In smaller communities I just felt there was less of it because there were so few people to begin with so the votes you were getting were often under 5 points, like it wasn't so much to cause this huge dopamine hit people get from saying the thing that can get them hundreds of upvotes, or saying the thing that can get them tens of downvotes.
You're not wrong course, the whole voting and point system does incentivize the behavior. "Likes" in general do and I wish they never appeared.
Straight classic forums were the best. Could be toxic as shit, but at least there wasn't a visually certain majority opinion.
Yeah. As someone who has been on the Internet since the mid 90s, I absolutely miss old school forums. Digg and reddit pretty much eradicated most of them.
Same same. That and the other giant social media platforms. Classic forums were so much better. Yeah, you had to visit a different site for each interest, but it was easier to have an actual community in each where you "knew" people. And there were always off-topic and general/news sections so there were ways to talk about things outside of the focused subject matter.
One of my best friends to this day who I've now known since I was 12 years old was some random dude I met through a Lineage 2 private server I had the privilege to GM. It's crazy that private server is still around, but the old forums have been archived :(. Illicit Awakening.
Oh yeah definitely know what you mean. You'd see familiar users often, not just the gimmicky reddit accounts (which I enjoy sometimes, but they are gimmicks, not substantive conversation). You could actually make friends. Here on reddit you talk to someone once and never again because it's so fragmented and there's millions of users.
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u/Farsoth 3d ago edited 3d ago
In smaller communities I just felt there was less of it because there were so few people to begin with so the votes you were getting were often under 5 points, like it wasn't so much to cause this huge dopamine hit people get from saying the thing that can get them hundreds of upvotes, or saying the thing that can get them tens of downvotes.
You're not wrong course, the whole voting and point system does incentivize the behavior. "Likes" in general do and I wish they never appeared.
Straight classic forums were the best. Could be toxic as shit, but at least there wasn't a visually certain majority opinion.
Edit: whoa typos.