I think you are reading too much into my comment. I am simply stating that "good" and "populist" are two different things. IMO, HN incentivize having popular o

I think you are reading too much into my comment. I am simply stating that "good" and "populist" are two different things. IMO, HN incentivize having popular opinions. Saying "HN incentivizes good behavior" comes with an underlying assumption that "populist" is "good" which I was trying to point out via my comment. > I'm not sure if "populist" is as pejorative as you think it is when describing HN. I am not using "populist" in perjorative sense. > Is it possible to have a forum on the internet with hundreds of active users that doesn't leverage a populist model (upvotes/favorites/likes)? Even places where the comments aren't ranked by the users they ARE ranked by activity (bumps/views) behind the scenes. Nearly all internet forums I have used leverage the populist model. However, I think this is more due to the designers of these forums. The designers of these forums want to show the most "relevant content" and their definition of "relevant content" seems to be the content with which most people agree. I believe one could experiment with different definition of "relevant content" to create different forums.