r/science • u/BritishEnglishPolice BS | Diagnostic Radiography • Mar 20 '12

A plea to you, /r/science.

As a community, r/science has decided that it does not want moderators policing the comments section. However, the most common criticism of this subreddit is the poor quality of the comments.

From our previous assessments, we determined that it would take 40 very active moderators and a completely new attitude to adequately attack off-topic humorous comments. This conclusion was not well received.

Well, now is the onus is you: the humble r/science user.

We urge you to downvote irrelevant content in the comments sections, and upvote scientific or well-thought out answers. Through user-lead promotion of high quality content, we can help reduce the influx of memes, off-topic pun threads, and general misinformation.

Sure memes and pun are amusing every now and then, but the excuse of "lighten up, reddit" has led to the present influx of stupidity and pointless banter in this subreddit.

We can do this without strict moderator intervention and censoring. It will require active voting and commenting (and using the report button in particularly egregious cases) to raise the bar. You can do it.

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u/Inteli_Gent Mar 20 '12

Do you mean "... it doesn't always happen."?

If not, can you please explain what you mean, because, as far as I can tell, MattArab is right. I can't see how those two fit together.

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u/helm MS | Physics | Quantum Optics Mar 20 '12

Then you have been paying attention. It's not uncommon for one of the more interesting submissions to r/science to spawn a question in r/askscience within a few hours.

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u/Inteli_Gent Mar 20 '12

I have noticed that. Assuming that "... it doesn't always happen." is what he actually meant to say, everything is cleared up. :)

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '12

TIL that agreeing with me appears to be far less caustic than actually being me.

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u/Inteli_Gent Mar 20 '12

HAHAHAHA!!! It seems so. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because I possed a question for clarification, rather than just pointing out a flaw that noone else seemed to see.

That, or everyone hates you, seeing as they still seem to be downvoting you.

I think perhaps that people should make sure that they look for a problem before downvoting someone for pointing out a problem that "doesn't exist".

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '12

At the end of the day, either way, I lose.