I cannot stress enough how toxic the karma system is. I believe online bullying is real, flag systems, and moderators are necessary. But Karma systems are often abused by punishing users for expressing opposing views. I believe this is part of what sculpts ecosystems into echo chambers. When someone gets downvoted, no matter the reason, they receive posting restrictions, bans, etc.
Why can’t there be a balance where users can post what they want as long as it isn’t bigoted?
Instead of a thousand sub Reddits, why not just 10 to 20 general boards. The user picks which of those boards they wish to subscribe to. No user generated boards so people can worship Elliott Smith and attack people who like Ed Sheeran.
Yes, my idea is basically 4chan minus the bigotry, plus user profiles. But also still focused on users posting links to articles as well as Ask posts like this one.
But there are great subreddits. (pro tip: none of them are the default subreddits.)
If you want to go discuss controversial topics, reddit is like being in a room of screaming and raving lunatics.
If you go a subreddit about 3D printers, or a particular city, or some niche hobby, there are awesome, well-moderated subreddits where the participants are civil and constructive.
Good luck defining “bigoted” and enforcing that objectively. Almost anything interesting will offend someone.
The idea that you can replicate the lasting success of 4chan minus the bigotry is misunderstanding the specific formula that makes 4chan work.
Part of the reason for the bigotry is as a defensive measure to keep out masses of thin-skinned people (some observers call them normies or NPCs) that ruin forums wherever they go. The types of people who can't mentally handle seeing pointless slurs are precisely the people who must be kept out to keep 4chan successful. And 4chan has mostly thrived for quite a while whereas many once interesting sites have become a bland, corporate morass.
And part of the reason for the bigotry is that reality in many cases is perceived as bigoted. You can't have a forum devoted to distilling ideas down to the truth without seeing bigotry. HackerNews is very successful in talking about technology and many ideas in many respects, but we all know that there's certain topics you can't fully discuss or you have to verbally dance around or risk getting blocked or banned. The pursuit of truth, as successful as it is for discussing many technology ideas, will forever be incomplete on HN.
> plus user profiles and NO KARMA SYSTEM
Another part of the reason that 4chan works is the lack of a user profile system. Unlike most forum systems, there's no way to save posts in any fashion. So the practice that has emerged is that really fantastic posts are saved as images and repeatedly posted. Essentially, the karma system that 4chan has is focused solely on the content.
I get where you're coming from. The idea of "uncensored" is appealing, but the ideal is ruined by a tiny minority who won't behave in anything even near a civil manner.
It is important to realize Reddit was originally self-sustaining. It generated the revenue it needed largely from the users who used it.
The real struggle, and how Reddit is moderated is a struggle, became an issue when it was sold for future value paid today. This meant Reddit must not only sustain itself, but deliver returns on those investments.
AD Revenue became a big deal, and with that comes the speech struggle we see today.
Or, have Uncle Sam run one. For the people, by the people, and run it to the letter of the law.
I would love to see the latter frankly. Would be a very interesting experiment.
Without karma/points you are relying on the platform and their definition of quality. Voting with points, is the easiest way to allow the community to decide what is important...
IMO the correct answer is to reduce posting and browsing forums. Unless you have a specific question, it is largely a waste of time designed to make you upset (see your comment about the Elliott Smith sub).
4chan has a joke that browsing Reddit is only bearable so long as you sort everything by controversial. I don't think that works too well when ranking content, but for comments it's far more interesting and probably my preferred way to rank comments on Reddit.
I kind of like the idea of a Reddit-like site which hides karma, but ranks comments by "controversy". Reddit really suffers from echo-chambers and in recent years I've mostly stopped reading and participating in discussions on Reddit because comment sections on Reddit are full of people uncritically agreeing with each other. I'm fine with receiving hate online and being downvoted, but what I don't like is spending time to write out a comment presenting a different opinion only be downvoted into oblivion and receive no constructive feedback. I always try to bring an opposing perspective to discussions (even when I don't hold the opinion I'm advocating for) because I think that's generally the only way to really explore problems and break out of local-optimas in our thought process on any given topic, but this is actively discouraged on Reddit because of the karma and comment ranking system.
I also think Reddit suffers from its popularity, and to some extent, its corporate interests. If a Reddit competitor emerges it should ideally be community funded, but more importantly it should try to be selective with it's user base and avoid the common growth at all costs approach to building social networks. Generally the quality of conversation on smaller, niche subreddits is far higher because there is a less casual audience. For example, in the past political subreddits were mostly comprised of users who were really interested in politics and they were there to have high-quality conversations about the details of policies and other political topics. Today, the average user on a political subreddit is someone with a casual interest in what's happening in the world politically and therefore the comments tend to be full of low-effort, reactionary opinions. For whatever reason HN has done a really good job at remaining a reasonably niche community and has no significant corporate bias. I think that's primarily why the quality of conversation here is that much higher than on Reddit.
Just some thoughts, because I agree with you a Reddit alternative would be great.