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rewrites.

This traditional separation of editor and writer mirrors the creative process itself, in which authors are exhorted to concentrate on *either* composing *or* revising, but not both at the same time, for the application of the critical mind to the creative process strangles it. So you write, and then you edit. Even when you write for your own consumption, it seems you have to answer to an editor.

The early experimental days of the Internet saw much experimentation with alternatives to traditional editor/author divisions. Slashdot, a nerdy news-site of surpassing popularity [fn: Having a link to one\'s website posted to Slashdot will almost inevitably overwhelm your server with traffic, knocking all but the best-provisioned hosts offline within minutes; this is commonly referred to as \"the Slashdot Effect.\"], has a baroque system for \"community moderation\" of the responses to the articles that are posted to its front pages. Readers, chosen at random, are given five \"moderator points\" that they can use to raise or lower the score of posts on the Slashdot message boards. Subsequent readers can filter their views of these boards to show only highly ranked posts. Other readers are randomly presented with posts and their rankings and are asked to rate the fairness of each moderator\'s moderation. Moderators who moderate fairly are given more opportunities to moderate; likewise message-board posters whose messages are consistently highly rated. 

It is thought that this system rewards good \"citizenship\" on the Slashdot boards through checks and balances that reward good messages and fair editorial practices. And in the main, the Slashdot moderation system works [fn: as do variants on it, like the system in place at Kur5hin.org (pronounced \"corrosion\")]. If you dial your filter up to show you highly scored messages, you will generally get well-reasoned, or funny, or genuinely useful posts in your browser. 

This community moderation scheme and ones like it have been heralded as a good alternative to traditional editorship. The importance of the Internet to \"edit itself\" is best understood in relation to the old shibboleth, \"On the Internet, everyone is a slushreader.\" [fn: \"Slush\" is the term for generally execrable unsolicited manuscripts that fetch up in publishers\' offices -- these are typically so bad that the most junior people on staff are drafted into reading (and, usually, rejecting) them]. When the Internet\'s radical transformative properties were first bandied about in publishing circles, many reassured themselves that even if printing\'s importance was de-emphasized, that good editors would always been needed, and doubly so online, where any mouth-breather with a modem could publish his words. Someone would need to separate the wheat from the chaff and help keep us from drowning in information.

One of the best-capitalized businesses in the history of the world, Yahoo!, went public on the strength of this notion, proposing to use an army of researchers to catalog every single page on the Web even as it was created, serving as a comprehensive guide to all human knowledge. Less than a decade later, Yahoo! is all but out of that business: the ability of the human race to generate new pages far outstrips Yahoo!\'s ability to read, review, rank and categorize them.

Hence Slashdot, a system of distributed slushreading. Rather than professionalizing the editorship role, Slashdot invites contributors to identify good stuff when they see it, turning editorship into a reward for good behavior. 

But as well as Slashdot works, it has this signal failing: nearly every conversation that takes place on Slashdot is shot through with discussion, griping and gaming *on the moderation system itself*. The core task of Slashdot has *become* editorship, not the putative subjects of Slashdot posts. The fact that the central task of Slashdot is to rate other Slashdotters creates a
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