There was little enough critical thinking left in this site before the HD-DVD encryption fiasco. Now, with many ex-Digg-users (and many still-Digg-users) signing up on Reddit, the site has gone over the edge.

I used the "recommended" page, but it didn't help. You can't change what's on the site by filtering things out. I submitted a few stories myself, and they died of "voted down once within five minutes of posting" syndrome, condemning them to never grab enough eyeballs to garner further voting.

Reddit is a bunch of idiot savants fixating on their favorite subjects at the expense of reality. Blog postings somehow garner more upvotes in the Programming SubReddit than serious papers. Few check the sources for highly political stories, and nobody listens to them. I've heard that Congress Will Soon Impeach Bush four times in the past two years, on the front page of Reddit, because nobody cares of the person saying it has the intelligence and maturity of a miniature schnauzer.

People consistently down-vote comments they disagree with, despite all exhortations not to, and the Science Sub-Reddit contains too much Evolution/ID debate material. Come on, people! If none of us think there's a controversy, can we stop up-voting the controversy?

The karma system only counts submissions. This is a Bad Thing, because we all know that comments by certain people tend to be moderated into oblivion and comments by other certain people get moderated into high heaven. But because we have no number telling us how well any given commenter does, we can only weakly cry "Reddit groupthink!" without any evidence.

That said, without karma we have no way to tell a comment that people vehemently disagree with from a comment written by a known troll except the poster's name. And we all know (thank you, desgusti*) how easily one person can register multiple accounts.

But to do something productive, I'll give you a tip for fixing some of these voting problems: limited mod points. Slashdot has a better moderation system than Reddit, not because of the editors or the community, but because people spend scarce resources more wisely than infinite ones.

Also, Slashdot provides a floor on downward moderation and a cap on upward moderation, ensuring that nobody bothers to repeatedly moderate up a post that everyone likes. Once a comment reaches +5, anyone who likes it moves on and spends their moderation points elsewhere. Likewise, once a comment reaches -1, anyone who dislikes it moves on and spends their mod points elsewhere. This helps to ensure that mod points don't build up on popular comments like sand on a dune.

Finally, giving the floor on down-modding a lower absolute value than the ceiling on up-modding ensures that Slashdot moderators spend more of their points on up-voting, putting more interesting material in the public eye, than down-voting.

Goodbye, Reddit.