You go from the most outrageous at the top to the most discussed at the top. All content gets a chance to be read. Even if it the first user find it uninteresting. On reddit, if what you post gets a downvote very quickly, you're basically done.

This is terrible for hobby boards because it means that content from long-timers gets drowned out by newbies asking the same questions over and over. In my experience hobby subreddits are completely dominated by inexperienced newbies giving one another the same cargo-cult advice. That, and straight up image posts with literally 0 value (for example the front page of /r/simracing at any given moment is usually about 30-50% pictures of just a steering wheel / rig from someone saying "got my new wheel/rig today").

The old days of forums were great for hobbyists because the long-running threads would stretch into the dozens or hundreds of pages of comments. Newbies could be directed to the longer threads or deep-linked directly to older comments. The format surfaced all posts, but did not favour recency - old threads could be revived (necro'd) or kept up top indefinitely. It wasn't perfect but it was a system that favoured long-timers over newbies.

People switching to Reddit has less to do with "it's Reddit" and more to do with the UX of Reddit being better for what people tend to want to do on a forum. Discourse is OK and comes close in some places (has great Markdown editing for example), but "1 account for everything" alone is somewhat of a killer feature.

It's a shame that Stackexchange didn't get OpenID to catch on anywhere other than Stackexchange. Could have been a big help in driving more attention to independent (and maybe even federated) platforms.

Any reasonable forum with - checks simracing - 168k members would have a dozen subforums for different reasons soas not to drown out the general forum. One might even be "post your rig" or "newbie questions".

But the rub with traditional message boards is, that they don't scale well. Some subreddits have many, many thousands of active regular participants. It's hard for a single subforum to operate at that scale.

Makes me sort of want an HN forum though. Maybe limited to self posts and with a more chronological feed.

Chronologically by last update, otherwise you could always read /r/yoursub/new, but that's only chronologically by last original post. By last original post doesn't help much. For slow-moving subs, it doesn't change anything much; for fast-moving subs, it's okay-ish if you care about posts more than comments, but you still lack curation (however imperfect).

Humans are so short-sighted, we don't even need a superintelligence to outsmart us. We happily stand by and collect profits while letting the AI do whatever it wants. Really, we need regulation that makes companies care about side-effects of their AI technology.

For instance, there are cases you can point to where some normal person on Twitter with a couple dozen followers posted the wrong thing, it blew up into an international story, and they eventually got fired from their real-world job for it. Who made the decision that this person's views should be widely scrutinized? In a lot of cases it was the algorithm: for whatever reason that tweet drew engagement, so a massive spotlight was put on this mostly-private individual.

In a real way that's an example of an AI system deciding to take away someone's livelihood.

This is a serious stretch. The algo didn’t force that person to sign up and post their every ignorant thought on a public forum. People can just put down their phones but they love the attention. Individuals are just as guilty for giving power over themselves to social media.

To make an old-world analogue, in 1980 for someone to be held to account for an objectionable view, it probably would have involved some journalist making the decision to write a story about the comments which someone made. That human component in deciding what is newsworthy has been replaced by a machine in some cases.

Another example would be dating apps. Now we have algorithms which make decisions about which parts of the dating pool an individual will have access to. In a real sense, non-human intelligence is playing some role in who gets to pass on their genes to the next generation, and with whom.

I'm not saying that our lives are ruled by machines, but they're not completely not governed by machines either.

I'm kind of surprised that aliases have not widely taken off already. But I suppose the consequences are not very severe yet.

The funny thing is that these aliases already existed, but we've largely eschewed them for our "real" identities. Prior to probably Facebook I think every interaction I had with other people online was behind a screen name detached from my real world identity.

(I’m not making any claims about where or how or how much these things are happening.)

For my part I think it's asynchronous written debates that are the source of these problems, so even earlier than facebook.

On a large massive forums, people write for themselves, not the others, and barely read the discussion. Oral debates or written rendering of them, had the advantage to be slow, less variate, and adaptative to a single argumentative line.

Nowadays when you discuss an issue online, everyone starts new train of thought to escape adaptation, and care little about an audience they d need to seduce or convince.

I suppose I just did the same anyway, you can reply but I wont read :)

The former is like a bunch of drunk grandpas mumbling to themselves in a room, the latter is like a self interested orator playing to a crowd. Asynchronous written debate can be the one of the best forms of communication. Think about Jefferson’s letters or other famous correspondence. The incentives are just wrong on boards with ranking and voting

E.g. Gandhi would have been called "radical" without implying any violent tendency.

And (to a lesser extent) the equivalent process for other domestic terrorist groups.

People will still understand what you mean if you use "radicalization" to refer to positive things, but they'll wonder if you're making a very dry joke.

* Anyone who drives slower than me is an idiot and anyone who drives faster than me is reckless.

* Anyone who's worse than me at me at Overwatch is a noob, anyone who's better than me has no life.

* Anyone who's views are less extreme than me is a sheep, anyone who's views are more extreme than me is a radical.

It takes a lot of effort to realize that I'm on the "radical" spectrum for a lot of my political views (I'm hella progressive) and that that isn't a bad thing, but neither are other people's, in my view less aggressive, ideas for tackling problems.

It's hard to suss out people's goals. They might not understand their goals themselves, and "goal" may be an abstract and unknowable thing. But I think it's necessary to find some goals to be a bad thing in order to figure out your own politics.

I like watching YouTube, I learn a lot from it. My wife likes watching tiktok, it is an exchange of culture. How exactly is this a waste of time? What would be a better use of my time? Making money for someone else? Watching TV? If I (and many others) enjoy it, why does it matter?

> distorted world view (mostly the posts with the highest engagement will be those that call for outrage, which leads to radicalization

This is propaganda. Do you think the perspective imposed on the public by an elite group of individuals, hand-fed information by government press conferences doesn't lead to a distorted world view?

At least for Twitter, it allows you to turn that algorithm crap off and it respects that choice - iirc even across devices.

Facebook, meanwhile, has entirely turned off that ability.

I'm sure they'll completely break it some day. They broke it briefly once already. Since I was working at Facebook at the time I filed a task on it. The response was the rudest I ever got in 3.5 years at the company. If it works, as long as it works, it's basically by accident (or because some front-end developer is resisting management's constant pressure to deprecate it).

I think of it this way. Lets say I walk past someone on the street and say "hi." Now lets say I punch them in the face. What creates the most engagement?