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You're saying this on HN: a site that's vastly more regulated than reddit ever has been or is likely to be. I'm old enough to remember reddit before the days o

by foldr 7y ago

You're saying this on HN: a site that's vastly more regulated than reddit ever has been or is likely to be. I'm old enough to remember reddit before the days of subreddits. It wasn't a magnet for extreme content back then. That happened as a result of subreddits.

jchw 7y ago
Reddit and Hacker News aren’t really similar/comparable, and extreme content came much, much later than the existence of subreddits (and the admins took a very hands off approach to it then, too.)
- foldr 7y ago
  Ah yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that subreddits immediately led to extreme content. However, they obviously are part of what enables it, since that stuff would never have got voted onto the reddit front page.
thefz 7y ago
You are right, but HN is regulated. Reddit is moderated. On Reddit there are so many examples of straight bad moderation, personal feuds, and aberrant behavior recently. Take a peek at /r/watchredditdie.
- pjc50 7y ago
  I'm not sure what the distinction is here?
  - krapp 7y ago
    There is no distinction. HN is aggressively moderated according to a set of guidelines (regulations.)
golergka 7y ago
And that's why HN is only good for a very specific and narrow subtopic of the whole reddit universe. You can't even have decent political discussion here, not mentioning all the other Reddit's delightful crazyness.
- dspillett 7y ago
  > And that's why HN is only good for a very specific and narrow subtopic of the whole reddit universe. Which is a good thing IMO. Not everything needs to be the next (or just another) digg/reddit/whatever. HN deliberately has a more specific focus than that of reddit, it is a feature not a flaw (if you watn everything to be reddit, then perhaps you would consider it a flawed feature). > You can't even have decent political discussion here Again, this is very deliberate. While there are some specific circumstances where significant political discussion is on-topic here, it generally isn't. See the very first section of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for official word on the matter. Complaining that you can't have the political discussion that you want on a forum where politics is officially off-topic, is like complaining that you can't have the bacon cheese burger (with real pig and cow involved) that you want in the vegan restaurant you've decided to take lunch in.
  - samdoidge 7y ago
    > Complaining that you can't have the political discussion that you want on a forum where politics is officially off-topic, is like complaining that you can't have the bacon cheese burger (with real pig and cow involved) that you want in the vegan restaurant you've decided to take lunch in. Except this is disingenuous. There are political discussions found here, but one side is generally downvoted.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Hardly. It's just that there's a standard for quality of argument, which means that a lot of conservative nonsense gets shot down on sight. There are big conflicting "liberal" and "libertarian" factions, a lot of European social democrats, a growing pro-union faction, but also the gun owner faction and (unsurprisingly) a lot of "small business conservatives" and so on. You can, for example, debate pro-vs-anti nuclear power without necessarily getting downvoted. You can't post straight up climate change denial. You can argue that the stackexchange moderator fiasco was incredibly badly handled. You can't post straight up homophobia.
Aozi 7y ago
>It wasn't a magnet for extreme content back then. That happened as a result of subreddits. This. And it's not just reddit. As long as you can create subgroups within communities you're eventually going to attract some problematic people. While something like CP on tumblr really brought it to light, tumblr was and still is home to some insanely extreme ideologies. Ideologies that some people find completely idiotic but which others truly believe in. It's the same with other places, in case you weren't aware, Instagram has a ton of CP as well. With tags you can find dedicated groups of various different ideologies, a lot of them extremely problematic. Same with Facebook and its tags/groups/whatever. And of course Reddit and its subs. This all stems from the fact that separating content into categories and tags that people can freely define, means that for people looking for extreme ideologies, it's trivial to find an echo chamber with just a tag or two.
- arkh 7y ago
  What is the problem with having extreme or dumb ideologies? Without extreme views you can't have progress: in a lot of countries, being for homosexual rights or abortion is extreme.
  - foldr 7y ago
    Try imagining that you're hosting reddit yourself. Pretty easy to see what the problem is from that point of view. Do you want to be hosting and enabling child porn, hate speech, terrorism, etc. etc.?
    - arkh 7y ago
      I'd like people to remember that some people's terrorists are other people's freedom fighters. Same thing with hate speech. And the age of consent is not the same everywhere: maybe (I hope not) people against child porn will be labeled bigots somewhere one day.
      - foldr 7y ago
        Well, if you're happy to host all that, why not just set up your own reddit? The software is open source. I think you might find that dealing with the legal consequences isn't a lot of fun. And I wonder if you'd really be so blasé about enabling that kind of content once you were actually looking at it on a daily basis.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Well, HN is an equivalent of a subreddit, not Reddit itself. There are plenty of subreddits with HN-level quality of discussion, and there are plenty of extreme content websites out there. Reddit as a whole is essentially a smaller Internet, dimensionally reduced into a discussion board format.
walrus01 7y ago
One example of an effective barrier that has kept shit to a minimum is metafilter, where you need to pay a one time token 5 dollars to make an account. It's been around for about twenty years now.
- xorcist 7y ago
  The one that do survive to a mature age are less likely to be unicorns however. Maybe that's where the real problem is.
- arpa 7y ago
  Or SA.
GoofballJones 7y ago
Wasn't it when Digg did their very unpopular redesign/rework that people left there and headed to Reddit?
- arpa 7y ago
  Earlier, as Digg started to suffer from eternal september cancer.
hoseja 7y ago
HN is very good for one focused thing. Reddit used to be good for everythng but more and more it's bad for everything but soulless corporate-friendliness.

by foldr 7y ago

jchw 7y ago

Reddit and Hacker News aren’t really similar/comparable, and extreme content came much, much later than the existence of subreddits (and the admins took a very hands off approach to it then, too.)

foldr 7y ago
Ah yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that subreddits immediately led to extreme content. However, they obviously are part of what enables it, since that stuff would never have got voted onto the reddit front page.

thefz 7y ago

You are right, but HN is regulated. Reddit is moderated. On Reddit there are so many examples of straight bad moderation, personal feuds, and aberrant behavior recently. Take a peek at /r/watchredditdie.

pjc50 7y ago
I'm not sure what the distinction is here?
- krapp 7y ago
  There is no distinction. HN is aggressively moderated according to a set of guidelines (regulations.)

golergka 7y ago

And that's why HN is only good for a very specific and narrow subtopic of the whole reddit universe. You can't even have decent political discussion here, not mentioning all the other Reddit's delightful crazyness.

dspillett 7y ago
> And that's why HN is only good for a very specific and narrow subtopic of the whole reddit universe. Which is a good thing IMO. Not everything needs to be the next (or just another) digg/reddit/whatever. HN deliberately has a more specific focus than that of reddit, it is a feature not a flaw (if you watn everything to be reddit, then perhaps you would consider it a flawed feature). > You can't even have decent political discussion here Again, this is very deliberate. While there are some specific circumstances where significant political discussion is on-topic here, it generally isn't. See the very first section of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for official word on the matter. Complaining that you can't have the political discussion that you want on a forum where politics is officially off-topic, is like complaining that you can't have the bacon cheese burger (with real pig and cow involved) that you want in the vegan restaurant you've decided to take lunch in.
- samdoidge 7y ago
  > Complaining that you can't have the political discussion that you want on a forum where politics is officially off-topic, is like complaining that you can't have the bacon cheese burger (with real pig and cow involved) that you want in the vegan restaurant you've decided to take lunch in. Except this is disingenuous. There are political discussions found here, but one side is generally downvoted.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Hardly. It's just that there's a standard for quality of argument, which means that a lot of conservative nonsense gets shot down on sight. There are big conflicting "liberal" and "libertarian" factions, a lot of European social democrats, a growing pro-union faction, but also the gun owner faction and (unsurprisingly) a lot of "small business conservatives" and so on. You can, for example, debate pro-vs-anti nuclear power without necessarily getting downvoted. You can't post straight up climate change denial. You can argue that the stackexchange moderator fiasco was incredibly badly handled. You can't post straight up homophobia.

Aozi 7y ago

>It wasn't a magnet for extreme content back then. That happened as a result of subreddits. This. And it's not just reddit. As long as you can create subgroups within communities you're eventually going to attract some problematic people. While something like CP on tumblr really brought it to light, tumblr was and still is home to some insanely extreme ideologies. Ideologies that some people find completely idiotic but which others truly believe in. It's the same with other places, in case you weren't aware, Instagram has a ton of CP as well. With tags you can find dedicated groups of various different ideologies, a lot of them extremely problematic. Same with Facebook and its tags/groups/whatever. And of course Reddit and its subs. This all stems from the fact that separating content into categories and tags that people can freely define, means that for people looking for extreme ideologies, it's trivial to find an echo chamber with just a tag or two.

arkh 7y ago
What is the problem with having extreme or dumb ideologies? Without extreme views you can't have progress: in a lot of countries, being for homosexual rights or abortion is extreme.
- foldr 7y ago
  Try imagining that you're hosting reddit yourself. Pretty easy to see what the problem is from that point of view. Do you want to be hosting and enabling child porn, hate speech, terrorism, etc. etc.?
  - arkh 7y ago
    I'd like people to remember that some people's terrorists are other people's freedom fighters. Same thing with hate speech. And the age of consent is not the same everywhere: maybe (I hope not) people against child porn will be labeled bigots somewhere one day.
    - foldr 7y ago
      Well, if you're happy to host all that, why not just set up your own reddit? The software is open source. I think you might find that dealing with the legal consequences isn't a lot of fun. And I wonder if you'd really be so blasé about enabling that kind of content once you were actually looking at it on a daily basis.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Well, HN is an equivalent of a subreddit, not Reddit itself. There are plenty of subreddits with HN-level quality of discussion, and there are plenty of extreme content websites out there. Reddit as a whole is essentially a smaller Internet, dimensionally reduced into a discussion board format.

walrus01 7y ago

One example of an effective barrier that has kept shit to a minimum is metafilter, where you need to pay a one time token 5 dollars to make an account. It's been around for about twenty years now.

xorcist 7y ago
The one that do survive to a mature age are less likely to be unicorns however. Maybe that's where the real problem is.
arpa 7y ago
Or SA.

GoofballJones 7y ago

Wasn't it when Digg did their very unpopular redesign/rework that people left there and headed to Reddit?

arpa 7y ago
Earlier, as Digg started to suffer from eternal september cancer.

hoseja 7y ago

HN is very good for one focused thing. Reddit used to be good for everythng but more and more it's bad for everything but soulless corporate-friendliness.