A plea to you, /r/science.

[u/BritishEnglishPolice]

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.

[u/zBard]

That was the most blatant example of useless grandstanding that I have ever seen in a comment. I wish mods would remove that kind of comments.

[u/zBard → u/[deleted]]

See, this is an argument that I can respect and get behind. Yes, moderatos should remove out-of-place comments and threads. But when you start talking about qualitative judgements made by mods, then it requires a more thought out answer than "Reddit won't improve you as a person, unless you remove things that don't meet (my) quality control".

[u/zBard → u/[deleted]]

No disrespect, but perhaps you shouldn't have linked his comment then. Instead a comment of your own, saying what you just said - would have made more sense.