> Aggressive moderation on some subs makes it hard to post. Posts might be deleted for arbitrary reasons. Sometimes questions are sent to a generic 'Ask a Question' thread, which isn't great for finding questions later via search.

This is my biggest problem with the site, and the reason I don't use it. Each community is at the mercy of a small number of moderators who are free to shape the conversation in any way they wish.

There's also a small number of people that control what is posted and commented on in all the main, default subreddits (news, politics, technology, etc). Browsing reddit is just ingesting the information diet of a small number of ideological moderators.

A lot of forums also have tyrannical mods, but the key difference is that a forum doesn't have the same unique authority that a subreddit with the best name for the topic has. If a forum has bad mods, other forums are on a bit more equal footing as competitors. The discussion thread format is also less prone to bad moderation than reddit's link/image focused post threads are, and usually also forces the mods to actually participate in the community. Plus if someone breaks a forum rule other than one related to creating threads, other users can come scold them for it more easily (necroing is a common example).

Reddit isn't built for community discussion and is getting worse at it as the admins try to turn it into instagram.

I can only speak to the one (top 10 by subscriber count) subreddit I am a "mod" in, but they also routinely engage in vote manipulation to control what their front page looks like through a more "organic" approach (edit: rather) than simple thread deletion. I'm sure this goes on in all of the major ones.

Not to mention rules are inconsistently enforced, rule breaking that aligns with moderator ideology tends to get shifted to the bottom of the priority stack.

Are you saying the mods of the subreddit are themselves purchasing votes from bot farms to influence the posts? Or am I not understanding you?

No, sorry for not clarifying. They would share links with "upvote this please" in moderator only channels to push things to the top of the subreddit. Which afaik is against reddit TOS.

> This is my biggest problem with the site, and the reason I don't use it. Each community is at the mercy of a small number of moderators who are free to shape the conversation in any way they wish.

Isn't this also the way with forums, especially niche ones?

Yes, definitely, but most forums aren't one of the most popular websites in the world.

Is this different from what mods/admins on old-style community forums used to do?

Some of the moderators are even there for 10 years. Reddit should have an obsolescence plan

Groupthink in recent years on Reddit has become a serious problem.

Even in /r/television, people downvote discussion of television when they disagree with the commenter's basic opinion of a television show.

The downvote button is not meant to be an "I disagree with your opinion" button, but it is that now.

People use the downvote on HN for disagreement all the time. People don't like critiques or dissenting views, and some fraction of OPs will downvote a critical response. Some other fraction will downvote maliciously or selfishly.

I think the downvote should be for low-effort or low-contribution comments. I abhor "^this" or "lol", nevermind trolling or unfounded disinformation.

> People use the downvote on HN for disagreement all the time.

To some extent yes, but I wouldn't say all the time - it's definitely a lot better here compared to places like Reddit.

I think voting is the problem. The gamification attracts a certain type of person who for various reasons is willing to spend absurd amounts of time / effort to "acquire more points". This in turn warps the community as a result.

I understand it was an attempt to police spam. However I still think that slashdot perhaps struck the right balance (the old slashdot I mean, I don't know how they do it now). Randomly a small percentage of users get mod ability when they read the threads which enables them to vote / classify / tag spam.

Dang. This is one I can speak to. Back around 2008 or so I was at a friend's college dorm and we spent an entire day watching a Mad Men marathon on AMC. This was long before binge watching, when an actor was either in movies, on HBO, or on bleh cable, so it felt like a cultural shift to me that we were all so enamored by this show. When I got home I typed in /r/television to see if maybe this was something others were talking about, but I discovered it was an abandoned subreddit full of soap opera gossip. So I messaged the user that created it, who eventually came around and saw my message, and he let me take it over. He didn't leave the subreddit so he was always top in the hierarchy, but I personally took full ownership. I spent years designing and enforcing rules discouraging things like downvotes, requiring people to submit the source instead of blogspam/clickbait, disallowing memes/image posts, banning any form of hate speech, etc. This was _not_ the norm on Reddit at the time. This was the era of /r/pics. Most passerbys hated it, it really didn't even follow the whole idea of Reddit as a whole, but the ones that stayed were awesome and it seriously just grew and grew and grew. Critics like Alan Sepinwall were practically gods there and guided a lot of the discussion throughout those years, and the AV Club was largely ignored.

I ended up taking a little hiatus from the Internet and left some mods I trusted in control, and when I went back after a few months I discovered the original mod had let Reddit take it over and install their own team to make it a default subreddit. Why wouldn't they? Now, it is what it is. Still, I look at it and know I designed that logo, I wrote the rules that have been repurposed and are buried in some wiki that nobody reads, and I wrote the stylesheet for the sidebar. Oh well.

I m starting to see the uselessness of down/upvote. Apart from reporting spam, maybe it's better to do away with them

In HN, people tend to pile up on the topmost comment and create enormous trees of comments, just because the next top comment is way too far down

I can't count the number of times that some jerk de-railed some comment section on genuine good content because they couldn't resist trying to score a few cheap virtue points pointing out that leaving X leaning against Y in the background is technically an OSHA violation or that Z in the background needs to be cleaned.

I have completely moved over to https://tildes.net, HN, and http://lobste.rs.

What are the advantages (or differences) of these compared to HN? From a quick glance they seem to be clones with a bit of glitter.

I've been trying to get a lobste.rs invite for years! It's a tough community to get into. I hadn't heard of Tildes before, but it looks cool, too.

Reddit reached Eternal September a while ago, so the key is to find small (yet active) communities whose content doesn't make it to r/all. I moderate a cycling community there, but we're really strict about what type of content gets posted. It sucks that we as a mod team have to do that, but if we don't our community gets overrun with memes, image macros, and rage comics.

Shoot me an email - it's in my HN bio.

I've been on lobste.rs a while. It's even worse than HN.

This is an honest question so I hope it doesn't come off in the wrong light. If you don't like it here? Why do you continue to visit and interact?

Because better platforms died off years ago (or have been killed).

Which platforms did you find better than HN? And of those which were killed?

NNTP, some mailing lists and the peer-based resharing/voting in Google Reader

>I feel like Reddit has replaced many niche forums

It assuredly has, but I think we're just now leaving the honeymoon phase where we are realizing that consolidating everything into Reddit hasn't actually improved the communities.

I think/hope that in the next 10 years we will see a quiet resurgence of niche communities again. In fact I think we're already seeing that with Discord.

I don't know if the solution to silo'ing everything in Discord as opposed to Reddit is any better? The medium is different enough that small sized communities can be far more active than a similar sized one on a forum or subreddit, but on the other hand as a member of a few communities with a few hundred to a few thousand people it's a nightmare to keep track of the conversations and requires far more mental engagement throughout the day.

I can't even try and be actively engaged with my Discord groups, there's just too much constant activity and no easy way to get caught up on what I've missed. All the Discord communities I join eventually end up on permanent mute and only occasionally checked.

Reddit also has a pretty short amount of time that threads have before they're archived. Lots of times I'll come across an old discussion from a few years ago (or longer) and want to ask a question, or thank somebody for somee insight or whatever, but can't because it's no longer available.

Six months.

Most discussions are effectively dead within 24 hours, often less.

About 3/4 of Reddit threads I've seen and wanted to comment on have been locked due to that time limit.

Sometimes the OP's original question is unanswered and I could have helped.

> Tree-style comments are not the best format for every type of discussion.

I've found that they work well for discussions where there are several subtopics. Under what scenerio would this format not be considered the best format?

Long-running discussions.

The lifespan of a Reddit/HN submission is basically a day. Past that point and it's unlikely anyone will even read your comment.

In such cases, a traditional forum's bumping system lets you pick up timeless conversations for new people to take part of. So many times an archived Reddit thread will show up in Google results and it's sad that I can't contribute to the discussion nor will anyone read it if I could.

But that's an UI/UX problem. I had extremly long running usenet discussions back then. My usenet reader was giving me a tree view of all topics were I could:

* See all news messages since the last time. I could see all the threads, news messages were marked in bold. * Cycle through them, i.e. show me next unread. * Make whole threads as read (when the topic is not interesting to me) * Ignore a thread or subthread (when it's going offtopic or completely uninteresting to me)

And it was also super easy to filter out idiots, without anyone moderating the stuff.

> And it was also super easy to filter out idiots, without anyone moderating the stuff.

That's one thing I've found lacking in practically any single forum out there. IMO, client side moderation is the best kind of moderation. That said, it can be daunting to a newcomer if the signal-to-noise ratio of a group is rather low due to numerous trolls, cross-posters, etc and they don't have their killfile set up yet.

Not sure I understand - in your example, isn’t it the archiving that’s to blame, rather than the tree/threaded format?

In more traditional forums (e.g. VBB) one effectively replicates the tree format through quoting - just without the tree being so clearly displayed.

In tree-format discussion, new replies disappear into the depths of subtrees, whereas in a linear thread they're always at the bottom and easily marked as new. There should be a way to somehow switch between the formats.

Some forums do both at the same time, which can be nice.

E.g. showing every comment linearly with time, but each comment that has replies also has a "show replies" link which expands when clicked to show the replies as children. Those replies are the same comments shown later in the linear list; it's just a convenient alternate way of showing them on request in context.

Fair point - thanks.

There are two problems here, one is reddit preventing new comments on old posts, which is not inherehent to tree-style threads.

The other is that trees make it harder to keep up with ongoing discussions as you can no logner just continue reading from where the thread was at when you last visited. Reddit actually has an OK solution for that which highlights new comments since your last visit(s) but it is only available to moderators or paid users.

Another possible solution would be a better notification system - with forums you can typically watch a thread to get notifications for any posts but with Reddit you only get notfications for direct comments to your post/comment.

Long while ago I noticed that on slashdot all the top rated comments by people with high karma were universally trash. And the best comments were made by some anonymous coward a few days after everyone else had moved on.

I guess it depends on the forum. On usenet, many threads would last for weeks, if not months. The reader I used (Thunderbird and its ancestors) would sort threads based on which one had the most recent reply. Given the indexed view of the thread, it was pretty easy to find the new replies and continue existing discussions.

Any thread where the discussion isn't expected to splinter into subtopics, and the newest posts have more value than the 'best' post.

One example might be a non-trivial tech support problem, where forum members work together to solve an issue. As the user tries solutions and posts their progress, the initial post isn't as valuable as the latest one. Other examples would include threads with real-time reactions to events, like a sporting event or political debate, or threads that are longer-running, like telling a story that unfolds over time.

> Any thread where the discussion isn't expected to splinter into subtopics

But most longer running discussions will splinter into subtopics. If the discussion is short enough, the way it's displayed doesn't really matter either way.

> Other examples would include threads with real-time reactions to events, like a sporting event or political debate

I think the line between a mostly synchronous chat and an asynchronous discussion forum as been blurred a bit. In chat, it's a lot easier to follow a discussion as it's happening because you can read the messages as they come in and only pay attention to the ones you're interested in. But trying to read the log after the fact is a bit more time consuming because you have to search for the relevant messages amongst many.

In a threaded and asynchronous discussion, it's easier to go down a subthread to follow a particular discussion than it is to find that discussion mixed in with all the other posts.

That said, I find it interesting that email clients have moved towards displaying messages in a conversation view, yet newer chat clients like Slack are introducing threaded discussiion as a feature.

re: Tree-style comments are not the best format for every type of discussion.

But it sure fixed some of the more infuriating aspects of classic / linear forums:

- long (winded) conversations between posters in threads

- off-topic discussions / people de-railing the threads

- finding things from specific dates in very large threads.

Some of those things are easily fixed with very active moderation - but self-moderation (via voting) sure works fine in most cases.

I don't think there's a one-sized-fits-all solution. Tree comments do solve many issues with linear threads, but they do introduce their own issues, especially when paired with voting. Many cases do work better for tree-style comments, but there are cases that work better for linear threads.

I'd love to have a mix, sort of like facebook I guess.

for me the biggest problem of Reddit is the Toxic culture. More than a half of the subs I follow its flooded with useless comments, toxic and negativity towards a subjected and many direct answers to get upvotes.

But i guess this is not very different from other social networks.

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