The Unofficial redditor's Guide to Commenting +

This is interesting because it reminds me a lot of problems in social media

• it shows the complex behavior of how people commenting on popular social media, and how differently it works from conventional plain commenting systems.
• It's getting boring if more people began to realize it consciously or unconsciously, once everyone began to follow this flowchart, the content will suffer homogenization, what makes reddit original, worthy reading and valuable will be gone
• The upvote and downvote button exist because it was designed to replace silly '+1' like comments, but soon people discover other usages, for example downvote would be abused to express disagreement while it originally means mark as spam or inappropriate, people would like to upvote more pun without thinking, there's whole category of karma abusing, like karma whoring, upvote party, a comment may get upvoted by simply saying "beacon!". Use upmod and downmod to simulate a voting system, etc. An ID's corresponding karma is more meaningless if more upvote abuse is conducted. People's behavior is out of design scope. The vote button even acts like a placebo button, people would upvote something simply think they can magically mark it as read.
• Upvote blindness. One is likely to upvote simply because many other people upvoted it, if you don't understand half of the comment and the commenter seems to like know what he is talking, you are likely to upvote it no matter you know the actual truth or not. HN once tried to show points after voting, but it wasn't quite successful.
• Eternal september. Proggit sufferes eternal september every year, because the submission quality downgrades eventually, so old users are more selective to read and reluctant to upvote. But newbies are very enthusiastic to upvote and downvote. So lots of stupid AskProggit are more likely to popup because newbies all have the similar problem, nevertheless the problem itself is rampant and answers can be easily found on other sites like stackoverflow.
• The FAQ won't work. Technology changes fast, newbies are likely to looking for the lastest, interactive and live answers from individuals, FAQ helps, but it often fails because it's not kept updated. And people are likely to select authority advices from multiple places , a question may be asked a millions times but a self-submission may be post because of one most simple motivation: let's ask proggit and see what proggit thinks.
• People hates self posts, because reddit was designed to be a 'social bookmarking tool'. They newbie's stupid question spamming my bookmark is not an good idea. But sometimes a redditor's answer to those stupid questions turned out to be extremely useful and insightful, and fresh. It's a pity to let a wittyful comment buried, it's hard choice but you had to upvote the whole thread anyway.
• Spam filter never works well. Some submission may not interest all but perhaps helpful to a lot of people. But they get downvoted before anyone spots it.
• To design a really effective and predictable system, a equilibrium or fixed point has to be found from social media participants' behavior.

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