They have an imperfect rate-limiting and shadowbanning system which has a decent average-case. It relies heavily on consensus, just a couple downvotes in succes

They have an imperfect rate-limiting and shadowbanning system which has a decent average-case. It relies heavily on consensus, just a couple downvotes in succession will prevent you from responding or clarifying your position (which can easily flip consensus), and a couple posts like that will have your account shadowbanned forever. This trips up new accounts pretty much instantly. And so new views don't last, extreme views don't last, and people that don't know the community nuances and rules don't last. There is also no way to recover from the bad states of an account. Once flagged, always flagged, it doesn't have a cooldown method to revert you to normal status or build up into higher status. The shadowbanning keeps people busy as they don't know that people don't see their post for a long time. Slows them down in trying to circumvent the shadowbans. The mods do know when a user tries to circumvent a ban in a variety of ways, but don't say anything until they act up again. The average case and best case of this algorithm is that quality persists, because the community nuances and rules are quite good. The worst case is that its an echo chamber, but that's not different than everywhere else. But at least those places acknowledge it. This place kind of sort of believes in the idea that non-consensus ideas can be presented "substantially" and they'll survive, in practice that's not very true. In conjunction with all of that there is active moderation. Also its against the rules to talk about the rules/karma/upvotes/downvotes. So we'll see.