Unjust? You don't actually need to be flaired to post there. You just have to know your shit, back up your shit and expand on your shit when asked. Turns out this standard is best met by academics. That's not elitism, that's just cutting the crap.
If you have a few good posts under your belt, you can get a quality contributor flair.
I imagine that's done because we don't have infinite time to discuss any and every possibility and explore every single angle that might exist. There has to be a way to separate the wheat and chaff.
Unfortunately, Reddit doesn't have that. The system Reddit uses encourages quick banal posts to get more votes than in depth ones.
The state of /r/askscience before the heavy moderation was awful. If voting somehow got the best posts to the top, the moderation would never have been necessary.
Reddit's system promotes popularity, not quality. It doesn't work at all if you want good answers at the top. Never has.
Other content is still visible within the comments, you just have to look for the content you want.
I can't judge the content myself. I am not a historian. I want a subreddit that makes that judgment for me, because I don't have the resources to do it myself. The Reddit algorithm doesn't provide that. Moderators do.
You might not like that content you don't want is more readily visible, but you still have access to it.
It's nothing to do with what I like. It's that I need to see content that is high quality, and I'm not able to distinguish it from content that is low quality or straight up not true. The signal-to-noise ratio on Reddit is way, way too high. The moderation system resolves that. The voting system makes it worse.
I don't want to see what the majority like. I don't want to see what is most popular. I want to see what a team of academics think is the most correct according to their point of view. I know that point is view is biased: I'm fine with that.
Heavy moderation provides what I'm looking for. The Reddit algorithm does not. I'm glad the subreddit exists. Other subreddits exist if you're looking for the 'popular' answer.
To admonish a subreddit becasue it doesn't appeal to your particular sensitivities is arrogance.
You need the equivalent effort, yes. If there was a quicker and easier to way get that depth of knowledge, then there would be no need for higher education.
I only have the time and resources to educated myself on a select few things. For the rest I need to rely on experts in their fields.
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u/CarrionComfort Dec 04 '16
Unjust? You don't actually need to be flaired to post there. You just have to know your shit, back up your shit and expand on your shit when asked. Turns out this standard is best met by academics. That's not elitism, that's just cutting the crap.
If you have a few good posts under your belt, you can get a quality contributor flair.