Yes, what I find most interesting about listening to the Stack Exchange podcast is how much attention and conscious effort they put into constructing the community, and in a continuous fashion (i.e. it's never finished).
That said, it seems to me that we haven't reached the limits of the machine part of the human-machine moderation team. Voting up and down (here on HN, on Stack Exchange, Slashdot, etc.) is fine, but pretty rudimentary, for example. I'm wondering if there are any others experimenting with more heavily algorithmic moderation.
I love the attitude of "meta == death" that stack exchange has. They have just enough meta to get the job done. The absence of social networking stuff is pleasing too. Compared to, for example, Wikipedia which has gigabytes of useless meta trollery and weird social norms.
I agree. I've lurked on StackOverflow for a long time now, and I watched the rise of 'meta' style questions as they polluted the question space. This lead to the establishment of the Meta-StackExchange site, which was not an obvious choice at the time. I love how the product they've created provides a very strict structure within which a community can take place.
I wonder what approach, if any, Quora will take to the potential of meta-pollution.
That said, it seems to me that we haven't reached the limits of the machine part of the human-machine moderation team. Voting up and down (here on HN, on Stack Exchange, Slashdot, etc.) is fine, but pretty rudimentary, for example. I'm wondering if there are any others experimenting with more heavily algorithmic moderation.