10 ms·

The Internet is decentralized. It doesn't matter that all the 13 year olds are congregating on Club Penguin or whatever; we can set up our own communities. That

The Internet is decentralized. It doesn't matter that all the 13 year olds are congregating on Club Penguin or whatever; we can set up our own communities. That's why HN is great (and other small communities). It's intrinsically hostile to the wider internet simply by virtue of the subject and the format of its content.

deleted 9y ago
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chongli 9y ago
The issue is when the unwanted folks follow the cool kids around. This happens a lot on Reddit. People will make a subreddit with the type of community they want. Others will join. Eventually people will complain that the quality has deteriorated. Then the cool kids will start a new one and migrate there. Rinse. Repeat... ad infinitum. Edit: I don't know if there's a general name for this phenomenon, but I believe it is related to network decay. [0] [0] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- gavinpc 9y ago
  The name I've heard for this is "Eternal September": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  - chongli 9y ago
    Yeah, that was posted elsewhere in the thread. I thought of it as a name specific to Usenet, as Network Decay is specific to television networks. I was hoping for a general term.
    - 0xffff2 9y ago
      I don't think the term is specific to Usenet at all. It's genesis is in Usenet, but I've heard it used many, many times to refer to the general phenomenon that the original Eternal September was a specific instance of.
      - chongli 9y ago
        It's fine to say that, but this phenomenon is even older than the Internet. Think of the hip bar that gains a sudden influx of customers following a New York Times story. Yogi Berra remarked on this phenomenon with one of his famous quotes "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded!" Another idea related to the general phenomenon is gentrification: the cool artist colony suddenly overwhelmed with yuppies who drive up the rent, forcing the artists to move out. Is there not a general term for this whole phenomenon?
        phillc73 9y ago
        I call it wankerisation. That is, a place, location or destination has become overwhelmed with wankers. "I don't go to that bar anymore, it's too wankerised." "I don't visit Facebook anymore, it's become wankerised." "The neighbourhood is too wankerised, I can't afford to live there."
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
        For communities and interests, I usually call it simply "getting mainstream", and the invaders "general population".
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      Eternal September afflicted mailing lists, too.
- plaguuuuuu 9y ago
  Reddit really 'dug' (see what I did there) its own grave by aggressively catering to casual users, in order to drive signups and grow the user base. I can't remember exactly what happened at which point, but it all follows the general pattern of appealing to the mass market. E.g. the curation of the frontpage via default subs such as /r/AdviceAnimals that don't really contain meaningful discussion. There's no real need to do this if one is concerned with maintaining an existing community, or the standards of it. As a counterexample, private trackers have been rather good at this, generally by having interviews/invitations for new memberships, or even disabling signups entire. Though these are really the most extreme options. The other main problem is that like Digg, that there is a powerful cabal of moderators in control of most mainstream subreddits, including those concerned with serious topics like news and politics and they do a lot of "curation" of content by removing stuff, rather than letting the users decide on which links and topics are relevant to discussion (by, ya know... upvoting/downvoting) with chilling effects on those respective subs. That this was allowed to continue, without overhauling and maybe even democratising the moderation system of default subs, was Reddit's choice. I can only suspect that this either (a) plays into the hands of advertisers directly via corporate censorship or (b) indirectly, by relegating content from users who fall outside of the "mass-market" demographic to niche subreddits or other websites.
  - SerLava 9y ago
    Curation of shitty content is also built right into the algorithm. They'll hide behind "But people are voting for this mindless content" but that's not the full picture. A vote after 5 seconds is actually weighted higher than a vote after 5 minutes. It's specifically because Reddit the company is against too much engaging content. They want people to smirk, chuckle, acknowledge, and move on. Engaging content means fewer pages viewed, which means fewer ad views.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      A vote after 5 seconds is weighted, or acts as if weighted? If that's built into the algorithm, that's one thing. If the social effect of early moderation is amplified, well, that's still a problem (and a major one), but ... of a different sort. Citations requested.
- specialist 9y ago
  Other possible factors: Is the monkeysphere is the root cause of the endless bifurcation of communities, culture? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number John Dvorak once opined that social networks stop being cool when that coworker you secretly hated tries to connect. Of course, pushing the other way, is the power law distribution of attention. The best explanation I've read for our current winner takes all economy. http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_weblog.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w...
- CM30 9y ago
  It happened a lot before Reddit too. Forums always used to have this cycle of starting out appealing to more mature audiences before getting flooded with casual users and spammers and many people then moving elsewhere. Heck, in the world of webmaster forums, the ease in which they got filled with spammers and low quality content meant that the same people usually ended up being members of dozens of different forums and moving to a new site every month or two.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  I believe "cool kids" is primarily used as sarcasm.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Appeal to the masses. It's a very pervasive concept. See Hannah Arendt's "The Crisis in Culture" (by way of ... Reddit): https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/50umjw/hannah_arendt_the_crisis_in_culture/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/50umjw/hannah_a... http://www.celinecondorelli.edu/files/arendtcrisisinculture_v2.pdf http://www.celinecondorelli.edu/files/arendtcrisisinculture_... There's the "evaporative cooling effect": http://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumble... I see these as mechanisms based on Gresham's Law, though that's based on a longer argument.
hellbanner 9y ago
Yes, but there have been an increasing trend in "reddit style" comments on news.ycombinator.com . Myself and other users have noticed, called people out, downvoted etc for the lousy comments. But the realities of the threading style & upvote democracy is that lowest common denominator spreads easily. Related discussion in same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699133
- incompatible 9y ago
  It always sucks to have your insightful (in your own eyes at least) comments downvoted, just because there's a group of people who disagree with it. It's a downvote democracy, but not a true democracy because it only takes a minority to vote that way. I don't even have access to this downvote feature, I guess I don't have enough karma.
  - greenyoda 9y ago
    Right, downvoting gets enabled when you hit 500 points, or so I remember.
  - hellbanner 9y ago
    Yeah, this too. I was more lamenting the lousy comments eg. puns, comments that add nothing etc. These are possible with 0second old accounts.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    You do have access to the upvote button,so your vote can cancel out an unfair downvote. Comments that get downvotes also don't get upvotes, so it's not just the small group who can downvotes who are causing the comments to be gray, it's also the large group who could upvotes but who chose not to do so.
  - SyneRyder 9y ago
    If something is unfairly downvoted, wait a while and someone else will usually upvote it again. But it's also worth remembering they're just internet points, there's no real value. Keep contributing good stuff & you'll eventually get past the 500 karma mark. After that it's just a vanity number.
r721 9y ago
>That's why HN is great (and other small communities) SimilarWeb says HN gets approximately 20M visits a month: https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

chongli 9y ago

The issue is when the unwanted folks follow the cool kids around. This happens a lot on Reddit. People will make a subreddit with the type of community they want. Others will join. Eventually people will complain that the quality has deteriorated. Then the cool kids will start a new one and migrate there. Rinse. Repeat... ad infinitum. Edit: I don't know if there's a general name for this phenomenon, but I believe it is related to network decay. [0] [0] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gavinpc 9y ago
The name I've heard for this is "Eternal September": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- chongli 9y ago
  Yeah, that was posted elsewhere in the thread. I thought of it as a name specific to Usenet, as Network Decay is specific to television networks. I was hoping for a general term.
  - 0xffff2 9y ago
    I don't think the term is specific to Usenet at all. It's genesis is in Usenet, but I've heard it used many, many times to refer to the general phenomenon that the original Eternal September was a specific instance of.
    - chongli 9y ago
      It's fine to say that, but this phenomenon is even older than the Internet. Think of the hip bar that gains a sudden influx of customers following a New York Times story. Yogi Berra remarked on this phenomenon with one of his famous quotes "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded!" Another idea related to the general phenomenon is gentrification: the cool artist colony suddenly overwhelmed with yuppies who drive up the rent, forcing the artists to move out. Is there not a general term for this whole phenomenon?
      - phillc73 9y ago
        I call it wankerisation. That is, a place, location or destination has become overwhelmed with wankers. "I don't go to that bar anymore, it's too wankerised." "I don't visit Facebook anymore, it's become wankerised." "The neighbourhood is too wankerised, I can't afford to live there."
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
        For communities and interests, I usually call it simply "getting mainstream", and the invaders "general population".
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Eternal September afflicted mailing lists, too.
plaguuuuuu 9y ago
Reddit really 'dug' (see what I did there) its own grave by aggressively catering to casual users, in order to drive signups and grow the user base. I can't remember exactly what happened at which point, but it all follows the general pattern of appealing to the mass market. E.g. the curation of the frontpage via default subs such as /r/AdviceAnimals that don't really contain meaningful discussion. There's no real need to do this if one is concerned with maintaining an existing community, or the standards of it. As a counterexample, private trackers have been rather good at this, generally by having interviews/invitations for new memberships, or even disabling signups entire. Though these are really the most extreme options. The other main problem is that like Digg, that there is a powerful cabal of moderators in control of most mainstream subreddits, including those concerned with serious topics like news and politics and they do a lot of "curation" of content by removing stuff, rather than letting the users decide on which links and topics are relevant to discussion (by, ya know... upvoting/downvoting) with chilling effects on those respective subs. That this was allowed to continue, without overhauling and maybe even democratising the moderation system of default subs, was Reddit's choice. I can only suspect that this either (a) plays into the hands of advertisers directly via corporate censorship or (b) indirectly, by relegating content from users who fall outside of the "mass-market" demographic to niche subreddits or other websites.
- SerLava 9y ago
  Curation of shitty content is also built right into the algorithm. They'll hide behind "But people are voting for this mindless content" but that's not the full picture. A vote after 5 seconds is actually weighted higher than a vote after 5 minutes. It's specifically because Reddit the company is against too much engaging content. They want people to smirk, chuckle, acknowledge, and move on. Engaging content means fewer pages viewed, which means fewer ad views.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    A vote after 5 seconds is weighted, or acts as if weighted? If that's built into the algorithm, that's one thing. If the social effect of early moderation is amplified, well, that's still a problem (and a major one), but ... of a different sort. Citations requested.
specialist 9y ago
Other possible factors: Is the monkeysphere is the root cause of the endless bifurcation of communities, culture? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number John Dvorak once opined that social networks stop being cool when that coworker you secretly hated tries to connect. Of course, pushing the other way, is the power law distribution of attention. The best explanation I've read for our current winner takes all economy. http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_weblog.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w...
CM30 9y ago
It happened a lot before Reddit too. Forums always used to have this cycle of starting out appealing to more mature audiences before getting flooded with casual users and spammers and many people then moving elsewhere. Heck, in the world of webmaster forums, the ease in which they got filled with spammers and low quality content meant that the same people usually ended up being members of dozens of different forums and moving to a new site every month or two.
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
I believe "cool kids" is primarily used as sarcasm.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Appeal to the masses. It's a very pervasive concept. See Hannah Arendt's "The Crisis in Culture" (by way of ... Reddit): https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/50umjw/hannah_arendt_the_crisis_in_culture/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/50umjw/hannah_a... http://www.celinecondorelli.edu/files/arendtcrisisinculture_v2.pdf http://www.celinecondorelli.edu/files/arendtcrisisinculture_... There's the "evaporative cooling effect": http://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumble... I see these as mechanisms based on Gresham's Law, though that's based on a longer argument.

hellbanner 9y ago

Yes, but there have been an increasing trend in "reddit style" comments on news.ycombinator.com . Myself and other users have noticed, called people out, downvoted etc for the lousy comments. But the realities of the threading style & upvote democracy is that lowest common denominator spreads easily. Related discussion in same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699133

incompatible 9y ago
It always sucks to have your insightful (in your own eyes at least) comments downvoted, just because there's a group of people who disagree with it. It's a downvote democracy, but not a true democracy because it only takes a minority to vote that way. I don't even have access to this downvote feature, I guess I don't have enough karma.
- greenyoda 9y ago
  Right, downvoting gets enabled when you hit 500 points, or so I remember.
- hellbanner 9y ago
  Yeah, this too. I was more lamenting the lousy comments eg. puns, comments that add nothing etc. These are possible with 0second old accounts.
- DanBC 9y ago
  You do have access to the upvote button,so your vote can cancel out an unfair downvote. Comments that get downvotes also don't get upvotes, so it's not just the small group who can downvotes who are causing the comments to be gray, it's also the large group who could upvotes but who chose not to do so.
- SyneRyder 9y ago
  If something is unfairly downvoted, wait a while and someone else will usually upvote it again. But it's also worth remembering they're just internet points, there's no real value. Keep contributing good stuff & you'll eventually get past the 500 karma mark. After that it's just a vanity number.

r721 9y ago

>That's why HN is great (and other small communities) SimilarWeb says HN gets approximately 20M visits a month: https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com