You're getting downvoted, but this raises a good point; how does HN avoid becoming a toxic cesspool?

It shares many attributes/features with other social media. Does it just come down to excellent moderation on the part of u/dang? Is it the lack of instant reply notifications? Is it that thread depth is capped? Only allowing downvotes for power users? Some combination of all those?

I believe so, it's hard to have flamewars as well since most users are limited from responding too fast. All of the above are good ways to increase the quality of discourse here.

In a way, based on the alcohol analogy, HN is kind of like an evening beer with friends at a biergarten, you drink socially, not too much to even get very inebriated, and if you try to, mechanisms exist to stop you, such as the biergarten owners kicking you out. You're not getting (or are supposed to get) drunk at a biergarten, generally speaking.

On the other hand, many other social media are more like clubs. Sure, you can drink less, but the entire environment is designed to get you to drink more. This is analogous to places like Twitter or Instagram which are specifically designed for you to use them as much as possible, like through only allowing short replies (thus stripping nuance and incentivizing short angry replies) or gamifying like counters and incentivizing heavily cherry picked and edited photos.

I've found a clear split between sites which are topic-focused and sites which are person-focused. Also smaller communities tend to be better. That said, Hacker News is unusually good even for a topic-focused site.

I think HN does become a cesspool for some specific subject matters that are controversial or anti-vc. Other than those subjects high moderation tools and extensive limiting of identified toxic contributors helps imo.

> It shares many attributes/features with other social media.

It doesn’t have any concept (much less a public one) of “following”, it doesn’t have public likes, it doesn’t have a DM facility, it doesn’t have a personalized algorithm, it isn’t ad supported (and thus isn’t incentivized to tweal its algorithms for maximizing engagement and ad delivery), it has negative (but equally not-public) voting and signals (flagging) that don’t require filling out a form and human review, and it has dang.

Aside: Has anyone analyzed social media in terms of it's inputs and outputs and distinguished what factors are most critical/useful to achieve a particular goal? That is, an analysis/compendium of social media sites from NNTP to Parler and the pros/cons of various methods? A book? A report?

From small scale (e.g., "How to create a social media site", etc.) to "How to best use Facebook to sell XXX, to influence political campaigns, to overthrow governments, to confuse your competition, etc.".

A good bibliography?

> “When we do things that are addictive like use cocaine or use smartphones, our brains release a lot of dopamine at once. It tells our brains to keep using that,” she said. “For teenagers in particular, this part of their brain is actually hyperactive compared to adults. They can’t get motivated to do anything else.”

/me checks how much time I spent on hn this week-end and decides it's maaaybe time to "log out"

Turn on noprocrast in your user settings.

HN is an online forum and online forums pre-date the widespread usage of 'social media'

Online fora are social media too, doesn't matter when they originated.

IMO forums don’t use any kind of upvote/downvote system for comments or content, so HN is not a forum.