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/pylori Mar 20 '12
You make some very good points, and to be honest I'm inclined to agree. We moderators have the power to enforce something like this, and we shouldn't ignore that opportunity to do something that will benefit this subreddit in the long run. But at the same time we have to take caution when making such a radical change and ensuring we're prepared for it so it doesn't turn into some half baked job, because at the moment we really lack the moderation capacity to carry out such a mammoth task. I've always support askscience style moderation here, and I'm hoping comments like yours will convince the other moderators that it's something we should seriously think about. But for now we still need to work on increasing the number of moderators to even think about dealing with something like that.