4 ms·

...and the lack of friction. I'm not making a new account for your forum on your site. And consistent UI. Threaded conversations rather than a single scroll

...and the lack of friction. I'm not making a new account for your forum on your site. And consistent UI. Threaded conversations rather than a single scroll by date. Upvoting. Following a user to see the content they've created in other forums. Easy discovery. Some guarantees of not being hacked by the site itself. Ways to block users. The auto-moderation tools. The fun bots in some reddits. And yes, most of all, the mnemonic forums. /r/minnesota. I just guessed that, and I was right. There's good and bad to that land-grab. I kind of wish that there was one more layer of indirection... That if I made a /r/minnesota and you made an /r/minnesota, that whoever has the most engagement is the "default" /r/minnesota that some new user will see... but that if the other gets the most engagement, the "default" would change. And that a given user can pick which /r/minnesota they want to be what they see when they type /r/minnesota. But that's just how I want to handle the case of tyrant mods who own popular mnemonics but have instituted terrible policies.

opportune 3y ago
The landgrab is part of the problem, you get discoverability and less of a fractured community, but always and forever that’s gonna be the first and probably main place people go to for Minnesota content. Which allows for really shitty moderation and all sorts of perverse incentivizes like registering subreddit names as soon as you find out about a new show/companies registering their own subs Splinter subreddits still happen, like the various right wing politics subs, but a lot of them fizzle out. People have attempted free speech subreddits and of course there was voat, but it turns out there is a lot of adverse selection in which kind of user goes there. One reason I’d prefer using the web and regular forums is that popular domains are already taken, so there’s naturally going to be more room for competition and multiple forums all discussing the same thing, with all the pros and cons that entails. While the vote->ranking/visibility mechanism is interesting I think it also biases towards simple content that appeals to the broadest base of users. It’s good for surfacing feel good pictures of something vaguely Minnesota related but not for things like discussing the merits of a legislative bill.

opportune 3y ago

The landgrab is part of the problem, you get discoverability and less of a fractured community, but always and forever that’s gonna be the first and probably main place people go to for Minnesota content. Which allows for really shitty moderation and all sorts of perverse incentivizes like registering subreddit names as soon as you find out about a new show/companies registering their own subs Splinter subreddits still happen, like the various right wing politics subs, but a lot of them fizzle out. People have attempted free speech subreddits and of course there was voat, but it turns out there is a lot of adverse selection in which kind of user goes there. One reason I’d prefer using the web and regular forums is that popular domains are already taken, so there’s naturally going to be more room for competition and multiple forums all discussing the same thing, with all the pros and cons that entails. While the vote->ranking/visibility mechanism is interesting I think it also biases towards simple content that appeals to the broadest base of users. It’s good for surfacing feel good pictures of something vaguely Minnesota related but not for things like discussing the merits of a legislative bill.