You really don’t. You discover sites (like this one) and interesting people by word-of-mouth. Within a site (forum or blog), recency, topical categories, sorting and (full-text) searching are sufficient. That’s how the web mostly worked 20+ years ago.
You can have personal rankings, for example people reporting on the most interesting things they’ve recently seen. But these will be individual lists, not aggregated by an algorithm over all user behavior.
You certainly don’t need likes and other reactions, and you also don’t need up- and downvoting of contributions. Those set the wrong incentives and do more harm than good overall, IMO. You do need reporting of problematic content, but only site moderation will see those.
But don't you have to have some sort of ranking system for discoverability?
That's a self-inflicted wound caused by the need for massive scale. Focused user communities don't need to rely on crowds to assist in moderation.
You really don’t. You discover sites (like this one) and interesting people by word-of-mouth. Within a site (forum or blog), recency, topical categories, sorting and (full-text) searching are sufficient. That’s how the web mostly worked 20+ years ago.
You can have personal rankings, for example people reporting on the most interesting things they’ve recently seen. But these will be individual lists, not aggregated by an algorithm over all user behavior.
You certainly don’t need likes and other reactions, and you also don’t need up- and downvoting of contributions. Those set the wrong incentives and do more harm than good overall, IMO. You do need reporting of problematic content, but only site moderation will see those.