1) There's a lot here; I'll try to respond to all your points. First of all, I love Reddit, so you don't have to sell me on all the things that are great about it. I have actually been saying for years that we should implement some of the features that work so well there on LetsRun. Things like being able to see yours and other users' post history, getting notified when someone replies to your post or posts in a thread you are following, etc. These are just standard good features most online forums have. A lot of improvements have already been made recently to the boards and more are coming:
https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=97760712) Your entire point in #2 is exactly how the discussion should be framed. I'd have no problem if the Outside magazine guy wrote all that and discussed the pros and cons of registration. But he didn't. I don't know if he was being disingenuous or if he's just misinformed, but if you're ignorant on how online message boards work and you read his piece, you'd think LetsRun was treading into some new controversial territory because you don't have to use your real name to post. Just read this line, "The adult men sulking in their mother’s basements would probably be less inclined to troll the Mary Cains of the world if they actually had to own up to it." It's absurd. If registration was mandatory and you had to verify your email address (something not even Reddit forces you to do), you could still post something mean about Cain, Rupp, Rojo, or whoever, without anyone knowing who you were. Even on Twitter, you can make a fake name and post whatever you want without ever risking revealing your real world identity. That was my main problem with the way he approached the topic.
3) I do not believe the Reddit voting system would work well for LetsRun. If you frequent Reddit, you know that the upvote/downvote system is often used as a "I agree" or "I disagree" button. That wouldn't be productive on LetsRun. Also, LetsRun's threads are an ongoing conversation that you follow from start to finish so it's a very different format than Reddit. All that said, I still think some kind of karma system could work on LetsRun. Maybe if you get too many negative points, your account is flagged and reviewed by a moderator. Maybe accounts with a lot of positive points get special designation (like a symbol under your username or whatever). I'm just brainstorming and not speaking for all of LetsRun, just saying I personally could see something like that working here eventually.
4) I mean, aren't you essentially describing what would be a LetsRun subreddit? We have an auto-mod function, we have a few devoted moderators and rules that are enforced. I'm not sure what you're saying with this point. We're
obviously nowhere near as big as Reddit; much closer in size/scope to a sub reddit.
I hope you aren't implying that we're being lazy rather than deal with issues. We've addressed moderation concerns and made huge improvements over the years, with some of the biggest ones coming recently. Weldon and Robert have started threads asking the community how they think we should handle certain controversial topics like women's eating disorders for example. We answer tons of emails and even phone calls about specific threads that require attention. So there has certainly been a lot of effort in this area. That said, we are against censorship and never want users to feel like they can't discuss issues like whether an athlete is doping for example.