> Downvotes have been in Reddit's DNA since the beginning. This is a reasonable stance.

No it's not. There are plenty of subs that have lots of reason to not have downvotes (or any votes at all). It won't affect much algorithm-wise because the post decay will eventually push things off the front page no matter what.

For example, there are entire groups of subs designed for self help, support group type activities that get overpowered by trolls downvoting everything and making it uncomfortable for people to even post in there. The only lever mods have is to take the sub private, but then they might

a) either exclude people who need the group

b) accidentally keep in one of the trolls

> Good advice! What else are they going to do? You can't punish a crowd.

The same thing the admins do, find the brigade and ban them from the sub. Problem solved. But as a mod, you have zero ability to do this and are at the whim of the admin staff to do anything about it. Good luck running a sub when you have a troll downvoting every post to -6 right off the bat.

> A sub isn't merely property of those who created it. It's community property. Personally I think even being able to set a sub to 'private' after it's been created is too much, because it's equivalent to a delete. People shouldn't be able to delete the hard work of a community.

There are tons of subs that were literally the creation of one person, and have only ever had the one person in them. They were experimenting with something, or screwing around or whatever, and they should be able to take it down rather than have reddit aggregate it into overall promotional numbers "look how popular reddit is! we have tens of thousands of subs!"

> If Reddit were to show the actual number of upvotes per post, people might feel a little daunted. Right now people think a mere 2,000 upvotes are all that's needed to get to the front page of a default sub, rather than the more realistic 80,000+. They may lose interest the same way most people aren't interested in the presidential elections: they feel their vote doesn't matter.

The fuzzing is fine at large numbers where small % up/down don't really affect things much, but at small numbers it gets frequently weird when number are off by 10 or 20%. It's even weirder when you just create a sub and suddenly you have ~6 users here now. It's not the right way to deal with it and if they're that inaccurate, just remove them entirely.

> AutoModerator seems pretty good for this, isn't it?

It's fine, but it should be part of the core mod tools. It's beyond ridiculous that it required a flaky bot that you invite and add as a mod and configure through wiki pages to do the work the core code should be able to handle on it's own.

> I don't know why this story keeps floating in regards to /r/technology, but this isn't it. Some moderator of /r/technology, when responding to censorship claims, responded roughly "Reddit is a place for cat pictures and insulting people. Stop getting so worked up." They didn't take their job seriously, and no one could do a thing about it. That's what pissed people off, and it became pretty clear there was no accountability internal to their mod team.

Yeah, the flip side is when a mod, or mod group gets too controlling/lax, there's really very little the user community can do about it. I bet that the only reason any action was taken at all was because the sub was default.