[scheveningen]

IMO, the downvotes are a big problem with reddit, unfortunately.

If people actually followed reddiquette (downvoting posts that do not add to the discussion) the system would work great. However, a large majority of people will just downvote what they disagree with. There is no way to keep this behavior in check.

What happens is that counterpoints that do not align with the majority 'party line' are rarely seen on reddit, and although the hive mind is often agreeable to me personally, I need to see dissenting viewpoints in order to get a nuanced understanding of any complex or opinionated issue.

I've pretty much eliminated reddit from my life in favor of HN (this is my first post, actually) and Metafilter and I couldn't be happier.

[toyg]

You just haven’t noticed this phenomenon on HN yet.

It’s a fact of life: a downvote button will eventually be used as a “disagree” button rather than some idealistic concept of what moderation should be. Even the most reasonable person has a trigger subject, be it gun laws, abortion, or vi vs emacs.

If you think HN is somewhat immune, you’re in for a rude awakening at some point.

[phkahler]

HN in general also has a couple things that are trigger subjects. Areas there is little hope of making even a reasoned argument. I still like to burn a little karma sometimes ;-)

[paulddraper]

HTTPS-everywhere, Net Neutrality, employee rights.

And of course, Rust.

[mattmanser]

It's more anything to do with women. That's HN's third rail.

[sebazzz]

The difference is that in HN you need to earn your downvote rights (which I have not yet). That should put up a bar for initial down voting, though I agree with you. Some posts of mine have been downvotes, but not for an obvious reason. This means I am more careful posting the next time.

[craftyguy]

> There is no way to keep this behavior in check.

Sure there is. For example, each user could be allocated a set number of 'downvotes to give' each day. If that limit were, say, 5, users would either 1) use them up very quickly if they didn't change their behavior, thus not able to downvote for the rest of the day or 2) change their behavior to use them more sparingly.

[dredmorbius]

This might help, somewhat, but it also leads to other hacks -- account farming to increase the number of votes on user has, say, or creating voting brigades.

My view on moderation systems is that you need to think very carefully about what the intended result of the moderation system is.

My read: that moderation is used to gather information about quality. And you've got to consider whether or not the contributed signal is actually useful or accurate information. The case of accurate-but-unpopular posts or comments being downvoted (or incorrect-but-popular upvoted) is a frequently encountered one. One possible view is that rather than gathering all available input, the inputs be considered relative to actual value.

If you're sick with some rare condition, or have some specialised piece of equipment that needs repair, you're far better off going to the specific expert(s) within a field for advice than asking randomly across the population (assuming that expertise is itself merited, which raises ... other interesting questions, the history of both medicine and engineering having some interesting examples).

Generally, crowdsourcing should be better than no information, but is not assured to be better than a sufficiently qualified expert opinion. Which means that if you do get such experts offering their opinion, you'd prefer those.

There's also the raw voting and ranking problem, the question of dimensions of assessment (e.g., accuracy, quality, readability, humour, etc.), which might want to be considered.

It's a complex, but not intractable, field.

[supreme_sublime]

While I don't use Reddit, I have always wondered what would happen if people were required to anonymously give a reason why they downvoted. I've been rather frustrated by this in the past on imgur. I'd love to know why someone downvoted me. There could potentially be a process that would remove downvotes if they were just nonsense that weren't actual reasons, like people putting in "asd".