though pg also set [HN] up in terms of direction and focus. [...] Both execution and constitution matter, IMO. 100%. that there are other money fauce

though pg also set [HN] up in terms of direction and focus. [...] Both execution and constitution matter, IMO. 100%. that there are other money faucets which don't create the same effects: natural resource extraction economies, [...] Tourist attractions [...] Yeah, there are other distinct factors with college towns relative to other money faucets. - The (putative, anyway) core mission of colleges is one of education and research. There's a hell of a lot of other stuff going on at colleges, to the point where that core mission often feels like an afterthought, but it is a unique factor relative to the other examples we can name. - While colleges sure love to suck up money, it is not their core focus in the way that it is for a corporation. - Colleges have a markedly younger demographic than just about any other money faucet we could name There are more of course. And at the other end of the scale, you can have college towns which are too successful. [...] These are so wealthy that the cultural amplification of the educational institution is dampened by the lack of affordability of the region 100%. 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. This is very true for me, especially on large threads with more than ~100 replies. Ultimately I don't find this to be a dealbreaker but it is for sure a shortcoming. One feature Reddit has that's underutilised (and underpowered, in terms of features, notably search) Yeah. On the subreddit I moderate(d) we saw the same questions over and over and we wanted the wiki to be the solution to that. But realistically nobody looks on those wikis unless a mod or somebody explicitly links them to the wiki. I don't know what the solution is there. A wiki is such a different paradigm w.r.t. a threaded discussion forum. And their functionality overlaps. I don't know how you weld them together. To really make it work in a synergistic way there'd need to be some thoughtful integration. First we'd need to define the purpose of each. This is an admittedly arbitrary distinction but IMO it would be useful to have the wiki be a place for higher-quality information that has been accepted as canonical or at least reliable by the mods and the community. This would need to be coupled with a way to "bless" or "promote" information from discussion threads to the wiki. And a helpful and magical way to automatically surface relevant wiki information in threads, for example if you are asking a question whose answer already lives in the wiki. The wiki search should, as you say, be better. But the underlying problem there is split-brain syndrome: the bit of information you want could lie in the threads and/or the wiki. At a bare minimum there needs to be a unified search.