4 ms·

That’s a feature, not a problem. The whole point is that every new post gets the same airtime. Of course actual spam/offtopic posting should get moderated away

That’s a feature, not a problem. The whole point is that every new post gets the same airtime. Of course actual spam/offtopic posting should get moderated away (yes, I know HN seemingly hates moderation and would prefer some algorithm to do it - I disagree), but any form of upvoting/nesting results in “winner takes all”/hivemind behaviour where barely anybody reads past the ‘good’ comments. A forum is like an in-person discussion; upvote-driven places are like an in-person discussion where a couple of people are grandstanding and nobody else gets a word in. That includes HN! There have to be mod posts saying there’s more than one page of comments! Of course as increasing numbers of passive users joined the internet, upvote-driven sites became more popular. That doesn’t mean they’re better for actually posting on, though.

naravara 6y ago
> That’s a feature, not a problem. It can be both. In the dying days of several community forums I was on, I noticed the conversation got more and more centered around links people were finding on Reddit or Digg. That was my first inkling that the days of bulletin board style forums were numbered. These sites are like genetic algorithms for surfacing content people want to discuss. So even when they want to discuss it with closer people than the firehose of Reddit, they're bringing up the same links and content. It's only a matter of time, though, before people prefer to just go to the source. And that kills the forum traffic.
betwixthewires 6y ago
As I said in a comment around here somewhere (probably above, if you can see the irony in that) there is a sorting algorithm I like that potentially solves the problem you bring up that can be found here https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/docs/src/about_ranking.md https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/docs/src/about_r... it is characterized by ranking votes on a logarithmic scale rather than a linear one. One of the goals of all this is to automate moderation as effectively as possible without impacting the social dynamics of the community. At some point manual moderation does not scale.

naravara 6y ago

> That’s a feature, not a problem. It can be both. In the dying days of several community forums I was on, I noticed the conversation got more and more centered around links people were finding on Reddit or Digg. That was my first inkling that the days of bulletin board style forums were numbered. These sites are like genetic algorithms for surfacing content people want to discuss. So even when they want to discuss it with closer people than the firehose of Reddit, they're bringing up the same links and content. It's only a matter of time, though, before people prefer to just go to the source. And that kills the forum traffic.

betwixthewires 6y ago

As I said in a comment around here somewhere (probably above, if you can see the irony in that) there is a sorting algorithm I like that potentially solves the problem you bring up that can be found here https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/docs/src/about_ranking.md https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/docs/src/about_r... it is characterized by ranking votes on a logarithmic scale rather than a linear one. One of the goals of all this is to automate moderation as effectively as possible without impacting the social dynamics of the community. At some point manual moderation does not scale.