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Likes/reactions should be hidden to everyone else except the poster, and not used for any kind of ranking.

And comments should be disabled by default. Users should have to take the extra step to enable comments ("I would like feedback") and if they're off by default, it won't feel strange or negative to the viewer.

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Likes shouldn’t be visible to the poster either. Once you see the number of likes you quickly see that radical posts get the most likes and start posting more of it.

The best online discussions I have seen where at simple forums where the posts were listed in chronological order without likes or anything.

I completely agree but most people aren't that interested in some kind of socratic online dialogue.

I don't expect to learn much at all from internet discussion at this point. It serves a minimal socialization purpose and then my actual learning is from books and language models.

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