I believe that the manipulation of the points/likes/upvote systems is a major problem that needs to be dealt with.
Upvotes and downvotes being equal buries even widely held near-majority opinions.
Hiding downvote counts makes it impossible to know if the comment was overlooked or is controversial
Unlimited up/down votes skews scoring toward fanatics that will take the time to score dozens or hundreds of comments
Collapsing low-scoring comments lets early readers control the discussion as hidden comments never get seen enough to get positive again.
For example, if every American voted on "abortion should be legal" on reddit it would score +3 million and you'd say "wow that's a great comment lots of people agree with" and "abortion is murder" would get -3 million and that person that wrote it is literally Hitler, but those are 51% and 49% view respectively. This is not good.
But look what happens if downvotes are only -1/2 points: "abortion should be legal" gets +92 million and "abortion is murder" gets +82 million score. The difference is still magnified somewhat, but not centered around zero so it's more conducive to real debate. This is halfway between 'controversial' and 'best' scoring and is the best of both worlds (it has beard).
Now what if in the extreme any one person gets one vote per thread. Ten people in TwoX each post "men are evil" and you post "penis power". On reddit that's 10*10=100 votes in favor of "men are evil" and 1 vote in favor of "penis power" if they vote on everything -- 100:1 and way more extreme than the 10:1 split in ideology, so it's enhancing an already echo chamber. With one person one vote it's more like +5 for the top "men are evil", +2 for next "men are evil", and -3 for "penis power". A much more healthy, balanced scoring where if you are not super offensive even small minority views can get seen.
Of course bots are still a problem, but it's way easier for a bot to cast 100 votes than to run 100 bots undetected.
Upvotes and downvotes being equal buries even widely held near-majority opinions.
Hiding downvote counts makes it impossible to know if the comment was overlooked or is controversial
Unlimited up/down votes skews scoring toward fanatics that will take the time to score dozens or hundreds of comments
Collapsing low-scoring comments lets early readers control the discussion as hidden comments never get seen enough to get positive again.
For example, if every American voted on "abortion should be legal" on reddit it would score +3 million and you'd say "wow that's a great comment lots of people agree with" and "abortion is murder" would get -3 million and that person that wrote it is literally Hitler, but those are 51% and 49% view respectively. This is not good.
But look what happens if downvotes are only -1/2 points: "abortion should be legal" gets +92 million and "abortion is murder" gets +82 million score. The difference is still magnified somewhat, but not centered around zero so it's more conducive to real debate. This is halfway between 'controversial' and 'best' scoring and is the best of both worlds (it has beard).
Now what if in the extreme any one person gets one vote per thread. Ten people in TwoX each post "men are evil" and you post "penis power". On reddit that's 10*10=100 votes in favor of "men are evil" and 1 vote in favor of "penis power" if they vote on everything -- 100:1 and way more extreme than the 10:1 split in ideology, so it's enhancing an already echo chamber. With one person one vote it's more like +5 for the top "men are evil", +2 for next "men are evil", and -3 for "penis power". A much more healthy, balanced scoring where if you are not super offensive even small minority views can get seen.
Of course bots are still a problem, but it's way easier for a bot to cast 100 votes than to run 100 bots undetected.