[rcoveson]

I'm very confused by this comment. The era you're talking about is also the era that Facebook was released and it didn't have a voting system, not even likes/reactions. But that's when the term "social networking" really took off, and it definitely referred to Facebook and not Digg or Reddit or Slashdot, to name another that has a comment voting system.

"Social media" as a term comes even later, to capture Twitter and the social features of YouTube and other stuff like that. But it's all sites where most users are people using real names and real faces, and users generally produce content themselves and follow each other's content.

There's clearly a cluster there and HN/Slashdot/Reddit/Digg are clearly outside it. An umbrella that covers both HN and Facebook is almost meaningless; it's "all websites with user-generated OR user-supplemented content."

[Karrot_Kream]

There were many attempts at this time to figure out how to scale forums. The bottleneck on forums and chatrooms was always human moderation. But a forum could only get so many mods and mods eventually burned out because moderation just really sucks. Moreover quality between forums was quite variable. One forum on Beets might be good, but the forums on Fantasy novels was run terribly and full of flamewars. Having a large social site of good quality would be a lot easier to manage than 30 different sites of varying quality.

Gaia Online was famously a large forum with a huge moderation staff, and the sheer amount of effort that went to running Gaia Online was incredible, and despite that it was popularly thought of as being a pretty low quality forum.

Reddit tried the upvote and downvote. HN tried upvotes only. 4chan tried full anonymity (rather than the pseudonymity of forums/usenet.) Facebook tried real names. Tumblr had the reblog (which became quote tweets when Twitter took the feature and is widely thought of now as a fairly controversial feature due to toxicity it can produce.) Twitter tried hashtags for discovery. It was a period of experimenting with how to build social spaces.