Quoted from guyincognito:How about having some other way of classifying forum posts other than thumbs up/down?
I remember Slashdot being one of the first sites to have flags for Insightful/Offtopic/etc. I don't remember the specifics, but it does look like their original moderation charter is still accessible. [1] Here's a slightly different explanation with a comparison to Reddit's policy. [2]
If there was an easy way to set a user's tolerance level ("Only show me on-topic posts" or "I feel a little silly today, show me everything"), you could effectively filter out unwanted posts completely to make it look like they never existed. Of course, as you probably already know, hiding quoted posts in on-topic replies can be tricky. In the past, doing something like this would require a significant amount of extra server processing, but you could experiment with pushing that down to run on the client browser.
This relies on both user and moderator participation to flag the posts. You could even allow the original poster to self-moderate, for example: she's in a goofy mood and she's going to flag her snarky animated GIF post as "Offtopic" and "Funny".
I stopped reading Slashdot a while back, so I don't know if they abandoned this form of moderation or not.
[1] https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml *and*
https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/386c75/sourceforge_locked_in_projects_of_fleeing_users/crsw1e5/
There's a post drain button to help with that, down in the lower left corner of each post (it looks like a waste basket). If enough people click drain on a post, and it gets hidden from view with a "this post is hidden" message.
