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That's an excellent question. Does HN count? It certainly bears mentioning, if you ask me. I've thought a bit about intentional communities --- communes,

That's an excellent question. Does HN count? It certainly bears mentioning, if you ask me. I've thought a bit about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like What makes HN work is two things. One, dang's insanely great moderation work. HN's guidelines are simple, opinionated, and tailored to a specific niche user audience. Dang is an excellent benevolent dictator, enforcing the guidelines with world-class skill and kindness. Two, there's no direct profit motive with HN. Can't underestimate that. It is optimized for user happiness rather than anything else. These factors work great for an online community but they don't have easy analogues in the physical realm. There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools. I agree that college/university towns in America are generally pretty nice places. Not utopias but generally cooler than others, as a vast generalization. I always see them as kind of a... unique byproduct of a flawed system. The average lifetime earning advantage of a bachelor's degree was about $1 million cumulative USD last I checked. So schools can charge a lot of money, and it is still a good deal, and people will pay that money, and the government subsidizes a lot of this via grants and loans. So you have a gigantic money faucet pouring money into the town, and a lot of people (students, faculty, and graduates who never move away) who have certain demographic traits: they tend be more intelligent and/or more driven and/or are more educated and/or enjoy more privilege. And that certainly creates a certain kind of place, although I think the key factors are hard to duplicate elsewhere w.r.t. founding intentional communities. (Although, maybe that is the ultimate lesson: found your intentional community in the shadow of a giant money faucet and/or a privileged niche community) Another element of the "small" bit Yeah. Small is key. I founded a (now defunct) online niche community that had a very committed fanbase. I viewed smallness as our moat, actually. Big players could never be as small as us; could never have the "small town" or "local bar" feel. This is still an extremely viable business plan for a lot of things IMO if you are willing to stay small and target a max of like... several fulltime employees. There is a lot you can do with a business if e.g. $250,000-$500,000 is your target revenue and are content with that rather than trying to conquer the world, but that requires you to bootstrap and avoid investors more or less. I think Reddit's approach was awesome, actually. A bunch of small, mostly-independent communities (subreddits) under a single roof. It would work if they could downsize and have a razor focus on the core functionality people actually care about. But no, they have to enrich investors, and pay SV rent and SV salaries, and therefore can't turn a profit even on hundreds of millions of revenue. I hope a leaner operation takes their approach and runs with it. I have seen a few mentioned in this discussion. And the StackOverflow network has AFAIK managed to prosper with an approach that is somewhat similar if you take a 50,000ft view.

dredmorbius 3y ago
I'd agree that dang's role is key to HN, though pg also set things up in terms of direction and focus. I've been diving into some of his comments on HN, goals, initial direction, and lessons learned. These are informative and address topics, questions, and issues frequently raised over the ensuing 17 years. Both execution and constitution matter, IMO. What you discuss regarding the enabling mechanisms of college towns is fair commentary, though it should be noted that there are other money faucets which don't create the same effects: natural resource extraction economies, excluding the rapid boom/bust variants, don't give rise to the cultural aspects of a college town. Tourist attractions may, if, say, arts and culture are significant elements of this (say, a Sedona or Ashland, OR, or Bayreuth), though it can be difficult to disentangle tourism from other elements for larger destinations (Disneyland and Hollywood in the Los Angeles region, San Francisco as distinct from its economic and tech-sector activity). Heavily merchantilistic cities can draw wealth, but are less effective with culture (again, trying to isolate for those without a major academic centre, so NYC, London, and Paris would be confounded examples). But a Hong Kong or Shenzen or Dubai or Singapore whilst having an extraordinary merchantile / trading role, does not have a commensurate cultural or academic one. And at the other end of the scale, you can have college towns which are too successful. I'd put Stanford and environs here: Stanford, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Los Altos, say. These are so wealthy that the cultural amplification of the educational institution is dampened by the lack of affordability of the region (housing, etc.). Several of the US East Coast college towns have similar issues. There's still something particular about the college town dynamic, and I think the points I've raised are fairly key to it. Regarding Reddit: The larger encompassing community was useful for a time, but with brigading and even just having a smaller sub appear on the front page or cross-posted to a larger one, the local in-group culture could very easily get overwhelmed. (This is hardly specific to Reddit, and there were examples of trolling and other cross-newsgroup attacks on Usenet.) Reddit does little to foster conversation. I still miss Google+'s dynamic of having a Notifications pane which showed all threads in which there was ongoing discussion (whether it directly involved you or not), and both presented those threads and enabled replying directly from the Notifications pane. This meant that: - Conversations could continue for a prolonged period of time. Days, weeks, even months or years in instances. And do so productively. (Yes, the thread host would have to delete spam and trolls, but a well-tended thread was a delight to behold.) - Other participants would be made aware of the ongoing discussion, and could choose to rejoin if they wished. Or to opt out (mute the thread). Again, with a principled and intelligent host, this could result in long-ongoing discussions. On Reddit, a comment reply generates a notification only to the author of the comment replied to. There's no sense of a thread-notification (or even some smaller region, say, the three or five preceding comments' authors). This means that conversation tends to die rapidly on Reddit. For HN there's a similar issue, though with the "Threads" link it's possible to see if there's been general response to a specific comment of yours. There's no notification mechanism, and unless a third party is higher up on the thread, they're not going to see the activity within their own Threads view. The G+ mechanism can be abused, of course, and is again affected by scale. On G+, a "thread" consisted of an initial post and up to 500 replies, a limit I saw reached occasionally. This limited total participation, though it seemed to be sufficient for most discussions. I'd make a practice of splitting off sub-discussions or linking a continuation thread to preserve integrity of the origin discussion. With 500 comment slots, 20 people would have an opportunity to comment 25 times each, which is reasonably comprehensive. One feature Reddit has that's underutilised (and underpowered, in terms of features, notably search) is the built-in wiki. That could serve far more than it does as an informational repository. There are some subreddits which make good use of the wiki, far too many which ignore it completely. Not being able to search the wiki means it's a bit of a roach motel (text checks in, it never checks out), but ... the concept is useful.

dredmorbius 3y ago

I'd agree that dang's role is key to HN, though pg also set things up in terms of direction and focus. I've been diving into some of his comments on HN, goals, initial direction, and lessons learned. These are informative and address topics, questions, and issues frequently raised over the ensuing 17 years. Both execution and constitution matter, IMO. What you discuss regarding the enabling mechanisms of college towns is fair commentary, though it should be noted that there are other money faucets which don't create the same effects: natural resource extraction economies, excluding the rapid boom/bust variants, don't give rise to the cultural aspects of a college town. Tourist attractions may, if, say, arts and culture are significant elements of this (say, a Sedona or Ashland, OR, or Bayreuth), though it can be difficult to disentangle tourism from other elements for larger destinations (Disneyland and Hollywood in the Los Angeles region, San Francisco as distinct from its economic and tech-sector activity). Heavily merchantilistic cities can draw wealth, but are less effective with culture (again, trying to isolate for those without a major academic centre, so NYC, London, and Paris would be confounded examples). But a Hong Kong or Shenzen or Dubai or Singapore whilst having an extraordinary merchantile / trading role, does not have a commensurate cultural or academic one. And at the other end of the scale, you can have college towns which are too successful. I'd put Stanford and environs here: Stanford, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Los Altos, say. These are so wealthy that the cultural amplification of the educational institution is dampened by the lack of affordability of the region (housing, etc.). Several of the US East Coast college towns have similar issues. There's still something particular about the college town dynamic, and I think the points I've raised are fairly key to it. Regarding Reddit: The larger encompassing community was useful for a time, but with brigading and even just having a smaller sub appear on the front page or cross-posted to a larger one, the local in-group culture could very easily get overwhelmed. (This is hardly specific to Reddit, and there were examples of trolling and other cross-newsgroup attacks on Usenet.) Reddit does little to foster conversation. I still miss Google+'s dynamic of having a Notifications pane which showed all threads in which there was ongoing discussion (whether it directly involved you or not), and both presented those threads and enabled replying directly from the Notifications pane. This meant that: - Conversations could continue for a prolonged period of time. Days, weeks, even months or years in instances. And do so productively. (Yes, the thread host would have to delete spam and trolls, but a well-tended thread was a delight to behold.) - Other participants would be made aware of the ongoing discussion, and could choose to rejoin if they wished. Or to opt out (mute the thread). Again, with a principled and intelligent host, this could result in long-ongoing discussions. On Reddit, a comment reply generates a notification only to the author of the comment replied to. There's no sense of a thread-notification (or even some smaller region, say, the three or five preceding comments' authors). This means that conversation tends to die rapidly on Reddit. For HN there's a similar issue, though with the "Threads" link it's possible to see if there's been general response to a specific comment of yours. There's no notification mechanism, and unless a third party is higher up on the thread, they're not going to see the activity within their own Threads view. The G+ mechanism can be abused, of course, and is again affected by scale. On G+, a "thread" consisted of an initial post and up to 500 replies, a limit I saw reached occasionally. This limited total participation, though it seemed to be sufficient for most discussions. I'd make a practice of splitting off sub-discussions or linking a continuation thread to preserve integrity of the origin discussion. With 500 comment slots, 20 people would have an opportunity to comment 25 times each, which is reasonably comprehensive. One feature Reddit has that's underutilised (and underpowered, in terms of features, notably search) is the built-in wiki. That could serve far more than it does as an informational repository. There are some subreddits which make good use of the wiki, far too many which ignore it completely. Not being able to search the wiki means it's a bit of a roach motel (text checks in, it never checks out), but ... the concept is useful.