Ok, but I think you’re conflating two separate things

I feel like they're distinctly separate things, and I thought I'd communicated as much. Oh, well.

...the voting system consistently produces pathological outcomes at scale.

That seems like... a little much. I do agree that upvotes/downvotes indeed gamify the system, but on the whole would say that the end-effect on Reddit results in a big bunch of hoomons acting in typical hoomon ways, which is with deep undercurrents of fickle, ignorant, selfish, feel-good behavior.

The Usenet comparison wasn’t really about scale. It was about the incentive structure.

Yeah, I get that, but I do observe that there are advantages to upvote/downvote that indeed work better on a larger scale. I'm not sure they're really needed on a smaller scale.

I'd say I agree with most of the things you wrote, but remain unconvinced that upvote/downvote is so absolutely toxic as to merit tossing. And of course, I don't think it's going to happen, anyway.

Aggregate behaviour amongst naked apes? Yeah, I would tend to agree. Now what?