> The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation. I think the voting system acts as another major d

> The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation. I think the voting system acts as another major difference, with ambiguous effect. Usenet had no concept of 'likes' or even views, so threads implicitly sorted by most recent reply. In the modern sense, its only measure of engagement was replies. Low-effort posts that would receive plenty of upvotes on Reddit (or equivalently here) but few replies would still quickly disappear, implicitly discouraged. On the other hand, a reply-only measure of engagement also gave birth to the original (high-effort) trolls and flamebait. Voting systems allow more passive suppression of this content, at least on topics where the "popularity contest" side effect is not a negative.