Slashdot's 1997-2006 Era

Obviously dating myself a bit here but Slashdot was a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Well I guess it still is technically, but ever since similar sites like Digg and Reddit have come to the forefront, the best days of Slashdot have long fallen behind.

The site has always been innovative in its moderation, curation and general operation. Summaries of stories and links to news articles are submitted by Slashdot's own users, and each story becomes the topic of a threaded discussion among users. Discussion is moderated by a user-based moderation system. Randomly selected moderators are assigned points (typically 5) which they can use to rate a comment. Moderation applies either −1 or +1 to the current rating, based on whether the comment is perceived as either "normal", "offtopic", "insightful", "redundant", "interesting", or "troll" (among others).