I wish that were true, but the traditional way is the traditional way for a reason. It worked, providing necessary efficiency in a specific context. Now, I would argue in an 'ideal discussion system' there would be a variety of different contexts that would be modeled in different ways. This means that you have to have flexibility in the individual implementation, which is part of the reason I was exploring the possibility of lisp list strings in transactional databases below on this thread.
The problem with the arbitrarily-tiered system as I see it is that it relies on tagging. This may work in a smallish community but then you still have a problem when what you or I might consider trolls put youtube-style comments into this discussion on social modeling.
The main way that this has been dealt with is to have evolving communities that focus on very technological subject material. By keeping things at a sufficient level of abstraction, one is able to create a new tech-specific language that must be mastered before one can participate. In other words, one has created a de facto tiered system.
The dark side of this is that the need to force discussion into tech-specific language prevents people from having substantial discussion about fundamentals. And fundamentals (like how people discuss things, or would like to discuss things) are often more important than the latest trends in functional programming.
So I would say that Slashdot and Reddit, though good models, encourage a certain faddishness with respect to the abstract language which they enforce.
As for responsibilities being incremental instead of predefined, I have had similar thoughts. I think the problem (as articulated in political philosophical tomes as well as other places) is that the populace may shift unless it has an investment in something in particular. Usually this investment is in property. With the online world one would need something like core users which are in some way invested in the success or failure of a particular online venue. Once one had core users (property owners) then there are a number of fluid mathematical systems one could employ for the evaluation and promotion both of good content and good users.
I was going to post more philosophical musings related what I see as the Turing Project, but I think Pg deleted my last comment on the topic and this post is quite long already.
Digg and reddit do it in the most straightforward manner. Slashdot is good because it actually matches up with some material in conversation theory. The metrics they chose are pretty good. The rating system though, not good enough.
I agree that the tech-specific language acts as a filter itself, but from a different perspective, I realized that Slashdot's modding system's UI and rules are probably a filter too. i.e., if you are willing to learn all the modding rules, and use the modding system, you've passed the "ritual." To the average user, these complications may well be intolerable.
I need to figure out what's tolerable, soon :)
Content rating is done on a color gradient, from white to blue. Blue is good, white is bad, light blue would be okay. Only members can rate content. Rating would be also be weighted according to the karma of the person doing the rating. In other words, members with more karma would give (or take away) more karma per rating.
Each post would receive a default rating based on the karma of the poster, which would display as a color on the white to blue spectrum already described. The color would change as people rate the content.
Not only comments, but also threads could have ratings on a similar basis. This would allow people to set up certain filters so they would view threads with a certain content rating. Probably a person could automatically become a member when they pass some arbitrary karma threshold.
What do you think about this? Are you already working on something 'tolerable'?
One thing though, I am fairly uncertain about the color gradient. In the beginning I used red-green. But some cultures have the order reversed, and total red and total green excite the eyes differently. Then I opted for using colorless-color (white-"gold", since gold is supposed to be culture-neutral), but when I showed some people they were confused and told me to use red-green :/
I also considered the "full functionality after x threshold" but It's opaque to me what would be a reasonable x. I hope I'll be able to make a judgement later, based on real user data.
I'm not sure about 'x threshold' either. If 'karma' assignment is weighted it wouldn't matter much anyways.
As for colors, what about a bar that increases vertically and has multiple segments? Higher is better and darker? This would give people two things to lock onto, just in case color is not enough.
just my two beans...
The examples you give about discussion are all "real discussion." What I'm saying is that I believe the ideal discussion system would accomodate all these discussions. Poetry, sports, academic journals, etc. If not now, eventually it must.
While sometimes it makes sense to nicheify, like separating a fashion-specific website from a tech-specific one, the material isn't always mutually exclusive, and so lots of information is lost. There should be channels for different discussions to connect to each other. Wikipedia is one example of how it can be done.
I guess arbitrarily-tiered system is a bad phrase. I just mean no explicit tiers, like, you have a bit set for mod status, a bit set for troll status, etc. Everybody will interpret authority, or hierarchy, differently, so just leave it as-is, at least with subjectively assessed content, like puns, politically incorrect jokes... Of course objective measurements are useful for winnowing things like necessarily true statements and necessarily informative statements, but not everything.
I think reddit has a pretty good model. So is Slashdot. They're both obvious improvements from BBS style discussions. But there's a lot more to explore, and this more should be where there is more flexibility. One example where this flexibility is lacking is in funny Slashdot comments. Some of the +5 Funny are great stuff, but I can't just, say, have a Slashdot Jokes section and only look at those (and add jokes to the jokes section). So there's seenonslash.com. But that's a reposting of slashdot comments; in effect, lots of information that could've been more effectively harnessed if the Slashdot system itself was more flexible.
Just my thoughts, but in general I don't like institutions and hierarchies and I'm biased against them. Of course it's insane to abolish all demarcations, but why not allow responsibilities to be expanded or dimished in small increments according to performance? It might take x percent of y to impeach someone in real life, but a virtual system would allow you to, say, have a bit less power if the populace thinks you should have less.
It'd be an interesting experiment if anything.