As far as I can see, Scoop allows all (that want) an equal say in a numerically based evaluation of each post, which freedom-wise seems to me to be an improvement over the closed group moderator model. However, it still suffers from the fundamental flaw of limiting the decision making power of the individual reader. Notice how some members here have already indicated a wish for the good old plonk.

So my idea is to turn things more-or-less upside-down:

Everyone should be able to rate and/or label each post based on their own opinion. This data would then be sent to the server, becoming metadata that is linked to both the post and the identity (persona) of the judging reader. Note that in the current models, each post is most often only linked to one global value/judgment.

Instead of the "old way" of moderating all posts (almost) the same for anyone, this metadata would then be made available to each individual reader, for filtering purposes. The possibilities seems endless to me, though the added bandwidth and processing requirements probably will limit what realistically can be done.

One simple example is emulating the old moderator models, by allowing the readers to choose all, or a subset, of the judging readers as their personal moderator(s). It would still improve the freedom of the reader significantly, because of the added possibility to individually choose your moderator(s). The choice of using no moderator should of course be available, both to freedom fanatics and to those interested in adding their judgments to the metadata.

To give readers incentives to participate in the judging process, statistics of all sorts could be published by the website. Most used moderator, most post moderated, most moderated post used, etc.

The website could also host one or several bot-based moderators, a word blacklist bot and a Bayesian based bot are some that comes to mind. As before the individual user would be in charge of choosing to heed the resulting evaluations.

The client side filtering could be implemented in many ways, for example as collapsed threads and links to sub-threads, like I think they do on Slashdot.

By making the metadata of the post author available for use in filtering, you'd get plonking, by the way.

Even a freedom loving web forum host would need to be able to delete or suppress a few posts though. I can think of at least two such cases; One is to delete posts that put the host at legal risk, the other is to edit multiple massive contents-free posts that are threatens to fill up the server database. In my view, both should be made obvious to the readers, perhaps by exchanging these posts with standard messages explaining the what and the why of the deleting/editing.

I doubt it's possible to adjust the Scoop software to incorporate this idea, but I'd love to be shown I'm wrong about that! For personal reasons, I currently have no time to code such a forum, myself. Since one never really know what tomorrow brings, and I wish this idea to live, I post it here so that others may take the ball and run with it. If no-one does, I will try to do so myself, later. I've left out a lot of ideas that will only clutter this article, but I'll probably post them using the comments, when time allows.