Memes

Personally I think the format of upvoting posts to decide what people talk about, upvoting comments to decide what information/opinions get more visibility, and branching comment threads so you can have multiple conversations about the same topic is just a much nicer format than forum threads just being bumped because someone posted "bump" and having multiple conversations trying to keep track of each other in one single comment thread. Unfortunately that formula can be easily replicated so really it was just a matter of time before similar alternatives popped up. Same thing happening with Twitter and Threads, all you did was give people a different way to post Facebook statuses, you didn't really "invent" anything so much as iterate on an existing concept and nothing about the idea was that difficult to replicate once it was legitimized as a tried and true formula.