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I also have 100,000 posts scattered about forums from the early 2000's, but very few (less than 1,000) since after 2010. The trend towards downvote groupthink is not an insignificant part of the reason I've dropped content generation.

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Thanks for sharing this. It's an interesting trend that I was not aware of (but maybe intuited?). It does seem that, while on the one hand, upvotes are necessary for ranking crowdsourced content on HN and reddit, on the other hand, the voting on comments is responsible for the groupthink/hivemind/echo chamber that develops.

In terms of fostering discussion, the comment voting is a silent killer.

In my experience, the worst aspect of current boards are the lifetime of threads. If you post a comment to a thread, and come back to the page couple hours later, the thread is no longer available anywhere; now you have to create the additional loop of going through your user account, locate each comment, and check whether anyone replied to it. I'd rather save myself the hassle and just shut up for the most part. And even if I do bother to find particular comment, seek out replies, and respond to them, they will go unnoticed if it's not done immediately, because it also requires the other users to go through these additional steps too. It's just impossible to write comments that have more than a couple of hours gap between responses.

Non English forums tend to be much more diverse in my experience simply by having a smaller audience. You can argue with ignorant Joe on a small forum since there only a handful of people are active at any time and everybody knows everybody else, but you can't argue with the seemingly infinite stream of ignorant people on a larger forum like the main subreddits.

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