Speaking of people misusing a feature, I think the very act of “faving” something would be misappropriated - if it was meant to be what the user thinks is good, then people applying different definitions of “good” would be working at cross-purposes. e.g. someone who claims that the holocaust never happened could either be making a wildly popular and perfectly acceptable statement, or else the exact opposite, depending on context. THAT issue… seems insurmountable to me, personally, unless a LOT more effort went into implementation. Maybe if it were something like an automated cross-posting / nomination process to the BestOf magazine, that could work? So one user could nominate the comment to a Best-Of mag, another could nominate the same comment to a Worst-Of one, still another could nominate it to a Most-Silly one, etc. Just like crowsourcing restaurant reviews!:-) In any case, people barely use that mag as it is, so it seems a nonstarter at least atm, and also, look out vulnerable restaurant reviews turned out to be:-(.

We almost might need like a separate voting system - one for “likes” and another for “something else”, so that when you sort, you can either see the “popular” stuff, or you could shuffle past that and get to the “other”. In Reddit, I think that was mostly accomplished by having each sub be the arbiter of its own policies - so something “popular” in r/AskHistorians would NOT be so popular in r/Memes, and vice versa. Good fences make good neighbors and so on. Although mods and users alike would also decry even in a place such as AskHistorians how end-users would abuse the upvote, turning it into a “like” button where you click it if you agree with the content, rather than indicating its relevance to the discussion. Also relevant is how large the communities are, so like if r/AskHistorian had only, lets say for ease of theoretical discussion “100 active members” (or rather, that being a useful approxomation thereof, like 100 people that contribute daily, or 200 people that contribute every other day, or 5-700 people that contribute once a week, and so on), while if r/Memes has “1 million active members”, then even inside a post within the r/AskHistorian sub, if the users of r/Memes were to ever see it somehow (it appearing on r/All lets say), then they could unintentionally brigade the smaller community, completely overwhelming their normal likes and dislikes with artificial ones, even (and highly likely) entirely unintentionally.

Potentially that could be solved by using sub-specific karma, like someone’s vote who has been in the sub for ten years could carry substantially more weight than someone who literally just joined a moment ago, made a reply, then immediately unsubscribed. The down-side there is that someone who had been in the sub for ten years would have to be careful to not throw their weighting around willy-nilly, and drown out people who have “only” been there like 2 years. The devil is in the details indeed, to working out such a system.

Although people on the Fediverse seem ADAMANTLY opposed to any such system of weighted voting, despite the best intentions. I think the argument goes: let the content be the deciding factor. …

And… I am exceeding the character limit again. I guess I should be more diligent about cutting back on my social media, as that Enui Engine article said:-), and if a response is worth writing, then I should find a way to do it within the limitations provided. That said, I’m going to allow myself to do it one more time b/c it is nearly midnight and I’m too tired to rewrite it, and having come this far it seems better than simply not responding at all?

As mentioned, this is part 2 of 2, which I am going to try to be more diligent about NOT giving such long-winded replies, but in case this is of interest, at least this way you’ll have the choice of whether to read it or not:

Even if the person speaking has -10000000 karma (at that point it would be a wonder they were not banned already, but setting that aside in this hypothetical:-), let their voice carry equal weight than someone else with that amount of positive karma. And I get that, I do, so long as there are only like 20 comments that’s a GREAT way to get along. Except actually no, even then while the “average” situation could handle it well (you simply read through all 20 to find what you want, discarding the rest), it seems to me like even then it would be heavily vulnerable to a purposeful worst-case trolling scenario where someone writes up content to look like it is valid, and it requires some DEEPER digging to avoid spreading misinformation? Like if some tells you to drink bleach, and someone ELSE tells you to NOT drink bleach, who will you listen to? The guy who spent 10 years getting a degree specifically in medicinal matters, or the guy on the TV screaming at you? (legit, a couple of people ACTUALLY did drink bleach, upon being told that it cured Covid from an authority figure, that is a REAL STORY I told just now - and it was only a precursor to what came next with the Ivermectin scenario, in-between which one of my family members even thought she got Covid and went outside to “soak up sunlight” trying to cure it, misunderstanding that direct sunlight onto the actual virus like on an exposed surface would sterilize said surface, but that sunlight cannot penatrate someone’s lungs to kill it!? oh, and it was below freezing temps when she did it too) On the other hand, this isn’t a “news” site, this is “social media”, so what the goal is should perhaps be thought of very much differently. I like the idea of equal access for everyone who is honestly engaging in the due-diligence process… the problem, as you mentioned for the Ennui Engine article, is when people do not do that.

And speaking of, I seem to recall its’ ending quite differently - while it did acknowledge that while that may very well be the only solution that has any chance of working, even so, it continued on to state as you and I are also doing now that people simply will not do it. So that, as they say, is that. All you can do is engage, or not engage, with the mindset of heavy skepticism. And engaging less overall is preferable, plus more to the point, doing so with intentionality (like you have half an hour to kill and want mindless meme entertainment, then time-box it and go for it!:-P) is what prevents its worst effects on a person, much like alcohol that can be used to relax muscles, ease breathing passages, warm a person up after coming in from the cold - in short has valid, even medicinal uses, as well as horrible outcomes for those who allow it to get the better of them.

Though I do wish that there was an algorithmic way to help prune through all the “popular” content for the real stuff. As I took over the mod position of a small (couple of) gaming subs, I read articles written by former mods who had put a lot of thought into that, as they watched Reddit turn from a discussion forum into a social media site. Guides, FAQs, discussion megathreads, and the like are higly desirable content for people to read, yet Reddit refuses to allow more than 2 pinned posts, and even those only show up when sorted by Hot. Also, NO MATTER WHAT you tell people, they will ADAMANTLY REFUSE to follow the simplest of directions - e.g. if a “Guide” flair is meant to be reserved for those articles that are among the top 1% of all posts for a given year, people not only will slap it onto their sinlege-semtanx misplellddded “guides”, but they will will even slap it onto their QUESTIONS “hey uh, I haven’t played for a whole month, and despite seeing the pinned post CLEARLY stating This Is What To Do If You Have Not Played In The Past Month, I would like to ask: what should I do, you know, since I have not played in the past month?” (sadly, if they were trolling, I could not detect it - some at least seemed quite genuine in asking thus). I suspect that such an algorithmic way might not exist, since it too would rely on people to uphold even the slightest set of standards, at which point it is perhaps doomed to failure? But it is an interesting problem for me to think about latey:-). The solution for the Guides matter btw was to shift the content away from Reddit and migrate it into an external wiki, which allowed for significantly easier discoverability. Not that it lessened the sheer flood of questions asking for it in the slightest (noticeably at any rate), you understand:-).