The voting system just presents the community opinion on the comment. There are any number of ways to weigh those opinions. The other metrics I would want to see are number of threads, average length of threads, average word count in replies, etc. But raw upvoted and downvote counts go a long way toward finding good content.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

It only really works in smaller communities imo, as the community gets larger, it just reflects what's popular, and that's a separate scale from good vs bad, especially once your community has self-selected itself into a common way of thinking.

So the question is, how do we mitigate that self selection? How do we promote diversity? Voting doesn't seem to cut it, and I don't think moderation is the way either (we just need the "right people" argument). So yeah, I'd like to see a lot more experimentation with different ways of sorting comments and posts, because I think promoting diverse content is better long term.