I'm reading a couple threads today and was caught by the one on the old boys network. As someone who has been contributing to open source for a long time in one form or another I too am concerned by what I see here.

Specifically, the trust here seems more like viral marketing than 'real' trust. I see the path of least resistance to being able to post here to be getting a few friends who are familar with my work to log on an cert me because I haven't a good way to associate with the folks already online.

An interesting way to build traffic, but not quite to the sweet spot yet.

Which brings me to the article on /.

A lot of the folks seemed to think that it was simply too big. I disagree. As a moderator I'll switch to -1 for the good of the community, but otherwise switching to 2 or 3 filters out the cruft quite nicely. If a thread looks interesting then pop the filter down and see more. The scaling that means every topic recieved 200 posts also means that I can delve deeper when something catches my eye.

That sweet spot?

Something in between the two sites. Let everyone post, but rate people and posts. Not just people. Not just posts.

This way the cruft gets filtered out on a topic by topic basis, but over time the human cream rises to the top and I can filter that was also.