[rleigh]

The difference is the nature of the engagement.

Facebook is primarily organised around the individual. You are following individuals, talking with individuals, and participating on a reciprocal basis as an individual with all the others. There are groups, but it's less prominent.

Reddit and HN are centred around discussion. Be it individual articles of interest (HN) or further grouped into specific topics (Reddit).

I don't think either are benign. The upvote/downvote mechanism does "gamify" the experience and adds some additional meta-effects to participation, which I don't think are necessarily healthy. However, it's not as bad as Facebook by a large margin. There's no pressure to participate; I can read interesting articles, make the odd contribution, and dip in and out as the fancy takes me. It's not nearly as addictive. Though I have to say, I still spent a reasonable amount of time on both HN and Reddit, I could step away for weeks without feeling like I was losing anything. I'm participating on my own terms.

[coolaliasbro]

All good points. I wonder if instead of a voting mechanism, a site could crunch things like number of posts, type of posts, length of posts, frequency of posts, replies to posts, and so forth to calculate something like participation/activity/clout scores, assuming this could be used to add value for the community of users. Essentially, mask any gamification of the system so the focus is textual/graphical interaction among users, instead of engaging directly in a ranking/award system.

IME, communities in the analog world engage in ranking, albeit largely unconsciously, and perhaps mimicking this pattern in a digital environment would be beneficial compared to current systems.

[isostatic]

> The upvote/downvote mechanism does "gamify" the experience

A key benefit to me is that the points aren't visible to others. Up/Down voting is fine, and there's no real public benefit to the karma given to an individual post, nor any way to even see what it is. Sorting isn't based only on the post score either, and it's not in your face -- it's a much better system that slashdot in my view.

[rleigh]

I am in complete agreement that the system is better than slashdot. However, I think even being able to see your own score can be detrimental to the way you behave. Is it healthy to check back and see if your comments were well received, or generally disliked? It's less bad than the alternatives. However, I think that it will still have some effect, and it might still have some negative consequences.