I run a number of forums, the largest yielding 250k monthly visitors. It's not huge... But it's 15 years old, very civil, and more interestingly has near zero moderation.
The ones I operate I do so on a simple basis... This forum is default dead, if you as users run it into the ground I'll turn it off as I make no money from it do not have any incentive to tolerate your bs. Make of this space whatever you want, but if you want it to exist then that's something that you all need to make happen by figuring out how to be adults.
It works.
I kill 10 sites for every one that makes it, and the ones that make it are great.
That's interesting, a sort of Darwinian selection pressure towards actual discussion. Though as I type that out it occurs to me that that could be a decent working definition of "good moderation"
It's a car enthusiasts' website in India.
Their forums section[1] is phenomenal.
Their official new car reviews [2] page is thorough. There are owner-reviews of most cars as well [3] (like for instance there's a dozen owner reviews for the BMW X3).
There's no membership fee. You don't need to be a member to read the content; you have to be a member to post content though.
It does not do advertisements of cars themselves (and openly calls out manufacturers who approach them with rewards for favorable reviews) because they believe it's difficult to be critical of manufacturers after accepting money from them for ads.
However, there are ads for non-car products so you might want to keep your ad-blockers on :D
Their moderators have other proper day-jobs. Like, they're doctors, entrepreneurs/business-people, dentists, teachers, pilots, software engineers (!) and everything else under the sun. The reason I mention this is because this website isn't really a source of income for anybody.
Content is moderated heavily, and people in violation of their guidelines [4] are banned (as long as you're civil, use proper English, don't use swear words etc you'll be fine).
[1] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/
[2] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/official-new-car-reviews/
[3] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/
[4] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/announcement...
There are a lot of forums that are good cuz they just ban annoying people (and that self selects a lot too). When you try to do mental gymnastics to justify removing people from a community suddenly a certain kind of person can show up and ruin it for everyone. (EDIT: that can be a valid choice for a community! Just has consequences)
But HN feels pretty unique in the quality despite being filled with a looooot of people who are, honestly, pretty agressive! The mod team seems to do a pretty good job.
The bans weren’t designed to be an excommunication but an inconvenience. I’d sign up again with another username which they knew was me, and I could stay until I acted like an idiot again and they banned me, etc.
As Noam Chomsky said, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
The reason I give that quote is because you're not wrong. In other topics you can express all of the absolutely vile and hateful things one might like, all while acting like an absolutely horrible person. So just stop making fun of the political ideology largely espoused by the political establishment and corporate elite, and you'll have no problems. It will be quite interesting to see how history ultimately records the times of today.
[1] - https://babylonbee.com/news/the-babylon-bees-man-of-the-year...
(A lot of awful ones too, of course.)
- mobile issues: text too small, up/down vote not usable
- post text almost unreadable, it should not be lighter than comment text
Myself I am writing this from an app I’ve bought on the App Store.
I am acutely nearsighted so I can still read 2mm tall characters unaided and am well past the point when most humans require corrective lenses for reading.
It's sort of a super power right about now.
So it depends. I dislike large text on my phone. old.reddit.com works just fine for me as well.
Post text is pretty bad, sometimes even on my PC...
If you are looking for an app, I am the developer of HACK which is available on both iOS/MacOS/iPadOS and Android:
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h...
A little off-topic, but I'm totally blind (use VoiceOver) and just tried the app on iOS. A few issues:
* Several buttons are unlabelled, so I'm not sure what they do. * Navigating through posts isn't the most efficient (I need to swipe several times to move from post to post). * The relative level of comments within a thread isn't announced (i.e. replies to OP are at level 1, replies to those replies are level 2, etc). Are these indented visually? * Accessibility actions should be added to quickly vote, reply to comments, etc.
Happy to provide additional feedback/model apps that do this well, but I'm not an iOS developer.
I discovered it a few days ago. It seems to include a "override CSS" box in the menu, allowing anyone to customize the look of HN.
- bulleted/ordered
- lists without making each entry its own paragraph.
If you browse any of it chronologically with showdead you'll find tons of completely innocent stuff moderated out from ever showing up before it would’ve ever been visible, quite often on first post for no apparent reason.
Unlike other communities where excess moderation is a concern (a frequent discussion here), you can’t object to a decision publicly. I’m knowingly flouting the abstract version of that fact because I think it objectively contributes to the discussion. But I have every reason to believe even this is going too far.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374040
I love this feature. I’m of a personality which really easily gets baited into flamewars (which is against the guidelines). Being forced to stop after 5 posts forces me into a cooldown period where I can reflect on my behavior. When the shutdown is over I will probably be demotivated enough to continue this recklessness and the probability of me being yelled at by dang goes down with it.
If I have something important to say, it can wait a couple of hours.
Inspired by Stalin, I imagine. I'm nervous to say 'it works', since we don't know really know what's being suppressed or changed.
It’s not directly monetized so the design is meant to serve the user. In contrast social media design principles are about controlling user behavior to maximize revenue. This means HN is fast, simple, and information dense. Those are desirable properties on any device.
With all due respect, this isn’t a restaurant it’s a McDonald’s.
(Except in this case, it would be the other way around)
In long threads, it's easy to loose track of which parent a given comment is replying to. So I'll click `parent`, which gives me the context I need. But then I have no way to get back to the reply I was reading previously.
Generally, the less commented upon articles are pretty excellent.
It is rare (in fact I’ve never witnessed this) that I see someone on Hacker News spout paragraphs of completely inaccurate information and be rewarded with hitting the top of the page. The culture on Reddit is so bad that on more than one occasion I’ve had someone respond to me with nonsense and provide sources that don’t even mention the topic at hand. But because people see links they upvote (and once a post has a positive upvote rating inertia kicks in since people want to agree with the karma score.)
So I disagree, you can manicure rotten eggs all day and they’ll still be rotten. Reddit is rotten and it gets worse every sprint as they introduce more and more Facebook features. The problems with Reddit have only been magnified by the fact that a majority of its users today use it as an app similar to tik tok, and the company is encouraging this. Mainly because what the platform was initially designed as (a top site + forum for the whole internet) isn’t as profitable as being just another gamified and over advertised platform where people can argue about whatever the topic of the day is.
I'm genuinely not sure what value the karma system adds
There’s plenty of social media companies out there already I don’t see why Reddit decided to become a worse version of Facebook when it could have charted a different path. I’m bitter I guess, as every other social media company is realizing they need to take a step back and add ways to make discussion more civil Reddit is doing the opposite and their karma system actively helps bad faith actors due to how much it affects the perception if a given post.
I’m completely done with Reddit, the last two times I’ve reinstalled it the UI has added improvements that I don’t want and I haven’t a productive conversation there in over a year.
Actually HN used to be libertarian as hell with a significant Rand contingent inherited from the Startup community. I feel that HN has mellowed politically over the years as a greater international audience has joined.
But I don't think local online communities will ever managed to get established anew again.
Still, your point is a good one.
They are the kind of people who are in majority in HN. They have similar views and when they comment here on HN their views are accepted and prompted more readily.
This makes it a kind of an echo chamber.
All deviants get banned or their comments are greyed out.
Dissenting is not allowed and dealt with severity and finality.
I can think of some with one or two of those attributes but not many that match it all the way around.