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I don't think reddit's problem is harassment, I think it's groupthink, extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading. I wish that there was a site w

I don't think reddit's problem is harassment, I think it's groupthink, extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading. I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. Maybe that's just not possible? I really love how self-enforcing the community is here towards snark and lazy comments, which have absolutely destroyed Reddit. Edginess is much easier than proper discussion.

lolidaisuki 10y ago
> with an hn-level of moderation But HN is one of the worst moderated places on the net.
keypusher 10y ago
Some subreddits are heavily moderated, AskHistorians for instance. If you feel there is demand for a heavily moderated subreddit about bikes or your local news, you could create it and be the moderator.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  But the prevailing zeitgeist is anti-moderation, and I'd be in competition with the other biking subreddits. I do wholeheartedly agree with you about the quality of AskHistorians, but that's a good example _because_ it stands out in a see of crappy, snarky, shallow communities (like r/NYC or r/politics)
  - tamana 10y ago
    But you don't need the prevailing zeitgeist. The low quality content can live in /r/bikes with all the crap tha t a front-page sub endures, and the high quality content can be happily moderated in /r/pedalpower
  - hippich 10y ago
    Make your own subreddit about bikes, and crosspost good pieces from unmoderated ones.
minimaxir 10y ago
The quality of the subreddit is directly proportional to the moderation. The Ask subreddits (/r/AskHistory, /r/AskScience) are consistently cited for having high quality due to actual, transparent enforcement of the rules. That said, moderation works as long as it doesn't modify the sentiment of content. Moderation for positive content only leads to groupthink which helps no one. (case in point, Product Hunt, where commenters get upvoted just for saying "cool!" with no additional insight)
- anjc 10y ago
  Imo AskHistory can be boring as hell because of the heavy-handed moderation. I get the effect that they're going for, and it works, but it's frustrating to go into an interesting topic to see every comment deleted and a mod warning at the top.
  - smitherfield 10y ago
    And they take their rules to the point of absurdity. I've seen many occasions where a commenter had direct personal experience with the event being asked about, and provided proof they were whom they said they were, but their comment was still deleted because "no personal anecdotes."
    - daveid 10y ago
      It's AskHistory, not AskForPersonalAnecdotes. History has the advantage of multiple personal anecdotes being cross-checked and compiled into a more or less reliable account. A personal anecdote may be interesting but not representative of anything.
- ben_jones 10y ago
  Heavy moderation also creates a meritocracy where reputable users who post a lot will have their content passed through the filter seamlessly and new contributors will be walled off completely in order to support the status quo. Let's not forget reddit has a deep history of moderator abuse.
gkya 10y ago
HN is incredibly focused compared to Reddit. That's what keeps HN clean. My idea is that if the user karma was removed, and upvotes on links were used to merely weigh and sort links, and downvotes on comments were removed, Reddit, and also HN, would improve. Many attention seekers spam many subreddits, and also HN, merely for the karma. Instead, give users some lives, as in games, and each time the user is seen spamming/harassing, take away a life, and when he runs out of lives, ban him. Though I have no factual experience to back my thoughts, but mailing lists and bulletin boards are mostly run similarly to what I describe.
- rayalez 10y ago
  That's a recipe for making users scared of expressing alternative/controversial opinions, also replacing positive feedback loop with a negative one.
  - travoc 10y ago
    It sounds like that's what he wants. A "clean" site.
  - logicrook 10y ago
    Really? It seems to me that downvotes are used very negatively, as they are put a strong incentive (for most people) not to express unpopular opinions, even if they are good comments. If they were used only to discourage low quality posts, it wouldn't change a lot, since the most upvoted comments would still be to the top. He suggests to remove lives for spam/harassment, not for shitposting. So basically, positive loop+ draconian enforcement of essential rules, and no negative loop.
    - gkya 10y ago
      I don't like downvotes because people mostly downvote what they disagree, not spam and whatnot. Having some ideas and habits contrary to what's popular, I experience this first-hand here on HN. And probably this is a reflex, most often when one sees someone disagree him, he feels a spontaneous whim and thinks that his argument is not reasonable. And only after a bunch of seconds does he understand that the other one actually poses a sound argument, criticism, etc. The HN's upvote-downvote sytem lacks undo, so unfortunately when you regret a downvote, there's nothing to do.
tensor 10y ago
While I definitely enjoy more nuanced and interesting discourse, I don't actually think that reddit has any problem. There is a self declared "elite" group of users on reddit who are always echoing exactly your sentiments to the point that it's almost a chant: groupthink, low quality comments, uniformed discourse! Of course, recognizing that there is a need and desire by some for a place to have more detailed and nuanced discussions is not bad in of itself. Arguably its' a very good thing. Where it turns bad is in their approach to a solution. Instead of "hey, people want a place where they can have more interesting discussions, let's go create one, promote, and moderate it!", they think "hm, these people with their memes and images, that's a problem. They shouldn't do that. We need to stop them and show them the right way to run a subreddit!" This latter thinking is incredibly intolerant, arrogant, and dangerous. It's the same type of thing that leads to laws being passed based on a particular religion or other philosophy that tries to ban thoughts different to theirs. This is why I say that reddit doesn't have a "problem" with low quality content. That's what a lot of people enjoy and they should have a place they can do that. If you want to change peoples minds, use words, not force. All that being said, I recognize that you didn't actually advocate that reddit be changed. More to your point, as others have said, one of the great things about reddit is that people are free to start their own subreddit and make it into whatever they wish. There are a lot of smaller more heavily moderated subreddits that have great discussion. People who are upset with the bigger subs should look for these or even create their own.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  My problem with Reddit is not not that COC and heavy moderation enabled group think and promotes censorship (both regular and self kind) is that it's conflict resolution model promotes segregation of ideas rather than discourse. Reddit is the place that instead of having /r/redvsblue you get /r/red and /r/blue 2 gated communities that simply live in their own little world happy with the perfect echo chamber they've created and that anyone who strays to post in the other camp's subreddit is automatically classified as a troll.
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    It's not a perfect echo chamber as you can browser /r/all and see and contribute content from/to both communities.
ben_jones 10y ago
I don't get why people think hacker news is this little utopia of internet discussion. Yes, it benefits from being smaller and well-moderated, but it suffers from the same group-think, the same "circle-jerks" (har har Golang/Django/Theranos), etc. There are plenty of snarky and lazy comments, we just up-vote them because we agree with them. It's amazing that a former executive of reddit thinks a) it's easy to build a large online community b) it'll be easy to monetize (the hardest part) community and c) it'll be easy to moderate (hey people will do that for free, right?).
- galistoca 10y ago
  I think it's because HN has a single theme. Like you said there are many annoying cases on HN too. Let's say your chance of coming across one is 1%. On Reddit you have many of these communities, so the chance of coming across annoying posts become N% (depending on how many subreddits you read)
  - dang 10y ago
    HN doesn't have a single theme, and if people think it does, we're doing something wrong. On the front page right now are posts about elephant brains, Nazi propaganda, and aphantasia, for example. That seems like thematic pluralism to me.
    - galistoca 10y ago
      It's interesting comment coming from the moderator. I know what you mean, but it is "Hacker News" after all. That's why when sometimes people see irrelevant posts they say "why the hell is this on the front page of HN?". The reason I said "Theme" instead of "Topic" is exactly for the same reason. I think the theme of this site is something that would interest people with curiosity (which comes from the "Hacker" theme).
      - dang 10y ago
        Ok, if intellectual curiosity counts as a theme, then I agree. This goes back to the beginning of the site btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
dustingetz 10y ago
i think the problem is link-focused discussions over two hours rather than people- and comment-focused discussions over time (same as hn). The true experts aren't writing blogs, they are busy building. A four sentence HN comment from a recognized expert is more valuable than a hundred blogs from a hundred nobodies. We need to figure out how to extract content from those experts. Give visibility into the identities of the participants. Identify the experts and give visibility and longevity to their content. Moderate the shitposts over to a peanut gallery below the fold.
doctorpangloss 10y ago
> I don't think reddit's problem is harassment, I think the problem is that anything good on Reddit gets copied elsewhere, has advertising added and makes money. Reddit is BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed-esque sites' biggest subsidy. This site isn't going to do anything about that.
sdegutis 10y ago
> I don't think reddit's problem is harassment, I think it's groupthink, extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading. HN isn't immune to these. It suffers just as badly as Reddit. It's just that the cultures are so different. HN is elitist and thinks technology will improve our lives, Reddit is racist and thinks pictures of cute kittens and in-jokes will improve our lives. Both are filled with ignoramuses who get upvoted to the top of a page for catering to that website's niche the most (HN = most elitist comment, Reddit = funniest comment). Anyone else barely sees the light of day, and get downvoted to smithereens. As long as there's an upvote button, I don't think any website can truly solve this. HN tried to fix it by using more algorithms on top of upvotes, but it just doesn't work.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >Anyone else barely sees the light of day, and get downvoted to smithereens. Hey look, you're down-voted. I agree. Look at some of the "top-posters" on the HN scoreboard. Much of their commentary is tepid oatmeal that panders to the "easy" things that HN likes. >HN = most elitist comment I'm not sure I agree with "elitist", but there's definitely a thing, which is well defined by things like "Shit HN says".
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    Shit HN says? You mean that twitter account[1] that posts one-off comments, devoid of any and all context, and then attributes it to the entire site as if it were one person? Or representative of the site's users in any way? Nothing positive, or useful, or interesting has ever come out of a "Shit (community) says" group. Those types of (what's the word here.. articles? groups? Whatever, things) are always crass, point-and-laugh-derisively-at-the-stupid-people-ha-ha-look-how-stupid-they-are affairs. Reddit's instance of this cancer (and I don't believe I've chosen the wrong term for something this awful) even functions as a more or less sanctioned voting brigade. [1]: https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says
return0 10y ago
The real problem of reddit is the people who think it has a problem.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  There's something to this: reddit is a place where you can write things about things. Why does it need to be controlled, moderated, or anything really? The argument against this mindset is usually along the lines of, "Well, we don't want the KKK organizing rallies on our boards!" Which, is true; you don't want that. But banning them from reddit moves them from a public forum to their own, more private, areas of the internet. You can't censor shit.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    I'm ok with forcing the KKK underground.
    - nailer 10y ago
      Sure, but a lot of reddit think anyone right of Mao is the KKK.
  - pink_dinner 10y ago
    The problem is thay it's not even as extreme as the kkk, if your opinions don't mesh with the current progressive groupthink, you will be downvoted, ignored, and bullied. The same happens to a lesser extent on HN, but without the bullying. The end result is content that leans in only one direction because everyone else has been silenced, they don't bother posting, or they left. The irony is that this behavior is exactly what progressives have claimed to be fighting (discrimination and online bullying) Edit: haha, the ironic downvoting happened fast.
  - warlox 10y ago
    Their private areas of the internet, namely Stormfront, predate Reddit. Before Reddit allowed racists and moot created /pol/, they didn't have a real platform to spread their propaganda, so you had to look pretty hard for sites like that. If they only had private forums, events like the Charleston shooting wouldn't have happened.
SixSigma 10y ago
SRS is cancer
- arrrg 10y ago
  SRS is awesome and exactly what’s needed.
  - kelukelugames 10y ago
    There is awful behavior on reddit, but I don't know if SRS is the answer. Actually at this point, no one knows what SRS is anymore. Edit: okay I found this. https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/o0pdv/meta_srs_faq/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/o0pdv/meta_...
    - SixSigma 10y ago
      Fighting opinions we don't like with opinions you don't like. Fucking for virginity
wslh 10y ago
This depends on the subreddit, if you look at the security groups (e.g. netsec, reverseengineering) they evolve to deep discussions.
emblem21 10y ago
Comparing Reddit, a community where specialists can setup a little fiefdoms and generalists can cheery pick from whatever fiefdom they can find, with HackerNews, a singular monoculture that just happens to attract people with a huge diversity of interests, is a challenge unto itself. Both deploy a wide variety of strategies to enforce quality content: crowd-vote mechanism and individual ignoring. These two mechanisms should be more than sufficient for even the most obsessively compulsive and curiously unaccountable of curators. The question isn't comparing communities based on content or upon curator strategies. One should question should take aim at the unspoken epistemological assumptions every single curator engages in. Suppose Poster 1 puts topic A into Community A. There are many overlapping relationships between topic A and community A. Now lets suppose Poster 2 puts topic B into Community A. There are few overlapping relationships between topic B and community A. "Overlapping relationships" is a very complex topic. Users might find topic B to be on-topic in an esoteric or meta way, and the moderators will find it off-topic. Users might find topic A to be off-topic because the topic is to frequently discussed, and the moderators remove it. However the dice roll, the concept of "overlapping relationships" between topic and community is not a guarantee of topic survival. The selection mechanism of topic survivability is divided between the collective hands of the crowd-vote mechanism, individual ignoring, or moderation termination. And notice I say "divided" , and not "sequentially evaluated". Agents of topic survival operate in parallel. This means that posters have to appeal to not only just three different selection criteria in order to survive, but eight different scenarios that have different highly targeted payoffs. Two rules of the topic lifecycle: * The topic must pass/fail three moderation phases. * The topic always has influence on the hardcore communtiy consumers (HCC), the average community consumers (ACC), and the moderators. (M) How topic lifecycles can still influence a community even via multi-phase curation: Case | CrowdVote? | Mass ignore | Deletion? | Outcome 1 | Pass | | | HCC get skeptical of ACC and M 2 | | Pass | | ACC get skeptical of HCC and M 3 | | | Pass | HCC and ACC think M is lazy 4 | Pass | Pass | | HCC and ACC think M is aggressive 5 | | Pass | Pass | HCC hostile to ACC and M, may fracture community 6 | Pass | | Pass | ACC get skeptical of HCC and M 7 | Pass | Pass | Pass | No effect 8 | | | | M gets skeptical of HCC and ACC The point is that having topics curated epistemologically only appears to work because it fails the slowest. No outcome of topic enforcement actually bolsters or adds to community value over time because all topic consumption is a destructive process (destruction of time). Thus, entropy always wins.
kwgardner 10y ago
We've actually done a few things to try to deal with those issues. We don't have any "default" communities or a universal front page or anything like that, because we believe that does lead to a lot of low quality conversations and groupthink. Instead, you only join communities you specifically opt into, and hopefully that way each community only has people who are actually passionate about those topics and discussions become more in depth and informed. (Cofounder here, btw, happy to answer any of your questions.) Edit: I just converted over from being a lurker and created my account to respond here, and apparently I'm commenting too fast. I'll respond to other comments when I can, sorry. :/ Feel free to email me at kaela@imzy.com if you want to talk more though!
- keithwhor 10y ago
  Hey! I'm the author of Nodal [1] and I think this could be a really neat platform for open source communities. Gitter / Slack tend to be the default for live, realtime chat and GitHub is central for issues and contributions, but I'm looking for something fun to direct developers towards where we can organize community events and the like. I'm a startup founder myself and would love to connect with the founding team, is there an ideal way to reach out? [1] http://github.com/keithwhor/nodal http://github.com/keithwhor/nodal
  - kwgardner 10y ago
    Awesome! Shoot me an email here and let's talk: kaela@imzy.com (Also, sorry it took me so long to reply--apparently I was commenting too fast because I just created my account. Whoops.)
- kelukelugames 10y ago
  The art on your site is sooooo cute! Who did it?
  - kwgardner 10y ago
    Thank you! We have an amazing designer. You can check out her stuff here: https://dribbble.com/jaleh https://dribbble.com/jaleh
forgetsusername 10y ago
>I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation What evidence is there that HN is any better? Everything looks good when you're on the right side of the groupthink. There are certain subjects here that have atrociously one-sided discourse. Personally, I think Reddit is just as informative as this place (besides the point that there is no monolithic "reddit")
eva1984 10y ago
HN can(which is in question) maintain a relative high quality discussion towards a focused and limited subset of topics (tech, science and certain social issue like surveillance) is because it is a niche forum by default. It is HACKER NEWS, rather than popular news. Reddit is just too board. However, certain subs are still pretty interesting and informational, until....it becomes popular. So yes. Popular means low quality. It is sad, but inevitable..
threatofrain 10y ago
If you consider Reddit as a whole, with millions of users, I don't think there's any behavioral change you can institute that will lead to high quality, informed discourse. High quality discussions take hard work, not just in the discussion process, but in all the things that come before it. Also, the information gathered by hard work is often gated. If you are looking for high-signal discussion, then most people in or out of Reddit don't have anything good to say on most subjects. Reddit is the wrong place to look for that kind of talk. Reddit is the right place to listen for community temperature about a narrow range of subjects which communities would be good for, such as user reviews or product discovery. Groupthink is also not the main problem. How are you supposed to have your own individual opinion on a wide range of phenomena -- unless, of course, you make yourself informed via hard work and gated access? So these people cannot be expected to have their own opinion. If you want elite opinion, then join an institution with institutional access to elite literature, and join an academic or professional community. Reddit is fine as it is. It's not supposed to be an elite source of information on a variety of phenomena. It's a place for humor and community discussion. I actually dislike the segment of Reddit users asking for "citations" because unless you have institutional access, then I think that this call for citations is a dishonest way of shutting down conversations.
awqrre 10y ago
Some Reddits are worst then HN when talking about censure.
duaneb 10y ago
Groupthink is a problem per-subreddit. Don't like it? Invest some time in finding better subreddits.
spchampion2 10y ago
> I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. You mean like Metafilter? http://lanyrd.com/2011/sxsw/scrdr/ http://lanyrd.com/2011/sxsw/scrdr/
- dubyah 10y ago
  They did mention groupthink. I used to think Metafilter was pretty decent, but the shift over the years with regards to certain topics like identity politics has been really quite insufferable.
dghughes 10y ago
The drama ebbs and flows on reddit and then settles for a bit then up again. Maybe it's my imagination but in my 9 years there it's like you can almost see the next wave of new users arrive. It's subtle at first but you soon see the common culture of that age/culture group, cohort or whatever it is. What I don't like is the new (~6 months) locking of threads I think that's a cop out of moderators or the admins. You don't like the conversation? Slam the door shut.
dominotw 10y ago
I go to reddit for entertainment, camaraderie and lols. I don't go the engage in a intellectual discussion. There are tons of subreddits like /r/askhistorians that do HN level of moderation and don't have 'lazy comments'
- mark_integerdsv 10y ago
  Similar for me. Reddit is what I do when I'm standing in a queue or waiting for something for a few minutes. I get quite confused when I see people take it so seriously.
gbog 10y ago
Low moderation and high level discussion is very possible and very common, but it depends on the topic and maybe the language. Just yesterday I've been on a French language forum on gardening, and this kid of dedicated community do not seem to struggle to keep away trolls and memes. Must be much harder for an English language forum on mangas, or a French language forum on politics. I'm not sure about Reddit, the subs I visit are either monocultural and barely interesting, or full of trolls and memes.
partiallypro 10y ago
HN has a totally different userbase (though there is some cross over) than Reddit. To me Reddit's trollish uninformed arguments are what makes it funny. For instance, /r/The_Donald and /r/SandersForPresident are basically parodies of themselves. Frankly, I'm going to go to Reddit for a laugh, and maybe a few sorted threads with insight into live events unfolding...but if I want something serious I'm not going to go there. Reddit to me is like Something Awful used to be but on a much larger scale, and that's why I like it. If Reddit ever matured to be like HN, I would probably stop going there. It's a happy medium between dashing moments of HN like insight and 4Chan like stupidity.
warlox 10y ago
I don't think those are reddit's only problems. The blatant racism on display in the comment sections of some of the site's most heavily trafficked areas, such as /r/worldnews and /r/news, does quite a number on its reputation.
buro9 10y ago
I run lots of forums, on many technologies, and the only way that I've achieved long-lived peaceful forums is to have virtually no moderation and no moderators. As soon as you have moderators, the users defer responsibility for confronting the bad stuff and it represents the start of the decline, "If that was allowed, why isn't this?". Without moderation, and with the community possessing some tools to enforce, most communities will take on that responsibility and do so. i.e. the flagging on here or on Craigslist that allows multiple people to moderate where an individual's signal is weak but collectively it becomes strong. Of the course the only thing that this doesn't address is broken group-think across the whole forum. To that, I've found making the admin of a forum the legal buck-stop for the forum works well. This is compatible with EU law, where you generally need someone to be responsible for complaints of a libel/defamation nature, and so I designate the forum owner as that and I move myself into the "mere conduit" role. This method of "everyone is a weak moderator, we have no strong moderators but we do have a strong leader who is liable" has been very effective at producing decade old, healthy and growing communities.
dave2000 10y ago
That applies to the comments more than the articles; you can still learn stuff there. And it's possible to ignore group think, you know, like if you've got a mind of your own.
harryf 10y ago
> I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. Maybe that's just not possible? We always assume human moderators are required. I wonder if AI could do something here?
CuriouslyC 10y ago
The single biggest problem I encounter with reddit is that being able to downvote attracts negative, unpleasant people.
scient 10y ago
It's an online community. You just described an online community or any community actually. What did you expect Reddit would be? :)
rmc 10y ago
> I think it's groupthink, extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading. I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. Maybe that's just not possible? It's possible on reddit. reddit.com/r/AskHistorians is a Q&A subreddit for asking historical questions. They have a very high standard for answers, comments, and even the questions you can ask. and they actively enforce it. As a result it's a very high quality resource. It can be done, if there's the will for strict moderation, from the mods and the users.
rthomas6 10y ago
I like Hubski (https://www.hubski.com https://www.hubski.com). It's self-moderating in a cool way. Each user decides exactly who and what they want to see.
hawtbabe22 10y ago
how about you stroke my big balls baby

lolidaisuki 10y ago

> with an hn-level of moderation But HN is one of the worst moderated places on the net.

keypusher 10y ago

Some subreddits are heavily moderated, AskHistorians for instance. If you feel there is demand for a heavily moderated subreddit about bikes or your local news, you could create it and be the moderator.

JBReefer 10y ago
But the prevailing zeitgeist is anti-moderation, and I'd be in competition with the other biking subreddits. I do wholeheartedly agree with you about the quality of AskHistorians, but that's a good example _because_ it stands out in a see of crappy, snarky, shallow communities (like r/NYC or r/politics)
- tamana 10y ago
  But you don't need the prevailing zeitgeist. The low quality content can live in /r/bikes with all the crap tha t a front-page sub endures, and the high quality content can be happily moderated in /r/pedalpower
- hippich 10y ago
  Make your own subreddit about bikes, and crosspost good pieces from unmoderated ones.

minimaxir 10y ago

The quality of the subreddit is directly proportional to the moderation. The Ask subreddits (/r/AskHistory, /r/AskScience) are consistently cited for having high quality due to actual, transparent enforcement of the rules. That said, moderation works as long as it doesn't modify the sentiment of content. Moderation for positive content only leads to groupthink which helps no one. (case in point, Product Hunt, where commenters get upvoted just for saying "cool!" with no additional insight)

anjc 10y ago
Imo AskHistory can be boring as hell because of the heavy-handed moderation. I get the effect that they're going for, and it works, but it's frustrating to go into an interesting topic to see every comment deleted and a mod warning at the top.
- smitherfield 10y ago
  And they take their rules to the point of absurdity. I've seen many occasions where a commenter had direct personal experience with the event being asked about, and provided proof they were whom they said they were, but their comment was still deleted because "no personal anecdotes."
  - daveid 10y ago
    It's AskHistory, not AskForPersonalAnecdotes. History has the advantage of multiple personal anecdotes being cross-checked and compiled into a more or less reliable account. A personal anecdote may be interesting but not representative of anything.
ben_jones 10y ago
Heavy moderation also creates a meritocracy where reputable users who post a lot will have their content passed through the filter seamlessly and new contributors will be walled off completely in order to support the status quo. Let's not forget reddit has a deep history of moderator abuse.

gkya 10y ago

HN is incredibly focused compared to Reddit. That's what keeps HN clean. My idea is that if the user karma was removed, and upvotes on links were used to merely weigh and sort links, and downvotes on comments were removed, Reddit, and also HN, would improve. Many attention seekers spam many subreddits, and also HN, merely for the karma. Instead, give users some lives, as in games, and each time the user is seen spamming/harassing, take away a life, and when he runs out of lives, ban him. Though I have no factual experience to back my thoughts, but mailing lists and bulletin boards are mostly run similarly to what I describe.

rayalez 10y ago
That's a recipe for making users scared of expressing alternative/controversial opinions, also replacing positive feedback loop with a negative one.
- travoc 10y ago
  It sounds like that's what he wants. A "clean" site.
- logicrook 10y ago
  Really? It seems to me that downvotes are used very negatively, as they are put a strong incentive (for most people) not to express unpopular opinions, even if they are good comments. If they were used only to discourage low quality posts, it wouldn't change a lot, since the most upvoted comments would still be to the top. He suggests to remove lives for spam/harassment, not for shitposting. So basically, positive loop+ draconian enforcement of essential rules, and no negative loop.
  - gkya 10y ago
    I don't like downvotes because people mostly downvote what they disagree, not spam and whatnot. Having some ideas and habits contrary to what's popular, I experience this first-hand here on HN. And probably this is a reflex, most often when one sees someone disagree him, he feels a spontaneous whim and thinks that his argument is not reasonable. And only after a bunch of seconds does he understand that the other one actually poses a sound argument, criticism, etc. The HN's upvote-downvote sytem lacks undo, so unfortunately when you regret a downvote, there's nothing to do.

tensor 10y ago

While I definitely enjoy more nuanced and interesting discourse, I don't actually think that reddit has any problem. There is a self declared "elite" group of users on reddit who are always echoing exactly your sentiments to the point that it's almost a chant: groupthink, low quality comments, uniformed discourse! Of course, recognizing that there is a need and desire by some for a place to have more detailed and nuanced discussions is not bad in of itself. Arguably its' a very good thing. Where it turns bad is in their approach to a solution. Instead of "hey, people want a place where they can have more interesting discussions, let's go create one, promote, and moderate it!", they think "hm, these people with their memes and images, that's a problem. They shouldn't do that. We need to stop them and show them the right way to run a subreddit!" This latter thinking is incredibly intolerant, arrogant, and dangerous. It's the same type of thing that leads to laws being passed based on a particular religion or other philosophy that tries to ban thoughts different to theirs. This is why I say that reddit doesn't have a "problem" with low quality content. That's what a lot of people enjoy and they should have a place they can do that. If you want to change peoples minds, use words, not force. All that being said, I recognize that you didn't actually advocate that reddit be changed. More to your point, as others have said, one of the great things about reddit is that people are free to start their own subreddit and make it into whatever they wish. There are a lot of smaller more heavily moderated subreddits that have great discussion. People who are upset with the bigger subs should look for these or even create their own.

dogma1138 10y ago
My problem with Reddit is not not that COC and heavy moderation enabled group think and promotes censorship (both regular and self kind) is that it's conflict resolution model promotes segregation of ideas rather than discourse. Reddit is the place that instead of having /r/redvsblue you get /r/red and /r/blue 2 gated communities that simply live in their own little world happy with the perfect echo chamber they've created and that anyone who strays to post in the other camp's subreddit is automatically classified as a troll.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  It's not a perfect echo chamber as you can browser /r/all and see and contribute content from/to both communities.

ben_jones 10y ago

I don't get why people think hacker news is this little utopia of internet discussion. Yes, it benefits from being smaller and well-moderated, but it suffers from the same group-think, the same "circle-jerks" (har har Golang/Django/Theranos), etc. There are plenty of snarky and lazy comments, we just up-vote them because we agree with them. It's amazing that a former executive of reddit thinks a) it's easy to build a large online community b) it'll be easy to monetize (the hardest part) community and c) it'll be easy to moderate (hey people will do that for free, right?).

galistoca 10y ago
I think it's because HN has a single theme. Like you said there are many annoying cases on HN too. Let's say your chance of coming across one is 1%. On Reddit you have many of these communities, so the chance of coming across annoying posts become N% (depending on how many subreddits you read)
- dang 10y ago
  HN doesn't have a single theme, and if people think it does, we're doing something wrong. On the front page right now are posts about elephant brains, Nazi propaganda, and aphantasia, for example. That seems like thematic pluralism to me.
  - galistoca 10y ago
    It's interesting comment coming from the moderator. I know what you mean, but it is "Hacker News" after all. That's why when sometimes people see irrelevant posts they say "why the hell is this on the front page of HN?". The reason I said "Theme" instead of "Topic" is exactly for the same reason. I think the theme of this site is something that would interest people with curiosity (which comes from the "Hacker" theme).
    - dang 10y ago
      Ok, if intellectual curiosity counts as a theme, then I agree. This goes back to the beginning of the site btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

dustingetz 10y ago

i think the problem is link-focused discussions over two hours rather than people- and comment-focused discussions over time (same as hn). The true experts aren't writing blogs, they are busy building. A four sentence HN comment from a recognized expert is more valuable than a hundred blogs from a hundred nobodies. We need to figure out how to extract content from those experts. Give visibility into the identities of the participants. Identify the experts and give visibility and longevity to their content. Moderate the shitposts over to a peanut gallery below the fold.

doctorpangloss 10y ago

> I don't think reddit's problem is harassment, I think the problem is that anything good on Reddit gets copied elsewhere, has advertising added and makes money. Reddit is BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed-esque sites' biggest subsidy. This site isn't going to do anything about that.

sdegutis 10y ago

> I don't think reddit's problem is harassment, I think it's groupthink, extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading. HN isn't immune to these. It suffers just as badly as Reddit. It's just that the cultures are so different. HN is elitist and thinks technology will improve our lives, Reddit is racist and thinks pictures of cute kittens and in-jokes will improve our lives. Both are filled with ignoramuses who get upvoted to the top of a page for catering to that website's niche the most (HN = most elitist comment, Reddit = funniest comment). Anyone else barely sees the light of day, and get downvoted to smithereens. As long as there's an upvote button, I don't think any website can truly solve this. HN tried to fix it by using more algorithms on top of upvotes, but it just doesn't work.

forgetsusername 10y ago
>Anyone else barely sees the light of day, and get downvoted to smithereens. Hey look, you're down-voted. I agree. Look at some of the "top-posters" on the HN scoreboard. Much of their commentary is tepid oatmeal that panders to the "easy" things that HN likes. >HN = most elitist comment I'm not sure I agree with "elitist", but there's definitely a thing, which is well defined by things like "Shit HN says".
- Karunamon 10y ago
  Shit HN says? You mean that twitter account[1] that posts one-off comments, devoid of any and all context, and then attributes it to the entire site as if it were one person? Or representative of the site's users in any way? Nothing positive, or useful, or interesting has ever come out of a "Shit (community) says" group. Those types of (what's the word here.. articles? groups? Whatever, things) are always crass, point-and-laugh-derisively-at-the-stupid-people-ha-ha-look-how-stupid-they-are affairs. Reddit's instance of this cancer (and I don't believe I've chosen the wrong term for something this awful) even functions as a more or less sanctioned voting brigade. [1]: https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says

return0 10y ago

The real problem of reddit is the people who think it has a problem.

forgetsusername 10y ago
There's something to this: reddit is a place where you can write things about things. Why does it need to be controlled, moderated, or anything really? The argument against this mindset is usually along the lines of, "Well, we don't want the KKK organizing rallies on our boards!" Which, is true; you don't want that. But banning them from reddit moves them from a public forum to their own, more private, areas of the internet. You can't censor shit.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  I'm ok with forcing the KKK underground.
  - nailer 10y ago
    Sure, but a lot of reddit think anyone right of Mao is the KKK.
- pink_dinner 10y ago
  The problem is thay it's not even as extreme as the kkk, if your opinions don't mesh with the current progressive groupthink, you will be downvoted, ignored, and bullied. The same happens to a lesser extent on HN, but without the bullying. The end result is content that leans in only one direction because everyone else has been silenced, they don't bother posting, or they left. The irony is that this behavior is exactly what progressives have claimed to be fighting (discrimination and online bullying) Edit: haha, the ironic downvoting happened fast.
- warlox 10y ago
  Their private areas of the internet, namely Stormfront, predate Reddit. Before Reddit allowed racists and moot created /pol/, they didn't have a real platform to spread their propaganda, so you had to look pretty hard for sites like that. If they only had private forums, events like the Charleston shooting wouldn't have happened.

SixSigma 10y ago

SRS is cancer

arrrg 10y ago
SRS is awesome and exactly what’s needed.
- kelukelugames 10y ago
  There is awful behavior on reddit, but I don't know if SRS is the answer. Actually at this point, no one knows what SRS is anymore. Edit: okay I found this. https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/o0pdv/meta_srs_faq/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/o0pdv/meta_...
  - SixSigma 10y ago
    Fighting opinions we don't like with opinions you don't like. Fucking for virginity

wslh 10y ago

This depends on the subreddit, if you look at the security groups (e.g. netsec, reverseengineering) they evolve to deep discussions.

emblem21 10y ago

Comparing Reddit, a community where specialists can setup a little fiefdoms and generalists can cheery pick from whatever fiefdom they can find, with HackerNews, a singular monoculture that just happens to attract people with a huge diversity of interests, is a challenge unto itself. Both deploy a wide variety of strategies to enforce quality content: crowd-vote mechanism and individual ignoring. These two mechanisms should be more than sufficient for even the most obsessively compulsive and curiously unaccountable of curators. The question isn't comparing communities based on content or upon curator strategies. One should question should take aim at the unspoken epistemological assumptions every single curator engages in. Suppose Poster 1 puts topic A into Community A. There are many overlapping relationships between topic A and community A. Now lets suppose Poster 2 puts topic B into Community A. There are few overlapping relationships between topic B and community A. "Overlapping relationships" is a very complex topic. Users might find topic B to be on-topic in an esoteric or meta way, and the moderators will find it off-topic. Users might find topic A to be off-topic because the topic is to frequently discussed, and the moderators remove it. However the dice roll, the concept of "overlapping relationships" between topic and community is not a guarantee of topic survival. The selection mechanism of topic survivability is divided between the collective hands of the crowd-vote mechanism, individual ignoring, or moderation termination. And notice I say "divided" , and not "sequentially evaluated". Agents of topic survival operate in parallel. This means that posters have to appeal to not only just three different selection criteria in order to survive, but eight different scenarios that have different highly targeted payoffs. Two rules of the topic lifecycle: * The topic must pass/fail three moderation phases. * The topic always has influence on the hardcore communtiy consumers (HCC), the average community consumers (ACC), and the moderators. (M) How topic lifecycles can still influence a community even via multi-phase curation: Case | CrowdVote? | Mass ignore | Deletion? | Outcome 1 | Pass | | | HCC get skeptical of ACC and M 2 | | Pass | | ACC get skeptical of HCC and M 3 | | | Pass | HCC and ACC think M is lazy 4 | Pass | Pass | | HCC and ACC think M is aggressive 5 | | Pass | Pass | HCC hostile to ACC and M, may fracture community 6 | Pass | | Pass | ACC get skeptical of HCC and M 7 | Pass | Pass | Pass | No effect 8 | | | | M gets skeptical of HCC and ACC The point is that having topics curated epistemologically only appears to work because it fails the slowest. No outcome of topic enforcement actually bolsters or adds to community value over time because all topic consumption is a destructive process (destruction of time). Thus, entropy always wins.

kwgardner 10y ago

We've actually done a few things to try to deal with those issues. We don't have any "default" communities or a universal front page or anything like that, because we believe that does lead to a lot of low quality conversations and groupthink. Instead, you only join communities you specifically opt into, and hopefully that way each community only has people who are actually passionate about those topics and discussions become more in depth and informed. (Cofounder here, btw, happy to answer any of your questions.) Edit: I just converted over from being a lurker and created my account to respond here, and apparently I'm commenting too fast. I'll respond to other comments when I can, sorry. :/ Feel free to email me at kaela@imzy.com if you want to talk more though!

keithwhor 10y ago
Hey! I'm the author of Nodal [1] and I think this could be a really neat platform for open source communities. Gitter / Slack tend to be the default for live, realtime chat and GitHub is central for issues and contributions, but I'm looking for something fun to direct developers towards where we can organize community events and the like. I'm a startup founder myself and would love to connect with the founding team, is there an ideal way to reach out? [1] http://github.com/keithwhor/nodal http://github.com/keithwhor/nodal
- kwgardner 10y ago
  Awesome! Shoot me an email here and let's talk: kaela@imzy.com (Also, sorry it took me so long to reply--apparently I was commenting too fast because I just created my account. Whoops.)
kelukelugames 10y ago
The art on your site is sooooo cute! Who did it?
- kwgardner 10y ago
  Thank you! We have an amazing designer. You can check out her stuff here: https://dribbble.com/jaleh https://dribbble.com/jaleh

forgetsusername 10y ago

>I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation What evidence is there that HN is any better? Everything looks good when you're on the right side of the groupthink. There are certain subjects here that have atrociously one-sided discourse. Personally, I think Reddit is just as informative as this place (besides the point that there is no monolithic "reddit")

eva1984 10y ago

HN can(which is in question) maintain a relative high quality discussion towards a focused and limited subset of topics (tech, science and certain social issue like surveillance) is because it is a niche forum by default. It is HACKER NEWS, rather than popular news. Reddit is just too board. However, certain subs are still pretty interesting and informational, until....it becomes popular. So yes. Popular means low quality. It is sad, but inevitable..

threatofrain 10y ago

If you consider Reddit as a whole, with millions of users, I don't think there's any behavioral change you can institute that will lead to high quality, informed discourse. High quality discussions take hard work, not just in the discussion process, but in all the things that come before it. Also, the information gathered by hard work is often gated. If you are looking for high-signal discussion, then most people in or out of Reddit don't have anything good to say on most subjects. Reddit is the wrong place to look for that kind of talk. Reddit is the right place to listen for community temperature about a narrow range of subjects which communities would be good for, such as user reviews or product discovery. Groupthink is also not the main problem. How are you supposed to have your own individual opinion on a wide range of phenomena -- unless, of course, you make yourself informed via hard work and gated access? So these people cannot be expected to have their own opinion. If you want elite opinion, then join an institution with institutional access to elite literature, and join an academic or professional community. Reddit is fine as it is. It's not supposed to be an elite source of information on a variety of phenomena. It's a place for humor and community discussion. I actually dislike the segment of Reddit users asking for "citations" because unless you have institutional access, then I think that this call for citations is a dishonest way of shutting down conversations.

awqrre 10y ago

Some Reddits are worst then HN when talking about censure.

duaneb 10y ago

Groupthink is a problem per-subreddit. Don't like it? Invest some time in finding better subreddits.

spchampion2 10y ago

> I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. You mean like Metafilter? http://lanyrd.com/2011/sxsw/scrdr/ http://lanyrd.com/2011/sxsw/scrdr/

dubyah 10y ago
They did mention groupthink. I used to think Metafilter was pretty decent, but the shift over the years with regards to certain topics like identity politics has been really quite insufferable.

dghughes 10y ago

The drama ebbs and flows on reddit and then settles for a bit then up again. Maybe it's my imagination but in my 9 years there it's like you can almost see the next wave of new users arrive. It's subtle at first but you soon see the common culture of that age/culture group, cohort or whatever it is. What I don't like is the new (~6 months) locking of threads I think that's a cop out of moderators or the admins. You don't like the conversation? Slam the door shut.

dominotw 10y ago

I go to reddit for entertainment, camaraderie and lols. I don't go the engage in a intellectual discussion. There are tons of subreddits like /r/askhistorians that do HN level of moderation and don't have 'lazy comments'

mark_integerdsv 10y ago
Similar for me. Reddit is what I do when I'm standing in a queue or waiting for something for a few minutes. I get quite confused when I see people take it so seriously.

gbog 10y ago

Low moderation and high level discussion is very possible and very common, but it depends on the topic and maybe the language. Just yesterday I've been on a French language forum on gardening, and this kid of dedicated community do not seem to struggle to keep away trolls and memes. Must be much harder for an English language forum on mangas, or a French language forum on politics. I'm not sure about Reddit, the subs I visit are either monocultural and barely interesting, or full of trolls and memes.

partiallypro 10y ago

HN has a totally different userbase (though there is some cross over) than Reddit. To me Reddit's trollish uninformed arguments are what makes it funny. For instance, /r/The_Donald and /r/SandersForPresident are basically parodies of themselves. Frankly, I'm going to go to Reddit for a laugh, and maybe a few sorted threads with insight into live events unfolding...but if I want something serious I'm not going to go there. Reddit to me is like Something Awful used to be but on a much larger scale, and that's why I like it. If Reddit ever matured to be like HN, I would probably stop going there. It's a happy medium between dashing moments of HN like insight and 4Chan like stupidity.

warlox 10y ago

I don't think those are reddit's only problems. The blatant racism on display in the comment sections of some of the site's most heavily trafficked areas, such as /r/worldnews and /r/news, does quite a number on its reputation.

buro9 10y ago

I run lots of forums, on many technologies, and the only way that I've achieved long-lived peaceful forums is to have virtually no moderation and no moderators. As soon as you have moderators, the users defer responsibility for confronting the bad stuff and it represents the start of the decline, "If that was allowed, why isn't this?". Without moderation, and with the community possessing some tools to enforce, most communities will take on that responsibility and do so. i.e. the flagging on here or on Craigslist that allows multiple people to moderate where an individual's signal is weak but collectively it becomes strong. Of the course the only thing that this doesn't address is broken group-think across the whole forum. To that, I've found making the admin of a forum the legal buck-stop for the forum works well. This is compatible with EU law, where you generally need someone to be responsible for complaints of a libel/defamation nature, and so I designate the forum owner as that and I move myself into the "mere conduit" role. This method of "everyone is a weak moderator, we have no strong moderators but we do have a strong leader who is liable" has been very effective at producing decade old, healthy and growing communities.

dave2000 10y ago

That applies to the comments more than the articles; you can still learn stuff there. And it's possible to ignore group think, you know, like if you've got a mind of your own.

harryf 10y ago

> I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. Maybe that's just not possible? We always assume human moderators are required. I wonder if AI could do something here?

CuriouslyC 10y ago

The single biggest problem I encounter with reddit is that being able to downvote attracts negative, unpleasant people.

scient 10y ago

It's an online community. You just described an online community or any community actually. What did you expect Reddit would be? :)

rmc 10y ago

> I think it's groupthink, extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading. I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. Maybe that's just not possible? It's possible on reddit. reddit.com/r/AskHistorians is a Q&A subreddit for asking historical questions. They have a very high standard for answers, comments, and even the questions you can ask. and they actively enforce it. As a result it's a very high quality resource. It can be done, if there's the will for strict moderation, from the mods and the users.

rthomas6 10y ago

I like Hubski (https://www.hubski.com https://www.hubski.com). It's self-moderating in a cool way. Each user decides exactly who and what they want to see.

hawtbabe22 10y ago

how about you stroke my big balls baby