There are generally 3 ways that discussion forums organize content:

You are assuming that users are just seeing a large stream of content that has no real complexity or nuance to it, like a newspaper or a book.

Instead, this is the internet, and ordering a set of posts is not all you can do in order to curate content.

Any system based around user voting is going to suppress, to some extent, unpopular content

We can agree that moderator or time based display of content is bad, and that a single-stream page of user content that everyone votes for will result in the suppression of unpopular content.

However, remember that you aren't just suppressing unpopular content, you are suppressing unpopular people. While this may lead to more unpopular content being posted, it will encourage a much stronger hive-mind, as everyone posting to a site will see that saying things the majority do not like lead to them being weaker.

There is a simple solution for this problem: Leave the community and find one that better matches what you're looking for.

Exactly my problem with this system.

Trying to force a community to be everything to everyone will simply lead to a worse outcome for everyone.

Communities should be based around topics, around discussion of topics, not based on the opinions and demands of the users who frequent that community, at least in the case of topics like "feminism" and "mens rights' where a healthy debate and moderating factor of having those who disagree with you goes a long way towards making a healthy society.

This tend towards isolation of opinions is what I feel makes our modern society so extreme in it's values, what makes us hate one another. We just don't understand, we can't comprehend, why people would hold values that disagree with us.

For example, I have been banned from many subreddits in the past, often for saying things they disagree with. However, I always make new accounts and continue to post, at least until I can get consistently upvoted in that sub. What's that do, why would I do it? Because it shows me how to say or think how the community does, and encourages myself to learn.

The majority aren't willing to do that, though, and require real debate and the response of people who hate the things they are posting in order to get this effect. Systems that encourage isolation are not positive systems.

Ultimately, a system should:

Encourage the seeing of opposing views.

Encourage the formation of cultures and strong senses of community.

Encourage people to have a good time seeing posts, and to generally enjoy their discussions and interactions.

These three things can be accomplished, but it requires a very nuanced, very intelligent system that is far more than a simple sorting algorithm. We need big-brother neural-networks.

More on that later.

Hence why it's valuable to rank quality comments highly, even if they were only posted a few hours "late."

Is it valuable? I'm sure it may end up beneficial in the long run, but at the end of the day you are still promoting comments based on the time they were posted rather than based on their quality, and you are doing this for the benefit of a minority of users who are viewing the post in this "tail". It's just not a severe enough issue with threads to be noteworthy.

That's the point of why reddit pushes threads down so aggressively as well, you have the time-stabilizing system of comments in threads, and the time-destabilizing system of threads themselves. The two complement each other.

Caucus allows multiple communities to form under the umbrella of any theme. ... If one /bitcoin community becomes toxic or unappealing, people can thus easily migrate to a different one.

I'd personally call this clustered or grouped communities. Themed makes it sound like CSS editing.

Also, how do you go about which community to show people when they first open up the bitcoin sub? Pick the most popular? Treat bitcoin like a "frontpage of all the /r/bitcoins"?

Running a site like Caucus is dirt cheap.

Not when it gets popular, and assuming "we can make money down the line" is not an appropriate fiscal decision.

It's later.

Here's an example of how I think a system would manage to promote a few different things:

I understand it is a pretty complex thing, and likely very hard to implement, and would take a lot of good design to make intuitive to a new user, although that's the purpose of having three levels of interaction, each one gets more complex, and users are slowly encouraged to participate in the lower levels as they become familiar with the site.

Encourage the seeing of opposing views.

Encourage the formation of cultures and strong senses of community.

Encourage people to have a good time seeing posts, and to generally enjoy their discussions and interactions.

I agree with the idea of "collections" of communities, and I think these "collections" should go one step further, not binding similar communities that disagree on something like "toxicity", but instead should be used to bind opposing communities in a way they that they cannot escape one another.

Consider the system of three levels. The "frontpage" which contains the most popular of all the content, showed to all random visitors to the site. The "collections" which bind topics like "gender" or "science" together into one system. Both of these are directly controlled and moderated by the site owners, and there would be a manageable, recognizable number of them, like the defaults on reddit. Then there are "communities" where there are moderators, well systematized ways to control content, and so on.

The frontpage is made of collections, and the collections are made of communities. Users may create a community by binding it to at least one collection, at which it must be approved by the admins for being relevant for the collection or will be reassigned by the admins.

Users can post and act on three levels: on the frontpage, on the community, and on the collection. Votes in a high level effect only that level, and those above it, so a large number of users can vote on a post from a community, and that community will not be effected, never seeing or being effected by the votes. Posts are only effected by votes on the layer they are posted in, and any other votes from other places end up not counting against the user.

That way you can have three layers of interaction. The average-hoarde that holds a lot of power, but cannot reach into the lower levels, or is prevented from. The interested-users who interact on the stream level, and the real dedicated users that post to a community. To join a community would need some form of gate, a cost in votes, or something else, and it should be relatively easy for the community to rapidly kick out users, meaning you should be careful about the communities you decide to join.

Users then have their own front-page, which consists of the things they can subscribe to. Here, the levels disappear, and the streams and communities are treated the same. Posts the user sees from a collection on this front page are voted on as if the user was voting in the collection, but if they are part of the community that made the post, their posts default to the community. In this way, posts and activity default to an action on the lowest possible level.

This takes a lot of data. Each post has to know where it came from, keep track of if a comment/vote on it came from a community, stream, or the frontpage. Votes, when made, have to decide if they are going to apply to the user or not.

However, this allows an interconnected, but separated, system that allows people to vote, comment, and so on, without drowining out or destroying communities with separate or different ideas. It creates a situation where you cannot avoid creating an isolated chamber in which you are safe from being seen or commented on by others.

Users do not get notified of comments on their post in a higher level, but should be able to easily access their posts from that higher level in order to see the common reaction. Users on a higher level, or users not part of the community, will rarely be notified that there is a lower level, and the higher level posts will never be directly linked to the lower level ones.

The rankings inside of the collections and frontpage will depend on an "average" of the votes in the community, and in the collection itself. The frontpage will be an average of that average, and votes from the frontpage. This gives a community disportionate power to move posts upwards, stopping the "hive mind" of the larger, more powerfully voting, collections from ever being able to truly control their own content.