Memes

You've outlined pretty much all of the challenges. I thought for years about just making a reddit style forum without any voting buttons, or maybe voting buttons but no visible scores. Maybe prioritizing comments like yours, which have actual substance. The threaded format is better than traditional forums for conversations, but the voting hurts meaningful contributions like you said already. The biggest reason why projects like that fail is the same reason why every successful company is another wham, bam, thank you ma'am platform. For a social community to work, you need a community. The best platform in the world doesn't mean anything if nobody is there. Most people aren't interested in building communities either, so if no one is there, no one is ever going to be there. MySpace and Facebook succeeded because they were novel, and people were interested in the new concept of having a presence on the Internet without needing to know how to create a WordPress website. That was 20 years ago now, so the novelty is gone. TikTok succeeded because they had financial backing from one of the largest countries in the world to create a huge userbase in a short amount of time. I don't think it would have caught on like it did without CCP support. So that leaves us where we are now, and not a lot of paths out of here. I really enjoyed old forums, and I enjoyed visiting people's blogs even more, but there aren't many people doing that stuff any more, and you can't find the ones that are since Google prioritizes enormous websites and paid content over relevance now. Oh well. I'm glad that I was able to be a part of the beautiful creation that was the early internet. It was a truly magical experience.