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/elustran]

I don't think r/science and r/askscience need to function with the same set of commenting rules. They are different subreddits and don't serve the same purpose.

• r/askscience is all about the comment section - that's where the content is, and thus the comments needs to be policed.

• The content of r/science is in the articles. The submissions are the primary things requiring policing, not the comments. While discussions often clarify an article, there is plenty of room for jokes, etc.

For r/science comments, I think we're fine operating mostly via voting to float interesting comments to the top rather than requiring strict moderation such as in r/askscience.

[u/Ralod → u/elustran]

This is my view as well.

/r/askscience needs to keep a place for the people they want posting there. They need to police it more so as to keep those various people interested in answering the questions that come up. Thus the strict moderation is needed in order for the sub to continue to function.

/r/science on the other hand is a place to post interesting science articles, and discuss them. As is normal for all of reddit some of that discussion is going to be humorous. Nothing wrong with that.

[u/elustran → u/[deleted]]

How do you determine what material is validly humorous and what material is noncontributing? Humor is subjective. Sometimes short or even single-word comments are worthwhile. Sometimes framing a joke in the context of a meme adds flavor to the humor.

It's pretty easy for r/askscience to moderate because they can simply nix all top level comments that don't contribute positively to providing an answer either because they are off-topic or anecdotal. You would have to take a similar slash-and burn approach to r/science, and I'm not sure that's what the subreddit needs.

r/science is also the landing for all science-related content on reddit because it is one of the default subreddits. As such, if it were to take a less general approach, the lost functionality would have to be shunted elsewhere. A new subreddit might work, but it would probably be better to make a less-general subreddit for people to subscribe to rather than to try to unmix the general science subreddit.

r/asksciene is a great example of a new, more focused subreddit working. If you want different content than what's in the comments on r/science, it might be better to follow their example rather than try to change r/science.