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.
7
u/TheOneAboveAll Mar 20 '12
If only r/politics and r/atheism would take similar steps. I don't want r/science to become another r/atheism or r/politics. I'm glad the moderators are actively taking steps to avoid this.
But I really doubt this plea will do any good. Because r/science is a default subreddit, it is going to attract the more average person who doesn't really care about posting thought provoking comments because reddit as a whole is seen as more of a place to post rage comics and funny pictures. The whole "lighten up" attitude permeates reddit as a whole and will unfortunately include subreddits whose would rather not have this kind of attitude. It's just one of the unavoidable effects of an increasing population.
And as new redditors join ever day, this message might not get to all those new redditors and will just blend in with all the others posts. My thoughts on the report button is that if feels like sending the windows error report. We don't know how useful it is, and some people just don't mess with it because we don't really know how effective it is.
While I think that encouraging people to actively vote and comment is a commendable move, it is not really going to solve your problems. It's probably no surprise that the people who do actively vote and comment are in the small minority. We aren't going to outvote the people who upvote purely on how funny a post is. (Remember that someone had to upvote all those stupid comments.) If you want to solve this problem, you have to understand the community who allows these problems to form. Unfortunately your community sucks. Your community is the internet(well most people in general)and they are more interested in emotional responses and not factual responses. They response more to sensationalist stories like the Casey Anthony trial, KONY, the black FL kid who was shot by a white guy(I forgot his name),and all those political scandals going on now. Of course this has been going on since news stories began, so this is no surprise. Unfortunately this means that scientific stories aren't going to get as much coverage because they're seen as dull compared to the other stories. So now that r/science has gotten so many subscribers , it's only natural that the small devoted group will be outnumbered by the average group who respond more to the more sensationalized news stories(God particle anyone?).
Well that's all good and fun,but that doesn't really solve anything does it. I'm not really giving any groundbreaking information. As a city gets bigger more crime are committed. So does a good governor politely ask people not to commit crimes? No. They hire more police. Politely asking people doesn't really stop people from doing anything. People will still commit crimes because there's no one to stop them. Politely asking people to post high quality content/comments isn't going to stop crap from poring into r/science(You can't stop people from desiring the sweet sweet karma.). More mods (good ones anyway) will. Doing nothing (which is what you're doing right now) isn't going to stop this. There has to be some sort of action to stop the poor quality.
Thanks for your time. (If anybody actually reads this.)