this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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Anybody here remember Plastic, circa 2000? It was a forum kind of like Reddit, although I don't remember if it had upvotes or not.
upvotes and gamification of human interaction ruined the internet and are directly responsible for the extremity of discourse today.
The internet was so much better before that shit.
Which is also the era before social media, because as far as I'm aware, social media introduced those addiction driven gamification mechanism for what should be, by now, clearly obvious reasons to even the most thick skulled individuals.
No, you're looking at it through rose colored glasses. Pure chronological sorting purely awarded the most active commenters regardless of quality, and led people to submit lots of low quality comments. Plus there was the "bump" phenomenon where a useless comment was made simply to manipulate the sorting.
Forums before slashdot just weren't that great without heavy moderation. By outsourcing some portion of moderation to the users, it made for higher quality discussion in the forums that allowed threading and voting.
and every forum had rules against bumping, typically only once in 24 hours, and only like once or twice. It was never a problem, much less as egregious as you try to paint it to be.
and I'd still take that any day, over the toxic miasma of gamification, advertising, and multibillionaire control we have now.
Honestly, I dont know how anyone can say that the days before gamification, before adpocalypse, before billionaire hijacking of the internet for their own personal ends, is worse than what we have today. It borders on either lunacy, or propaganda.
You're talking about pure bumping where someone has a zero-content comment like "bump" and nothing else. I'm talking about the entire spectrum of low to high quality content, from "bump" to the general phenomenon of reviving old threads to soft bumps like adding additional useless information to an unanswered request.
Other examples include stupid arguments that needed moderation to be shut down (a phpBB or vBulletin post that spanned 50+ pages in a forum where 3-4 was the norm, all because 2 users wouldn't shut the fuck up), always occupying the top of the chronological sort.
The point is that any active forum with more than 1000 comments per day needed to be heavily moderated. User votes allowed forums to scale beyond that limited size. Chronological sort was terrible and didn't scale beyond a group of 100-200 users (not coincidentally similar to Dunbar's number), which is why any decent forum today doesn't do it by default, including any totally free and open source forums, like the fediverse forum platforms of Lemmy and Piefed and Mbin. And even choosing to put these platforms on pure chronological sort reduces the quality of the overall experience.
I'm talking about the use of user voting, which undoubtedly improved the quality of forums (along with comment threading so that each comment could branch off into its own collapsible side discussion) when slashdot and a bunch of copycats started doing similar things (see HN, Reddit). You can't look at Reddit in 2026 and complain that the sorting algorithms they implemented in 2005 or 2007 made things worse. No, things got worse around 2015-2020 when the front page algorithm stopped prioritizing quality over engagement bait.