[jhmarten]

Of course reddit is flawed. Anyone that has spent time on Slashdot or Advogato could have told you the whole premise of up/down voting is beyond silly.

No, the utility of up/down votes is in retention. It's nothing more than a Skinner box that people check in on to see if they are winning or losing. Which is how Digg and Reddit both became huge in a short amount of time.

[belorn]

The system up/down replaced two worse system, being "they who post most get seen the most" and "moderators do and decide everything".

What ever system that will replace up/down voting has to do better than the ones it will replace.

[baby]

> the whole premise of up/down voting is beyond silly

It's not silly when you have a community this size. It might be flawed but it's one of the less flawed system.

[icebraining]

Do you know Slashdot's system? jhmarten wasn't criticizing community-based moderation, only the simplistic model of up/down voting, when compared to ones which get users to specify why they're voting.

[baby]

I'm just a lurker so I didn't know their system. They have an extremely small community compared to reddit though, that was my point.

[icebraining]

Compared to Reddit as a whole, yes, but that's because Reddit is a collection of disparate subreddits, not a single common area. Slashdot had 5.5 million users in its heyday, which is on the same order of magnitude of the biggest subreddits.