Just add a dislike button and put controversial tweets collapsed at the bottom. It works well for reddit. Let the community moderate themselves.
It resulted in rampant child pornography, doxxing, death threats, gory violence etc. It epitomised the worst of humanity.
Now the Reddit admins keep a watch on moderators and if their subreddits do not meet site-wide standards they are replaced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
"The community (Beatingwomen), which featured graphic depictions of violence against women, was banned after its moderators were found to be sharing users' personal information online"
"According to Reddit administrators, photos of gymnast McKayla Maroney and MTV actress Liz Lee, shared to 130,000 people on popular forum r/TheFappening, constitute child pornography"
> CNN is not publishing “HanA*holeSolo’s” name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-use...
Yeah, I totally trust these people to not lie.
Reddit definitely had all of these issues, and they were handled horribly.
It resulted in reddit. That style of moderation is how reddit became reddit; so it should also get credit for whatever you think is good about reddit. The new (half-decade old) reddit moderation regime was a new venture that was hoping to retain users who were initially attracted by the old moderation regime.
Unmoderated hell holes tend to have to survive on questionable funding and rarely grow to any size.
My Reddit account is 16 years old. I was there in the very early days of the site well before the Digg invasion and well before it gained widespread popularity.
It was never because it allowed anything. It was because it was a much more accessible version of Slashdot. And it was because Digg did their redesign and it ended up with a critical mass of users. Then they started opening up the subreddits and it exploded from there.
The fact that Reddit is growing without that content shows that it wasn't that important to begin with.
Their anything goes policy is also a huge part of what made them successful back in the day.