I occasionly see a story here where I know something about the subject matter and can say with some authority that the post is low quality. I can comment about this but that has no guarantee to get read and the article might get upvoted anyways because it sounds good. On top of that there is no downvote i can give the article for being low quality.
Is there anyway to encode this into lobste.rs and would it be worth it? I am thinking perhaps something along the lines of some people being given tags which they are “experts” in and they can downvote with low quality (and hopefully a comment describing why).
The comment volume is so low here that on the face of it your proposal strikes me as over engineered. A comment describing the flaws in the article seems adequate given the size of this community, given most articles garner fewer than 10 comments. It’s not clear to me that poor articles with good comments are a problem that needs fixing.
On this, if I see an interesting title, I am hesitant to read it if it doesn’t have comments exactly because I want to be able to get a reading of how accurate the article is in the comments. For me that’s why Lobste.rs is so appealing, I get to read commentary from extremely smart people on topics I don’t have much expertise in. I’d rather read a comment about why the article is a poor representation than never see the article.
In my experience, this road often leads to elitism by using the wrong criteria – in other words, how do we define “certain people”?
I would like to see expert criticism even if the expert hasn’t taken the time to befriend the lobster staff for a few months ahead of time and get certified. If there are enough of us to upvote the comments that reflect knowledge and thoughtfulness, that signal should be strong enough.