Have Reuters cracked the comment nut ?

Hats off to Richard Baum at Reuters. He seems to have come up with a blissfully simple way of making comments on stories more useful.  You have to register to post a comment at Reuters.com, but then software adds "a point" to your record every time you get through moderation.  After hitting a certain number, your comments get published instantly, without moderation - unless you later fall foul of post-moderation.  Highest scoring commenters get classified as expert users, earning as yet unspecified additional privileges.  And each commenter gets a publicly available user profile (suspect this is a dummy).