You may be looking back into the past with some rose color glasses. SD was not that good either. Its moderation system basically enforces first posting being

You may be looking back into the past with some rose color glasses. SD was not that good either. Its moderation system basically enforces first posting being the ones who got to control the conversation. So it encouraged camping so you could yell loudest. They added a 'troll' over on soylent. But that did nothing. It just gave people more ways to abuse each other. They even gave more people more mod points. Thinking that would fix things. But it still has the -1/5 problem SD has. The up/down system that hacker and reddit use has its own issues very similar to SD. Early ideas get the most attention late ones get nothing. Wisdom of the crowd sometimes works. But it also can create a negative feedback loop where bad ideas do pop to the top touted as good ones. One of the underlying issues is the use of text. Text is a terrible way of conveying conversational meaning. Which I personally think is how many people consume the internet. "oh that is a good idea" can have so many shades of meaning from "that is actually a really terrible idea lets never talk about that again" to "yes I 100 percent agree lets do that right now". In conversation depending on which word gets the inference the meaning changes. In my head I hear it one way. But you read it a different way and the next person reads it in a totally different way.