This is just an article by a guy with bad opinions upset others don't agree with his bad opinions.
- https://jsavage.xyz/2022/03/12/why-covid-19-restrictions-are...
- https://jsavage.xyz/2022/02/22/covid-19-advanced-authoritari...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.