I don’t think slashdot was firs to use crowd sourced rating, but I am not aware of others to have an actual functioning system at a scale of 10s of thousands in that era.

And to be fair, everything2 used the term karma before slashdot. We had the concept of karma, but it was called like modtotal or something innocuous. Nate was working on e2 and we were discussing ideas and I realized the term was way more clear so I did the UPDATE TABLE that day. 98 maybe?