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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Did you leave out a word or two here?

One word:

'IMO a large part of the reason social media platforms outmoded message boards is that [they] provided lurkers and semi-lurkers a "no effort" way of showing content creators that people were seeing and appreciating them.'

So the verb "provided" corresponds to "social media platforms", not "message boards". The meaning is backwards from what you thought I was so saying. Reddit and Twitter provide an easy engagement buttons for lurkers. Old forums did not.

Some of them provide an upvote feature or even upvote/downvote, but many don't.

Some forums have added upvotes nowadays, yes. Around the time Digg and then Reddit were on the rise, though, phpBB forums usually had nothing. Some had a karma system where you left messages for other users, but critically, these features were karma-gated. So lurkers could not "commend" or "upkarma" a post they found interesting. This was supposed to encourage quality participation. In practice, content creators would get less reaction for their effort. You could post on a social media platform and see the number +30 next to your comment, or on a forum and get no reaction.