Or: why moderation systems are trickier than they look.

Understanding the dynamics of online communities is one of my pet interests, so as a regular reader of Hacker News, I took notice when Paul Graham started experimenting recently in an attempt to stave off the gradual but unmistakable decline (AKA redditization) of what used to be my favorite online community after TurnKey.

The discussion inspired me to write a blog post about an experiment I tried a while back at my other geek haunt - Slashdot. Just to throw in my two cents.

In theory comment moderation systems are democratic and promote a high signal to noise ratio. But I've long suspected them of promoting group-think and being easy to game once you understand a little bit about the dynamics at play.

Do you find yourself occasionally wishing you could freeze a misbehaving program at an arbitrary point in time and then examining what was going on interactively?

That's exactly what the debugger is for, but sometimes it's just too much of a bother to run your program inside it, you have to set breakpoints, etc.

Well there's a really simple alternative: call the debugger from an arbitrary point in your program, like this...