I came here from Askville ages ago, so I may be remembering a different Askville than the one you know. The design of the reward system on Askville created a lot of competitive friction. One of the answers to each Q was chosen as “Best Answer’ and given bonus points, so users tried to get that distinction. That may have had the advantage of urging answers to be complete and well-crafted, but there was also the feeling that it was you vs. the other answerers and, to make things worse, it was the answerers who (along with the asker) rated the quality of each others’ contributions. That led to all kinds of ill-feelings about the fairness of the ratings. It got pretty nasty at times.
Here we have the “lurve” system, and even that can create some resentments, but overall there’s more a sense that rather than being in competition for some prize, we’re each contributing toward a comprehensive and complex exploration of the topic. It’s kind of a “it takes a village” approach. That’s where the whole “collective” idea comes from. We all build an answer together, one that looks at many angles.
You can’t have a bunch of humans working (or playing) together without conflicts, but I just felt that there were structural features of Askville that unnecessarily fed into our worst human proclivities.