But, as with digg, I couldn't have reasonable discussions there. It was always a flamewar or an attack by the hivemind. Then there is the memes. Too too many on nearly every board. Don't get me started on rage comics.
If you want serious discussion, hit-and-run style up/down comment systems are not what you're looking for. The up/down system acts mostly as a psychological reinforcing mechanism, to get people addicted to checking their karma or points or whatever. Moderation at this level really just hurts discussion and makes it a popularity contest. Things that people agree with go up, things that are controversial (that spur actual debate) go down. And it will all be forgotten in a day. It's junk food conversation. The equivalent of the online water cooler.
Usenet, mailing lists, forums, or even IRC are all much better places for discussion than reddit. The hivemind and clique behavior exists within all these places as well, but usually your words stand much better chance of being on equal footing.
> I couldn't have reasonable discussions there.
Total freedom and lack of regulation and curation + everyone gets in = the apocalypse of mediocrity. Same goes for the comment section of any hugely popular website (see Youtube and all big news agencies).
Absolute freedom is not for everyone, or even for a majority.
Just curious, which subreddits did you try to have reasonable discussions in? The ones I find myself in are moderated efficiently and there's not a trace of memes or rage comics.
Even subreddits like /r/feedthebeast, which has become the de-facto modded minecraft subreddit (for Forge flavors, at least) host much higher quality discussions and content and have almost no memes/jokes upvoted.
But again, that's probably because the FTB subreddit has less overall subscribers (less incentive to post for karma, as there are less potential viewers to reward you) as well as an average higher age of the users.
Hold up, you might be on to something. What if reddit divided karma received by the number of subscribers in the sub where something was posted? They'd need to then multiply it by some constant multiplier or something, there'd be some details to tweak, but that might do a lot to mitigate the problem of subreddits getting crappier as they get more popular.