The idea is, you get what you measure. Reddit's voting system measures impulsive opinion, so we get a lot of content that caters to impulsive reactions. So, what if voting took just long enough to be clumsy? This could be either a delayed reaction to clicking, or requiring people to hold down the button for a second in order to vote.
Posted Sep 27, 2011, 7:32 AM UTC
A problem with these suggestions in general is they address a problem that not everybody believes is a problem. I don't know who the top guys are at reddit, but do they share our opinion that a lowest-common-denominator reddit is a bad thing? They probably look at their alexa graph and have no motivation to change anything that isn't an open and acknowledged issue. For example, getting front page traffic to care about the rules of the subreddit from which the post came.
That will make me less likely to vote when I don't care, which I guess is your point. I see how that might slow the upvotes on "cheap" content, but I think it will slow downvotes even more. People already don't downvote enough, in my opinion, so doing this may end up just as a wash.
I'm guessing this will have a subtler effect than discouraging people from voting when they don't care. It will also slow down the decision, hopefully to the point where it is slightly less of a gut reaction. I think impulsive downvoting is also a problem, at least on comments, even if people don't downvote enough in general.