[kprobst]

One of the problems with Reddit in my experience is the spam filter. What happens is in the bigger subreddits (say, /r/pics or /r/funny) is that there seem to be people around who downvote stuff regardless of content, presumably to give their own posts a better chance. When your submissions consistently end up with -1 or -2 scores, the spam filter then decides that you are a spammer and you should be punished. Except in this case it's not for submitting spam, but because other people want their own submissions to have more visibility.

(As an aside, I obviously wouldn't be complaining about this if I had actually tried to spam reddit, my few submissions to date match the typical fare there)

Once the spam filter 'hates' you (as they put it) then subsequent submissions are 'ghosted' in the sense that you see them, but they don't appear in the /new section of the subreddit. Assuming you get wind of this (no downvotes, no comments, nothing) then you get to message the moderators, who may or may not respond in good time and restore your submission. By that time your obvious reaction is to delete and re-submit (because by now the post has drifted down the submission sort order), which apparently makes the spam filter hate you even more.

The problem I have with this is that by no fault of my own I ended up submitting things that were flagged as spam and hidden from view without any indication to me. You can see your posts, but no one else can. This might be a clever solution to deal with systemic spammers, but it's really annoying to normal users like me.

Karma games are fun and internet drama is lame of course; I don't lose sleep over this. But it's unfair to people who want to share something with the community. Of course you see reposts of lame memes that hit the front page and wonder why the picture of your cute hedgehog submitted in good faith ends up in the spam void.

There's supposed to be a user flag that tells the filter you're an approved submitter for a given subreddit; good luck getting that, I guess. So ultimately this makes me not want to submit anything. Right now reddit might not care about that because it has such a large user base, but I would remind them that Slashdot and Digg also thought they were invincible once.

[ericd]

Yeah, I think users should have a limited amount of downvote power to spread around, and that each successive downvote diminishes the power of all their previous downvotes in determining spamminess.

Ghosting really, really sucks for legitimate users. Craigslist does the same thing, and normal people are devastated when they realize they've been judged/victimized by a computer somewhere with no appeal.

[landr0id]

I like the Stack Overflow system of downvoting

  Downvotes remove 2 reputation from the post owner.
  Downvotes on answers remove 1 reputation from you, the voter.
  Downvotes on questions are free.
  You can vote 30 times per UTC day. You get an additional 10 votes on questions only.

On Reddit, people just tend to downvote when they don't agree with something. That's really it. The only times that I've downvoted posts have been when it's a repost from recent, and on comments I only downvote if it's something that's hateful or doesn't contribute to discussion.