This meant on traditional forums everyone’s position was not only presented equally

No, the earlier web forums based on phpbb or vbulletin or whatever prioritized the most recent posts. That means that plenty of good content was drowned out by fast moving threads, and threads were sorted by most recent activity, which would allow some threads to fall off quickly unless “bumped.”

It was inherently limited in scale. The votes made such a difference for the forums that implemented it (slashdot, hacker news, eventually reddit) that it could make the more popular stuff more visible, rather than the most recent stuff more visible. And whatever the local site culture was could prioritize the characteristics that were popular in that particular place. That’s why tech support almost entirely switched to reddit or similar places, because the helpfulness of a comment was generally what drove its popularity.

And the biggest problem with the older forums was that they didn’t allow for threading. Any particular comment can spawn its own discussion without taking the rest of the thread off on that tangent.