C3ntaur's Journal: Lazy Moderators

I've all but given up on submitting stories; I've been rejected more times than I can count as an AC, and every story I've submitted as myself has also been rejected. Anyway, I think the topic submitting today is too important to just go into the bitbucket, so I'm posting it here also:

So I'm looking at Will Humanoid Robots Take All the Jobs by 2050?, and I see that the first 7 posts have all been moderated to +5. None of these posts are that insightful, informative, or funny, but I have a pretty good idea as to why they got modded up that high.

Under the current system, when mod points are handed out, the moderator gets 3 days to "use them or lose them". Furthermore, if the moderator doesn't use up his points, his chance of getting another allotment is decreased. Add to that the risk of getting negative karma for modding negatively, and it's pretty easy to see why the first several posts that are even remotely on topic always get modded up to ridiculous scores.

Some possible solutions that came to me are:

1. Eliminate the criterion that shuts off the flow of mod points to those who don't use them up. People go on vacation, or get busy with other things in life, and don't always have the time to apply their mod point allotments. Why penalize them for this?

2. Only the most extreme cases of abuse should result in penalties for modding negatively. Maybe this is already so, but the moderator community needs to be reassured that they won't get penalized when they mod down something that's been modded too high.

3. Create some sort of incentive for deep moderation. Perhaps mod points applied to posts deeper than the first 50 would only subtract half a point from the moderator's allotment.