Yes the author's previous blog article "COVID-19 Restrictions are the new Sharia Law" might give you an idea of why these "random" cherry-picked example reddit comments made it into this article.
That was satirical (eg. because people wearing cloth masks despite them having been shown to be ineffective against COVID19 is similar to wearing a garment for religious reasons). If you had literally looked at either of the posts after or prior to that, you would've seen more in-depth and serious criticisms of COVID-19 restrictions:
Yes, and, I think he outlines some serious issues with discourse on Reddit. I think if you strip away some of his biases you get one singular complaint:
Reddit strips nuance from conversation.
Adding nuance introduces attack vectors, complicates your argument and requires that the group as a whole be more informed in order to create compelling arguments.
It's so much easier to throw out quips and one-liners that help your world view, and obliterate comments that present constructive criticism.
I find one-line quips as top comments confirming one's preconceived notions to be incredibly harmful, because they make one overly confident in their own certainty. "See, I was right! Everyone else feels the same way! Everyone else on the other side is wrong and stupid!".
Whenever I feel overly confident in some viewpoint, often the first thing I do is look for the contrarian view, because that's where you're more likely to actually gain knowledge and be forced to defend your viewpoint. Unfortunately, Reddit makes it too easy to end up in your bubble.
I would forgive the list of bad takes if the OP's suggestions on "how to fix Reddit" were actually useful in fixing the problems he's claiming exist. Instead, all his suggestions do is add barriers to common functions that do nothing to actually change the quality of discourse but just make it more difficult for people to interact. The other suggestions (that are basically just "HN does this so I like it") may work to limit bot usage or downvoting through alt accounts but they do nothing to fix the ultimate problem that he's describing which is that any platform where quality is distilled to a thumbs up or thumbs down will, by nature, get polarized as people choose a side. If you want nuance, you need to rely on moderation and Reddit, unfortunately, is astro-turfed by power mods who run all the big subs.
If he wants nuance again, he needs to visit more nuanced sub-reddits that aren't approaching terminal velocity. This happens every time a social media platform/news aggregator gets popular. Look at the history of Digg, /., and even HN itself to see why and how they get overtaken. If your userbase grows exponentially and your moderation doesn't, you're going to end up in the same place as teenagers and know-it-alls take over just by sheer volume.
My suggestion to improve the algorithm adds no barriers to the user. Reddit is already using an algorithm to sort comments ("Best", no idea how that works), so it's certainly feasible that they could either improve that, or offer alternative algorithms like "Insightful" or "For You" like I recommended in the article.
The modal on downvote does add a barrier, but maybe it would reduce downvote=disagree. Or maybe not. I don't know. Either way it could be worth testing, though obviously wouldn't be as impactful as changing the algorithm.
Happy to hear recommendations on subreddits on higher quality discussion, especially pertaining to things like politics and current events where it's very difficult to find high quality discussion.
>My suggestion to improve the algorithm adds no barriers to the user.
While that's true, it's also completely empty in terms of usable, actionable steps that can be taken. You mention an algorithm that rewards based on the length of comments but that also rewards any kind of copy-pasta or bot-driven blogspam comments. The other suggestion is to use an AI/ML to improve the quality but that completely ignores that AI has to be trained to be useful. If Reddit, whose goal is to generate views on ads and clicks to sponsored content, trains the model to suit them then it's no more useful to you than the current algorithms (which, for reference, sort by disparity between upvotes and downvotes - top equals most upvotes while ignoring downvotes, "best" equals highest upvotes with lowest downvotes, and controversial sorts by the smallest delta between upvotes and downvotes).
As for recommendations, I don't think you'll find what you're looking for on Reddit. Even subs like /r/neutralpolitics, by virtue of today's political climate, lean left and subs that tend to lean right are full of deleted comments, over-enthusiastic mod censorship, and memes.
Nothing you said negates ML as a possible solution to better tailor content for people. Other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. already use algorithms to try to better tailor content for users to increase engagement, absolutely no reason Reddit couldn't offer something similar (with the option to use the classic mode obviously). Also to be clear I'm talking more about comment quality than post quality (there are no ads in comments).
Of course using length of comments isn't perfect, and that should never be the sole input in any general-purpose algorithm, just one variable among many. I still believe it could be used to help improve quality. It would likely be more about punishing extremely short comments (eg. one or two sentences) which are rarely insightful, rather than simply scoring comments based on length.
This explains everything anyone needed to know about your original post. Reddit itself is an ad. Those other networks you mentioned use their algos to do one thing and one thing only and that's make money.
I mean your comment literally reads exactly like the type of Reddit comments I criticized in my article. One-liner with no substance. I'd expect this from Reddit, but disappointing that HN has devolved into this.
This comment is almost a parody of the terrible comments the author is referring to on reddit. Expecting someone to respond with, "No, your opinion is bad!"
