The upvote/downvote-system by itself seems like a bad idea in regards of free speech. You'll end up with the largest group agreeing to each other and upvoting e

The upvote/downvote-system by itself seems like a bad idea in regards of free speech. You'll end up with the largest group agreeing to each other and upvoting each other thereby silencing (and driving away) other groups. The votes themselves take almost no energy and simple puns get showered in upvotes while long and well thought-out but slightly unusual posts die in the desert. If you go with the voting system alone with moderate moderation you'll probably always end up with mediocre content that is easy to consume by a majority of your users. Depending on your users you'll get funny cat gifs or ever repeating racist jokes. The subreddits seem to help a bit since they filter users by interest first and employ strict moderation throughout but after they reach a certain threshold they, too, seem to go downhill fast. I have no solution but the effortless vote system doesn't sound like such a good idea after all these years.