Well now that’s a horse of a different phenotype. A person who wants to be in a giant platform shouldn’t leave when the aol users come barging in.

But voting isn’t required for that size of system to work. Consider a big forum: the cat memes thread might be a hundred thousand pages long and might have an images only button so you only ever see the memes, none of the commentary. Do you need a voting system to keep the quality up? No! When someone posts bad memes they’re told to get it right by all the other people.

I think one of the parts of Reddit (and most social media tbh) that you’re not really engaging with is that most users don’t post. Most users don’t put up pictures of themselves or share the most recent thing they ate or comment on someone else’s. Most users don’t fire off a two sentence missive when someone cuts them off in traffic or repost someone else’s so all their friends will see it. Most people using social media don’t post. And that’s fine.

So when you have a platform with that situation and you’re making money off of ads you want technologies that push engagement. For some platforms it was bigger more aggregated front pages (digg, slashdot, Reddit) and some more subtle ones used the conflict algorithm. That’s why we never saw votes before the age of social media, there wasn’t a reason to have them.

But when you’re not trying to sell ads and go public and get acquired and retire at 30 a multi-millionaire, that’s a “solution” (it messes up more stuff than it fixes) in search of a “problem” (there was never a dearth of good posts and everyone could find them).

We don’t need to extensive metrics to have a good, big, high quality community.