a funny headline or photoshopping a funny image, not the story itself.
I think YC News works because it is small, and I think it stays small because it is focused. So thank you all for keeping it focused.