I was a founding moderator of /r/gamernews, which was founded with a seriously different mindset than that of r/gamingnews or r/gaming. When we started, we had a lot of people coming from the other communities trying to force in memes, rumors, blogspam, and other things that were against our founding principles. It took a few months before the submitted content matched the community we were looking for. Trolls realized they weren't welcome, and people who wanted news without rumors or other cruft felt comfortable there. If we didn't have heavy handed (and often controversial) moderation policies for the first few months, we never would have hit 100 subscribers, let alone 90,000.

Relying on a community to police itself is great for an open community (like /r/gaming), but if you want any kind of formal structure you need some moderation. Especially on such a sensitive subreddit as /r/twoxchromosomes where the potential for abuse, spam, and general hatred is so high. Although with that community, I seriously have to wonder why reddit would want it to be a default, or why the moderators agreed. Terrible, terrible decision to take a community of respect and trust and open the floodgates to the greater internet full of assholes and trolls. Oh well.

Voting in an open system only works to reenforce the viewpoints of the majority of voters, not the viewpoints of the specific community. That's why I can't vote in the elections of another country.

This is a really interesting idea. I wonder if there were a way to track per-reddit karma, and only allow redditors to vote in a certain subreddit once their karma reaches a threshold or account age. (Just like HN, but per-subreddit.)

"I wonder if there were a way to track per-reddit karma"

This already exists: each user has a "show karma breakdown by subreddit" link on the profile page for exactly this.

It does! I guess I meant "I wonder if there's a way to take this thing you're already tracking and use it as a per-subreddit voting gate."

> Although with that community, I seriously have to wonder why reddit would want it to be a default, or why the moderators agreed.

I assumed that reddit admins made /r/twoxchromosomes a default because it was a good subreddit and wanted to expose better content to the default users.

Also, I thought that subreddit moderators don't have input regarding whether the subreddit is made default.

Subreddit moderators do have input. The admins wanted to make AskHistorians a default and the moderators, who are already work overtime to ensure the posted answers are highly professional, said no. And some moderators have, I think, chosen to remove their subs as defaults.

Becoming default is opt-out.

Voting and karma is Reddit's biggest flaw because as you said "Voting in an open system only works to reenforce the viewpoints of the majority of voters." Subreddits can be ruined by any small influx of SRSers or whatever sub is annoyed for the day. The only subs that are actually good are the heavily moderated subs.

You do not want to see the cesspool that is moderated comments on 2xc.

Spam and hateful comments fall pretty fast anyway, but that doesn't mean that it should stay there. What would you prefer - a youtube page with all comments and some hidden due to a low score, or a page with all the shitty comments removed altogether? Someone is going to see that shit anyway and it's going to be awful as it involves everything from rape threats on support threads to someone that is trying to post something completely irrelevant to the subreddit.

And then there are comments that are really unpopular but they aren't hateful or spam, and even if it's buried we don't remove those. They would be mixed in with the hateful comments just because people don't like what the person is saying.

Some type of moderation is, in my opinion, a necessity. There are very few free-for-alls on the internet - if you have a good example of that working out, then I would like to know.

Feel free to start your own community with a hands off approach. :)

We have 1.1 million subscribers in an active and default subreddit. Related and private subreddits are growing too to meet the random niche demands of some of our users, and that's a great thing. Our users have options if they don't like our moderation style.

Great attitude, and don't let assholes convince you that responsible moderation is ever a bad thing. The "freedom of speech" thing is just another trolling approach. Someone has a right to say anything they want, but they don't have a right to say it anywhere they want. If you and your participants have built a community and a culture that is inclusive and respectful, anyone choosing not to participate within those guidelines is opting themselves out of your community.

And, it's worth nothing that HN is a moderated community, and while there are people who find that problematic, the reality is that a significant portion of the best contributors here wouldn't stick around if it were not reasonably moderated. I believe that's true of communities in general, but particularly communities that are controversial (I'm a mod at /r/occupywallstreet; I've seen some shit).

No.

Precisely because, as alexis said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8390156) reddit is a platform for communities as much as it is a platform for users, and the norms for communities are created through moderation. The moderator gets to create the community they want, and it's up to users to accept the standards of moderation or move to/start a different community

It doesn't work in practice and I don't know of any big reddit community that has managed to keep things clean without strict moderation. For example, one problem that happens very often is that image macros and other "lighetweight" content get more votes than longer articles. It only tkes seconds to look at a picture but ot everyone can take a couple of minutes to read an article and vote on it (not to mention that the "hotness" metric gives less weigth to votes after a few minutes than votes after a few seconds).

This kind of argument pops up all the time whenever a subreddit has a discussion about moderation but in my experience it doesn't work in practice. For starters, only are there technical disparities between what the rating algorithm considers hot and what the community actually likes (for example, images can get lots of quick votes soon after submission, which propells them to the front page). But perhaps even more importantly, there is the "eternal september problem": moderation lets a subreddit enforce their culture to the new users, which is very important. Something like /r/askscience would be impossible to maintain in its current state with just user voting.

As for tagging, it helps in some situations but its not an universal solution. The UI is kind of lacking (you need a 3rd party extantion to hide unwanted tags and it doesnt filter posts in the reddit.com frontpage) but it also doesnt do anything for passing users who havent configured their tags.

In a hypothetical world maybe its possible to create a smarter "hotness" algorithm that is less prone to these problems but in the current system I really don't think "just downvote the bad stuff" is a practical solution.

What if moderators had control of how posts are ranked in their subreddits? I think that would result in some very interesting subreddit specific ranking algorithms.

No, the point of reddit is that communities of people moderate themselves under the rules they make up. Voting is not a substitute for moderation- see memes, offtopic comments, trolls, or the middlebrow dismissal that plagues HN. The later is always sitting at the top of page and in the positive; HN would be better if mods removed the comments or punished the accounts who make them.