8 ms·

Are there many sizable communities out there left that rival HN’s s/n ratio, civility and substance? I can think of some with one or two of those attributes bu

Are there many sizable communities out there left that rival HN’s s/n ratio, civility and substance? I can think of some with one or two of those attributes but not many that match it all the way around.

Pxtl 5y ago
Various well-manicured gardens tucked away in Reddit are quite nice. And honestly I don't think HN is as nice as it used to be now that more and more culture war topics are creeping in.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  I hear people say this all the time but even the “well-manicured” gardens like the neutral news subreddits suffer from the fact that Reddit as a platform is just not a proper solution for actual discussion. HN is a bit better even and only due to not showing comments karma. It is rare (in fact I’ve never witnessed this) that I see someone on Hacker News spout paragraphs of completely inaccurate information and be rewarded with hitting the top of the page. The culture on Reddit is so bad that on more than one occasion I’ve had someone respond to me with nonsense and provide sources that don’t even mention the topic at hand. But because people see links they upvote (and once a post has a positive upvote rating inertia kicks in since people want to agree with the karma score.) So I disagree, you can manicure rotten eggs all day and they’ll still be rotten. Reddit is rotten and it gets worse every sprint as they introduce more and more Facebook features. The problems with Reddit have only been magnified by the fact that a majority of its users today use it as an app similar to tik tok, and the company is encouraging this. Mainly because what the platform was initially designed as (a top site + forum for the whole internet) isn’t as profitable as being just another gamified and over advertised platform where people can argue about whatever the topic of the day is.
  - SantalBlush 5y ago
    If every reddit user had a tag displaying their age, it would help shed light on why that site is such a joke. I suspect it's largely teenagers and young 20-somethings playing expert in a wide variety of fields.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      It definitely is, the demographic seems to completely have changed from when I began using Reddit a decade ago. It use to be fairly technical in nature similar to HN. That has completely changed as even the commentary is so poor compared to just a couple years ago that I can’t believe a company would be so hostile to the user base that initially built it in favor of becoming an application the market has little need for. There’s plenty of social media companies out there already I don’t see why Reddit decided to become a worse version of Facebook when it could have charted a different path. I’m bitter I guess, as every other social media company is realizing they need to take a step back and add ways to make discussion more civil Reddit is doing the opposite and their karma system actively helps bad faith actors due to how much it affects the perception if a given post. I’m completely done with Reddit, the last two times I’ve reinstalled it the UI has added improvements that I don’t want and I haven’t a productive conversation there in over a year.
  - simonjgreen 5y ago
    I've definitely seen this happen in a slightly different form on hacker news. For example, sometimes someone will reply to a dissenting post simply with a link to the original posters profile as if their history and karma somehow justifies not arguing with them. I'm genuinely not sure what value the karma system adds
- zarzavat 5y ago
  Culture wars topics have always existed on HN. Today it is landlord/motherboard, a few years ago it was master/main, and who can forget Donglegate? Actually HN used to be libertarian as hell with a significant Rand contingent inherited from the Startup community. I feel that HN has mellowed politically over the years as a greater international audience has joined.
alasano 5y ago
Not sure to be honest, but it feels like if HN never goes through a redesign, we'll still be enjoying it in 2050.
- chrononaut 5y ago
  The lack of a redesign I think is a big part why the community remains (if it ain't broken, don't fix it!), plus HN's heavy moderation -- towards these very guidelines.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Does it really have heavy moderation, though? I always feel that the team here has a rather light touch.
    - jolux 5y ago
      For sure it’s very carefully moderated, dang works very hard to keep conversations civil and away from flaming, especially around politics. “Heavy” has some negative connotations though. I think the moderation is appropriate.
      - chrononaut 5y ago
        Yes, perhaps that was a bit strong of a word. On a related note, a good opportunity to repost this article for those that hadn't seen it: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374040
      - ozfive 5y ago
        Dang tends to be fair in his assessments. The first and last time he called me out he made it clear that I ran afoul of the terms and that I should go read them again if I had not. I stopped posting and went and read them. Like another poster said above this is a place where people get chances and when those are given even multiple times to the same person before getting "heavy" there is a high likelihood that people can turn around for the better and permanently. This is now the only place I come due to it being laid out by dang in the way that he did and my active decision to take the advice and become a better poster. There are a lot of very intelligent people here and sometimes I am in awe with the breadth of knowledge that is shared in the comments. I agree that the moderation has been appropriate and effective at that. Things are changing for the positive in my life all around thanks to that reminder and my choice to be a better person because of it.
rdiddly 5y ago
Don't forget how it's fast as heck!
- the_only_law 5y ago
  That is nice. I’m worried I somehow damaged my phones wifi radio (it sits infinitely looking for SSIDs while never finding any now) and my mobile network is screwy, constantly switching networks between low-bar LTE and 5G. Sometimes HN is the only site that wants to load
rtpg 5y ago
I feel like places like tigsource have better civility and high signal to noise ratios. There are a lot of forums that are good cuz they just ban annoying people (and that self selects a lot too). When you try to do mental gymnastics to justify removing people from a community suddenly a certain kind of person can show up and ruin it for everyone. (EDIT: that can be a valid choice for a community! Just has consequences) But HN feels pretty unique in the quality despite being filled with a looooot of people who are, honestly, pretty agressive! The mod team seems to do a pretty good job.
- jorgesborges 5y ago
  A lot of my early experiences on the web involved being banned from places (forums) until I learned to be civil or at least contribute something interesting. The bans weren’t designed to be an excommunication but an inconvenience. I’d sign up again with another username which they knew was me, and I could stay until I acted like an idiot again and they banned me, etc.
  - vlunkr 5y ago
    Yeah, people complain about censorship and bans on social media now, but honestly I don't see it. Seems like you can pretty much spit out nothing but hatred and personal attacks on Twitter or Reddit for years and nothing will happen.
    - mynameisnoone 5y ago
    - bezier-curve 5y ago
      The problem at least for Reddit is consistency and quality of moderation. Moderators will play favorites, and they'll spitefully punish people they don't like. There's no rules on Reddit - paid moderation is the fundamental difference with HN.
    - somenameforme 5y ago
      Twitter completely banned The Babylon Bee for this [1] article/joke. This is among countless other similar decisions on their part. In this case Elon Musk even contacted them (The Babylon Bee) before starting his current crusade, because the ban there is so overtly political. As Noam Chomsky said, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." The reason I give that quote is because you're not wrong. In other topics you can express all of the absolutely vile and hateful things one might like, all while acting like an absolutely horrible person. So just stop making fun of the political ideology largely espoused by the political establishment and corporate elite, and you'll have no problems. It will be quite interesting to see how history ultimately records the times of today. [1] - https://babylonbee.com/news/the-babylon-bees-man-of-the-year-is-rachel-levine/ https://babylonbee.com/news/the-babylon-bees-man-of-the-year...
dredmorbius 5y ago
Metafilter, by a general sense.
- kraussvonespy 5y ago
  Metafilter has always been well moderated. This is an odd one but boards.straightdope.com also works well thanks to good moderation.
the_only_law 5y ago
Sizable I doubt, however I have been in smaller circles that do better.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
It depends how you define "communities". If you treat each of Reddit's subreddits as a separate community then there are a lot of small-to-medium sized ones that qualify. (A lot of awful ones too, of course.)
jdavis703 5y ago
I don’t want your limit for “sizable” is, but yes, but they’re semi-hidden on places like Slack, Reddit and Discord.
thisistheend123 5y ago
I feel that people who find HN good, do so for a reason. They are the kind of people who are in majority in HN. They have similar views and when they comment here on HN their views are accepted and prompted more readily. This makes it a kind of an echo chamber. All deviants get banned or their comments are greyed out. Dissenting is not allowed and dealt with severity and finality.
- Veen 5y ago
  That’s fine though. It’s ok to have communities with shared interests and goals. Sometimes that means keeping out people who prefer something different. That’s ok too; they can start a forum for their community and impose whatever conditions they like. HN is just an Internet forum. It’s not a massive social media platform or a country where exclusionary rules can be damaging to large populations.
kekeblom 5y ago
The Financial Times comment section is surprisingly civil and useful despite it’s size. Not sure if that is the kind of community you had in mind.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  Unless it relates to Brexit/Covid/whatever the current flavour of the month is. Generally, the less commented upon articles are pretty excellent.
- petepete 5y ago
  Is that just a benefit of being behind a paywall though?
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    WSJ is a cesspool, so no.
    - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
      I add the Washington Post comment section, which has to be the most mindless thing I have ever read.
icelancer 5y ago
Some finance forums come close, but they're heavily moderated, just like HN is. Still, your point is a good one.
- symlinkk 5y ago
  Which forums
2143 5y ago
Team-BHP. It's a car enthusiasts' website in India. Their forums section[1] is phenomenal. Their official new car reviews [2] page is thorough. There are owner-reviews of most cars as well [3] (like for instance there's a dozen owner reviews for the BMW X3). There's no membership fee. You don't need to be a member to read the content; you have to be a member to post content though. It does not do advertisements of cars themselves (and openly calls out manufacturers who approach them with rewards for favorable reviews) because they believe it's difficult to be critical of manufacturers after accepting money from them for ads. However, there are ads for non-car products so you might want to keep your ad-blockers on :D Their moderators have other proper day-jobs. Like, they're doctors, entrepreneurs/business-people, dentists, teachers, pilots, software engineers (!) and everything else under the sun. The reason I mention this is because this website isn't really a source of income for anybody. Content is moderated heavily, and people in violation of their guidelines [4] are banned (as long as you're civil, use proper English, don't use swear words etc you'll be fine). [1] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/ https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/ [2] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/official-new-car-reviews/ https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/official-new-car-reviews/ [3] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/ https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/ [4] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/announcement-team-bhp-rules-please-read-before-posting.html https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/announcement...
leksak 5y ago
This comment made me think of a local online social network that was used predominantly in Umeå, Sweden. I can't speak for what happened in DMs but all the public facing content was very civil. And hardly any noise whatsoever. But I don't think local online communities will ever managed to get established anew again.
- timcambrant 5y ago
  Apberget? It was fairly outstanding in being mostly clean and professionally ran without attempting to go national or sell out much. Until they did get bought.
  - leksak 5y ago
    That's the one. Yes, post buy-out it went poorly but that fallout was a given considering the company that purchased it.
buro9 5y ago
Lots. And they are as unknown to you as HN is likely to be to the users of them. I run a number of forums, the largest yielding 250k monthly visitors. It's not huge... But it's 15 years old, very civil, and more interestingly has near zero moderation. The ones I operate I do so on a simple basis... This forum is default dead, if you as users run it into the ground I'll turn it off as I make no money from it do not have any incentive to tolerate your bs. Make of this space whatever you want, but if you want it to exist then that's something that you all need to make happen by figuring out how to be adults. It works. I kill 10 sites for every one that makes it, and the ones that make it are great.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  This is fascinating and I'd love to hear more about it. I generally despise heavy handed moderation as it changes the feel of a community from "a bunch of people talking about X" to "a group of power-mad narcissists and their groupies". Do you see ways of seeding forums that are effective? What kind of moderation do you have (I noticed that LGSS has moderators) - is it just "remove spam and illegal stuff"? Do you have rules for the forums? How often does a long-running forum suddenly, or not so suddenly, go bad? One of my lifelong "addictions" is tabletop RPGs, but the choice of forums just kinda is poor, mostly because of moderation, and so I always have in the back of my mind starting a new one, but I'm always concerned about the moderation effort, so the concept that you can take a different "moderation-free" path is tantalizing!
- ineedasername 5y ago
  >I kill 10 sites for every one that makes it, and the ones that make it are great. That's interesting, a sort of Darwinian selection pressure towards actual discussion. Though as I type that out it occurs to me that that could be a decent working definition of "good moderation"
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
Lobste.rs (I'm not a member) seems pretty good; civil and focused. I guess it's not sizeable.
freddie_mercury 5y ago
I participate in 8 or 10 like that. They aren't especially rare, in my experience.

Pxtl 5y ago

Various well-manicured gardens tucked away in Reddit are quite nice. And honestly I don't think HN is as nice as it used to be now that more and more culture war topics are creeping in.

edgyquant 5y ago
I hear people say this all the time but even the “well-manicured” gardens like the neutral news subreddits suffer from the fact that Reddit as a platform is just not a proper solution for actual discussion. HN is a bit better even and only due to not showing comments karma. It is rare (in fact I’ve never witnessed this) that I see someone on Hacker News spout paragraphs of completely inaccurate information and be rewarded with hitting the top of the page. The culture on Reddit is so bad that on more than one occasion I’ve had someone respond to me with nonsense and provide sources that don’t even mention the topic at hand. But because people see links they upvote (and once a post has a positive upvote rating inertia kicks in since people want to agree with the karma score.) So I disagree, you can manicure rotten eggs all day and they’ll still be rotten. Reddit is rotten and it gets worse every sprint as they introduce more and more Facebook features. The problems with Reddit have only been magnified by the fact that a majority of its users today use it as an app similar to tik tok, and the company is encouraging this. Mainly because what the platform was initially designed as (a top site + forum for the whole internet) isn’t as profitable as being just another gamified and over advertised platform where people can argue about whatever the topic of the day is.
- SantalBlush 5y ago
  If every reddit user had a tag displaying their age, it would help shed light on why that site is such a joke. I suspect it's largely teenagers and young 20-somethings playing expert in a wide variety of fields.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    It definitely is, the demographic seems to completely have changed from when I began using Reddit a decade ago. It use to be fairly technical in nature similar to HN. That has completely changed as even the commentary is so poor compared to just a couple years ago that I can’t believe a company would be so hostile to the user base that initially built it in favor of becoming an application the market has little need for. There’s plenty of social media companies out there already I don’t see why Reddit decided to become a worse version of Facebook when it could have charted a different path. I’m bitter I guess, as every other social media company is realizing they need to take a step back and add ways to make discussion more civil Reddit is doing the opposite and their karma system actively helps bad faith actors due to how much it affects the perception if a given post. I’m completely done with Reddit, the last two times I’ve reinstalled it the UI has added improvements that I don’t want and I haven’t a productive conversation there in over a year.
- simonjgreen 5y ago
  I've definitely seen this happen in a slightly different form on hacker news. For example, sometimes someone will reply to a dissenting post simply with a link to the original posters profile as if their history and karma somehow justifies not arguing with them. I'm genuinely not sure what value the karma system adds
zarzavat 5y ago
Culture wars topics have always existed on HN. Today it is landlord/motherboard, a few years ago it was master/main, and who can forget Donglegate? Actually HN used to be libertarian as hell with a significant Rand contingent inherited from the Startup community. I feel that HN has mellowed politically over the years as a greater international audience has joined.

alasano 5y ago

Not sure to be honest, but it feels like if HN never goes through a redesign, we'll still be enjoying it in 2050.

chrononaut 5y ago
The lack of a redesign I think is a big part why the community remains (if it ain't broken, don't fix it!), plus HN's heavy moderation -- towards these very guidelines.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Does it really have heavy moderation, though? I always feel that the team here has a rather light touch.
  - jolux 5y ago
    For sure it’s very carefully moderated, dang works very hard to keep conversations civil and away from flaming, especially around politics. “Heavy” has some negative connotations though. I think the moderation is appropriate.
    - chrononaut 5y ago
      Yes, perhaps that was a bit strong of a word. On a related note, a good opportunity to repost this article for those that hadn't seen it: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374040
    - ozfive 5y ago
      Dang tends to be fair in his assessments. The first and last time he called me out he made it clear that I ran afoul of the terms and that I should go read them again if I had not. I stopped posting and went and read them. Like another poster said above this is a place where people get chances and when those are given even multiple times to the same person before getting "heavy" there is a high likelihood that people can turn around for the better and permanently. This is now the only place I come due to it being laid out by dang in the way that he did and my active decision to take the advice and become a better poster. There are a lot of very intelligent people here and sometimes I am in awe with the breadth of knowledge that is shared in the comments. I agree that the moderation has been appropriate and effective at that. Things are changing for the positive in my life all around thanks to that reminder and my choice to be a better person because of it.

rdiddly 5y ago

Don't forget how it's fast as heck!

the_only_law 5y ago
That is nice. I’m worried I somehow damaged my phones wifi radio (it sits infinitely looking for SSIDs while never finding any now) and my mobile network is screwy, constantly switching networks between low-bar LTE and 5G. Sometimes HN is the only site that wants to load

rtpg 5y ago

I feel like places like tigsource have better civility and high signal to noise ratios. There are a lot of forums that are good cuz they just ban annoying people (and that self selects a lot too). When you try to do mental gymnastics to justify removing people from a community suddenly a certain kind of person can show up and ruin it for everyone. (EDIT: that can be a valid choice for a community! Just has consequences) But HN feels pretty unique in the quality despite being filled with a looooot of people who are, honestly, pretty agressive! The mod team seems to do a pretty good job.

jorgesborges 5y ago
A lot of my early experiences on the web involved being banned from places (forums) until I learned to be civil or at least contribute something interesting. The bans weren’t designed to be an excommunication but an inconvenience. I’d sign up again with another username which they knew was me, and I could stay until I acted like an idiot again and they banned me, etc.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  Yeah, people complain about censorship and bans on social media now, but honestly I don't see it. Seems like you can pretty much spit out nothing but hatred and personal attacks on Twitter or Reddit for years and nothing will happen.
  - mynameisnoone 5y ago
  - bezier-curve 5y ago
    The problem at least for Reddit is consistency and quality of moderation. Moderators will play favorites, and they'll spitefully punish people they don't like. There's no rules on Reddit - paid moderation is the fundamental difference with HN.
  - somenameforme 5y ago
    Twitter completely banned The Babylon Bee for this [1] article/joke. This is among countless other similar decisions on their part. In this case Elon Musk even contacted them (The Babylon Bee) before starting his current crusade, because the ban there is so overtly political. As Noam Chomsky said, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." The reason I give that quote is because you're not wrong. In other topics you can express all of the absolutely vile and hateful things one might like, all while acting like an absolutely horrible person. So just stop making fun of the political ideology largely espoused by the political establishment and corporate elite, and you'll have no problems. It will be quite interesting to see how history ultimately records the times of today. [1] - https://babylonbee.com/news/the-babylon-bees-man-of-the-year-is-rachel-levine/ https://babylonbee.com/news/the-babylon-bees-man-of-the-year...

dredmorbius 5y ago

Metafilter, by a general sense.

kraussvonespy 5y ago
Metafilter has always been well moderated. This is an odd one but boards.straightdope.com also works well thanks to good moderation.

the_only_law 5y ago

Sizable I doubt, however I have been in smaller circles that do better.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

It depends how you define "communities". If you treat each of Reddit's subreddits as a separate community then there are a lot of small-to-medium sized ones that qualify. (A lot of awful ones too, of course.)

jdavis703 5y ago

I don’t want your limit for “sizable” is, but yes, but they’re semi-hidden on places like Slack, Reddit and Discord.

thisistheend123 5y ago

I feel that people who find HN good, do so for a reason. They are the kind of people who are in majority in HN. They have similar views and when they comment here on HN their views are accepted and prompted more readily. This makes it a kind of an echo chamber. All deviants get banned or their comments are greyed out. Dissenting is not allowed and dealt with severity and finality.

Veen 5y ago
That’s fine though. It’s ok to have communities with shared interests and goals. Sometimes that means keeping out people who prefer something different. That’s ok too; they can start a forum for their community and impose whatever conditions they like. HN is just an Internet forum. It’s not a massive social media platform or a country where exclusionary rules can be damaging to large populations.

kekeblom 5y ago

The Financial Times comment section is surprisingly civil and useful despite it’s size. Not sure if that is the kind of community you had in mind.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago
Unless it relates to Brexit/Covid/whatever the current flavour of the month is. Generally, the less commented upon articles are pretty excellent.
petepete 5y ago
Is that just a benefit of being behind a paywall though?
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  WSJ is a cesspool, so no.
  - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
    I add the Washington Post comment section, which has to be the most mindless thing I have ever read.

icelancer 5y ago

Some finance forums come close, but they're heavily moderated, just like HN is. Still, your point is a good one.

symlinkk 5y ago
Which forums

2143 5y ago

Team-BHP. It's a car enthusiasts' website in India. Their forums section[1] is phenomenal. Their official new car reviews [2] page is thorough. There are owner-reviews of most cars as well [3] (like for instance there's a dozen owner reviews for the BMW X3). There's no membership fee. You don't need to be a member to read the content; you have to be a member to post content though. It does not do advertisements of cars themselves (and openly calls out manufacturers who approach them with rewards for favorable reviews) because they believe it's difficult to be critical of manufacturers after accepting money from them for ads. However, there are ads for non-car products so you might want to keep your ad-blockers on :D Their moderators have other proper day-jobs. Like, they're doctors, entrepreneurs/business-people, dentists, teachers, pilots, software engineers (!) and everything else under the sun. The reason I mention this is because this website isn't really a source of income for anybody. Content is moderated heavily, and people in violation of their guidelines [4] are banned (as long as you're civil, use proper English, don't use swear words etc you'll be fine). [1] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/ https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/ [2] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/official-new-car-reviews/ https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/official-new-car-reviews/ [3] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/ https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/ [4] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/announcement-team-bhp-rules-please-read-before-posting.html https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/announcement...

leksak 5y ago

This comment made me think of a local online social network that was used predominantly in Umeå, Sweden. I can't speak for what happened in DMs but all the public facing content was very civil. And hardly any noise whatsoever. But I don't think local online communities will ever managed to get established anew again.

timcambrant 5y ago
Apberget? It was fairly outstanding in being mostly clean and professionally ran without attempting to go national or sell out much. Until they did get bought.
- leksak 5y ago
  That's the one. Yes, post buy-out it went poorly but that fallout was a given considering the company that purchased it.

buro9 5y ago

Lots. And they are as unknown to you as HN is likely to be to the users of them. I run a number of forums, the largest yielding 250k monthly visitors. It's not huge... But it's 15 years old, very civil, and more interestingly has near zero moderation. The ones I operate I do so on a simple basis... This forum is default dead, if you as users run it into the ground I'll turn it off as I make no money from it do not have any incentive to tolerate your bs. Make of this space whatever you want, but if you want it to exist then that's something that you all need to make happen by figuring out how to be adults. It works. I kill 10 sites for every one that makes it, and the ones that make it are great.

gilbetron 5y ago
This is fascinating and I'd love to hear more about it. I generally despise heavy handed moderation as it changes the feel of a community from "a bunch of people talking about X" to "a group of power-mad narcissists and their groupies". Do you see ways of seeding forums that are effective? What kind of moderation do you have (I noticed that LGSS has moderators) - is it just "remove spam and illegal stuff"? Do you have rules for the forums? How often does a long-running forum suddenly, or not so suddenly, go bad? One of my lifelong "addictions" is tabletop RPGs, but the choice of forums just kinda is poor, mostly because of moderation, and so I always have in the back of my mind starting a new one, but I'm always concerned about the moderation effort, so the concept that you can take a different "moderation-free" path is tantalizing!
ineedasername 5y ago
>I kill 10 sites for every one that makes it, and the ones that make it are great. That's interesting, a sort of Darwinian selection pressure towards actual discussion. Though as I type that out it occurs to me that that could be a decent working definition of "good moderation"

pbhjpbhj 5y ago

Lobste.rs (I'm not a member) seems pretty good; civil and focused. I guess it's not sizeable.

freddie_mercury 5y ago

I participate in 8 or 10 like that. They aren't especially rare, in my experience.