I agree, I mean voting literally hides comments, and if someone is being mean or rude it at least tells you other people think they’re being unreasonably rude. Which hopefully makes you feel better about it and consider that it may not dignify a response.
Moderation is complicated by sitewide moderation requirements (which result in the sub being banned if not followed or inherently part of the topic, or the moderation replaced if followed but too slow) and cabalistic supermod groups. If we instead used the web then typical DMCA and other procedures could be followed, and European users wouldn’t get American laws (eg Reddit bans discussion of some kinds of grey market drug vendors because the drugs are illegal in the US, despite being legal in many European countries) foisted on them.
This like the most shallow take of reddit over moderation.
Karma limits, account age limits, even surving "new", automoderator deleting things based off some word in a title, needing a email verified account to post,unresponsive mods.
Then yes, there's the downvotes when you say something different or isn't a joke.
You can technically do that, but you will probably never succeed, because 90% of voters never or rarely post (so they have no idea how over moderated their subs might be) and probably 99% of users will just go straight to /r/myhobby or /r/mytopic instead of doing extensive research regarding whether /r/realmyhobby or /r/freespeechmyhobby is better and what drama lead to it being created.
From what I understand all mods also get a lot of bullshit requirements foisted on them by Reddit itself to remove content that infringes various sitewide policies. Which contributes to the supermod problem as it makes moderating time-sensitive in a way that regular people can’t consistently uphold.
Echo chambers are boring. I don't need reddit to be an affirmation of my opinion on a subject, I want real discussion with alternative viewpoints.