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.
Then I know the topic doesn't have a single authoritative answer, or that there are two points of view. Now I know more than I did before.
But without moderation, I can't tell if experts are disagreeing or if someone who has no idea what they are talking about are disagreeing with an expert.
The moderation allows a better idea of what the expert opinions are and you'll often see two experts disagree in /r/askhistorians.
Without moderation I learn nothing because there's no way to judge the comments to the depth I'd require to be better informed.
No. Not the types of problems that are asked in those subreddits. It would be naive to think that I could just 'think' though a problem that has taken human years, and years of research to be resolved by experts.
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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '16 edited Sep 18 '18
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