An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
But the latter was also true of Reddit. Good information from smaller subreddits still remained unseen, because of upvoting.
Binary voting isn’t a perfect system, but so far it’s proven to work well enough.
If a better mechanism proves itself in the future I imagine Lemmy will adapt to it over time.