this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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The initial intent of reddit was to have downvotes be for off topic stuff, and yet most people use it as a silent "your opinion sucks" button. That stuff just adds to the hivemind feel of reddit. I wish there was a way to have an alternative system of weeding out misinformation or rude stuff without having to deal with something like downvotes. I suppose moderation could serve the purpose of weeding out the bad stuff instead, but then each community would need to be moderated properly.
An old forum I used to frequent had a downvote system that required you to specify a reason for why you felt that post or comment required a downvote. That reason (and the account that submitted it) was visible to the person whose post got downvoted and to the moderators, but to no one else.
It still worked well for filtering out troll posts and spam, and legit posts were almost never downvoted as you couldn't do so fully anonymously and moderators could take action when you abused the system.
I could see this becoming highly impractical when communities become as huge as on Reddit though, but for a smaller forum that one had a few hundred active users it worked really well.
That’s actually genious
Your text is almost exactly my thought process too. But unlike Reddit if you don’t like how a community is moderate you can go start the same community on a different instance and lead its moderation efforts the way you think is appropriate. Then the communities will follow natural survival prices where whichever community is liked more will attract most people from the other community
Some subreddits managed to do it when the topic was very specific and the mods were dedicated. I'm thinking of r/AskHistorians and r/Askphilosophy