I liked that Slashdot had different upvotes for informative/insightful/funny, and funny doesn't add to karma.
The forum needs to strongly encourage every comment to have their opinions substantiated, and show rigorous reasoning and inference explicitly where it occurs (and where an opinion is not directly based on evidence but is a reasonable conclusion from evidence). It's not an impossible task, since we have a similar example of a forum with high standards in Stack Overflow and its network.
This means that the platform is primarily one for discussion and developing opinions grounded in evidence and reality, not one for free expression (which reddit primarily is).
The forum needs to strongly encourage every comment to have their opinions substantiated, and show rigorous reasoning and inference explicitly where it occurs (and where an opinion is not directly based on evidence but is a reasonable conclusion from evidence). It's not an impossible task, since we have a similar example of a forum with high standards in Stack Overflow and its network.
This means that the platform is primarily one for discussion and developing opinions grounded in evidence and reality, not one for free expression (which reddit primarily is).