Honestly, I find the entire system annoying and counter to fostering real discussions.

If you go to a party, it's not like people in the room have tags over their heads which say "trustworthy," "troll," "crazy," or whatever else. You have to make up your own mind based on your interactions and (hopefully) use of critical thinking to decide if someone you are talking with is worth your time.

If I don't want to take the time to read anything which might offend me, put me off, make me uncomfortable, challenge me, or just in some way be contrary to my world view then frankly, online forums would not be the spaces in which I would be reading things.

I believe that everyone has a point of view that can have value in some way, if only to illustrate that "negative" or "contrary to me" view and people exist around me. They have voices to contribute. Deciding if their contributions are valuable enough to award them a positive or negative "Reputation" is not an abstract thing. A true reputation takes time to build in the real world. It is earned for better or for worse, by actions people take over time not by some arbitrary number farmed by a bot posting cat memes 24/7 or whatever, or posting viewpoints sure to garner upvotes because like minded people are the only ones replying.

"will be" ??

It already has been for decades. The north American diet is a death sentence basically. Everything from "fine dinning" to "fast foods" encourages everyone to over-eat for one. For another portions are insane, and food quality is low. High carbs everywhere, high saturated fats, low fiber, low or now water, too much caffeine and alcohol, sedentary jobs, sedentary hobbies, driving everywhere... it's just crazy. Trading health for "convenience" is not my idea of high quality life.

And all this development of medications is another indicator of tools to drive profits to pharma vs investment in effective long term interventions which permanently educate and change behaviours which lead to these issues.... What do we get instead? A war between an 100 billion dollar weight loss industry and pharma.

Pretty sure that I know who is going to lose in their battle.

Obesity is not a just social, individual issue in this country -- it's an economic systemic problem which is ironically being supported by the very systems claiming to rile against it.

I think the system on Reddit was pretty terrible and ripe for abuse. Over the years I saw a lot of threads where people discussed being harassed by another user who disagreed with them in a sub, and then proceeded to hunt down their posts and down-vote every single thing they posted across the site. Downvotes for literally no reason other than some irrational dislike of someone they don't even know, etc. Conversely, lots of high karma posters who never really contributed anything other than low effort posts like memes and pics.

I think having and using the upvote/downvote system is a very poor tool for promoting critical thinking and open discussion. Even posts that contain opinions that seem horrid to the majority of others commenting in a thread discussion can still have value as they can help illustrate the world is larger than the little bubble present in a thread and sub of like minded people where only those who agree with each others' ideas are given value.

Already disliking that I see the upvote/downvote buttons present on kbin as well as reputation points, so not really even sure I will be engaging long term tbh. Have stated before in other comments that I don't think it wise to just recreate the systems in Reddit since we will just end up in the same place, with the same issues. We should be better than that. Feel free to downvote now. ;)

I would say by not trying to just recreate it.

If this space it to be truly it's own, there should be more freedom to not only share ideas but actually discuss them, even if they are difficult. Reddit often felt like a place for like-minded only discussions, over and over, almost everywhere.

The negativity and toxic habits especially need to really be left there. Question shaming/ridiculing, immediately down-voting comments into oblivion just because they don't reflect the same opinions --- ending all of those bad habits would be a welcome start.

I was wondering about this. There seems to be some sort of similar system here already, since I see some people have "Reputation Points" and it shows on your profile as well. Have no idea how it's actually working since I could not find information on it. I rather dislike the karma system from Reddit so it would be nice to see that not repeated here.

Haha!! you gotta love this! 😂
Will definitely be fun to hear what he has to say about all this in the next Last Week Tonight. 😊