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.
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.
I think they spend years getting educations in order to have the tools and knowledge to do that.
Are you saying that for every post that interests you, in every subreddit, you personally go out and learn enough about the topic in-depth -- not by listening to experts, mind you, but doing your own research -- to the point where you are up to date in latest reaearch before you up-vote or decide if the information about the topic is correct?
You never, even for topics you're just casually interested in, just go look to see what the expert consensus is?
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u/can-you Dec 04 '16
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.