Some subreddits managed to maintain pretty high quality in the past, with pretty aggressive moderation. eg: r/askhistorians or r/politics. No idea how the situation is nowadays, I haven't really been on there in years.

But that requires a lot of effort from the moderators.

Yes, I've seen some. The aggressive moderation does turn casuals away and caps the growth of the subreddit though.

Aggressive moderation can be very toxic. The /r/toronto and /r/askTO subreddits are modded by essentially the same people. They remove comments/posts without explanation as to what rules were broken, and then when you critique them in the comments surprise, surprise, they remove them too!

>Some subreddits managed to maintain pretty high quality in the past, with pretty aggressive moderation. eg: [...] r/politics

not sure if serious.

Yeah, that's one of the worst subreddits IMHO

To me the No. 1 reason HN is successful is that it doesn’t have to monetise its users.

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

It does monetize them (us). It’s an advertising platform, just one with a very narrow set of clients (companies ycombinator invests in)

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.

depends on how you want to define ad because every new apple product is going to have a post up about it. apple doesn't pay for that placement but its totally an advertisement for the product.

Something inevitable bad happens to those forums who make exposing pictures easy. Also applicable to IM.

HN feels like email groups. Lots of useful discussions but isn't very accessible to a younger audience.

I’m 21, have been following HN since I was 18, from Asia.

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.

There is hipster UI, and there's not handling pagination, having buttons bordering on the unusable on mobile, commenting requiring a new page to be opened, etc.

i complained of this but finally bought a larger phone and it fixed most of my complaints. i was using an iphone 4 till last year

I have a 11 inch tablet for HN casual reading. And I moved over to the laptop for serious discussions. My phone is for checking only because it’s always near.

thankfully, due to the simplicity of this site, it's easily parsable, and Daniel Wu made an iOS app which addresses some of those issues, called Octal.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/octal-for-hacker-news/id130888...

> I think HN is far less accessible than Reddit.

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.

I think they mean that the content is less accessible, as in having less mass appeal

That’s not a real issue tho. Like ever imo.

Niche content will yield niche audiences. As long as you have thoughtful consistent interaction between at least two people that is what matters.

Compared to specialized sub reddits, HN is huge. I find the content to be generally extremely accessible. Of course, there are some specialized subjects and links to research papers few will understand. But even for those, if you ask nicely, there will be a kind soul who will try to explain.