I would very much like a world where upvotes and downvotes are not symmetric. As is we say total is upvotes minus downvotes, but in reality upvotes exist to say "good job" and downvotes should exist to say "this is spam or unnecessary"

A better system, IMO, would be to make downvoting closer to reporting, a little harder to do, but if the ratio of down to up passes a certain threshold, the comment is then flagged for review and/or just massively downgraded.

Oh, and you cannot do that to something you reply to. Either say "this is trash not worth engaging with" and move on, thus ensuring trolls do not get fed, or reply but acknowledge it was worth engagement.

Honestly it was kinda foolish for Reddit to ever think it was going to be otherwise. People are inherently tribal by nature.

It was absolutely impossible to have a constructive conversation between two opposing beliefs on reddit partly because of that system, it was really infuriating. On the other hand, beehaw seems to outright block the instances where users don't subscribe to their echo chamber, and I don't think that's good either.

That's always distressing to see, but if it keeps happening it's also evidence that community isn't worth the time to visit.

basically every thread i was apart of.