this is an interesting question i’ve had banging around in my mind since well before Reddit’s implosion (and Discord’s enshittification), but which seems really worth asking now.

you can’t blame Reddit and Discord or their imitators entirely for these going out of style, but they’ve sure put the dagger in a lot of remaining ones, and i kind of wonder if they’re just in an irreversible and terminal decline a la USENET. i can only name two or three i even consider checking anymore, and i’m not sure how sustainable any of those are long-term.

  • HarvesterOfEyesEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    ironically–and probably under the influence of reddit, where this has become completely gamed–i can’t stand this style of information sorting. i think it really only works if you have people mashing inputs for it with good faith and good understanding; otherwise, it descends into muck eventually. i do much better with either forums or real-time chats, probably because i go in with no expectations of what’s good or bad having already been sorted for me

    On reddit, I used a userscript to hide upvotes/downvotes just to avoid that gamification. It made my experience much better because, like you said, I went in without expectations and forced myself to read and reflect on the content (both comments and posts) instead of having them presented to me as being good or bad.

    I’m glad beehaw has, at least, the number of upvotes/downvotes on comments hidden by default.