Reddit's algorithm gets around much of the brain-damage of simple vote counts or capped moderation (e.g., the Slashdot method -- utterly broken).
What it doesn't address is the quality or relevance of the upvotes themselves. Spend much time on reddit and it's clear that there are a great many people who are voting on stories and content with little regard to its significance or truth.
As a measure of popularity or agreement, the metric is ... better than most. As an indicator of true quality it continues to inherit the faults of virtually all online moderation systems. Absent either creating a class of users who are considered "trusted moderators", or a means of finding agreement between a given reader's preferences and those of the raters indicated, that's pretty much a persistent issue. The better subreddits, in my opinion, address this through guidelines, posting policies, and very strict subreddit moderator policing: removing nonconformant or low-quality posts, banning individuals who troll or don't follow posting / commenting guidelines.
Even subreddit mods cannot change the voting on submissions or comments themselves (nor can they see who's voted on what), but they can influence what is visible within the sub -- editorial prerogative.
> The better subreddits, in my opinion, address this through guidelines, posting policies, and very strict subreddit moderator policing: removing nonconformant or low-quality posts
A moderator deleting someone's comment should be the last resort. It's irritating to spend 5 minutes writing a comment in a subreddit, press post, then see "the comment you're replying to no longer exists" because the moderator decided deleting a thread of 10 comments was more appropriate than taking some time to write a comment with their own opinion. It's also irritating when one's own comment with 4 upvotes is deleted while someone else's comment with 6 downvotes remains untouched although collapsed. This recently happened to me twice, a week apart, on a subreddit I'd been visiting intermittently for the last 4 yrs, and very occasionally commenting in, without any trouble.
> Even subreddit mods cannot change the voting on submissions
Perhaps this is the real reason a subreddit moderator deletes upvoted comments they don't agree with, while leaving downvoted ones. Downvoting and replying should be the means to control quality, with a moderator deleting a comment as the last resort.
AskScience and AskHistorians regularly delete comments. Both are intended for the serious discussion of the topic at hand. Hell, they'll even delete comments which are serious but don't reference their sources. I've had this done to a few of my own comments. The mods are fair-handed about this, and point to the rules. The result is a good experience and high level of discourse.
The tune's a bit different in /r/economics, where while posts aren't deleted, there's a very strong bias toward economic orthodoxy, despite the many, many, many flaws it contains (full disclosure: my degree is in economics).
For my own subreddit, the focus is on intelligent discussion. I make no bones about deleting trolls, or even just vapid comments. I'm not looking to win any popularity contests.
Some sub reddits make it clear that they delete a lot of comments. (Askscience is one example). This is great. A well crafted answer to a deleted post is still useful - someone has a mistaken idea about science and that is deleted while your well crafted post corrects the myth.
And in some subs it is iust a lot easier to delete posts that are almost trolling than to allow a large angry thread to spawn. Often those are the same tedious meta topics, or very simple beginner topics, that have been covered very many times and which are not interesting but which are flamebaity.
What it doesn't address is the quality or relevance of the upvotes themselves. Spend much time on reddit and it's clear that there are a great many people who are voting on stories and content with little regard to its significance or truth.
As a measure of popularity or agreement, the metric is ... better than most. As an indicator of true quality it continues to inherit the faults of virtually all online moderation systems. Absent either creating a class of users who are considered "trusted moderators", or a means of finding agreement between a given reader's preferences and those of the raters indicated, that's pretty much a persistent issue. The better subreddits, in my opinion, address this through guidelines, posting policies, and very strict subreddit moderator policing: removing nonconformant or low-quality posts, banning individuals who troll or don't follow posting / commenting guidelines.
Even subreddit mods cannot change the voting on submissions or comments themselves (nor can they see who's voted on what), but they can influence what is visible within the sub -- editorial prerogative.