I think they're not wrong either. I was rather invested in what used to be a small subreddit that is now huge. It's a shitshow now sometimes but back then most of the posters were regulars and could recognized each-other. Moderating was a lot easier and context and what have you could be taken into account. I know i could trust one person's expertise, that another often would take a specific stance, another that was always an asshole but very careful to stay on the edge of getting banned and what was technically allowed generally got downvoted. There was space for public meta discussions about sources (not)accepted by the community that actually had an impact, etc

Experiencing the transition has made me value small communities much much more.

The Evaporative Cooling Effect[0].

[0] https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ...

Thank you for that! It's what I've been trying to word regarding some subreddits back in 2011-2012

Small communities - you might as well say community communities. Not picking on you, just agreeing, to the point of asserting that "community" can't exist past a certain scale. Dunbar's number and all that.

Unsubscribing from any subreddit over ~50K users (incl defaults) really improves the reddit experience.

The one problem specifically with reddit and other 'frontpage' type communities is that they don't surface where the actual conversation is in the way vbulletin or other forum software does. With the old reddit code, however, you could go to https://old.reddit.com/r/subreddit-name/comments and see a comment view of the entire subreddit. This would bring the current conversation to the top regardless where it is in the standard view. Really improves the experience for smaller subreddits that don't have much traffic otherwise.

Unfortunately they seem to have removed the feature in the new code. You can still use it in old per above however.

> With the old reddit code, however, you could go to [...] and see a comment view of the entire subreddit.

Depending on the newsreader, you could essentially get the same thing by having the thread with the most recent comment move to the to of the thread list. Then, expanding the thread would show new comments in bold font to distinguish then from ones you've already read or previously downloaded.

Being able to see new posts is something that's lacking in reddit and HN (though reddit does provide this feature on subs you moderate or have reddit gold).

The tried and true thread model from usenet, email and vbulletin-style forums leads to long-standing topical conversations that easily stretch days and weeks, commonly months and sometimes years.

The continuous fountain of content model at reddit/hn/digg/etc is good for retinal adhesion but not so good for exchange of ideas.

This is a very cool feature in the old reddit code (stupid they removed it) that I would never have thought to use in this way.

Right, the unifying thing there is basically about community size. The same thing happens offline. The fact that you had a highly educated user base made a difference too. Early internet users either at a university or affluent and interested enough to pay a lot of money for that use (pre-flat rate AOL.)

A lot of the challenges today are related to community size. Also, a lot of the problems are either solvable or already solved, but just relate to platforms wanting maximum user growth/monetization so they disregard those early learned lessons. Just take a look at the stuff Randall Farmer has written. These are lessons dating back to easy online communities in the 1980s.

I think you're mistaking "educated" for "similar". The community don't necessarily have to be educated, but it helps a lot if they're broadly similar in some way. Same background, same age, same goal, same education, same interests, something.

(And lets be honest, the reason size is a problem is because beyond a certain point, you can't do human moderation).

That's also a lot of rose-tinted glasses. The classic exchange comes to mind:

A: Remember when 4chan was good?

B: 4chan was never good.

This is true for just about every community.

I genuinely miss my LAN forum though. I've spent a lot of time talking to different people from my city there, playing video games and just socializing. Ten or twenty years later we've met each other a few times in real life, and the nostalgia is strong in everybody I see.

I was heartbroken when I've realized that one of the forums was hosted by an ISP that is no more. I've got some content archived, but damn did I feel weird like some part of my life is gone, wiped off the face of the internet.