The somethingawful forums? With the exception of the forums expressly for bad discussions, every thread has high quality content.
Granted, this is subjective to some degree as what I consider "noise" might be considered "signal" by others. I think that it worked because their intention was to make the sort of community that they wanted whereas Reddit seems more interested in making a platform for everyone.
I can see the use for each approach and I still find it one of the best things about internet communities in general. If you want something different, it's relatively easy to take a shot at making something more to your liking.
I just think that same $10 or whatever that it costs to join the SA forums and motivates most members to avoid shitposting would also present a barrier to the sort of broad, mass appeal Reddit is shooting for.
Also allows friends to say "I gawd, this place is terrible. Let's leave it all behind. I'll meet you in level 22?" They then hold hands and take the irreversible plunge into the unknown ;)
I don't mean to belabor the obvious here, but do you consider HN a "large Internet community?"
Though I do think the place can be a bit humorless and pedantic at times...
No. I'm talking about the largest 30 or so Internet communities.
That's actually a very interesting point.
I think a lot of the stereotypical poor Internet comments only exist because the author is anonymous and is talking to a faceless account. (Not all of it, of course, some of it is probably due to the communications medium.) I can't find the original post that I liked, but this one[0] has some interesting information on allowing an attacker to identify with a victim. I would think that would apply in this case too some extent.
If you actually had to vouch for what you said and what you said online were associated with you as a person, and you had a ballpark idea of who you were talking to, I think people would add more filters to themselves. That kind of social pressure is largely self-policing. Jerks will be jerks, but hopefully fewer non-jerks would turn into jerks.
I like the option of anonymity, but in all honesty I think it mostly just helps the edge cases, not large-scale discussion. Is it any wonder that Facebook and Google have tried to enforce "real names" policies and the Play store now links all reviews to a G+ account? There are other reasons for those moves, but it can't hurt to encourage the civility that accountability brings. Anonymity can bring out both the best and worst in people.
[0]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/the_psycholog...
Do we have any examples of large Internet communities with unilateral good discussion?
They way I've thought about it, the subreddits with better user content/discussion are primarily because:
* They attract fewer people, so only users more dedicated to the topic and more dedicated to finding a good community will find them. These users tend to be better contributors.
* Heavy-handed authoritarian moderation.
The first one only works so long as the subreddit is less popular. The more it will regress toward the mean of Internet contributions, which I believe to be inherently low.
The second one only works well when you have a specific topic with carefully defined rules and very active moderators with no regard for popular consensus and said moderators don't develop a power complex.
I don't think reddit has shown any interesting solutions to the problem of high quality contribution. At the risk of sounding elitist, we've seen how popularity kills quality discussion on countless communities over the years. Again, I think massive discussion tends toward being inherently low on average.
Edit: Beaten by noir_lord by a couple minutes listing the exact same two points.