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With the same quality of discussion and excellent moderation? I'm sorry to say that one does not exist for those topics. YMMV, but both /lit/ and Goodreads stil

With the same quality of discussion and excellent moderation? I'm sorry to say that one does not exist for those topics. YMMV, but both /lit/ and Goodreads still have some great discussion amongst all the deep-fried drivel. Most 2000s-era communities have been swallowed by the reddit leviathan and are now made up of similarly low-quality, validation seeking type of discourse.

shagie 4y ago
> With the same quality of discussion and excellent moderation? ... Most 2000s-era communities have been swallowed by the reddit leviathan and are now made up of similarly low-quality, validation seeking type of discourse. There's nothing saying that one can't create a community on reddit and moderate it severely. Yes, it will get some flack from being one of the subs where the moderators delete everything. The community and moderation evolve together and with a few exceptions of being able to edit titles after the fact or change where links point to - reddit offers similar moderation tooling. What is needed is the "create a sub, and moderate it to match the vision." Be it reddit or grabbing a reddit clone and hosting it yourself, or finding another format that works better - the problem is similar. And the core problem there is that volunteer moderation is a thankless task that people only complain about and rarely praise.
- derefr 4y ago
  The core problem of using Reddit as hosting is that Reddit's site-global social gamification mechanisms incentivize things — posting jokes, hearsay, etc — that a "serious" community (e.g. /r/AskHistorians/) explicitly wants to disincentivize. With no ability for a subreddit community to opt out of these gamification mechanisms. So your moderation efforts are always fighting against the direction the system wants to push things. Hosting a community on Reddit, is like having a shortest-path route between two buildings that cuts through a grassy field, and then sticking a sign up saying "keep off the grass" and writing tickets for anyone seen on the grass. Rather than being able to either pave the shortest-route path, or rearrange the buildings so that the route between them doesn't go through the field. There's also no ability to enable any kind of "moderated mode" on a subreddit where only subscribers may post, or where posts/comments (of new users, recent subscribers, etc) must go through a moderation queue. So you're always getting drive-by posts from users who don't know where they are or what the rules are, nor are they going to stick around long enough to care to learn them. The classic "I just found this on /r/all" comment. (You can make a subreddit invite-only, but then people can't even see posts/comments from the subreddit if they're not logged in — i.e. the subreddit is no longer a public website — which is rarely desired.)
  - shagie 4y ago
    You'll see that is a problem here too... Turn on 'showdead' in your profile and you'll see them that get moderated away. Even the trivial posting of jokes and rather content free - it is the community and the moderation that the community does that is there. You can make a restricted subreddit where only people who are subscribers can post (though anyone can read). https://www.reddit.com/r/modguide/comments/dt2qgr/private_restricted_or_public_subreddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modguide/comments/dt2qgr/private_re... You can make a subreddit such that only people who have been flared can post more than once a day with external bots doing moderation and then as a moderator add/remove flares to people who contribute. You can have a sub not show up in /r/all. There is a lot of tooling that can be created and added to subs to get it to fit the moderation that is desired... it just takes work. I would contend that it will take a less work to get a reddit sub to have the community and to match the moderation desired as it would be to launch a site with custom coding that has the desired tooling and community.
    - e12e 4y ago
      Tbh, I see few dead comments these days.
      - shagie 4y ago
        Try browsing through https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463908&p=5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463908&p=5 (or wherever the last page ends up) - though there are more than a few nestled in the comments themselves. And if you scroll to the bottom of even this, rather innocuous ask HN question, there's one at the bottom.
        e12e 4y ago
        > And if you scroll to the bottom of even this, rather innocuous ask HN question, there's one at the bottom. I consider "one at the bottom" and "a handful out of 1300 comments" to be "few". How would you define (non zero) few?

shagie 4y ago

> With the same quality of discussion and excellent moderation? ... Most 2000s-era communities have been swallowed by the reddit leviathan and are now made up of similarly low-quality, validation seeking type of discourse. There's nothing saying that one can't create a community on reddit and moderate it severely. Yes, it will get some flack from being one of the subs where the moderators delete everything. The community and moderation evolve together and with a few exceptions of being able to edit titles after the fact or change where links point to - reddit offers similar moderation tooling. What is needed is the "create a sub, and moderate it to match the vision." Be it reddit or grabbing a reddit clone and hosting it yourself, or finding another format that works better - the problem is similar. And the core problem there is that volunteer moderation is a thankless task that people only complain about and rarely praise.

derefr 4y ago
The core problem of using Reddit as hosting is that Reddit's site-global social gamification mechanisms incentivize things — posting jokes, hearsay, etc — that a "serious" community (e.g. /r/AskHistorians/) explicitly wants to disincentivize. With no ability for a subreddit community to opt out of these gamification mechanisms. So your moderation efforts are always fighting against the direction the system wants to push things. Hosting a community on Reddit, is like having a shortest-path route between two buildings that cuts through a grassy field, and then sticking a sign up saying "keep off the grass" and writing tickets for anyone seen on the grass. Rather than being able to either pave the shortest-route path, or rearrange the buildings so that the route between them doesn't go through the field. There's also no ability to enable any kind of "moderated mode" on a subreddit where only subscribers may post, or where posts/comments (of new users, recent subscribers, etc) must go through a moderation queue. So you're always getting drive-by posts from users who don't know where they are or what the rules are, nor are they going to stick around long enough to care to learn them. The classic "I just found this on /r/all" comment. (You can make a subreddit invite-only, but then people can't even see posts/comments from the subreddit if they're not logged in — i.e. the subreddit is no longer a public website — which is rarely desired.)
- shagie 4y ago
  You'll see that is a problem here too... Turn on 'showdead' in your profile and you'll see them that get moderated away. Even the trivial posting of jokes and rather content free - it is the community and the moderation that the community does that is there. You can make a restricted subreddit where only people who are subscribers can post (though anyone can read). https://www.reddit.com/r/modguide/comments/dt2qgr/private_restricted_or_public_subreddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modguide/comments/dt2qgr/private_re... You can make a subreddit such that only people who have been flared can post more than once a day with external bots doing moderation and then as a moderator add/remove flares to people who contribute. You can have a sub not show up in /r/all. There is a lot of tooling that can be created and added to subs to get it to fit the moderation that is desired... it just takes work. I would contend that it will take a less work to get a reddit sub to have the community and to match the moderation desired as it would be to launch a site with custom coding that has the desired tooling and community.
  - e12e 4y ago
    Tbh, I see few dead comments these days.
    - shagie 4y ago
      Try browsing through https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463908&p=5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463908&p=5 (or wherever the last page ends up) - though there are more than a few nestled in the comments themselves. And if you scroll to the bottom of even this, rather innocuous ask HN question, there's one at the bottom.
      - e12e 4y ago
        > And if you scroll to the bottom of even this, rather innocuous ask HN question, there's one at the bottom. I consider "one at the bottom" and "a handful out of 1300 comments" to be "few". How would you define (non zero) few?