How would this be prevented in a decentralized system? Spammers would join the network, create thousands of bots, and upvote all their spam.
The upvote system is also basically useless on reddit these days, the site is way too big to enforce any kind of etiquette and people gladly upvote empty one-line quips while they'll bury anybody expressing any form of vaguely dissenting opinion. It's frankly toxic.
At least good old blog spam is easy to identify and ignore.
There are a few topics I care about where you have both big subreddits and also dedicated "old school" forums on third-party websites. The forums are always more interesting and in-depth in my experience, when the subreddits are just a litany of karma-whoring picture posts and low effort so-called "memes".
For example, I have noticed shameless downvoting in operating system war threads, both on reddit and on HN. In highly technical threads about physics or mathematics I have noticed people tend to vote based on the quality of the content posted.
The upvote system is also basically useless on reddit these
days, the site is way too big to enforce any kind of
etiquette and people gladly upvote empty one-line quips
while they'll bury anybody expressing any form of vaguely
dissenting opinion. It's frankly toxic.
I don't know what the rest of the people praising reddit's redesign are talking about. My experience has been that its so heavily sanitized that unless you say something saccharinely in-tune with the consensus view, your comment risks being banished to the nethermost regions of the thread.
Most of the comments are rehashes of the same groupthink, echoing the same banal and glib points over and over till they choke out any real thought provoking, refreshing and original insights.
If the cost of having a system that surfaces original and thought provoking viewpoints means living with _some_ borderline hate speech subreddits, I dont mind paying that cost.
The alternative is just feel-good insanity and a thousand times worse, in import.