There is a self declared "elite" group of users on reddit who are always echoing exactly your sentiments to the point that it's almost a chant: groupthink, low quality comments, uniformed discourse! Of course, recognizing that there is a need and desire by some for a place to have more detailed and nuanced discussions is not bad in of itself. Arguably its' a very good thing.
Where it turns bad is in their approach to a solution. Instead of "hey, people want a place where they can have more interesting discussions, let's go create one, promote, and moderate it!", they think "hm, these people with their memes and images, that's a problem. They shouldn't do that. We need to stop them and show them the right way to run a subreddit!"
This latter thinking is incredibly intolerant, arrogant, and dangerous. It's the same type of thing that leads to laws being passed based on a particular religion or other philosophy that tries to ban thoughts different to theirs.
This is why I say that reddit doesn't have a "problem" with low quality content. That's what a lot of people enjoy and they should have a place they can do that. If you want to change peoples minds, use words, not force.
All that being said, I recognize that you didn't actually advocate that reddit be changed. More to your point, as others have said, one of the great things about reddit is that people are free to start their own subreddit and make it into whatever they wish. There are a lot of smaller more heavily moderated subreddits that have great discussion. People who are upset with the bigger subs should look for these or even create their own.
But just standard moderation of content? That's absolutely necessary. Without moderations subreddits degrade into memes and low effort comments. You only need to look at web archive to see the quality of many subreddits vastly decline as they got big.
As a mod of a default subreddit, we remove joke comments and image posts. And it's not like it's a new thing, we have always done that. And the quality is still far from perfect, but it's much better than other subs.
Sometimes I click on the comments of a reddit post looking to see more discussion about it. And instead it's just a bunch of jokes. Often by a handful of people that lurk in the rising posts, and make sure they get their comments there first, and so beat all the other comments (reddit's comment sorting algorithm is god awful and easily exploited like that.) Even if they don't have anything to say, or any insight into the subject.
Another problem is there are two different types of users. "Serious" users, for lack of a better name, and "entertainment" users. The users there for entertainment upvote images, jokes, etc. Serious users are looking for discussion and debate and whatever. These two categories aren't easily separated and often mix. The users looking for entertainment often take over subs about serious subjects, e.g. worldnews.
The top posts become whatever pleases the lowest common denominator, or requires the least effort to read. Short articles are easier read the long articles, and images are even easier, and provocative headlines even easier. So image posts and headlines like "mildly important official says something politically unpopular" take over entirely.
In short, we should stop saying that "low quality content subs" are a problem. They really are not. The problem is instead a lack of well moderated subs, and/or a lack of promoting these or inability to discover them.
As long as this is true, what's wrong with taking over a sub, if that's what the people want? Making a new sub requires getting everyone to change.
You might as well ask those who wanted the old sub behavior to make their own sub.
There's no inherently right decision as to what the default should be, and in particular that decision isn't "just do what the original mods/creators want".
After all we are talking about subreddits that somehow got popular with what they were doing... So why does a popular subreddit have to change and why do the people who made the subreddit into the popular thing it was have to find a new place instead of whoever has a problem with how things are done making their own and new place?
I'm not sure which cases of hostile takeovers they're referring to, so I don't know what happened there, but presumably they either had a mod on their side, or got an admin to step in. The mod's behavior must have been pretty bad if an admin intervened.
I don't understand why you'd say that if an admin did something then the mod's behavior must have been pretty bad. Define bad? Bad for reddit's public image? Bad for monetization?
If what you're about to do after taking over was actually "what the people want" then you wouldn't have to take over.
If you remember when r/trees broke out of r/weed, people found out about the new sub because there was no auto mod bot which went and removed key words.
Those that want their heavily moderated spaces have them within easy reach, those that want their low effort internet junk food, likewise.
So what's the problem, again? It sounds like the system is working mostly as designed.
the defaults are important because they let people use the site before they decide they want to sign up
Don't road block me with some set of tiles and vague "business, technology, fashion, music" screen.
Reddit has it right that a new account should have some baseline. Their discovery tools however are not intuitive, if you can even call them tools.
have defaults with strict moderation, and alienate newcomers
have defaults with loose moderation, and the voting algorithm will favor the most superficial, bitsized posts.
All the best!
Obnoxious moderation is just as big a problem on reddit as the aforementioned.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3pme4i/a_list...
https://reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/374s5i/this_we...
Some subreddits will ban anyone that posts or comments in certain other subreddits.
For one, the worst behaved subreddits moderation wise are often the "default" ones, meaning the ones that everyone sees when logged out. They have a favored position on the site, in other words. Every user is subscribed to them by default, which also means their content is going to wind up on /r/all more often.
Also, once a subreddit gets that size, crap mods can get away with a lot more because the volume of submissions make it hard to tell that something untoward is going on. And the people who pay attention (perhaps a few thousand on a good day) will easily be drowned out by those who do not.
Community forks happen, but never at that level. The deck is hilariously stacked towards the entrenched communities.
See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centrali...
Usually it's easier to just make a new subreddit and convince people that yours is better.
You would need some moderating, but it "could work".
Lots of unknowns, such as how much moderating, how do control moderators etc. Its not really a solution to the actual people "problem" but more a UI/ presentation solution to compensate both sides. Now, trolls will always exist, and will always try to crash the party, does not matter what you do.
And that's bad because?
(My question is a rephrase of the parent's comment).
It's perfectly OK for people to have memes and low effort comments. Not everything should be a "high-bro" discussion, with nuanced arguments and evolved though policing.
Oh by the way they don't say they're removing the submission because it's pro-trump, they just enforce rules that are so broad that there can be a wide discretion in how they're enforced. These rules are heavily enforced for pro-trump and pro-clinton sbumissions, but not pro-sanders submissions.
You might not think it's a problem, but it's still a problem for Reddit: the conversation is generally inferior to the standards required for it to see mass adoption.
A lot of people want to create and consume low quality content. I don't dispute that. But a lot of people don't want to and the way Reddit is organized unfortunately pushes the low quality to the top.
Over the years, I have frequently tried to get into Reddit. I've found smaller subreddits and interesting communities, but even in them I'm confronted with low-effort comments too often. Structurally, the site just doesn't do enough to incentivize high quality contributions.
It's fine for there to be places for low quality content. There's plenty of them on every social network. The problem for Reddit is that they're front and center, not at the fringes.
As the parent intimated people don't all want your idea of quality. Reddit seems perfectly capable of quality within its structure - AskScience and AskHistorians seen like good examples. In other subs [SERIOUS] tags seem to work quite well.
>The problem for Reddit is that they're front and center, not at the fringes. //
It's primarily for entertainment the low SNR subreddits being most prominent seems to be a consequence of that.
I've seen people point to specific subreddits as quality before, but I've never found it to be true.
To verify, I just did a quick peruse through /r/AskScience. While the questions themselves are generally good and the SNR is definitely higher than Reddit overall, I hardly think it's an emblem of quality. There are plenty of drive-by comments with low substantive value and the combination of Reddits norms and algorithms don't seem to do a good job of burying those—even on the "best" subreddits.
Judging from the kind of statistics Reddit has, I seriously doubt that this is a problem for them.
The notion that there are untold millions (more than currently) waiting to get into Reddit but don't because they don't like the memes and jokes doesn't really strike me as accurate.
Where are the competing "serious" sites filling that niche?
It's rather the contrary -- the "serious" and high traffic comment threads, from the Guardian and NYT to CNN, -- get increasingly more (rather than less) Reddit like comments.
In fact killing those memes and jokes will more probably alienate Reddit's largest user base than do any good.
What is stupid memes and jokes for one, is the ability to discuss trully and freely for another.
Absolutely hilarious comment. It's the 31st most popular site in the world. You may struggle to use it but they're clearly not suffering.
Uhm, what? Low quality comments have never been a barrier for a website reaching mass adoption. In fact, mass adoption has been what has crippled the discussion in the biggest subredits. In any case, when discussing the quality of the comments, mass adoption is beside the point as far as we (average users that have no financial stake in reddit) are concerned.
Reddit is the place that instead of having /r/redvsblue you get /r/red and /r/blue 2 gated communities that simply live in their own little world happy with the perfect echo chamber they've created and that anyone who strays to post in the other camp's subreddit is automatically classified as a troll.
(Not all of that impression; certainly upvote-downvote systems tend to exacerbate groupthink. Even so.)
* Twitter in particular has the problem that if you want to interact with the other side, you have to pick a particular person to interact with; yet having someone you don't know initiating conversation just to disagree with you is rather unpleasant, especially if you're "famous" and end up with a lot of such conversations. On Reddit at least you can address an entire subreddit and avoid targeting anyone personally. You will probably be downvoted, which isn't great, but...
Eh why is that exactly? This is pretty much like calling people who object to the ideas that others present on Twitter as harassment. When you go on a public forum and present your ideas you open yourself to a public debate, hearing things that might be "unpleasant" should fall well within the realm of expectation in this case.
But the main one is the blurred line between public and private. Posting here definitely comes with the expectation of a public debate and so people who aren't in the mood for it will not post. But on Twitter everyone is encouraged to publicly post everything from random status updates to highly personal matters to idle chatter that is meant to only circulate among friends (and may not be fully thought through). You can avoid this by setting your account to private, and many do, but this blocks the spontaneous spread of posts through the social graph by means of retweets and replies, which is IMO the best thing about Twitter. There is no granularity, either: only one account toggle between all your tweets being visible to the entire world or to just your direct followers. (Including replies, which makes private accounts an imperfect shield: if you have a private account but chat with a public account, people can still see their replies to you and infer the content of the conversation, plus your username.) Also, whereas you can easily leave HN or Reddit or some forum altogether if you get fed up with it, leaving Twitter may be tantamount to losing contact with friends; you can make your account private but it's not the same sort of mental break.
The worst arguers on the Internet don't just disagree; they bring a moral judgment along with it. "You're wrong for believing in X, and the fact that you believe in X makes you a bad person." If you have enough people who agree with this, (and this often has absolutely nothing to do with broader support for X or whether X is actually bad or not) you actively feel hated, demeaned, etc for believing in X and voicing your opinion. Even being polite will provoke an enormous amount of vitriol simply because it's very easy to lump in a polite X-believer in with preexisting ideas that all people who believe X are assholes.
A lot of people react to this with, "Well, good. There are a lot of shitty Xs that people believe, and people really should be afraid to say those things out loud."
That's all well and good for some opinions; I'm not advocating being polite to, say, neo-Nazis who are denying the Holocaust or advocating genocide. But people rapidly expand X to "whatever I disagree with," and the result is that we treat disagreement on legitimate, reasonable issues that people will naturally disagree on as equivalent to endorsing genocide and believing that the Holocaust didn't happen.
It doesn't help that the Internet naturally magnifies hatred because it's very, very easy for 5,000 people to get ahold of something and leave one really nasty comment apiece. They spend 10 seconds writing a comment, but the person who originally posted X gets 50,000 seconds of written vitriol. It's overwhelming.
As a result, there are certain issues on the Internet (and in real life, for that matter) - vital issues, important issues, that I will not touch because they are far too likely to dump a massive amount of vitriol on me. I have better shit to do. As a result, the best possible outcome for me is not to engage entirely.
And then those exact same people who dump anger and hatred on all believers in X complain that said believers in X are "avoiding them." Well no shit they are, who would volunteer for that?
This is the core problem: what is "legitimate and reasonable" and what is closer to neo-Nazis (to pull your example)?
Painting a target on myself here for the sake of illustration: I am a Christian, and I believe in the literal truth of the Bible. This means, for example, that I believe homosexuality is a sin. (which, for the sake of clarification, does not mean that I hate other humans who are gay).
Where does that put me on the spectrum from "legitimate, reasonable issues" to "neo-Nazi"? The answers to that vary far and wide, and the way I get treated online varies accordingly.
I've been treated as another person at the conversational table ("so why do you think that?", "what does that mean for how you treat others?"), and I've been told I'm "objectively a terrible person" (and much worse) for believing what I do.
The problem is often less "how do I treat people who have reasonable disagreements with me" and more "what constitutes a reasonable disagreement?"
"Hey Bob, here's why you are wrong."
This is bad:
"Hey everyone else, here's why Bob is wrong and evil."
Twitter and the like are mostly 2 masquerading as 1. Call it open debate or whatever, I still don't like it.
Without that hard, often-gated work, how is anyone supposed to form an independent opinion on something like global warming, models of crime, economic policy, intimate relationships, pedagogy, and so on? So what you're seeing is not the discussion of ideas, but rather the negotiation of clan policy and identity.
There's no policy that you can implement to stop this "echo chamber" or "groupthink", which are merely symptoms of a deeper issue: that the antecedents of independent opinion on a wide range of phenomena are simply not there, and that obtaining quality is resource-intensive with non-trivial opportunity cost.
I truly miss the open forums (and even IRC, although that tended to be more focused) of the late 90's early 2000's yeah they could get vile some times but that's a bargain price for getting a public forum in which anyone can express their mind no matter how "wrong" or "offensive" some one can perceive that opinion to be. Today we get people claiming getting PTSD over twitter and every online community adopting a COC which often leaves no room for discourse that would make some one uncomfortable all and all forgetting that ideas that make some one uncomfortable are the ideas most worth discussing. 60 years ago it was "uncomfortable" for way to many people people to hear that blacks should be allowed to use the same bathroom as they are and thank cthulhu we didn't had Twitter and Reddit back then.
An obvious first step is removing downvotes so you can't completely obliterate someone who crosses sides to try to have a conversation, but after that, what else would help?
In my mind, some kind of code of conduct would help further those conversations, because it doesn't prevent people from expressing their opinions, it just makes them express them civilly. And if they express an opposing view without being overly antagonistic, then hopefully the other side wouldn't start insult slinging, and if they do, then that's what the COC would be there for.
I think there's a difference between having a "wrong" or "offensive" opinion, and expressing it in an offensive way. Do you think there's a way to achieve that balance, so that people can feel comfortable to express their opinions on either side, regardless of right or wrong, without it devolving into mudslinging and pure animosity on both sides? How do we accomplish that?
People mistake being challenged for being offended, having a discussion especially on a polarizing subject isn't supposed to be comfortable, but sadly we have too many people that have been cuddled to believe that it's their right to only hear the choir of angels reinforcing their opinions.
Heck even if some one decides to make a comment about ones maternal employment preferences I would not see a reason to moderate that, because unless you are discussing prostitution it most likely has very little to do with the actual argument and so would not score one much points in a debate.
Skilled debate in a venue like Reddit requires an understanding of esotericism, of not simply laying out facts and implications based on your own assumptions, but presenting a fascinating puzzle to the reader that leads them to challenge their own assumptions without being challenged by anyone in particular. When successful, such a puzzle glides beneath the surface tropes of the discussion, presenting the perspective without provoking hostilities. The karma system does not reward this very well, as those carefully crafted puzzles tend to get middling scores, while simple agreement, rationalization arguments(why your assumptions are right and the critics are wrong, from Someone Smart), and congratulatory joking trigger the instant upvote response. But putting in the effort into that dialogue is essential to engaging the community.
Also, for the first few years of its growth, the most popular search term that lead people to the site was 'jailbait'. That's the kind of community they nurtured and catered to.
Reddit would benefit from some way to put it in "intellectual mode" or "picture mode" that weighed certain post types and subs heavier.
If you just separate upvote buttons into funny and intelligent/insightful, then let users sort by the type of comment/post they prefer, wouldn't it solve this?
Slashdot does that, why hasn't that caught on? Complexity?
They could also harvest data on how often people click through a headline, how long they scroll through a comments page, how long until they move to the next item...
So in addition to having more voting options on an aggregator, I also want a separate aggregator that's purely driven by behavioral data, like average clickthroughs and time on page.
The only real problems I see with Reddit are political censorship in default subs and corrupt mods.
When you add all that together, Reddit (or at least the most visible part of it) really has become a bad place for open discussions.
And that's the same type of thing as brigading.
All the above is intolerance. We've forgotten as a society what that word really means.
My idea is that if the user karma was removed, and upvotes on links were used to merely weigh and sort links, and downvotes on comments were removed, Reddit, and also HN, would improve. Many attention seekers spam many subreddits, and also HN, merely for the karma. Instead, give users some lives, as in games, and each time the user is seen spamming/harassing, take away a life, and when he runs out of lives, ban him. Though I have no factual experience to back my thoughts, but mailing lists and bulletin boards are mostly run similarly to what I describe.
He suggests to remove lives for spam/harassment, not for shitposting. So basically, positive loop+ draconian enforcement of essential rules, and no negative loop.
I wonder how much karma Mark Twain would have if he had a Hacker News account...
Anyway, I, too, find downvoting very distasteful. IMO it should be reserved purely for low quality comments. When the crowd downvotes unpopular opinions, the place inevitably becomes an echo chamber, which is unquestionably harmful to honest, open debate and discussion.
My first thought was probably about as much as coldtea has. Lots of up votes and lots of down votes with the up votes winning.
Actually interesting posts are often grumpy four liners written during a short break from actual work (e.g. while waiting for a compile to finish).
What do you (assuming you are someone from Imzy, sorry if not) do with spam, when there are no downvotes? Do you have a flagging system, automodding, spam filters, etc.?
We have the nascent stages of algorithms that will help us with tracking spam and such, but those take time and data to become better, and we're pretty small right now. They will grow as we do. That's one of the reasons we're invite-only right now. Dumping a whole bunch of people into one place all at once turns into a free-for-all, and we want to make sure we're able to moderate communities to have the kind of quality interactions we want rather than a bunch of circlejerking, and that our technology is able to evolve at the same rate our userbase grows.
I'm not sure that fully explains why HN is so much better than Reddit.
Obviously HN is more focused than Reddit overall, but it's ostensibly less focused than many dedicated subreddits. Yet the quality of conversation here is invariable superior.
I don't think karma is the culprit. It exists on HN and works quite well—I put effort into my comments to ensure my ideas are clear and when a post is downvoted it makes me reconsider my writing.
The flip side of that is that reddit will throw up discussions on things which would never in a million years show up on HN, this one today for instance I found very interesting
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4g1pgu/serious_t...
I personally don't know of another "forum" where a post like that could happen and get such interesting responses.
The moderation, of course, plays a huge part too though.
I really don't think HN is much better than reddit, these days...
That said, moderation works as long as it doesn't modify the sentiment of content. Moderation for positive content only leads to groupthink which helps no one. (case in point, Product Hunt, where commenters get upvoted just for saying "cool!" with no additional insight)
We absolutely don't think Imzy should be a place where people can only say nice things and anything negative gets removed. That defeats the point of talking at all.
Our vision is that communities enrich people's lives in a positive way. That doesn't mean every comment, post, or discussion is positive. It means that I come away a better, more informed person from the discussions I have, or maybe I just enjoy my time there.
What that means is that harassment that makes people unhappy, fear for their lives, or feel like they can't participate isn't okay. But disagreement and even voicing opinions that are very unfavorable can still exist. We all become better people when we can share our own perspectives and hear the perspectives of others. Otherwise you end up with an echo chamber.
Hope that helps explain our thinking. I'm happy to elaborate further if you have any questions.
- Private groups, for anonymity.
- Maybe limit upvoting privilege (to certain users?), if it's used in a strange attack.
There are definitely private communities! We also allow you to have different usernames in the different communities you participate in to partition your identity if you need to be anonymous, or post anonymously when you need to, all from one account, so you don't have to have throwaways and create different accounts just to be able to manage your privacy and online identity.
If you mean sexism, are you using this term to imply that sexism is only directed at women?
Also Minor thing: I think you guys are taking about r/Askhistorians, not r/Askhistory
Of course there is. Any moderator can be removed by another moderator higher on the list. There's just no way for non-moderators to hold a coup d'état and remove moderators they don't like.
/r/AskHistorians is an Ask subreddit with strong and active moderation and has high quality.
(Cofounder here, btw, happy to answer any of your questions.)
Edit: I just converted over from being a lurker and created my account to respond here, and apparently I'm commenting too fast. I'll respond to other comments when I can, sorry. :/ Feel free to email me at [email protected] if you want to talk more though!
(Also, sorry it took me so long to reply--apparently I was commenting too fast because I just created my account. Whoops.)
If you are looking for high-signal discussion, then most people in or out of Reddit don't have anything good to say on most subjects. Reddit is the wrong place to look for that kind of talk. Reddit is the right place to listen for community temperature about a narrow range of subjects which communities would be good for, such as user reviews or product discovery.
Groupthink is also not the main problem. How are you supposed to have your own individual opinion on a wide range of phenomena -- unless, of course, you make yourself informed via hard work and gated access? So these people cannot be expected to have their own opinion.
If you want elite opinion, then join an institution with institutional access to elite literature, and join an academic or professional community.
Reddit is fine as it is. It's not supposed to be an elite source of information on a variety of phenomena. It's a place for humor and community discussion. I actually dislike the segment of Reddit users asking for "citations" because unless you have institutional access, then I think that this call for citations is a dishonest way of shutting down conversations.
It's amazing that a former executive of reddit thinks a) it's easy to build a large online community b) it'll be easy to monetize (the hardest part) community and c) it'll be easy to moderate (hey people will do that for free, right?).
Drive-by wit doesn't get upvotes, even when it reflects HN groupthink.
More importantly, on contentious issues HN will still reward quality participation. Take ad blocking for example—you'll invariably see a lot of comments decrying advertising and associated upvotes. But you'll also see well-reasoned defenses of advertising that can also rise to the top.
HN has managed to allow different groups to interact somewhat civilly without resorting to tribalism.
Maybe the problem is what you consider "contentious"? I certainly wouldn't put ad-blocking in that boat. I would put "sexism in tech", "H1Bs" and "finance crimes" in that boat. How do they fair?
I'd say that's a nice collection of all the reasons my account would disappear somewhere else. As dang and tptacek described, there is an effect where they get hit with significant, sometimes massive, downvotes followed by more thoughtful people who valued a counterpoint that at least presented arguments or evidence. Plus a handful that agree with it probably. The sloooow upvote, but rapid downvotes, of some of those comments which would be popular elsewhere shows the site bias in action.
Critical to a parent's claim, though, is that those comments all survived with positive votes and sometimes continuing discussion. It's rare that I delete one for being totally ineffective. For me, high in dissent in contentious topics, I scrounged up 5000+ karma in a year without actually trying to get karma. That's clearly due to culture and moderation here that pushes for higher-quality discussions that are more tolerant of dissent than critics elsewhere say about HN.
For the latter two, you see a diversity of perspectives. There are plenty on HN toeing the populist line (H1Bs = evil, HFT = evil), but also people willing to go into the nuance and give oppositional evidence. Well-substantiated comments rise to the top even when they defy the populist thinking.
I'll concede that the former doesn't have good discussions, but I'm not sure it's possible to have a quality discussion about "sexism in tech" in any online forum. Saying the wrong thing will lead to you losing your job, but full anonymity brings out the trolls and the sexists.
Describe 3 good arguments in favor of the NSA you've seen on HN.
And as much as a lot of us here (myself included) think they're a net negative on the world, that doesn't mean they don't come with positives. They may not catch all threats but it's highly doubtful they catch none.
I'd wager that if you broke it down to the core elements, people aren't against the NSA but against the techniques they use: lack of transparency, gag orders, mass surveillance, etc.
And just to give you an actual third separate argument, the NSA existing keeps security in check. The threat of an entity that turns theoretical attacks into actual attacks means you can't get away with the "it'll never happen" excuse when building a secure system.
I'm asking you to recount specific instances when an NSA proponent did make arguments here, that they themselves held, at the risk of their own social capital.
As an example, I dislike prejudice and believe in a level playing field. This often puts me at odds with Political Correctness and feminism (eg. I disagree that sexism is a male behaviour (eg. The use of the term misogyny to reenforce this belief) and I condemn sexism by anyone). About 50% of the time I am modded down on HN. Challenging sexism from a feminist a guaranteed mod down at The Verge and a near certainty of being modded down at Ars Technica.
So, I consider HN to be more open minded than almost all other forums, save one. Many users on this other forum are mindful of the PC trap and discourage sexist terms like misogynist (instead of the more balanced, less political term - sexist)
I don't think anyone thinks that. The point isn't "HN is a utopia." It's "HN provides better discussion than most other places on the internet." On reddit, your comment probably would have been downvoted to hell by people who disagreed with you.
Does a "hacker type" correlate strongly with a certain race, gender or nationality? Is one political point of view more valid for "hacker types" than another? The guidelines of the actual site uses the qualifier "a good hacker," implying one should not only be a hacker, but "good" Good at what? Programming, startups, or conforming to an archetype of a "hacker" personality?
Even "intellectual stimulation" tends to lead to the belief that only intellects of a certain type should be considered valid. Dang has to constantly correct people who assume that content which is intellectually stimulating, but not explicitly about startups or technology, is off topic or detrimental. Hacker News is not what some people assume it is. The "good hacker" archetype itself is the problem, as people differ wildly as to their interpretations of it, and by extension, in their belief in what the true theme and purpose of Hacker News is.
Yet what really separates the average Hacker News user from the average Reddit user? I don't know how many users HN has, but Reddit has tens if not hundreds of millions, so one can assume the average Reddit user is not necessarily less intelligent than HN. Reddit also has a number of high quality subreddits which are heavily moderated and used by experts in their field, so I'm not certain HN possesses more technical acumen than Reddit, either. Quality of articles? Many things posted here also appear on Reddit.
Why, then, do Hacker News users seem to detest Reddit so much? Because among the few commonalities in the various interpretations of the hacker archetype are elitism and a distaste for mainstream culture, and new users want to appear to be "good hackers" and hating the mainstream is what people think "good hackers" do. Yet read the comments here, especially in controversial, non-technical threads where posturing as a "good hacker" has less value. Most are no better than, or even worse than, comments in similar subthreads on Reddit.
This goes back to the beginning of the site btw:
As soon as you have moderators, the users defer responsibility for confronting the bad stuff and it represents the start of the decline, "If that was allowed, why isn't this?".
Without moderation, and with the community possessing some tools to enforce, most communities will take on that responsibility and do so. i.e. the flagging on here or on Craigslist that allows multiple people to moderate where an individual's signal is weak but collectively it becomes strong.
Of the course the only thing that this doesn't address is broken group-think across the whole forum. To that, I've found making the admin of a forum the legal buck-stop for the forum works well. This is compatible with EU law, where you generally need someone to be responsible for complaints of a libel/defamation nature, and so I designate the forum owner as that and I move myself into the "mere conduit" role.
This method of "everyone is a weak moderator, we have no strong moderators but we do have a strong leader who is liable" has been very effective at producing decade old, healthy and growing communities.
You mean like Metafilter?
I think the problem is that anything good on Reddit gets copied elsewhere, has advertising added and makes money.
Reddit is BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed-esque sites' biggest subsidy. This site isn't going to do anything about that.
Maybe it's my imagination but in my 9 years there it's like you can almost see the next wave of new users arrive. It's subtle at first but you soon see the common culture of that age/culture group, cohort or whatever it is.
What I don't like is the new (~6 months) locking of threads I think that's a cop out of moderators or the admins. You don't like the conversation? Slam the door shut.
It is HACKER NEWS, rather than popular news. Reddit is just too board. However, certain subs are still pretty interesting and informational, until....it becomes popular.
So yes. Popular means low quality. It is sad, but inevitable..
What evidence is there that HN is any better? Everything looks good when you're on the right side of the groupthink. There are certain subjects here that have atrociously one-sided discourse.
Personally, I think Reddit is just as informative as this place (besides the point that there is no monolithic "reddit")
It's possible on reddit. reddit.com/r/AskHistorians is a Q&A subreddit for asking historical questions. They have a very high standard for answers, comments, and even the questions you can ask. and they actively enforce it. As a result it's a very high quality resource.
It can be done, if there's the will for strict moderation, from the mods and the users.
There are tons of subreddits like /r/askhistorians that do HN level of moderation and don't have 'lazy comments'
I get quite confused when I see people take it so seriously.
We always assume human moderators are required. I wonder if AI could do something here?
HN isn't immune to these. It suffers just as badly as Reddit. It's just that the cultures are so different. HN is elitist and thinks technology will improve our lives, Reddit is racist and thinks pictures of cute kittens and in-jokes will improve our lives. Both are filled with ignoramuses who get upvoted to the top of a page for catering to that website's niche the most (HN = most elitist comment, Reddit = funniest comment). Anyone else barely sees the light of day, and get downvoted to smithereens. As long as there's an upvote button, I don't think any website can truly solve this. HN tried to fix it by using more algorithms on top of upvotes, but it just doesn't work.
Hey look, you're down-voted.
I agree. Look at some of the "top-posters" on the HN scoreboard. Much of their commentary is tepid oatmeal that panders to the "easy" things that HN likes.
>HN = most elitist comment
I'm not sure I agree with "elitist", but there's definitely a thing, which is well defined by things like "Shit HN says".
Nothing positive, or useful, or interesting has ever come out of a "Shit (community) says" group. Those types of (what's the word here.. articles? groups? Whatever, things) are always crass, point-and-laugh-derisively-at-the-stupid-people-ha-ha-look-how-stupid-they-are affairs.
Reddit's instance of this cancer (and I don't believe I've chosen the wrong term for something this awful) even functions as a more or less sanctioned voting brigade.
The argument against this mindset is usually along the lines of, "Well, we don't want the KKK organizing rallies on our boards!" Which, is true; you don't want that. But banning them from reddit moves them from a public forum to their own, more private, areas of the internet. You can't censor shit.
The same happens to a lesser extent on HN, but without the bullying.
The end result is content that leans in only one direction because everyone else has been silenced, they don't bother posting, or they left.
The irony is that this behavior is exactly what progressives have claimed to be fighting (discrimination and online bullying)
Edit: haha, the ironic downvoting happened fast.
Both deploy a wide variety of strategies to enforce quality content: crowd-vote mechanism and individual ignoring. These two mechanisms should be more than sufficient for even the most obsessively compulsive and curiously unaccountable of curators.
The question isn't comparing communities based on content or upon curator strategies. One should question should take aim at the unspoken epistemological assumptions every single curator engages in.
Suppose Poster 1 puts topic A into Community A. There are many overlapping relationships between topic A and community A.
Now lets suppose Poster 2 puts topic B into Community A. There are few overlapping relationships between topic B and community A.
"Overlapping relationships" is a very complex topic. Users might find topic B to be on-topic in an esoteric or meta way, and the moderators will find it off-topic. Users might find topic A to be off-topic because the topic is to frequently discussed, and the moderators remove it. However the dice roll, the concept of "overlapping relationships" between topic and community is not a guarantee of topic survival.
The selection mechanism of topic survivability is divided between the collective hands of the crowd-vote mechanism, individual ignoring, or moderation termination. And notice I say "divided" , and not "sequentially evaluated". Agents of topic survival operate in parallel. This means that posters have to appeal to not only just three different selection criteria in order to survive, but eight different scenarios that have different highly targeted payoffs.
Two rules of the topic lifecycle:
* The topic must pass/fail three moderation phases.
* The topic always has influence on the hardcore communtiy consumers (HCC), the average community consumers (ACC), and the moderators. (M)
How topic lifecycles can still influence a community even via multi-phase curation:
Case | CrowdVote? | Mass ignore | Deletion? | Outcome
1 | Pass | | | HCC get skeptical of ACC and M
2 | | Pass | | ACC get skeptical of HCC and M
3 | | | Pass | HCC and ACC think M is lazy
4 | Pass | Pass | | HCC and ACC think M is aggressive
5 | | Pass | Pass | HCC hostile to ACC and M, may fracture community
6 | Pass | | Pass | ACC get skeptical of HCC and M
7 | Pass | Pass | Pass | No effect
8 | | | | M gets skeptical of HCC and ACC
Edit: okay I found this. https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/o0pdv/meta_...
I really love how self-enforcing the community is here towards snark and lazy comments, which have absolutely destroyed Reddit. Edginess is much easier than proper discussion.