For example, take the comment section of the post that was sitting at the top spot of the /v/all when I posted this. Every single response (at least right now) is a low-effort, low-content one-liner joke just rehashing the content. I'm sure these are people just trying to up their comment contribution points.
By strongly incentivizing reaching 20 or 100 CCP, people will try to comment whether or not they have something to say. For a lot of people, that means posting anything they can, over and over, until they reach that sweet, sweet threshold.
This works great for a small community! People become involved and aren't afraid to comment or fear rejection. Except when that community grows—especially when it grows rapidly—now peoples' voices are being drowned out by a whole lot of junk. It's becoming quantity, not quality.
Encouraging discussion and limiting the down-vote-filter are two of the site's strong points. Still, I wonder if there is a way to incentivize meaningful contributions.
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[–] i_ate_them_whole 0 points 4 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago
I agree that the front page seems saturated with poor content, but I still like the small hurdle to get full access to the sites features.
I know it's something of a sin to mention it, but I was at Reddit for 2 years and didn't contribute with a single comment. Conversely, after only a few weeks here at Voat I finally made my very first post today and am finding that it's not as intimidating after taking that first step. The full site features were incentive enough to push me to contribute to the site!
That's my personal experience. I see your point with all the terrible posts, but I think that those are always going to be the symptom of a democratized system of visibility. The good content is still in there, you just gotta avoid the bad subs like /v/funny and /v/gifs