4 ms·

The best way to stop an alternative becoming filled with extremists is to start it off as a community for a specific audience, then expand to a more general one

by CM30 6y ago

The best way to stop an alternative becoming filled with extremists is to start it off as a community for a specific audience, then expand to a more general one later on. Twitch and Discord did well there for instance. Started out as gaming focused, then became more mainstream. By doing this, you bring in non extremists early on, and tilt the audience pecentages in such a way that most regulars aren't such extremists. The problem is most 'alternative' platforms market themselves as 'Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube except with free speech and no rules' rather than 'an art/gaming/music/sports themed alternative to Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube with free speech'. Former means you draw in the outcasts and extremists, latter means you draw in another audience that can then be made more mainstream by opening up support for more and more fields of interest.

moomin 6y ago
This is a seriously good observation. To add to it: moderation is _the_ hard problem of discussion forums. A nine year old can write a discussion board in python, any five decent developers can write one that scales reasonably. Or, you know, copy an open source codebase. Way harder is getting any actual users, but even that’s nothing compared to community maintenance. Saying you have no moderation is attractive to one crowd in particular (there are other people who theoretically favour it, but practically they’ll use a moderated forum anyway). So you get a quick numbers boost but you’ve now fundamentally limited your audience to people prepared to share head-space with that crowd. Reddit, Facebook and Twitter got in early and got to spend a lot of time learning on the job. Unless you start small, you’re not going to get that luxury now. (Please don’t take this as an endorsement of any particular moderation policy, in theory or practice. Most of them are kind of awful at times. But the problem is hard.)
- needAnAltHN 6y ago
  Moderation is extremely difficult. I can't say HN is done well because there is a heavy subjective hand. The only thing good are the vast majority of users here have good intention. If only HN had multiple boards with various mods.
jedberg 6y ago
But if you're just copying reddit, why would someone want to go to "a reddit for art" if reddit already has a section for art? You have to offer something substantially better, otherwise it's easier to just stay where the traffic is.
- kortilla 6y ago
  The interface on Reddit is garbage, a huge chunk of the existing users are garbage, people brigade into subreddits, the admins have the final word over you; and, finally, Reddit has no features for specific communities (e.g. image tools for art).
thereticent 6y ago
I see what you're saying, but I have to say as someone who was there, this was not the problem with Reddit. Early Reddit (as in first year) was extremely tech/programming/"netizen" focused, and it was really a lot like HN has been for years. But when you start to gain popularity, the way you treat "free speech" becomes an issue. Discord is not a great example in that niche communities are not scraped for web search (that I know of).

by CM30 6y ago

moomin 6y ago

This is a seriously good observation. To add to it: moderation is _the_ hard problem of discussion forums. A nine year old can write a discussion board in python, any five decent developers can write one that scales reasonably. Or, you know, copy an open source codebase. Way harder is getting any actual users, but even that’s nothing compared to community maintenance. Saying you have no moderation is attractive to one crowd in particular (there are other people who theoretically favour it, but practically they’ll use a moderated forum anyway). So you get a quick numbers boost but you’ve now fundamentally limited your audience to people prepared to share head-space with that crowd. Reddit, Facebook and Twitter got in early and got to spend a lot of time learning on the job. Unless you start small, you’re not going to get that luxury now. (Please don’t take this as an endorsement of any particular moderation policy, in theory or practice. Most of them are kind of awful at times. But the problem is hard.)

needAnAltHN 6y ago
Moderation is extremely difficult. I can't say HN is done well because there is a heavy subjective hand. The only thing good are the vast majority of users here have good intention. If only HN had multiple boards with various mods.

jedberg 6y ago

But if you're just copying reddit, why would someone want to go to "a reddit for art" if reddit already has a section for art? You have to offer something substantially better, otherwise it's easier to just stay where the traffic is.

kortilla 6y ago
The interface on Reddit is garbage, a huge chunk of the existing users are garbage, people brigade into subreddits, the admins have the final word over you; and, finally, Reddit has no features for specific communities (e.g. image tools for art).

thereticent 6y ago

I see what you're saying, but I have to say as someone who was there, this was not the problem with Reddit. Early Reddit (as in first year) was extremely tech/programming/"netizen" focused, and it was really a lot like HN has been for years. But when you start to gain popularity, the way you treat "free speech" becomes an issue. Discord is not a great example in that niche communities are not scraped for web search (that I know of).