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What's an example of a major site with a good community?

• SethTro 7y ago
  free karma answer: "Hacker news"
  • knolax 7y ago
    Yeah no, when's the last time you've actually seen the rules enforced?
    • chronogram 7y ago
      Often. Perhaps not as immediate and often as I'd might like, but often enough.
    • ve55 7y ago
      HN moderators are actually pretty active, but usually maintain a low profile compared to how things appear on other websites, so it can be harder to notice the work that they do.
    • dahart 7y ago
      All the time. I see dang smoothing things out like almost daily. You can also turn on “showdead” in your profile options, and maybe you’ll become more aware of it.
      • zzo38computer 7y ago
        I do keep it on, because I want to see all messages even if most people hate it. Fortunately, they do not delete the messages permanently in such case, unlike some others do. (I also use custom CSS so that no messages are grey; all of them are black. If I can, I would also want to change the sort order of messages so that it is based on time (perhaps, of the most recent nested reply) rather than karma (if that is what is done; it doesn't seem to be sorted by time).)
        • dahart 7y ago
          Comments and articles both definitely have a time component in the sort. For comments, time might mostly be a tie-breaker, because up-votes do have a greater weight. Articles always drop over time, upvotes only keep them around for slightly longer. I don’t know what the precise sort is, but FWIW I think Paul Graham published what it used to be, once upon a time... you can probably find the old code. I’d guess it hasn’t changed all that much except maybe for how it handles gaming / voting rings.
      • knolax 7y ago
        I have "show dead" turned on and most of the time the same account posting dead comment after dead comment keeps it up for weeks.
        • gjs278 7y ago
          that’s because we are told if we want to be unbanned we have to keep posting dead comments and one day they’ll unban us if enough comments get approved
      • JasonFruit 7y ago
        I keep showdead on all the time, because sometimes I see insightful, thoughtful answers that are dead for no reason intrinsic to the comment. Then I can vouch for them, and I hope they become visible to others — though the workings of that system are opaque to me. I get annoyed reading the same smarmy-sounding "Please don't post unsubstantive comments" replies from dang all the time — but it's what makes this site work, when so many others don't.
        • dahart 7y ago
          Those two things are related. The warning messages are what happens before the account gets shadow-banned. Sometimes you can walk back in a dead commenter’s history to see what caused the problem and it’s obvious. Sometimes it’s not apparent because it can happen for multiple reasons. Personally, I’d rather have the constant out-of-bounds reminders than not. I’ve never seen one of those warning messages on a comment that didn’t deserve it, I’ll take the ‘please play nice’ requests all day if it quells ugly flame bait, and that’s exactly what it seems to do. He’s giving people both notification that it’s out of bounds and advance warning that there could be consequences. Much worse is out there and easy to find. Do you have examples that are much better, on a comparably sized forum?
          • JasonFruit 7y ago
            Like I said, it's why this site works and others don't. I'm not aware of a better solution. Facetiously, I suppose you could take the approach of the app 'Yo': constrain the possible messages to exclude anything potentially offensive.
            • dahart 7y ago
              I used to work for Disney and we were tasked with constraining the possible messages to exclude potentially offensive material. It does keep out the obvious no-effort messages with swear words, and it does tend to reduce negative messages. But it was interesting and sometimes fun to see the creative ways people would write bad words or sexually suggestive materials or tell each other off. It’s not possible to stop all offensive content with constraints or technology. Not yet anyway.
      • cannonedhamster 7y ago
        I was not aware what this feature did. Thanks for pointing it out. I generally enjoy reading things even if I disagree with them because they tend to at least give me something to think about.
    • avip 7y ago
      ex.: Can't see why you were downvoted?
  • luckylion 7y ago
    "Major". Hacker news is a small, heavily user-policed special interest site.
    • SethTro 7y ago
      Isn't that the point of the article? to heavily user-police your site?
      • luckylion 7y ago
        Sure. My point is that HN doesn't fit the "major" category. A group of people doing something that all know each other and fit into a single room is easier to run than a metropolis. I also find "community" to not fit the bill, but that's another point.
  • hvs 7y ago
    It's honestly the only site (excepting certain subreddits) where after 10 years I still read the comments.
  • enraged_camel 7y ago
    Hacker News is a small niche site.
    • DoreenMichele 7y ago
      It gets five million visitors a month.
      • enraged_camel 7y ago
        That's nothing compared to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
• avip 7y ago
  Github?
• theDoug 7y ago
  'Major' is up to personal definition and will distract people here no doubt. Metafiter has been my long-time lighthouse for this kind of gauge, though obviously not as big as its peak. https://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi https://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi - Anyone can view the site and its content - Very clearly putting their rules of the road up (link above) before you can 'join' - Commenting/posting/membership is a $5, one time fee - A one-week wait before you can post - Paid moderation And it works.
• scarejunba 7y ago
  Metafilter. Instagram has a pretty positive feeling too.
  • codinghorror 7y ago
    Instagram is the future of Facebook. Probably the most important tech acquisition since YouTube.
• dlphn___xyz 7y ago
  lobster is pretty good platform but the content could be better
• wpietri 7y ago
  Depends on what you mean by "major", but Metafilter is one example that comes to mind. Honestly, though, I think "major site" and "good community" are in conflict. Facebook's revenue is something like $0.12 per user-day. Twitter's is circa $0.07. It is at best extremely difficult to do effective policing of users with that kind of money to spend. You can use ML, etc, to do the first cut. But real anti-abuse work basically requires humans. (Or not-yet-existant strong AI.) So my general take is that ad-supported social media is a dead end as far as real community goes. Doing it right takes either real money or dedicated volunteers. And probably both.
  • x0x0 7y ago
    You seem to have thought about this, and you're generally insightful, but I have to disagree. The problem with twitter and fb isn't the low revenues per user-day. The problem is the behavior they've cultivated and incentivized from the beginning. For example, had twitter not created a culture of basically brigading, they would be in a different place. But they at minimum allowed and probably incentivized that to become part of the twitter experience, and I don't think it can be recovered from. As for facebook, if it took you until 2019 to say Alex Jones can't build his business on your platform, you haven't even started to think in any serious way about what behavior you want on fb. Well actually they have: mark wants dollars and doesn't give a shit about anything else. You may find this interview with former Reddit pm Dan McComas fascinating: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/dan-mccomas-reddit-product-svp-and-imzy-founder-interview.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/dan-mccomas-reddit-pr...
    • wpietri 7y ago
      I don't think these are different problems. If Twitter or Facebook had taken harm reduction seriously from the get-go, they wouldn't exist. Ad-supported social media only works at enormous scale, because of the network effect, because of the high fixed costs, and because of the low per-user revenue. McComas is right that a grow-at-all-costs mentality is part of the problem. But that's a consequence of the financial situation, not the cause. If they had infinite money, they could have had growth and user/society safety. But they didn't, and they prioritized the things that let them get to the scale where the investors got the payoff that was promised. And where the people in charge got rich, of course.
• DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Multiple people here have said Metafilter in response to you. My experience is that it was a toxic, classist cesspit where open misandry was embraced as some kind of cheap substitute for feminism. In other words, it didn't actually empower women. It just tolerated women venting about how very, very angry they were at men and, to some degree, taking it out on male members in AskMe who dared to ask questions about their love life. One particularly ugly incident involved a man asking for support resources for himself to cope with his wife having been raped. He was basically told he was an asshole for asking. I wrote a long reply with actual suggestions which was deleted by the mods as "tangential" and "not answering the question." I posted it to my blog, where he soon found it and private messaged me and thanked me profusely and told me how traumatic it had been to basically be told he was an asshole for seeking support, a comment that got favorited at least 70 times. There are no perfect communities and a good community experience is partly up to you to craft for yourself. Some Reddits seem to be decent places with a sense of community. I've been on email lists that worked for me for a time. Hacker News had a genuine sense of community when I first joined. It seems to have less of that these days, partly a product of scale. It's grown a lot and it's hard to keep a sense of community at scale. Even in IRL communities, large cities rely more on formality to help make up for the inability to know everyone. The human mind seems able to have a sense of community with a group of up to 150 people. I had access to information from an internal study of one community that suggested that only 20 percent of members were 'active' participants, either regularly or occasionally. Another ten percent participated once or rarely and the rest lurked. This seems to fit with what I have observed elsewhere. So that means that about 750 accounts gets you about 150 active participants. Anything beyond that and you see challenges in fostering a sense of community. I've long speculated that HN's leader board ought to be 150 names instead of 100 to help foster some sense of community here, but it's a completely untested hypothesis and not anything I feel strongly enough about to actively campaign for.