[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".