I’d like to see ideas like this make a comeback, hopefully with some modifications this time around to protect our privacy and resist corporate exploitation.

We used to use del.icio.us and other variants to do exactly this before browsers had profiles. Back then, its primary draw was that you could take your bookmarks with you anywhere to any machine (this being before that function was baked into browsers and before web browsers could be carried in your pocket). The secondary effect was that you’d share and tag those websites with your own categories/descriptors, thus crowdsourcing a new version of the old web’s link directories using Web 2.0. You could browse through symantic tag clouds to discover new things. Del.icio.us was for websites, but people were tagging and logging all of their favorite stuff and sharing it online so that like minded strangers could filled the gaps in their cultural awareness. We tagged our books with librarything. We tagged recipes with recipe thing. Audioscrobbler (later known as last.fm) logged our music listening to automate the tagging, not by direct symantic tagging, but by relational/temporal coincidence. If other people that listened to a lot of the stuff you listened to and they also listened to some other stuff you didn’t, those became recommendations for you. That kind of relational algorithm would survive the slow death of Web2.0 to become the backbone of recommendation services like Spotify and probably even TikTok.

You’ve just traded down votes for the report button.

I say they are two different use cases. There is often a very wide gulf between a comment that I feel does not contribute to good discussion and one that is so heinous that it needs to be removed. Most of your comments for instance: pretty naive and banal adding little good to the discussion overall, but I don’t feel that you’ve said anything hateful, obscene, or aggressive enough to warrant total removal. Usually I just downvote and move on, especially when I don’t want to hear that person’s bad take reply on my own point of view. I’ve made an exception here for you simply because you are trolling all over this thread, seemingly inviting downvotes. But, I’m going to block you and move on because you’ve killed any interest I have in this thread or the larger discussion. I still don’t think your comments rise to the level of reporting.

Reports and blocks aren’t a replacement for downvotes and if your instances doesn’t federate downvotes you shouldn’t use them that way.

Yes. I’m assuming your just some dude and not a telecom with teams of lawyers.

Self-hosting is inherently not low effort. This isn’t memes or shitposts. This is people helping people that are trying to help themselves, a.k.a. people making an effort. Communities rely on the discretion of mods and rules specific to the community focus. If this community didn’t have some kind of bar to meet for low effort posts it would drive away participants and contributors more interested in higher effort and more interesting topics. It gets real old seeing people ask and answer the same basic questions about Plex, Jellyfin, *arrs, and docker all the time. Worrying about if this rule will be abused seems premature. Besides (as others have pointed out) there are other communities with similar interests, if you’re that concerned that your spammy no-context YouTube video got deleted, please go try your luck elsewhere.