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Thanks for sharing this. It's an interesting trend that I was not aware of (but maybe intuited?). It does seem that, while on the one hand, upvotes are necessary for ranking crowdsourced content on HN and reddit, on the other hand, the voting on comments is responsible for the groupthink/hivemind/echo chamber that develops.

In terms of fostering discussion, the comment voting is a silent killer.

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In my experience, the worst aspect of current boards are the lifetime of threads. If you post a comment to a thread, and come back to the page couple hours later, the thread is no longer available anywhere; now you have to create the additional loop of going through your user account, locate each comment, and check whether anyone replied to it. I'd rather save myself the hassle and just shut up for the most part. And even if I do bother to find particular comment, seek out replies, and respond to them, they will go unnoticed if it's not done immediately, because it also requires the other users to go through these additional steps too. It's just impossible to write comments that have more than a couple of hours gap between responses.

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