an easy way to stop vote manipulation is to just force the content you submit to be good and/or make votes unequal. But maximizing for quality content and making votes unequal both have problems.
you have to define ‘quality’. Even though reddit can be hilarious, if jokes are more visible than insightful discussion (and they will be, because it doesn’t take as long to process/vote on them) then insightful discussion will be buried and no one will have an incentive to do it. But, people will always make jokes anyway
you have to keep out non-quality [...] This is by design a form of elitism, and elitism is rarely as profitable as populism. Romance outsells conceptual fiction; Time magazine outsells the New Yorker. But at least those models have some way to make money [...] if reddit is not the source of startup wealth, well, it’s not like you’re going to find it by making an even more selective reddit [...] and profitability determines whether a solution will ever be implemented at all. [...] If “reddit but better” were something someone thought had real monetary potential, you’d have seen it by now.
HackerNews in particular requires that you get 500 upvotes before you can downvote someone, so every user has to think about how they are voting. Stack Exchange is even more stringent, and requires that you earn this privilege per discussion area as opposed to sitewide.
Ultimately, you cannot have some kind of content quality permanence unless you curate who votes in some fashion. This is done indirectly on most websites by simply creating discussion boards around subject matter that filter out idiots. If you start a message board around Algebraic Topology, well, your “off topic” forum is probably going to be a bit more rigorous than usual. But nothing is stopping you from being a bunch of idiots if you all decide to talk about normative ethics or exercise science or cognitive psychology or whatever
So, the solution would be a reddit-like entity where: Some kind of ‘curator curator’ exists whose job it is to approve who can vote/not vote. [...] Users have to earn the ability to upvote, and especially the ability to downvote, on a per-subreddit basis [...] New subreddits are made by application—i.e. someone has to make the case for this subreddit’s creation before it’s actually approved [...] Links with very few words require captcha entry—no actual penalty, but enough to make submitters second-guess whether they really want to submit, say, a link to a tweet. Subreddits have the ability to separately set permissions on who can submit and who can comment
It’s about prior expectation. If you give someone a right or power and then take that right or power away, they will feel cheated and be angry. [...] Reddit is probably beyond repair in this respect. [...] it’d be better to start from scratch
three major things people feel in response to internet comments [...] laughter, insight, and [...] we could vaguely call the third one “feels.” [...] splitting up the third category further would probably have diminishing returns [...] people just naturally gravitate toward stuff like laughter and feeling good. Trying to be insightful is hard. People were making other people laugh and cry before writing existed, but logic by comparison is really new and our brains clash with it a lot. Users will manage to insert jokes and moving anecdotes into their content even if you make insight a priority. But if you don’t make insight a priority people aren’t going to work to pursue that
In comments: