>What exactly is so bad about Reddit? I don't read it, so I don't know?
The cliche is that reddit is turning into digg. I recently stopped visiting reddit because I think there is truth to the cliche. There are two dimensions to the the quality problem with reddit: content and comments. For 80% of the cases the content (i.e. the posted links) problem is solved: a few weeks back reddit did some excellent work on the algorithm to aggregate user's subreddits (e.g. politics, programming) and present links on the top page. Users seem to be happy with the change, so for example if someone doesn't want to see lolcatz, they just unsubscribe from the lolcatz subreddit. There are problems around people posting to wrong subreddits, but these are minor.
On the other hand comments are getting really bad. To understand this point, check out the "most dugg" comments on digg for pg's disagreement hierarchy essay. The top comment is just the word "No", and the 2nd and 3rd aren't that much better. So based on that I think whatever karma system you'll have, at the end it will reflect the overall sentiment of the user population on the site. For example, if the majority of the users believe that the comment "u r a fag" is a "good" response and give karma to the comment, then regardless of how you write the karma algorithm, the comments with the highest karma will reflect this primitive nature of the user population. Another example is youtube comments where there is a voting system, but reading comments makes you want to poke your eyes out.
There doesn't seem to be a solution other than to restrict comment voting/karma giving to a subset of the users who represent and vote in line with the behaviors that should be considered "good".
The cliche is that reddit is turning into digg. I recently stopped visiting reddit because I think there is truth to the cliche. There are two dimensions to the the quality problem with reddit: content and comments. For 80% of the cases the content (i.e. the posted links) problem is solved: a few weeks back reddit did some excellent work on the algorithm to aggregate user's subreddits (e.g. politics, programming) and present links on the top page. Users seem to be happy with the change, so for example if someone doesn't want to see lolcatz, they just unsubscribe from the lolcatz subreddit. There are problems around people posting to wrong subreddits, but these are minor.
On the other hand comments are getting really bad. To understand this point, check out the "most dugg" comments on digg for pg's disagreement hierarchy essay. The top comment is just the word "No", and the 2nd and 3rd aren't that much better. So based on that I think whatever karma system you'll have, at the end it will reflect the overall sentiment of the user population on the site. For example, if the majority of the users believe that the comment "u r a fag" is a "good" response and give karma to the comment, then regardless of how you write the karma algorithm, the comments with the highest karma will reflect this primitive nature of the user population. Another example is youtube comments where there is a voting system, but reading comments makes you want to poke your eyes out.
There doesn't seem to be a solution other than to restrict comment voting/karma giving to a subset of the users who represent and vote in line with the behaviors that should be considered "good".