That kind of summed up my view Reddit. Groupthink circle jerks. Why was I part of any of that??
It took you 8 years to realize that's how that place operates? Hell, that describes the culture on HN pretty well.
Freewheeling downvoting was a flawed idea from the beginning. 20 years later it turns out Slashdot had the right model for moderation.
The best part was you could set your personal filters to exclude “funny” comments, or boost “offtopic” ones if you want. With thresholds! So the funniest stuff could still break through, but you didn’t have to wade through a million pun posts to find the serious comments.
They also have a metamoderation system where others’ moderation choices are shown to you and you agree or disagree.
Never seen another site like it. Kinda hope /. makes a resurgence.
I mean even 4chan doesn't have downvote functionality, if people disagree with you they'll just call you a f* or n* which, while nasty, doesn't actually change visibility of your post, plus only the admins can ban you or delete a post, not jumped-up mods, and frankly you'd have to be pretty extreme on there to earn that.
"free speech absolutism" wasn't ever a huge problem, on the contrary, the suggested alternatives always seem to end up worse.
You have to suffer through idiotic opinions if you expose yourself to new ideas. There is never any alternative to that and there is no magic moderator that can make this decision in your stead. It isn't any more complicated than that really.
Hate to say it, but fleshy meatbag humans love this stuff on and off line. Our species is evolutionarily motivated to group up.
It's completely undeniable, societal progress regardless. We still do it all day every day, some worse than others.
