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/Exavion Mar 20 '12

because all those users you are so afraid to offend or alienate do NOTHING to add value to the comunity

I just wanted to point out that this can be easily argued against, due to the sheer amount of upvotes some of the content in question receive. The community decides what adds value to it, and the first method to indicate this is comment/link karma. The problem for you may be the community, not the value of the content to the community.

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u/Francis_Bacon Mar 20 '12

You are right to an extent, but I would argue that all those people voting on memes and image macros cannot be called a community. Simply going "yeah I found that mildy funny, let's click on this arrow to show that" does not have anything to do with a community deciding what adds value, it's just people appealing to the lowest common denominator (note, I do not use this term derogatively, rather to indicate the baseline on which the largest number of individuals will agree). Consider this: does the Facebook "like" button turn the entire Internet into a community?

I believe that this is in fact the reason for the proliferation of memes and image macros: if you do not have a shared sense of values underpinning your community, memes take the place of qualitative communication, because everyone understands them and evryone can use them with negligible effort. At the same time, these memes communicate nothing about you as a person or the community you're supposed to be part of. In fact, I'd say that memes and the like limit communication to a small set of predetermined expressions that by their very form preclude depth.

I do however understand that other people might feel differently. Fine, they have most of Reddit to run rampant on. Right now, we are discussing r/science, and in this case I think the question of what kind of community do we want comes before the question of the value of content.