...let each user be able to vote only on a small random sample of submissions/comments
Slashdot first pioneered that. In case you are not familiar with the scheme, all logged-in users are occasionally asked to vote with their 5 allotted points. Users with high karma are given a chance to vote more often. The points expire in a day or so if they are not used. They also have a meta-moderation system, where you judge how others have used their votes.
They've had the present system for a while (I want to say over 6 years, but I don't frequent the site as much these days). The overall quality of comments there is... OK. Not great, but not as bad as it was for a while around the turn of the millenium.
The level of snarky comments there in contrast with actual commentary is too high, though. If a story has 25 comments chances are one is modded insightful though it is factually incorrect, two are modded as funny, and the rest are hidden.
I remember when real scientists used to visit /. Now, not so much.
The quality of Slashdot comments depends a lot on your default threshold. If you hide every post with score < 2, it's decent. If you include lower scores, it drops considerably. -1 is almost masochism.
Yeah, I have my account set to show 3+ comments by default.
I also appreciated the changes they made when comments marked as 'funny' didn't count towards your karma, and made it possible to filter based on that too.
actually, it shouldn't be a per day quota because heavy users will be disadvantaged. The idea is to have a steady rate of voting for as long as a user is on the site.
Slashdot first pioneered that. In case you are not familiar with the scheme, all logged-in users are occasionally asked to vote with their 5 allotted points. Users with high karma are given a chance to vote more often. The points expire in a day or so if they are not used. They also have a meta-moderation system, where you judge how others have used their votes.
They've had the present system for a while (I want to say over 6 years, but I don't frequent the site as much these days). The overall quality of comments there is... OK. Not great, but not as bad as it was for a while around the turn of the millenium.