When you start wishing social news site X won't become like social news site Y, it's probably inevitable at that point.
Slashdot is bad because people post the same fucking diatribes over and over. I guess this happens on Reddit and Digg too, but to a lesser extent. You could roll Slashdot back to 1999 and it would be the same people with the same views talking about the same thing. We get your point, enough already :)
Oh well, at least there's still Lambda The Ultimate.
Sssshhhh! The others will hear you.
1) Roll Slashdot back to 1999 2) ?????????????? 3) Profit!
Hmmm. How about I start a site called "Lambda teh Ultimate" which does nothing but promulgate bad programming practices, procedural spaghetti code, and Farkish stupitrivia that's somehow still too nerdy for the mainstream?
There will be a regex filter that introduces bad grammar, misuse of homophones, to instead of too, their instead of they're, etc... Also bots that the markov chains to post schizophrenic sounding manifestos promising to revolutionize all programming by subsuming everything with GOTO and DB tables.
There will be auto-moderation, giving certain users bonus points, implemented by running StupidFilter in reverse.
To become a moderator, you first have to prove that you spend more than 9 non-sleeping hours alone in your room a day, and that you still live with your parents.
The site will be ad supported, but all ads will be required to be pop-ups that install plugin EXEs. If there are not enough ads, they will be randomly generated from emails in my Spam folder.
All of the web design will be generated by using genetic algorithms operating on the corpus of MySpace profiles for users aged 16 or younger.
The commenting will be modeled on YouTube from early 2007 and before.
1-pg's financial interest is not impressions, it's the number of smart hacker readers he can attract to YC, and for that he needs high signal-noise.
2-pg retains ownership. He has control and can judiciously change the system or deputize people at any point and in any manner to filter content.
But hey, since pg wants to pay for it, that's fine with me :)