The thing I really miss about traditional forums is the lack of the up/down-voting feature. I think in a way it sometimes worked better when posts naturally bu

The thing I really miss about traditional forums is the lack of the up/down-voting feature. I think in a way it sometimes worked better when posts naturally bubbled to the top that simply had more active discussion. And if you really cared about a topic being addressed, you could just bump it. I think the basic difference with up/down-voting is that unpopular topics couldn't be squelched as easily. I also suspect that, when there was no visible "approval" score from the up/down-votes, people would tend to approach discussions with more of an open mind. Of course, it was probably the case that this sort of style worked much better with smaller scale communities. For example, the bumping behavior could easily be abused by bad actors if the community moderator didn't have enough bandwidth.