The moderation and meta-moderation system was a thing of elegant beauty.

I'm till flabbergasted that noone stole it, it worked so well.

I wonder if it would work for HN.

It would work, the mods just don't like it

Any source on that?

I would guess it's more likely that the Slashdot moderation system is too hard to implement. It also requires a lot of finetuning (like how to determine how many moderation points to dole out to users based on their karma and activity). The Hacker News developers seem to prefer to keep things simple, so they might reject Slashdot-style moderation for being too complicated, but that doesn't mean they don't like it in principle.

The source is that the HN mods know about Slashdot, and people have been asking for those features here for 15 years, and they haven't been implemented.

Slashdot's mod system is not complex.

Did it work well for retaining good discussion and a community?

...or for making money?

Good discussion and community.

Technically soylent news did, but then, they also used the whole codebase and just changed the site red.