[financltravsty]

Clearly, I am horrible at communication or Redditors are horrible at reading something at face value.

I shared a recent anecdote about Reddit, because I was reminded of it from your comment. There was no point, I was just sharing what I felt the same way you did when you wrote about wishing HN to have a gild feature.

But if we want to go down the combative discourse route: you're hyperbolizing. Reddit became the mess it was due to a mixture of many things. One of those was its site design/UI; notably public display of post and comment scores that leads to a "dog-pile" effect, rather than natural voting patterns. Being able to gild just intensifies the effects, and leads to posts being interacted with not because the content of their message is informative or interesting, but because it has countless flashing symbols violating your focus, screaming "look at me! look at me!"