The problem is that it appears most people actually want noise, and it's becoming especially apparent as a lot of these content channels become more mainstream.

The problem is that it appears most people actually want noise, and it's becoming especially apparent as a lot of these content channels become more mainstream. Anyone who's been on Reddit for the majority of the site's existence will probably have noticed monumental shifts in popular content, which I feel is essentially a movement away from serious diverse discussion towards entertainment and self validation. I don't think I'd be going out on a limb to say a large amount of HN readers are interested in serious discourse, and I wouldn't be surprised to find there are many like me who feel completely alienated by modern Reddit. Previously it was enough to just ignore the default subs, but the momentum has become so strong that it has become pervasive even in niche subs. I've been thinking about it a lot recently, probably mostly stemming from nostalgia of what Reddit used to be, but I feel something that is quite important is identifying that different people are interested in different content, an that nobody is really entitled to stop others enjoying the category of content they want to consume. I don't care about entertainment on Reddit, and I particularly don't care about image macros, in-jokes and one liners. I absolutely love the high effort informational posts and discussions though, and some of them are truly insightful. I yearn for a mechanism to reliably filter out most of the entertainment things and promote the high effort content. I'd love for it to stay some form of voting mechanism though as it seems really effective when the community votes using congruent inclinations. The Slashdot voting system worked using a classification system (interesting, funny, etc.) but that is hardly good supporting evidence for content classification as it didn't work particularly well, perhaps because it was so limited (votes themselves were limited in quantity.) My current line of thinking is using emoji reactions might be an interesting option like you see on GitHub comments. If I want to avoid the entertainment posts I could filter out posts which predominantly have the laughing emoji. There is evidence that emoji reactions themselves are compelling enough to be used, and possibly more compelling than the style of categorisation that Slashdot used. I feel that it's fundamentally important that a system like this needs to integrate into existing communities somehow, as there's no point having it if there's no content to apply it to. This is probably the hardest part but possibly also a very compelling part, having a content indexing / classification system might also be a way to centralise a lot of this content. This post got a little long winded and ranty so apologies for that, but I've been wanting to get these thoughts in writing for a little while. If anyone has any ideas around this general topic I'd love to hear. I've gotten to the point where I'd like to invest energy into attempting to solve it.