“embarrassment”?

The whole voting system attached to posts and comments was originally designed and intended as a self-moderation system. Along with the voting part there was an equally important tool to control what vote level of comments/posts would be displayed in the open. Everything with a lower vote count was hidden unless you clicked on it to look. So basically you were self-moderating by viewing only comments above a certain value (commonly 0). It typically only took a couple minutes for blatant trolling like stereotypical n-word usage to drop down to -5 and lower. One can easily argue that it worked more quickly than the current system. And of course it provided the option for people with thicker skin to open their eyes and minds to the occasional well thought out (but unpopular) argument.

This is how all the original link sharing sites like DIGG and slashdot worked at first. And reddit worked this way until 2008 when they started to kill it by introducing subreddits and their respective moderators. Before, you had topics and the like, but no groups. Since 2008 in slow increments the vote level viewing tools became more and more hidden and minimized and the power and control of moderators increased. Now we have a majority of people unaware that there is any other option and the result is that most alternative reddit sites all use the same broken central authority model.

To give this some historic perspective. When these kind of sites were introduced the web forums were the big thing. Along with the problem of having to check various sites individually for subjects, stories and to comment, there was also the really big problem of the authoritarian moderators common on forums. These early sites provided solutions to both of those problems. But of course the big sites like Digg, slashdot, reddit, etc soon got pressured to drop that model from investors as more and more investment started paying people’s bills and making people rich. First was slashdot, then Digg and then Reddit.

As more and more mainstream people joined these sites they also clamored for such centralized moderation. TV watchers are not the kind of people who enjoy taking responsibility for their own actions.

Source: I was there and was an adult in my 20’s at the time. So all of this is based on my memories, except for the dates which I verified by checking wikipedia several years ago when I first started trying to tell people how it use to be.

Sorry I didn’t respond sooner. Got sidetracked after starting to use a different browser and forgot to check this site in too long. ;[