Hacker news is social media. Most of your suggestions aren't implemented here. Yet the discourse is generally ok.

The only thing that matters is the size of community. Beyond a certain scale, it always breaks down. Ultimately, the problem is the people.

HN is not pursuing 10%/week growth, "engagement" etc. It doesn't care for bots, viral posts, there's a small, definable ruleset and largely enforceable.

It naturally attracts people interested in its themes and subjects, and doesn't try to cater to everyone needs. Hell, it isn't even trying to be beautiful or having any order other than chronological timeline and upvoted posts!

No wonder it hasn't become a toxic wasteland.

Right, so the problem is making your KPIs exclusively about measurable 'growth', rather than optimizing for making the best communities possible.

It isn't inherently social media or democracy that's the problem, it's the incentives behind it.

A little ironic that this community was also founded by the guy who wrote http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html :D

I loathe all ads, so HN is great in that aspect. The design is good with its beige and orange, very simple no pretentiousness. Also the community is smart and usually thoughtful in both replies and posts. Its really the only 'social media' I participate in.

The user base is sufficiently pretentious to bring the site up to the expected pretentiousness baseline for an SV product. Just needs a bit of quiet ukulele music in the background to really get it over the line consistently.

/s

That's definitely true. Without messing up a good thing (HN), I wonder though how similar community platforms could be constructed incrementally better in terms of reasonableness, fairness, ethical/principled/respectful debate, curiosity, quality people, and signal.

It might be bad analogies but the lack of flash a-la Drudge Report (haven't seen it in years) or the old Fry's Electronics (stores and their website). I think it somewhat deters engagement addiction and focuses on content.

> No wonder it hasn't become a toxic wasteland.

It is a toxic wasteland, though, at least sometimes. Also depends on who you are and how you experience the world - HN can be a very ugly place.

HN is no cakewalk. There are lots of very vocal climate deniers, homophobes, Nazis, etc. here. I've been called hateful slurs on HN that nobody has said to me anywhere else. Much of this flies under the radar of the mods and the users are frequently not warned or banned.

HN suffers all the same problems as Twitter or any of the others.

The difference is visibility. A few hours into a conversation, the top two comments are, more often than not, a well-reasoned argument for one side and a well-reasoned rebuttal. If you start in on a thread while it's early, you'll see a lot of garbage, but that tends to float to the bottom over time. In general, the HN system (tech+mods+community) rewards thoughtful content and penalizes shallow nonsense.

Twitter is the opposite. The most inflammatory comments trigger the most engagement, and so get the most visibility.

I don't agree with that. I think often hours in, the top comments often get more offensive here. Not less. The garbage floating to the bottom is not my experience here.

> In general, the HN system (tech+mods+community) rewards thoughtful content and penalizes shallow nonsense

I don't see this happening on HN. The shallow nonsense isn't the problem, it's the hateful opinions and "carefully reasoned, smart sounding" racism that is the problem. Calling it shallow nonsense makes it sound like no big deal or low effort hate posts. But that's not what I'm talking about.

People say the worst things here but they use a large vocabulary and so it seems to get a pass. The hate here is very similar to the hate I see elsewhere and often it is much much worse here than on Twitter, in my personal experience.

Ah, okay, I understand better what you're saying. So you do perceive Twitter as different than HN, but only in quality of writing, not in lack of hateful content.

Can you give an example of a thread that turned out that way? I'm genuinely curious if I've been missing something, or if I've just managed to steer clear of topics that end up like that.

I'm on Hacker News more than I care to admit and I don't see evidence of this widespread racism you proclaim. Please provide evidence if you're going to make these wild accusations.

I'm scratching my head on this one. There are passive-aggressive haters in the world, but I don't see much of that around here. People around these parts usually keep their biases to themselves or outright flaunt them and get hammered for it.

$5 words instead of plain speak is an accessibility problem but anti-intellectualism never solved anything. Maybe inferiority feelings or catastrophizing? Do what I do, subscribe to the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day. :) Go through the GRE prep materials if you want a bigger vocab. Heck, I would get a used unabridged dictionary and make it a point to work from cover-to-cover. Watch those obnubilated smarty-pants shudder in fear. :)

If this is as widespread as you claim, I'm sure you can link/quote some real examples.

Twitter is dominated by outrage and disinformation. HN very much is not. You may still encounter conversations with people who hold terrible views, but they remain conversations.

I've never been downvoted for making a controversial point on HN. And, I have ONLY been downvoted for making glib, lazy, or intellectually weak arguments. This is exactly how it should be.

Your experience on HN does not resemble mine at all. I'm frequently downvoted for controversial opinions. And I see a lot of outrage and disinformation here.

And on twitter I see little outrage and disinformation. Our experiences are so far apart on social media that I'm not sure anecdotes will do much for the conversation here.

How depressing if true =(

Can you point to some example topics I should keep an eye out for?

Anything critical of the failure that is the United States, it's crumbling democracy or the Frank insanity inflicted upon the world by the psychopaths operating out of silicon valley. Unbridled Capitalism of the American variety is cruel and big tech is complicit in propagating antidemocratic efforts through walled gardens and mass tailored propaganda. How's that?

>I've never been downvoted for making a controversial point on HN. And, I have ONLY been downvoted for making glib, lazy, or intellectually weak arguments. This is exactly how it should be.

That's probably because you don't post any opinions that the HN hivemind finds controversial. Stray outside the lines just a bit and expect moderator censure and downvotes/flags.

It's hard but possible, I find, to post and discuss controversial things. You have to be very carefull how you present the topic, and you have to put a lot more effort into the discussion than you normally might to make sure it doesn't devolve, but if you wade through and cut off the drive-by commenters that misunderstand your position because they aren't actually bothering to think critically about it,and try to try to keep the discussion it on track, you sometimes get very interesting discussions out of it.

Sometimes I end up softening or changing someone's position on something, sometimes I soften or change mine or learn a lot of new things, and I have to imagine that happens with some lurkers as well, and I'm not sure what more I could hope for, besides wishing it was easier sometimes.

Flags and moderator actions are also much rarer, but controversial stuff does get downvoted quickly unless it’s quite high quality.

Indeed. As one point of comparison: Solid scientific information showing efficacy for AA gets routinely upvoted here at HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25493182

Compare this to Reddit, where some high-traffic sub-Reddits (/r/atheism cough cough) delete links to scientific evidence showing AA efficacy: https://archive.is/gEXfA Why let facts get in the way of a good social networking rage fest?

Certain topics like politics or war or religion or LGBT will always tend to produce flame wars and "toxic wasteland" no matter which platform. The technical threads are usually a lot better.

Please provide some specific examples. Even with examples, the important question is about how frequent they are, but without examples, your statement is just your personal experience.

PS: Your usage of “smart racism,” “nazis,” “homophobes” etc are strong bayesian evidence (to me) that you’re just looking to guilt-trip people and victimize yourself. The only kind of racism I have seen on HN is the kind I see literally everywhere: people don’t really care about people not in their bubbles. This is better named selfishness than racism, and it’s inherent in human nature. (If you’re curious, I am middle-eastern, and not exactly binary myself; I have been abused when I was younger for being “transgenderish.” Which kind of forced me to adopt more conforming, binary social masks.)

I've seen explicit scientistic (scientific-sounding) racism on HN somewhat frequently, usually as a mintoriy opinion, but somewhat tolerated - generally in discussions about IQ, stuff like The Bell Curve. Homophobia I've seen much more rarely, though maybe I didn't hit the right topics.

I've also seen anti-religious sentiments and anti-chinese nationalism popping up pretty proeminintely every now and again. Climate change denial is also rarely missing from any longer conversation about climate.

Edit: Here's an example that eventually got flagged, but sparked a long conversation that had a few supporters as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26990070

You example is an example of the system working. It eventually got removed by mods, and the parent comment you're linking to called the behaviour out.

I'm not sure what you'd like to see changed in this case?

Dang's response came 4 days after the comment was written. Before being flagged, it was downvoted, but not to hell - it was gray, but still readable, like most of that poster's other comments. So I would say that someone may be justified in feeling somewhat attacked and not that well defended on such topics. As I said, it's a minority opinion, but it is somewhat tolerated.

Ideally, when someone claims that they can tell how smart someone is from how they look, that should be downvoted to oblivion and receive overwhelming counter-evidence or no attention at all.

Of course, what happened was quite OK, and much better than many other corners of the internet. But still, it's proof that that there is some explicit racism on HN, not just people not caring about others.

I understand the linearity of the Shrodinger equation under a model which MW entails. However, you are sidestepping the randomness involved in the choice of world that you reside in. You can dress it up all you want, but your consciousness is bound to one world of the many worlds. And that is a defacto random phenomena.

I’ve been abused all my life by religion, and the Iranian regime (which all evidence points to being much milder than the Chinese dictatorship). You’re no different than your predecessors; What are you doing to help people that actually goes against your bubble’s conventions? It’s not exactly an achievement to be pro-gay etc when gays etc are your bubble’s current fad.

I do not understand your point in any way. You claimed that there are no racists on HN and that claiming there are suggests someone is a drama queen. I pointed to some racists on HN to show that at least some do exist.

What does this have to do with doing something about the Iranian regime or Chinese regime or any other regime? I barely even discussed homophobia.

And note that you can be anti-fundamentalist without being anti religion, and you can be against the Chinese regime without being anti Chinese people (just like you can be anti Israel without being antisemitic).

And competent moderation, essentially editorial guidelines. (Something that pretty much implies a community that isn’t too big.)

That probably helps here, but I don't think moderation works once you get beyond the point where one moderator can handle everything.

I guess the issue is keeping moderation consistent (like bar exam grading) coupled with a manageable size of community that handles scaling. I wonder if social media platforms could cluster 10-25 people together into "troops" with a "troop leader" and a "guidance counselor." This way, it's not just a sea of individuals floating along ephemerally disconnected, but brings some tribal belonging and support back that people yearn for.

I've since come to believe that to have a high quality medium, you really need not just the editorial guidelines I've mentioned, but also someone who interprets those guidelines in the intended way, and the ability to enforce them properly.

That means you can, at best, have a small team of moderators/community managers, likely with the person who has manifested the editorial guidelines at the top. This does not scale, so the community is limited in size.

When I think back to the times of TV channels, professional magazines, radio shows etc., I remember how amazing the quality of that content could be. Reading the same magazines printed back then today confirms that to me.

Curated content wins.

Sure, some TV channels and magazines were terrible instead, but that's just because I did not agree with their curation.

Slashdot had metamoderation 25 years ago.

Slashdot died from the incoming content, not the posts, as far as I recall from those days. Digg suffered the same fate. Reddit has so far been kept from it since moderators can only pin a few posts and only have "negative" control of the posts that appear at the top.

Yes, I was there. :) 23 years ago ;) I meant some sort of mechanism to improve the training/fairness/consistency of moderators rather than merely double-checking them.

Their metamoderation was innovative but ultimately pointless.

Instead of having one popularity contest, it was like a popularity contest that qualified you for another popularity contest. Theoretically the metamods were "good" posters, but being a "good" poster was ridiculously easy - you could just rack up karma by parroting the hivemind and bashing Microsoft or whatever.

That's true. If a community platform's moderation were more professional like the example I used of bar exam graders, who grade practice samples and do other calibration exercises, it would improve the signal and tend to reduce biases if the culture were one of strict professionalism.

HN has basically one moderator. It's just that we've trained an army of downvoters and flaggers that mostly clobber anything "un-HN" almost immediately. There's a community here and it defends itself.

Most subject-specific forums are actually ok. Because posting there demonstrates that you have something worthwhile to care about. Of course one can troll and flamebait on such forums as well but it takes effort and it's not going to seriously rile people up about anything. Twitter is poles apart from that, it's like being in a different universe.

Yes, that's absolutely right.

Also, I noticed how most underdog / less socially-acceptable lifestyle/interest forums tend to be pleasant, humorous, and reasonable. The other aspect maybe that marginalized people (without chips on their shoulders resentment) know what it feels like to be othered / not treated well and go out-of-their-way to be friendlier. For example, I can't remember any LGBT+ people who aren't cool, decent, and sociable... and I'm the goofy, straight, ally interloper stealing all the pretty cis girls (or they're stealing me, IDK).

On niche interests-side where it's a small world, I think the cosiness reduced sized and inherent common interests also reinforce, promote better behavior, and friendliness.

Twitter and such definitely throw unbounded numbers of random people at each other, and so the odds of clashing are astronomically-higher. In this alternate (mainstream) universe, the sad part is that social and online ideological Balkanization has cemented echo chambers of memetic civil war; a people divided-and-conquered.

The reason for that is HN is not for direct profit, has a charter, is not afraid to moderate content, via flag, and to bar people, via marking them as dead, and actively hunts spam and trolls.

If Twitter/FB were to do this, they'll have 1/5th the customer base but will have more sane content.

I think the major ingredient for HN is focus on topics that are interesting to "techinical" people. When you focus on particular set of activities it becomes easier to just say no to a lot of other contents.

I don't have twitter but i check some users(like the pico8 dev) once a week for interesting content. I don't see anything offtopic there and it's very nice and sometimes i learn something even in the replies. Same with certain subreddits. Just consuming in polling mode, helps a lot.

HN is not social media. Social media has friends/followers, chats, inboxes, timelines... stuff like that. Social media involves some insularity. This is how so-called fake news spreads, because insular networks do not get outside feedback. .

The rep meter is what makes the difference. I've caught myself posting something only to spam f5 to see if what I was said was accepted or rejected.

Social media just needs the possibility to share media with other people to be called social media. So HN is social media.

If they introduce targeted ads or up-votes/interactions could be monetized in HN, even with the the same community, you would start to see the deterioration IMHO.

Cool headed, interesting or curious do not generate enough click through as much as controversial, conspiracy theory, outrageous, hateful, etc. It's interesting that there's no ban on political or controversial content in HN but still, you don't see them take over the platform. The incentive is simply not there!

HN has decently big scale. Somehow it works because of heavy handed moderation, manual, crowdsourced and automated.

I think twitter really needs a downvote button. But they prefer relying more on their AIs instead of crowdsourced moderation. Probably so they can sell more ads.

HN is a tiny monoculture community catering to a niche audience. Of course the discourse is okay, there's almost no disagreement.

Oh my heavens no. There are certain topics that even this site can't discuss in good faith without groupthink, hurt feelings, big egos, and so forth. No, I will not list those topics here to avoid invoking them, but most of them are political. Sometimes they get just as toxic as twitter and reddit, just with less namecalling since that'll get you flagged off with a quickness.

On that note: If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all. Here you've got great moderation, a high SNR, and vanishingly few of the pathologies that infest most web fora. Almost everything else is a step down in quality.

"If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all."

They can be, just not in a any format where anyone can post, let's say, 10 paragraphs of whatever, and then hundreds of people can jam their 40 paragraph rebuttals and threats right underneath it. While convenient for many purposes, the formats where the interactions are this tight and integrated are not the only formats.

You need something more like a weblog-structured community, where people can post their lengthy thoughts at their leisure, and others can post their own rebuttals on their own weblogs, but I think it's actually important that there not be tight integration such that everyone is getting a phone notification every time someone posts some link to them.

I would agree that online platforms that stick everyone into one metaphorical mosh pit have certain topics that simply can't be discussed reasonably, but "metaphorical mosh pit" isn't the only option.

Wrong!

OMG, you win the internet for today. Haha.

If we can respectfully disagree and see each other's point-of-views without ghosting each other, then we're dialoguin'. Otherwise, we're just talking past each other, seeking karma brownie points, or taking out our frustrations.. and then what point is there to participating if there isn't meaningful communication?

Yeah, that's not really true.

The political differences here are often stark. You also have a fair amount of Independents here which makes this place a bit more tolerable for me. I really can't stand left-wing or right-wing ideologues, much less the extremists.

HN caters to people from all across the US (most of the audience is outside Silicon Valley and the global audience continues to grow based on dangs postings).

You could say it's mostly male, but I've seen more usernames with women's names in them.

I have a dream that one day, there will be no political parties, only nuanced, informed debate on stand-alone issues. Tribal groupthink is one of my pet peeves (isn't that the tao of flat-earthers?) because it often places loyalty over honesty. Elections are almost as bad because they've devolved into celebrity popularity contests.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party, and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently - and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.

Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.

― Gore Vidal

Maybe it's me, but I don't think about participants' gender or if there's enough/too much of any particular attribute group. I infer your point is that HN extends well-beyond the stereotypical academic, software engineer, or tech entrepreneur: male, Caucasian/Asian/Indian subcontinental, high-income or college student, SF to Milpitas.

Vidals assessment of Democrats is a bit rosey, I think. This reflects the average dishonesty in politics though. An equally rosey picture of Republicans or equally bleak picture of Democrats (or both) would've made better sense in an honest reflection.

The rest of this is pretty spot on, and your assessment of my sentiment was spot on.

Ah yes, Vidal, opposed to "The Property Party" yet owned luxury villas in Italy and the Hollywood Hills.

Property for me, not for thee...

I don't think that's the only thing going on. Twitter has code written and an ML model trained to actively and intentionally surface material of indeterminate quality that is likely to drive engagement. HN has people using moderation and upvoting to surface material of high quality assuming that drives engagement.

True, people will always be the root of the problem. But they are also the best part of everything.

We need platforms that encourage the good stuff and minimize or discourage the bad. Not the other way around.

Absolutely.

I think there's a virtuous spiral when the one (specific platform features, philosophy, and conventions) reinforces the other (people's perceptions, attitudes, and interactions), and people care about excellence.

The for-profit, outrage-seeking, clickbait model of "engagement" is the opposite of that.

We can't fix everything with technology (if there's still people problems) or with good people (if the platform fails them) alone.

Maybe money they raise is for purchasing a Dang?

I know that scaling moderation is difficult, and can’t imagine how it’s all kept in check here.

How Twitter intend to address that is interesting.

I think you're partially right.

HN started niche and attracted a narrow audience intent on productive communication; mostly college grads and/or positive attitude people (successful attributes, even if a bit rowdy and troublemaking at times), and not many lottery ticket buyers [1]. It is very open, so it could be overwhelmed by less signal crowds over time should it hit mainstream visibility.

Do some platforms need to limit the number of participants and do stack-ranking dismissals? IIRC, the ASW platform culled a bunch of accounts.

There have been studies on social media interactions (I can't recall the links atm, and am almost done posting from the loo :) and "captological" aspects that influence people's online perception, behaviors, and reactions. I think the problems are the people, the power they're given, the presence/lack of fairness they perceive, what they're presented with, and whether or not the community defends itself and its values strongly (I think dang does a Herculean job with this).

[1] Best characterizes the lottery ticket phenomenon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393875

We have had moderated platforms for discussion, but when people don't like being told they're wrong (especially when they are) they create their own.

Personal details don't deter it, as shown by the various platforms that were inhabited by the alt-right. There's a cultural lack of responsibility for the truth.

Maybe for that subculture, but I meant generally.

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2205-there-is-an-inverse-rela...

Any open social media platform where you can choose who you follow and who sees or doesn’t see your content is effectively an invite-only platform.

Twitter is pretty close to that, except it’s default opt-in rather than default opt-out. Meaning everyone can see your content by default, rather than you having to explicitly allow rando’s to see your content and reply to you.

But if you follow people who make high-quality posts, and unfollow, mute, and/or block people who produce all noise and no signal, you’ll have a pretty good professional and personal networking experience.

Most other social media have ways of curating your feed, but you have to proactively do it, can’t just rely on the social media platform to do it for you.

You say "dv" four times like people should already know what it means

Sorry! I thought that were obvious by mentioning voting. Mea culpa.

Specifically downvoting (DV).

Downvote

> - reputation/karma that isn't apparent or chased

The more I think about those problems the more I'm convinced up- and downvotes are a mistake in general. They can only cause damage and are completely useless as they're not even used for the same thing by different people. For example when someone gets 5 downvotes it's probably for at least 2 different reasons, none of which are communicated to the poster. When I get a random downvote I'd really like to know if it was warranted, but there's no way to find out.

If any kind of rating system had to exist I'd vote for something like tags; with users being able to tag any content with any 1-2 words, and frequent ones are visible without some extra clicks. For one this would give more nuanced information, and at the same time it would make tons of content much easier to find or filter.

That reminds me of the slashdot moderation system - when a user gets modpoints they get to spend them on posts as they browse and indicate why they spent that modpoint that way (e.g. 'Troll' or 'Flamebait').

Having used many broken moderation systems and designed a few (also broken) myself, a few observations.

- Popularity itself is a very poor metric for quality. It's mostly a metric for ... popularity. Which is to say: broad appeal, simplicity, emotive appeal (or engagement), and brevity. This does however correspond reasonably well to sales and advertising metrics.

- The most critical question the designer of a moderation / rating system needs to ponder is what is the goal? See https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content...

- My own goal tends toward maximised overall quality, with a high favouring of truth value and relevance.

- There's some value to a multi-point rating scale. This is called a "Likert Scale", typically an odd-number of points (3, 5, 7, ...), most commonly encountered as a star-scale system. Amazon and Uber are the most familiar of these today, and highlight failure modes. If users' ratings are rebalanced based on their own average rating, at least some of the issues go away (e.g, a very positive rater giving away 5/5 will have those ratings discounted, a conservative rater offering 3/5 on average would see those uprated). The adjusted average becomes the rebalanced rating.

- Note that a capped cumulative score is not the same as an averaged Likert score. Slashdot's moderating system is an example of the former. It ... kind of works but mostly doesn't. Highly-ranked content tends to be good, but much content deserving higher ratings is utterly ignored.

- Taking number of interactions and applying a logarithmic function tends to give a renormalised popularity score. That is, on a log-log basis, you'll tend to see a linear scaling from "1 person liked this" to "10 billion people liked this" (roughly the range of any current global-scale ratings system). See also: Power Distribution, Zipf Function.

- Unbiased and uncorrupted expertise should rate more strongly. In averaging the inputs of 300 passengers + 2 pilots for an airplane's flight controls, my preferred weighting is roughly 3300*0 and 11. Truth or competence are not popularity games.

- Sometimes a distinct "experts" vs. "everyone" scoring is useful. I've recently seen an argument that film reviews accomplish this, with the expert reviewers' scores setting expectations for "what kind of film is this" and the popular rating for "how well did this film meet established expectations"? There are very good bad films, and very bad good films, as well as very bad bad films.

- "The wisdom of crowds" starts failing rapidly where the crowd is motivated, gamed, bought, or otherwise influenced. Such behaviour must* be severely addressed if overall trust in a ratings system is to remain.

- Areas of excellence ("funny", "informative", "interesting", etc.) are somewhat useful but very often the cost of acquiring that information is excessively high. Indirect measures of attributes may be more useful, and there's some research in this area (Microsoft conducted studies on classification of Usenet threads based on their "shape", in the 2000s. Simply based on the structure of reply chains, there were useful classifications: "dead post", "troll", "flameware", "simple question everybody can answer", "hard question many can guess at but one expert knows the answer", etc.

- Actual engagement with content, even just for a voting or other action is a small fraction of total views. Encouraging more rating behaviour often backfires. Make do with the data that occurs naturally, incentivised contribution skews results.

- Sortition in ratings may be useful. It greatly increases the costs of gaming.

- As is sortition of the presented content. Where it's not certain what is (or isn't) highly-ranked content, presenting different selections to different reader cohorts can help minimise popularity bias effects.

- Admitting that any achieved ratings score is at best a rough guess of the ground truth is tremendously useful. Fuzzing ratings based on the likely error can help balance out low-information states in trying to assess ratings.

> Maybe an invite-only platform

Many social media platforms have tried this and failed Even at the lowest level of having to get an invite from someone you know - its never worked:

- Clubhouse - Google+ - ELLO - Mastodon

The paradox here is you need people to generate sustainable communities. When you don't have enough people, users will stop using the platform. Another classic case of this is all the "decentralized" social platforms like Diaspora and others. Great idea, great implementation, but without enough people, its doomed to fail.

I agree nearly completely with the inherent failur-proneness of invite-only networks, and participated in three of the four you mention. I'd dispute Mastodon as invite-only however.

That said, the exception is a network created for an extant community. In fact, most of the major successful social media networks have emerged from just such a community, and quite frequently one that's academically oriented.

Email, Usenet, and Facebook all emerged out of academia. Email and Usenet with early Arpanet and major research universities. Facebook was once literally Harvard. Several other early networks such as The WELL and Slashdot were strongly adjacent to these.

Several early BBS systems emerged out of or alongside military service communities. I don't recall if it was AOL, Prodigy, or another early network which was strongly popular among US military personnel and families (a large, reasonably cohesive community, widely distributed, with contacts and ongoing communications in distant locations).

YC's HN would be another example.

But generally, creating an early cohesive community is a challenge, and many of the tricks for short-cutting this process tend also to greatly diminish the long-term value and prospects of the discussion platform.

My own contention is that Google+ actually did have a strong internal-to-the-network (not just Google) community (though one that excluded a great many people). I feel the social network hurt itself by trying to open too quickly (Ello certainly did), as well as by Google's own greatly bifurcated affinity groups: technologists on the one hand, and marketers on the other. Marketing/advertising is toxic to social cohesion, and this showed early in G+ evolution.

> - login required to view content, no search engine spidering

Why do you think this is a good thing?

> - servers and legally based in a country the US and EU cannot control

I see two ways that could go: either somewhere that China and/or Russia have control over, or in an unstable third-world dictatorship. Do you have any specific countries where none of the above would apply, or do you prefer one of the latter two to the US and EU?

No search engine spidering so discussions aren't monetized or ripped-off, discussions can be freer (half-way to being YC dinners), and potentially greater incentives to apply.

Somewhere like Iceland or Greenland.

Is there an accessible list of countries available to host servers that aren't in a treaty with the US, EU, RU and CN?

> elimination of pile-on

I'm thinking of some kind of ML scheme where the site analyzes your comment and sees if it is similar enough to existing comments.

Or perhaps also analyzes your comments to see if they are similar to older comments you have made already.

Most of those things are good, but they address symptoms more than root causes I think.

The root cause is that platforms like Twitter rely on engagement (and maybe more importantly, growth of said engagement) for their lifeblood.

When that's the case, the incentive will always be to increase engagement at all costs and nothing drives engagement like flamewars and other lowest common denominator garbage.

Additionally, as long as the social currency is "how much other members of the userbase like your posts" you'll wind up with either a single hivemind or multiple warring factions IMO (e.g. conservatives vs. liberals on FB)

HN manages to keep its discourse level fairly high because of this, I believe. HN does not need to grow nor generate revenue directly. A Twitter-alike, curated as strictly as HN, might work. It might even be able to turn a profit, if the goal was sustainable profit and not some impossible dream of unbounded growth concocted by investors wanting the next trillion-dollar hit.

An excellent set of wishes for an enforced good faith social network. No idea how it'd fly though.

… in other words, something that is unlikely to materialize any time soon.

"dv"???

Self-reply: DV == "downvote", from other responses.