3. New news.

I think users of Slashdot/Reddit/HN/Digg might like this, especially those who are longing for an eternal September, since it's primarily an idea regarding keeping chat forums from degenerating: given that we can readily see the interesting, well-behaved, consistently high quality participants on other forums, why not simply invite them to a new forum or news aggregator site, and limit participation to those people? We can all think of names off the top of our head- byrneseyeview, for example. I'm guessing there are a lot of these great posters who would love to participate in an environment free of trolling and other bad behavior, which might be more easily maintained by controlling the population than in having lots of moderators and complex valuing algorithms. Just as important, make the forum public for viewing- I know that there are thousands of people like me, who rarely participate, but love to read great discussion.

To this you might say- "but what about those people who could chime in with something interesting, who are barred from participating?". For this I suggest making a "ghost forum", a mirror copy of the elite forum, but which allows anyone to participate in pseudo-tandem with the comments on the elite forum (i.e. elite posts show up there simultaneously, but anyone can write anything in response). This would further make it possible to see who would be a worthy addition to the elite forum, at the same time as the forum administrator could scour other sites for any new, consistently high-quality discussion participators.

This idea could easily be commercialized, with participators earning some money as well. People love to watch good discussion- just look at the large number of TV and radio chat shows, and magazine group interviews. Or, more direct to the Internet experience- the fact that there are generally about 100 readers for every 1 writer. Or, the number of times I have read on Reddit "what keeps me coming back to Reddit are the commenters". If the discussion is interesting enough, I am sure that there will be enough eyeballs that it must be worth something. Or the forum could simply be left standing as an excellent public institution- I believe something like this could be an excellent teaching tool, something to demonstrate "this is how you participate constructively" for the readers.

Ironically, I recently wrote the above paragraphs (except the intro), intending to email it to PG, since I thought he might be interested. Never got around to it. The idea could be extended to the news, and to submitting links. Some people are pretty consistent in their journalism, or their quality taste in links/news.
My personal belief is that it all comes down to the people involved, more than to any set of rules, since no person is as simplistic as even the most complex set of rules ever devised. Useful people are self-regulating, and dysfunctional people are hard to moderate, no matter the number and type of rules, or how much authority you have.

My great personal hope for the forum idea, if it is ever implemented, is that we might finally see constructive dialogue between people of opposing political viewpoints (the same goes for any other subject in which few people talk to the other side). There are some people capable of debating constructively with their opponents, but on every forum I've ever seen, it all goes to hell because of trolls, or mob rule downvoting the dissenter into oblivion.

But if you narrow the debate down to the people who can manage to disagree without being disagreeable, there might be some hope for progress. I think that until average people can learn to debate opponents constructively, our politicians will never do it, because even if the politicians wanted to, their constituents will pressure the politicians to behave like the constituents would.