If you don't have the ability to vote, you can't influence the content in a positive way either. Some comments are pointless, like some tool making the "and my axe" joke for the millionth time.

Reddit lost its way when they started heavily moderating or banning entire subs that didn't fit with their woke US-centric world view, while rape porn was "fine". I closed my account a while back and stopped visiting the site, but unfortunately, there are so many organisations and FOSS projects that use it in an official capacity that it's unavoidable.

In more user-centric (as opposed to content-centric) forums this problem is solved by banning users who repeatedly make low quality posts. One crappy comment here and there is something anyone might make, but the same person posting pointless comments in every thread deserves a ban.

The solution is simple: Use downvotes for rude and disrespectful comments. I am all for moderating a forum for pointless and useless comments. Most downvotes now-a-days are about disagreements. Using downvotes as a tool to push others into conformity is the shittiest part of HN.

I actually have a sort of nice idea about this: make your downvotes' worth be inversely proportional to how many downvotes you give.

A person who gives 100 downvotes per month will have his downvotes count 1/20th as those of a person who downvotes 5 times per month. An incenctive to be really judicious in handing out downvotes and not simply using them to drown out minority opinions.

Only issue here is that you are penalized for activity even if it’s in removing objective garbage. But I like the idea quite a bit. That you take a hit for being a negative ass that downvotes questions you think are beneath you.

Interesting. I think we would still have the issue of 10 people piling up on a comment with downvotes, as judiciously as they can spend the budget.

You can’t crowdsource quality. Comment voting systems only tell you what is popular, not what is high quality. So many sites make this mistake, including HN.

You reminded me of a failed experiment I did a while back with music tags. I still purchase music monthly (Bandcamp when possible), and I always tag music. I have a bunch of multi-value tags including 'instruments' and 'moods'. It works really well with a huge collection. I can quickly find songs similar to the one I'm listening to, or generate playlists.

Anyway, a few years ago I thought I could speed up the tagging process by pulling tags from Last FM and filtering out the shite by only including tags that matched an instrument name or mood. Luckily I backed up before running the script on my whole collection. The data was absolute garbage.

It reminded me of when I went through and ripped my CD collection. I'd estimate that almost a third of the album data was complete trash, and there were a shockingly bad number of spelling errors. I couldn't help but wonder if someone was deliberately poisoning data.

Slashdot tried to solve this problem by making mod points limited and requiring you to give a reason for moderating a comment. Then there was a metamoderation system where you decided if the moderation someone gave was fair or not. If someone consistently doesn't use the moderation system correctly (and the metamoderation system is successful in identifying this), they don't get mod points anymore.

It didn't work perfectly (obviously the site is still highly opinionated in favor of certain things, like Linux and free software), but it also wasn't the smooth-brained hivemind that Reddit comments sections are. I can't think of another site that's even tried to come up with a better moderation system than simple up/down votes. At best, there are some behind-the-scenes algorithms that decide how exactly to prioritize comments based on the voting, but that's derived from popularity as well. An immeasurable side effect of this is that many heterodox comments simply aren't posted at all since people know they're going to be downvoted to oblivion anyway.

In my experience, your message would get buried or you would get bullied to the point where you leave the forum, nowadays it's done via downvotes. I don't see much of a difference, other than that the new way produces less noise.