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rhizome

Typical web surfers like to see the most upvoted stories and most upvoted comments

Refresh my memory, but upvoting wasn't even a thing until sites made commercial decisions to implement it.

No system is perfect but web forums like reddit and HN have less spam than Usenet

I'd like to see the numbers behind this assertion.

your newsgroup reader software had to have an "account id"

???

A lot of this sounds like hindsight bias and just-so stories to me.

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>Refresh my memory, but upvoting wasn't even a thing until sites made commercial decisions to implement it.

I believe most common web forums like PHPBB had voting or something like it. Even imageboards have implicit "voting" by bumping threads with the latest comment to the top.

As an active phpBB and Invision user for years, I recall voting being only available with plugins, and they weren't typically considered upvotes or downvotes but reputation votes for the user. May sound like six of one / half-dozen of the other, but it was still a very different environment.

In addition, bumping was more of a way to get attention to something than to vote. As when asking for help on a specific topic, or to let other users know you edited and added to a thread's initial post.

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