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by u801e 1805 days ago
Before comment karma was a thing, certain forums and usenet newsgroups didn't really contain constructive arguments or disagreements.
1 comments

Forums have envolved in to social lands known as Reddit,HN, Twitter and the such. The only element that's shifted is how the way the content is presented.

Twitter is a glorified SMS/MMS message

Reddit is a glorified PHPBB forum

HN is glorified usenet.

Specific forums hold specific coversations which the above platforms are the same. HN is targetted towards the tech edge, reddit is targetted towards the average casual indiviual and Twitter/TikTok for the teenages but you still get the same output on all three.

As reddit to HN, The "downvote/upvote" mechanism is old, broken and blatent. Reddit introduced fuzzing to hide the real numbers and as a method to hide abuse. HN had the upper edge of only allowing selected users to downvote after a threshold but that itself feels bias. How many engineers read HN, and how many colleagues know each other with the power to conspire? They all have a problems of their own. HN for example has an problem that if you comment calling on a "fanboy" group, whether it's Elon, Apple, Google in discussion you end up getting lynched for it.

The karma-idealogy has been done and it worked when the internet was growing, however the internet has grown immaturely and we've never shifted away. We still live in an "upvote/downvote" generation where to the point now that folk are paid to farm for internet points. Controversial opinon, but it's civil.