I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy’s default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I’m aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the “chat” option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They’re just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don’t post for a while and miss them if they’re gone for too long.
Except vote systems are abused to hell. Dissenting opinions are down voted into oblivion and we end up with the echo chamber.
I spent a lot of time on the ebaumsworld forums in the early 2000s, and it was your classic shitshow. Not a huge amount of traffic, though, so you could have conversations, but you’d leave, and come back the next day, and sometimes you’d have pages of nonsense to read through.
Then, they introduced rep, and it was such a shitshow. Users conspired together to abuse it, because that’s how it goes, except now, instead of late night Skype sessions, it’s bots, and marketing, and PR.
I guess the problem was and always is, when there’s too many people, it ruins things.
This is the thing when people talk about the Fediverse’s traffic compared to Reddit. To me it’s very much a feature. I don’t think trying to get everyone and their dog on the same platform is a particularly good idea!