For the first such group, whoever hosts the ratings site can decide who gets to moderate. A benign autocrat is ideal in this case.
That may be true, but the benign autocrat of today will all too soon be replaced by a not-at-all-so-benign fascist, who then has the power to keep critical post of the net "for the common good".
You're missing a few qualifiers. The benign autocrat mentioned above is for _bootstrapping_ a workable _distribution_ of moderation. Once the dynamic of moderator selection is stable, this autocrat then loses most all power to influence, since the initial distribution of articles to moderators need not be in any particular place.
Just say NO to Usenet moderation.
I'm not proposing that every newsgroup be moderated, even in distributed form. What I am proposing is a system for a distributedly moderated newsgroup which can compete for attention with other newsgroups and other fora. Eric