>>19
If you think /b/ is unmoderated, try posting CP.

On one hand, endlessly recycling the same ten threads makes a board suck, but on the other hand, banning people for posting stupid threads will turn a board into Something Awful.

I think much of the reason /b/ sucks now is not because of the existence or lack of moderation, but rather the fact that it's just way too fast to keep up with. People don't bother looking around to see if something's been posted because it's impossible to do so, and they don't bother coming up with something original because it's less likely to get a response within about two seconds. The latter point is a matter of thread survival: for a thread to live, it needs to have a population. Front-page visibility by someone who is likely to respond increases this population; each post in the thread brings it back to the top of the front page, thus providing another chance to increase the thread's population. The chain goes, roughly, interesting content -> posts -> thread visibility -> greater thread population -> continued participation -> vitality.

The other factor in play is that any site containing x type of content is most likely to appeal to people who have an interest in that type of content. For sites featuring primarily or exclusively user-generated content, this results in a feedback loop because the people interested in this content continue to post the same sort of content, and those not interested in it typically leave. (For the purposes of simplicity I will casually ignore trolling and crapflooding here; however in actuality, these play a fairly important role in defining what sort of content is most readily available.)

Now, as I said earlier, the speed of posting on the board is a large deciding factor in the range and quality of content the board has to offer. Thread discoverability -- that is, the likelihood that someone interested in the thread is going to see it -- plays a crucial role in the existence of "minority" threads, and is inversely proportional to the speed of the board: faster boards decrease discoverability, and exponentially so. All of this adds up to an environment that rewards crap and discourages thought, because the ultimate goal becomes not "post something interesting" but "post something that will get replies".

I could probably derive a mathematical formula for determining how likely a thread is to survive based on this, but I think I've overanalyzed enough for today.