Every subreddit with a large following eventually turns into a complete meme fest with low quality comments and trolls. But the smaller subreddits still offer good value.
But that requires a lot of effort from the moderators.
not sure if serious.
This leads to much stronger alignment of incentives between users and the owners of the platform.
That’s not to say it’s not valuable to YC. It provides them with very good marketing to a core demographic they are trying to market to.
Kinda like sports teams run by petro states.
For social media platforms it means that HN’s existence isn’t driven by the need to grow [1], leading to a focus on quality. Hackernews does this using the HN guidelines, which are rigorously enforced.
[1] insert graphic comparing HN growth vs other social media
What it isn’t, is dependent on an ad marketplace. It’s more like a industry digest published by an investment firm active in that industry.
HN is perfectly accessible for younger folks, if you make it more accessible for casual unserious people, you’ll start getting more and more casual and unserious conversation.
The UI is a good filter to remove folks who need hipster UI to just use a platform.
HN is fine.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/octal-for-hacker-news/id130888...
depends on what you mean by accessible - i assume you don't mean accessibility (for blind/disabled people), but ease of access.
HN is way more easily accessed by someone. You are not nagged by a dialog to get you to download the mobile app. HN has way less clutter in their UX (even compared to old.reddit.com). HN has fewer call to action in the UX to do things like submit, vote etc.
Niche content will yield niche audiences. As long as you have thoughtful consistent interaction between at least two people that is what matters.
The other factor is that the mod(s) here are excellent and, and I rarely say this, rather neutral. No, it doesn't mean I agree with them, dang has knocked me in the head a few times over the years, but meaning I get to see both sides of arguments uncensored, so long as respectful and interesting. Really rare experience here, and I fear for the day dang leaves.
Reddit has had several notable high quality subreddits entirely because of user moderation, and is able to host niche interest communities.
I can’t think of a realistic business justification for a paid moderator to curate forums for some of my incredibly niche hobbies. These were formerly hosted on different phpBB boards, which were also moderated by unpaid volunteers. As a bonus, generally one or two of them actually had to pay to host the forum.
meh. I 'member the old phpBB etc. days... it was decent, but once Metasploit and Shodan entered the scene and you could buy DDoS attacks for cheap on the "darknet", the workload got so much harder for operators. Not staying up to date on patches? Your server got pwned in days if not hours - or in the worst case, you'd get someone trying out their newly discovered 0day, and there were lots of these in phpBBs code base. Some troll and/or pissed off user deciding to spend 10$ on a DDoS attack? You got yourself days of fighting cat-and-mouse to keep your server up. And that's before you got into the legally nasty stuff such as people using your board (or your server) to store warez or CSAM, and before "concerned parent" and anti-sex work troll groups made waves panicking about groomers, prostitution and drugs and got incredibly dumb regulations passed, not to mention the newest batch of anti-terror legislation requiring 24h response time throughout the year.
Moderation essentially became a full day job even for small communities and carried significant legal risk, which led many small boards to close shop because a bit of swag, events and occasional donations didn't cover the expenses by far. Reddit in contrast deals with CSAM, DMCA and DDoS stuff paid for by advertising and VC money, so unless you're a corp sub, you don't need paid mods just to keep the lights on.
> These were formerly hosted on different phpBB boards, which were also moderated by unpaid volunteers. As a bonus, generally one or two of them actually had to pay to host the forum.
Being hosted on a bunch of different boards also meant that the influx of "junk users" was waaaay lower. You had to discover it in the first place, usually by word of mouth, so organized trolls just looking for fights didn't even stumble upon them.
Subreddits in contrast? They get recommended by Reddit these days, right on the frontpage of billions of users. It's on the one side awesome for new niche subreddits, but on the other side it is an insane challenge for the mods of smaller subs to keep up. Once a sub gets recommended to users, work explodes, alone from the countless onlyfans spammers.
“Bad moderation” complaints vary widely. Without elaboration, a person complaining about it gets lumped in with people also complaining about:
- “I was banned” (and the community didn’t like the behavior)
- “I used language that should be allowed” (that offended the community and automod removed it)
[edit] and, flip-side, there are some I’d like to easily be able to spot in large threads, because they’re consistently good.
For a list of good commenters, consider using https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717598