Been thinking about the voting system lately and how it inevitably kills in-depth discussion in growing communities.
Every sub/community follows the same trajectory: starts small with passionate users sharing quality content/discussion → grows in popularity → memes and low-effort posts flood in → actual discussion gets buried or downvoted.
I’m guilty of this too tbh. I realized I use upvotes/downvotes as personal “like/dislike” buttons rather than judging relevance to the community.
Here’s my hot take:
- Voting should be restricted to subscribed users only
- Downvotes should be capped at a fraction of total upvotes a user gives out
The clearest example of this failure is gonewild. The demographics mean male content (which is 100% allowed) gets mass-downvoted into oblivion while female content dominates the front page. It’s not about quality or relevance anymore - it’s just a popularity contest.
Anyone else feel like the voting system needs a complete rethink?
Isn’t the situation in gonewild a clear sign it’d be wise to set up two separate communities? gonewildgals and gonewildguys or something? If a community is “too broad”, niche content will always lose out. The answer is usually setting up a new community specific to that niche.
Fighting low-effort posts and memes either means setting up a meme community, more moderation on the posts or both.
People could discuss pretty much anything in old school forums which had only a handful of boards. Now we need millions of communities just because Reddit has them as well, even if there isn’t enough activity to justify them. I feel like the Fediverse already has enough fragmentation issues as it is because of all the similar communities in different instances. Separating niche communities into even more niche ones when those communities are barely active to begin with just doesn’t make sense.