[claudiawerner]

I consider that to be a feature. Voting systems mean that homogeneity is prized first and foremost, since most people only look at what's highly voted. This leads to a situation where the site will foster users with particular views and biases. Voting systems can also be gamed (like on Reddit), when you can pay some people to bot-upvote your post. Applied to comments, it's even worse. "Echochambers" on places like Reddit aren't formed just from mod bans, but because they attract users who upvote content that appeals to their biases and downvote the rest. That's how they control the discourse.

This is in my view one thing 2channel-style boards get right. Not everything has to be about "quality content", and it does a bit of a disservice to users to say that they have such little control that they can't tell good content from bad. Humans aren't animals, we don't just take what we're given. Sites like Reddit, HN and Twitter destroy that agency within us, and it's a shame.

Here is an essay by Shii, one of the most well known historians of imageboard culture on the value of anonymity: http://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/