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by TrueGeek 1478 days ago
I like how this is the most upvoted comment
2 comments

Upvotes are for letting "good" posts be more visible than "bad" posts, not validation for the poster
Maybe in theory, but they've become "I agree"/"I disagree"
Those ain't as mutually exclusive as you assert.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_news_website

Edit:

I actually can't think of any such site _without_ comment voting today. Really that's because virtually every social media site now has a one-click way of engaging with comments (notably excluding 4chan). The difference between sites is in whether sorting by score is lacking, available, or part of an inscrutable algorithm; and what other ranking methods are available.

I can't find a single result relevant to the history of voting or user moderation in any search engine. Was Slashdot the first? It and Fark lacked this at launch in 1997;

- Slashdot handpicked 400 users to be moderators in 1999-03[0], and began randomly assigning moderation duty some time between then and the addition of moderation reasons in 1999-05[1]. Metamoderation was added in 1999-09.[2]

- Fark only added comment voting, with separate 'smart' and 'funny' votes, in 2011,[3] making it the only social news site AFAIK without negative votes.

</rabbithole>

[0] https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/03/23/1058204/slashdot-mo...

[1] https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/05/24/1848220/slashdot-no...

[2] https://slashdot.org/story/99/09/07/155233/slashdots-meta-mo...

[3] https://www.fark.com/comments/blog256/New-feature-Favoriting...