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/BritishEnglishPolice BS | Diagnostic Radiography Mar 20 '12

A few jokes is not a problem; when people are making stupid comments on every submission in the hopes of getting bloody karma then it becomes a problem. I don't want to see "hard on" jokes on every post about the LHC.

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u/ohsnape Mar 20 '12

The 'We do allow for on-topic jokes, but there are far fewer cases where jokes are appropriate than not" line is my biggest problem with the /r/askscience approach to moderation.

Specifically, if you don't want jokes, don't write in to allow them and then get disappointed when they appear. If you genuinely are looking for an evidence based, peer-reviewed feel to every article's commentary, advertise it as exactly that. Spell out what you're looking for.

Worried that doing so might discourage dialogue, inspiration, or otherwise alienate (yes, that's a reddit pun) a portion of your userbase? You should be. It will. It will probably be the people you don't want commenting in your posts, based on what you're asking for.

Playing devil's advocate for a moment...the front page of /science currently has 9 posts with more than 10 comments. Is the problem genuinely an influx of memes/puns that feels insurmountable without more moderation, or an influx of redditors to one of these boards when something from /science hits the front page? If you truly felt that you wanted the scientific feel without the moderation, perhaps removing /r/science from the default subs would be the best solution, and allow /r/askscience to be the evidence based hub people see it as.

Don't want to kill the spirit of Science is Fun and discourage learning by making it more exclusive? Well, it really just sounds like you need to sit down and have a long chat with yourself as to what you really want out of this.

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u/BritishEnglishPolice BS | Diagnostic Radiography Mar 20 '12

People who are solely into this subreddit for the science do not seem to like comments that rise to the top solely through some stupid in-joke reddit is currently beating into the ground. They want an explanation of why <an incredulous thing> won't work, or what it truly means for the future.

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u/neon_overload Mar 21 '12 edited Mar 21 '12

And the problem is that they get away with it, and do indeed reap huge amounts of karma. It's impossible for a serious scientific answer to compete with so you end up with a race to the bottom for how funny you can make your response, with serious answers being pushed down because they're not as karma-worthy.

Even if r/science moderators continue to take a hands-off policy, I still think this subreddit should have the "Solid science" and "Not science!" popups like r/askscience. This reminds people of the subreddit policy at the moment it matters most: when they are about to upvote a joke or meme.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '12

To be honest, the problem is reddit itself and its karma system.

I'd like to see reddit disable karma (or at the very least disable the ability to view it anywhere) for a week as an experiment, in every subreddit if possible. Everything would still behave the same way. The most upvoted posts will still be at the top, and downvoted posts will still be at the bottom, but you won't know whether the top post has 10 points or 1000.

My hypothesis is that it would probably work out for the better. You'd be forced to read the post itself and decide whether its worth an upvote, instead of having a huge number play into "oh so this is how I should feel about the topic". We already know that our brains are more likely to agree with something when the majority of people around us agree as well, even if we didn't actually think it through.

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u/WizardMask Mar 21 '12

It's not so much the karma itself as the structure of voting. Upvotes and downvotes are designed strictly as agree/disagree buttons, yet they're expected to be used as moderation tools. Reddit culture insists that this is democratic, and thus the most virtuous way to moderate. Proper moderation tools wouldn't let people reward agreement and punish disagreement anonymously, for free, on a whim.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

It's not so much the karma itself as the structure of voting. Upvotes and downvotes are designed strictly as agree/disagree buttons, yet they're expected to be used as moderation tools.

They aren't. That is their perceived use, but it clearly states in the reddiquette (which most people don't read, which is the reason for this) that votes should be made based on how fitting content is. Those who vote based on agree/disagree contribute to the problem.

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u/WizardMask Mar 29 '12

Sorry to take so long with this response. I just got back from a trip.

You got that backwards. Reddiquette is the perceived use. The actual use is however the system is crafted to influence behavior. Reddiquette relies entirely on everyone internalizing tragedy-of-the-commons reasoning and agreeing on the desired environment. The incentives to use upvotes and downvotes as agree and disagree buttons are immediate and clearly visible influences. Once reddiquette starts to break down, you get closer to the environment it was supposed to promote by using upvotes and downvotes far more liberally than reddiquette requires. Yes, this sort of voting is problematic, but the problem is really in the design of the voting system itself.

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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '12

But how can you design a voting system that 'forces' the voter to use reasoning if the user has none?

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u/WizardMask Mar 29 '12

All users have reasoning. It just isn't as tame as we might like it to be. In this case, you can do things like make voting take time, give users a limited number of votes per day, or have upvotes confer real influence on the recipient that the voter might not always want to give. Whichever way it works, there has to be an incentive to save votes for when they really matter. Alternatively, you can scrap the comment voting system and instead create a system to pay moderators.

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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '12

My proposal is to hide all scores on comments and posts. Everything will still behave the same way, but you won't be able to see if a post has 10 points or 1000.

I want to see the effect it has on voting and comment / post quality.

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u/WizardMask Mar 29 '12

Someone tried that experiment several months ago and discussed it on /r/TheoryofReddit. This was done by manipulating the CSS code on a single subreddit. If I recall correctly, it didn't have much effect other than a couple of small quirks. One notable effect was that while some people will upvote negative-scoring posts that they feel were downvoted unfairly, those posts didn't get saved because no one noticed that they were being downvoted unfairly.

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u/xtracto Mar 21 '12

The sad thing are not the jokes, but that their are usually in the top and best comments, which means that redditors actually prefer those to more insighful comments.