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.