This is a guess but I feel like it was around the time that most coding was done for things that weren't explicitly "programs", like web design CSS/Java and smartphone "apps".
There's an easy solution to that: I'm pretty sure on Lemmy (not sure about Piefed) admins can see who downvoted. So it's just a matter of mods/admins having and enforcing rules that facilitate conversation.
I said it was first I didn't say it was standard. But being the first it definitionally can't be "nonstandard" since it was the only one at the time!