Rethinking Moderation

So Slipshod Slashdot has a story up on a Chinese cryp­tog­ra­pher who found a short­cut through the SHA-1 scheme two years ago. While I’m not a cryp­tog­ra­pher, it appears to be eas­ier to forge mes­sages or crack hashed pass­words which use the SHA-1 algo­rithm. Unfortunately, even read­ing the com­ments at +5 puts the num­ber of com­ments at 40, includ­ing the same dumb-assed argu­ments about gun control/gun rights that you sim­ply can­not avoid when you stick Libertarians and Liberals (sounds like an RPG to me) in the same room. Shorter: Bullshit about Censorship and Gun-control and Tha Gubment and The Constitution have invaded +5, and since the goal of the point-based mod­er­a­tion sys­tem is to save the time of peo­ple who don’t care to wade through the same “legal­ize it!” v. “crim­i­nal!” argu­ments on threads about hash­ing algo­rithm secu­rity, it should be evi­dent that it has has failed.

So, why not extend or remove the upper lim­its on the mod­er­a­tion points, and add an option to only show the top n com­ments and replies to them? That is, at least, more con­sis­tent with why I use mod­er­a­tion (to save time).