I used to downvote fairly often on Reddit as a sign to disagree or to push down really disgusting bigoted comments. And to be honest, it became a habit to just downvote without replying. However, now that I’m on lemmy and not Reddit I’ve been actively trying to not instantly downvote things and instead move on or take the time to reply. Has anyone else been trying to do this?
HackerNews has an interesting approach: You can’t downvote comments unless you reach a certain amount of “Karma”, and you can’t downvote posts at all, you can “flag” them, meaning you think they don’t belong here. Flagging doesn’t affect the vote count, but massive flagging does make the post appear lower in the feed, and alerts mods.
This, alongside the tight moderation and zero-tolerance towards flame wars in the comments makes HackerNews one of the best places on the internet imho.
Completely agree on all points.
An additional one I’d argue is a huge part of HN’s success is their employment of a full-time moderator, dang, who does a great job.