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[–]sproketboy 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Yeah same. I think the upvote/downvote is the problem over there. Here we don't do that. :)

[–]whistlepig 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I'd argue it is the moderators that killed reddit. It was way better before those were introduced.

[–]comments 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

there was a time before moderators?


eta: I was censored here on SaidIt without explanation

[–]whistlepig 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The whole point of the voting system was so it would be self-moderating. You had better controls of what level of negative votes you wanted to show or hide. That was the big plus that sold the idea. This was the day of forums and this model was designed to automatize (or decentralize) moderation and make it the user's responsibility so the site host didn't have to do it.

The idea that the voting system would show what was popular was a secondary benefit in the beginning.

Back then if you turned off the hiding of heavily voted down comments you saw a fair amount of bigoted and stupid crap. But there was also occasionally the very well made argument that most didn't want to hear.

Digg was like that originally... slashdot.org was like that originally..

Remember reddit started 15 years ago. The public internet was 100% about free speech in the 90's and it was only through the 00's that the mainstream became more and more involved that the clamoring for censorship was started. The idea of your reddit's and diggs was to create a model that balanced both ways of thinking and allowed the individual to decide how much censorship they wanted.

Soon after these models became popular and more of the irresponsible public (and advertisers) got involved the more clamor there was for centralized censorship and that is when the sub moderator system was introduced.

Before that time the gross and disgusting comments just got voted down to extreme levels and you had to intentionally click on them to see them. And after the first one you had no excuse for not knowing what you might be getting.

This comment is mostly based on my memory. Although I double checked a couple dates on the wikipedia. ie.. started in 2005 and the subs were started in 2008. I think it was 2006-2007ish when I first heard of reddit and started using it. Originally I was using Digg and Slashdot, but they started top down control and others in the comments there suggested I check out reddit.