That said, I think the highest quality forum is currently lobste.rs. It might just be that smaller forums are easier to moderate, but also I think lobste.rs' moderation isn't vulnerable to some of the exploits that HN's moderation succumbs to. For instance, on HN if someone posts something mildly negative, they'll likely get moderated; however, if they post something that's pretty obviously hostile (to most people, anyway) but with the thinnest possible veneer of plausible deniability, they're not likely to be moderated (and anyone who challenges this plausible deniability may themselves be moderated for violating the 'assume positive intent' guideline). Lobste.rs' moderation lets users flag violating posts and too many flags will result in some moderation--I'm sure this could also be abused, but so far it seems to be doing a good job--maybe there's something Zsync could learn from their approach as well?
> Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
I believe HN moderation works similarly. Users can flag posts, which - given enough flags - (automatically?) triggers the [flagged] annotation. Moderators also see flags and can act further on them - adding/removing [flagged], warning/banning accounts, etc.
In addition, dang has said in the past that the most likely reason some stuff doesn't get moderated is because the moderators don't see it [0], rather than them letting some stuff off the hook.
Elections are always-ongoing affairs, they never stop.
This seems absolutely, horrifically, terrible. Under such a system, no leader will ever lead, instead, a leader will grandstand constantly. You'll end up with moderators that spend all day, every day, playing a popularity contest.
That's the whole point. It elects spokespersons, not leaders. It's a wonderful idea.
Besides, you are precisely claiming that dictatorships are better than democracies.
As for grandstanding, that may well be the case if that's what the membership wants - in which case I would argue that it is precisely what they should get. But also, does it really matter if you can just opt out from moderators you don't like?
Tagging posts with hashtags or topics or labels or whatever misses what actually made reddit great, which is the sense of community in (mostly?) smaller subreddits, and the ability for specific subreddits to have their own rules, moderators, and general sense of what that place was for and why people would want to be there.
Which is an interesting point to make because that's exactly the experience I'm finding with Mastodon, having joined a community-specific instance (metalhead.club) which gives me that feeling of being in a community, but having some access to users from other communities via following interesting people. That last thing is the key difference with Mastodon - discovery is different. There's no algorithm pushing things into your feed - you need to be much more active in your own content discovery.
Lurking can sort of be achieved through judicious use of following tags.
At its best and its worst, reddit reminds me of a more impersonal version &TOTSE's forums from the web of the 90s and early 00s: a community of communities, where you might see familiar faces from one spot to the next, but they were largely their own little worlds with their own norms, regulars, moderation, etc.
It was infamous at the time for the Bad Ideas forum where things like explosives and shoplifting techniques were discussed, but it also hosted flourishing communities dedicated to books, literary criticism, movies, politics, etc. Many people were quite content never sticking their heads out of the nicer places into the more 'interesting' areas, and it remained markedly welcoming and collegial throughout most of its existence.
It and reddit also had the benefit of easier discoverability: it's trivial to move around and discover new, related communities, which IMHO was also the charm of IRC and something rather missing from Discord and the like.
I agree that there's still value in private subreddit style communities, but I believe that that could co-exist with tags.
Ultimately it's a tradeoff. Without tagging you have to figure out which subreddits to post in, potentially cross-posting in tons of different subreddits, fragmenting discussion. With tagging you only need to post once, but a single tag feels less like a "community". I guess personally I never really felt any real sense of community from any subreddits (unlike the old phpBB forums), so the sacrifice made sense to me to keep discussion in one place. But this would only work well if the site can actually foster balanced, intelligent discussion and debate across the spectrum (otherwise just becomes the PC hivemind dump that is the mainstream subreddits like /r/politics), which Reddit has proven incapable of over the last decade - ending up fostering extreme communities like /r/TheDonald as a backlash to the PC hivemind + censorship in the rest of the site.
Adding a tag to something doesn't communicate that you are posting it in a community, nor does it communicate that community's rules, etiquette, morals and values. When a user "tags" something it just means adding a label to it. "Posting" in a community communicates something very different.
Honestly that staggers me. Maybe you’re spending too much time on giant subreddits rather than in smaller communities? Your experience with Reddit appears to have omitted the parts that make Reddit great.
I think this is definitely the case for a lot of people who use reddit. My advice to everyone I've recommended Reddit to is:
1. Sign up for an account 2. Unsubscribe from every subreddit you're subscribed to by default 3. Join smaller communities like <list of subreddits that I think they might be interested in>
Take gaming as a topic for example; /r/gaming has over thirty million subscribers, which is insane. There's no way that space can be welcoming or foster a sense of community.
Instead, look for something more specific, like /r/NintendoSwitch, /r/PS5, /r/BaseBuildingGames, and so on. You can also look for more cross-topical subreddits, like /r/GirlGamers, /r/AccessibleGaming, /r/Gaymers or /r/LGBTgaming, and so on.
This is the distinction that so many of these Reddit clones miss; I'm not just looking to get a feed of links, I want to get to know and recognize people, learn others' perspectives, and get a real sense of what these people are like. I want to be able to bring up things like the trans and antisemitism concerns around Hogwarts Legacy without being drowned out by (or targeted for harassment by) transphobes and nazis.
Isn't this kind of the point - different communities will have different discussions if the same content gets posted.
If I'm talking about a base-building game that's on Humble Bundle, should I discuss it in #BaseBuildingGames, #Gaming, #PCGaming, #HumbleBundle? Where are people going to see and contribute to the discussion the most?
If I'm posting about Hogwarts Legacy's antisemitism, do I post it in #Gaming and #AntiSemitism? Aren't the antisemites and trolls who enjoy gaming going to see my post and go brigade #AntiSemitism?
What happened was that around Trump running for office, and with an increase in users overall, certain subreddits (most of them not political btw) became more active and for want of a better word more "problematic" than others. The reddit admins, active mods and other vocal internet users wanted this content removed. To do this they added "quarantine" in an effort to restrict the activity of identified subreddits, and called these subreddits "communities" for the first time. Visiting a subreddit was labelled as joining a community.
By isolating subreddits they further isolated the users of reddit from each other, but they increased the group identity and feel of individual subreddits. Subreddit mods were very happy with this and other concerned users were happy with the politicisation via group creation of reddit.
A group identity becomes stronger the more one defines it in opposition with other groups.
A lot of the subreddits that I've been in for a while have always been their own communities with their own topics and guidelines. Smaller subreddits, like /r/NintendoSwitch, /r/AccessibleGaming, /r/DND, and so on didn't become their own communities and their own moderation guidelines because of Trump, they became that way because they wanted a focused space to discuss a slice of their own topics and interests.
They did however lately introduce a channel format that functions more like a forum.
I avoid content feeds that aren't driven by algorithms with simple, understandable rules, like the HN's voting system.
But I thought maybe there would be an application for using ML to help moderators more quickly detect posts and comments which warrent their attention. In that case, the "opaqueness" of the algorithm doesn't matter to me.
I've thought many times about ideas for platforms which involve user-submitted content, and I've always given up on them quickly because I couldn't think of a good way to handle moderation. It's probably just wishful thinking that ML could significantly help with that.
Then there is AskHistorians. AskHistorians has some of the best answers, and almost no discussion. It is pretty common to have posts with no surviving comments. I someti es wish it was less strict, but maybe it needs sister sub where unanswered questions and discussion can go. Can the replacement platforms have AskHistorians on them?
I agree on the value of subreddits as private communities. I suppose private communities and tagging can still co-exist. Many different ways to design that.
I think the route to go if the spam persists would be making it invite-only, and so that uninvited user registrations would have to be manually approved. Wouldn't eliminate the problem, but would potentially dramatically reduce the amount of moderation work vs. making it a free-for-all. Not getting enough usage now to justify it, but just an idea.
I think with the right people, the platform doesn't really matter at all. I mean the best communities now are probably in random Telegram group chats.
The main challenge is attracting a community of the right people in the first place, and that challenge is more marketing than technical. I think maybe the right approach here might just be creating and curating high quality content, then the people come. This is how most communities are built I think (eg. Indie Hackers). I'm admittedly more focused on other projects at the moment that I think have more obvious utility though (working on a self-hosted open source Notion clone at the moment)
The point of subreddits has been a failure. Most people do not understand that subreddits are individual communities. If you browse reddit from the frontpage, you get little sense that you are participating in different communities.
Most people, for better or worse, perceive reddit as one community. So the question is: Should power mods have this immense power to shape the values of this community?
This isn't HN (moderated) or reddit (individual communities) but HN and reddit already exist, a new thing should be different.
Firstly, you have a bit of dissonance in your thinking that you’ll need to clear up. You say lots of complementary things about HN and suggest that the quality is what you’re aiming for. But you also say you “don’t believe in censorship”. Depending on what you mean by censorship (people have wildly different definitions!), you’ll need to reconcile the fact that HN has relatively restrictive community guidelines, and very active moderation. Many people would credit the high quality of discussion to those things.
Secondly, I think your “tags as subreddits” misses the point of subreddits. They’re not a filtering mechanism for which links you want to see, they’re a way to let users associate into small(er) communities where community norms, standards, shared experiences, running jokes, moderation expectations, and generally a community identity and spirit can develop.