There used to be forums without voting. It was discovered that forums with voting attract more engagement because of the emotions produced by the voting.

It also used to be that reddit comments were the epitome of quality in their time, much closer to current HN if not better. I attributed that to the voting mechanism; clearly I was mistaken.

Everything is modeled after gambling nowadays to nudge and gamify the user experience to a desired outcome

If your definition of "gambling" is "things with uncertain outcome", then there's nothing in life that's not gambling.