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Comment by sodapopcan | Hacker News Reader

The only thing not "old" about it is upvoting, which is one of those YMMV features.

I have fond memories of Slashdot in 1998. It was the spiritual forerunner to HN, and had upvoting, and in a more complex form as there were categories of votes. I got lots of +5 Funny comments. Hard to imagine, isn't it.

I've only seen the ./ category moderation style in one other place and it's really a shame as I think it has great value if it can be linked up with filters besides raw thresholds, of course balanced against how it would be used in reality by a large group of people. Voting incentivizes populism, and that means a lot of topics degrade into "everyone's a comedian" or virtue signalling whatever is acceptable in that particular forum, mostly retreading old ground instead of moving the discussion forwards.

Same but, I think "funny" killed /.

It gradually became a comedy website and at that point I stopped visiting it.

Ya, sorry, I never read Slashdot back in the day (even though I'm well old enough to have had), so I'm very wrong here. I'm just generally annoyed how every forum now a days has it. But of course one of the reasons I dislike it is because I fall victim to its dopamine effects.

Upvoted your post. Muhahaha!

It has the entire web 2.0 neophillia. Discussions stay for a day or so in focus, then they are gone.

This one is almost gone already.

Were you even here?

I made my account here in 2011, I don't know how it was before.

But I understand the OP was talking about how HN is today.

(Score:3, Insightful)

I love how great this "takedown" is, but also how it'll only be apparent to people over 35 or so.

Naw, it's my bad, I'm 45 but never spent any time on Slashdot as I didn't really care about tech at large back then. None of the forums I spent my time on back then had voting systems and now all the ones I use do and I'm not the biggest fan.

I've really soured on votes in recent years. They promised a sort of crowdsourced moderation and I appreciated the cleverness of the idea back around the time reddit first came out.

But now I think that downvotes have just kinda become a sort of digital tomato for people to throw, a means of burying a post without putting any thought into an argument as to why the post is illegitimate.

And that's the best case. In the worst case it's a really easy system for bots to game. You don't even need AI. All it takes is a bunch of accounts "legitimate" enough to not get flagged by whatever botting heuristics the site implemented and you can produce a false consensus.

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