(This is the continuation of a conversation that I started with fenix down about slashdot moderation. I saw a +5 comment that I thought had a lot more value than the other comments attached to that article. Rather than get moderated OT for the rest of the discussion, I thought I'd move the conversation here to my journal. Please join in the conversation, as I think this is an interesting topic.)
I don't have a lot of experience with other moderation systems (Kuroshin comes to mind), but I know what features I'd like to see in a moderation system.
I expect that any given thread of conversation will have a bell curve distribution of rated comments, assuming no cap to the top or the bottom. That is, there are very few highly-rated comments, very few low-rated comments, and a vast proportion of comments in the middle, spread out.
I'd like to see a moderation system that reflects this. I'd like to be able to set my threshold to a percentage of the bell curve: show me the top 2% of posts. You could also set it to say: show me the top 20 posts, which would figure out what the threshold percentage should be, based on the posting distribution.
With this model, having a cap at the top and the bottom cuts off the bell curve prematurely, saying, in essence, that all posts that would have been rated above (or below) the cap should all be treated as equal.
Caps do prevent the abuse of moderation, however. No single post can be sent into the stratosphere or down to oblivion. But I thought metamoderation, as currently implemented on slashdot, is seen by the editors as being the solution to invalid moderation.
All summed up, I don't see any reason why the scoring caps on the top and the bottom should remain on Slashdot.
However, I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. Please educate me.