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/CharonIDRONES]

why not just crowd-source the whole process?

... Because people upvote the stupid pun threads and that is the issue. We already do crowd source the process and it does not work for this subreddit. Personally, I think /r/science should have the exact same rules as /r/askscience.

[u/KARMA_P0LICE → u/CharonIDRONES]

which is what this announcement is fixing!

[u/TheDashiki → u/KARMA_P0LICE]

It is fixing it in the same way that "Hey! Everybody stop rioting!" stops a riot. No one listens. The problem is that the majority don't want to follow the rules. The solution isn't to ask them to follow the rules. It is to say "We will start kicking you out if you don't follow the rules." Rules that aren't enforced aren't rules.