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I have two slightly challenging comments, which I hope you will take as constructive prodding to clarify your thinking. Firstly, you have a bit of dissonance i

I have two slightly challenging comments, which I hope you will take as constructive prodding to clarify your thinking. Firstly, you have a bit of dissonance in your thinking that you’ll need to clear up. You say lots of complementary things about HN and suggest that the quality is what you’re aiming for. But you also say you “don’t believe in censorship”. Depending on what you mean by censorship (people have wildly different definitions!), you’ll need to reconcile the fact that HN has relatively restrictive community guidelines, and very active moderation. Many people would credit the high quality of discussion to those things. Secondly, I think your “tags as subreddits” misses the point of subreddits. They’re not a filtering mechanism for which links you want to see, they’re a way to let users associate into small(er) communities where community norms, standards, shared experiences, running jokes, moderation expectations, and generally a community identity and spirit can develop.

throwaway894345 3y ago
I upvoted your comment, but presumably the idea is to get to HN-quality commentary mechanically (rather than having a handful of human moderators doing all of the moderation). That said, I think the highest quality forum is currently lobste.rs. It might just be that smaller forums are easier to moderate, but also I think lobste.rs' moderation isn't vulnerable to some of the exploits that HN's moderation succumbs to. For instance, on HN if someone posts something mildly negative, they'll likely get moderated; however, if they post something that's pretty obviously hostile (to most people, anyway) but with the thinnest possible veneer of plausible deniability, they're not likely to be moderated (and anyone who challenges this plausible deniability may themselves be moderated for violating the 'assume positive intent' guideline). Lobste.rs' moderation lets users flag violating posts and too many flags will result in some moderation--I'm sure this could also be abused, but so far it seems to be doing a good job--maybe there's something Zsync could learn from their approach as well?
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  Re. HN, the guidelines cover this: > Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- aw1621107 3y ago
  > Lobste.rs' moderation lets users flag violating posts and too many flags will result in some moderation--I'm sure this could also be abused, but so far it seems to be doing a good job I believe HN moderation works similarly. Users can flag posts, which - given enough flags - (automatically?) triggers the [flagged] annotation. Moderators also see flags and can act further on them - adding/removing [flagged], warning/banning accounts, etc. In addition, dang has said in the past that the most likely reason some stuff doesn't get moderated is because the moderators don't see it [0], rather than them letting some stuff off the hook. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35971955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35971955
- chmike 3y ago
  I'ld love to login lobste.rs but we need an invite to join. How can we join if we don't know anybody ? This leaves good people out.
  - cgeier 3y ago
    If you leave a way to contact you, people might be able to help you with an invite.
    - chmike 3y ago
      Thank you very much. Here is my email address: mail@chmike.com I have just set it up. It should work
    - cynix 3y ago
      Not GP but I’m also hoping someone can invite me. My email is cynix@cynix.org
      - cynix 3y ago
        Thanks for the invite :)
parpfish 3y ago
I agree that the tags aren’t going to work quite right. If you have multiple tags, the conversion will get dominated by the largest/most vocal tag. niche tags will be drowned out.
int_19h 3y ago
With respect to moderation and censorship, I would suggest the authors look at Aether (https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/ https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/). That project sadly didn't go anywhere, but their overall approach to moderation, I think, is the one that comes closest to reconciling the need to curate with decentralization and differing points of view.
- b112 3y ago
  Election structure Elections are always-ongoing affairs, they never stop. This seems absolutely, horrifically, terrible. Under such a system, no leader will ever lead, instead, a leader will grandstand constantly. You'll end up with moderators that spend all day, every day, playing a popularity contest.
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    > Under such a system, no leader will ever lead That's the whole point. It elects spokespersons, not leaders. It's a wonderful idea.
    - b112 3y ago
      It's terrible. Peer pressure, eg popularity contests, are the cause of most of this world's ills!
      - goodpoint 3y ago
        Do you realize that on the Internet people can move to a different community if they don't like the BDFL-style mods? Besides, you are precisely claiming that dictatorships are better than democracies.
        b112 3y ago
        Read carefully. I said no such thing.
  - 3y ago
danudey 3y ago
I think most 'Reddit alternative' options that people are trying to show off are missing what made Reddit great. I've always described Reddit to new users as 'a community of communities', because that's what it is. Tagging posts with hashtags or topics or labels or whatever misses what actually made reddit great, which is the sense of community in (mostly?) smaller subreddits, and the ability for specific subreddits to have their own rules, moderators, and general sense of what that place was for and why people would want to be there.
- phs318u 3y ago
  > I've always described Reddit to new users as 'a community of communities', because that's what it is. Which is an interesting point to make because that's exactly the experience I'm finding with Mastodon, having joined a community-specific instance (metalhead.club) which gives me that feeling of being in a community, but having some access to users from other communities via following interesting people. That last thing is the key difference with Mastodon - discovery is different. There's no algorithm pushing things into your feed - you need to be much more active in your own content discovery.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    What I find strange is that I don’t want to be part of only a single community. Yeah I know I can follow others, but to me it’s still somehow stranger than e.g. reddit’s model.
    - phs318u 3y ago
      Yes. I agree there’s more friction if you’re active in multiple communities. Lurking can sort of be achieved through judicious use of following tags.
- zelse 3y ago
  Nicely put. At its best and its worst, reddit reminds me of a more impersonal version &TOTSE's forums from the web of the 90s and early 00s: a community of communities, where you might see familiar faces from one spot to the next, but they were largely their own little worlds with their own norms, regulars, moderation, etc. It was infamous at the time for the Bad Ideas forum where things like explosives and shoplifting techniques were discussed, but it also hosted flourishing communities dedicated to books, literary criticism, movies, politics, etc. Many people were quite content never sticking their heads out of the nicer places into the more 'interesting' areas, and it remained markedly welcoming and collegial throughout most of its existence. It and reddit also had the benefit of easier discoverability: it's trivial to move around and discover new, related communities, which IMHO was also the charm of IRC and something rather missing from Discord and the like.
CivBase 3y ago
IMO, I'd rather see ML used to improve moderation rather than another opaque algorithm picking content for a social media feed. I wonder how accurate an ML algorithm could get at picking out moderation-worthy comments.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  How is ML not also an opaque algorithm? You can still bake bias in, especially if you train it on the type of content to favor.
  - CivBase 3y ago
    I wasn't trying to say ML makes an algorithm any less opaque - just that I don't like when such algorithms are used to populate content feeds. I avoid content feeds that aren't driven by algorithms with simple, understandable rules, like the HN's voting system. But I thought maybe there would be an application for using ML to help moderators more quickly detect posts and comments which warrent their attention. In that case, the "opaqueness" of the algorithm doesn't matter to me.
- pasc1878 3y ago
  You might want to look at the current issues in StackOverflow - both sides of the dispute say that ML is not good enough to detect bad things.
  - CivBase 3y ago
    Do you have a good link? I think it's an interesting subject, but all I can find are posts made by SO mods and admins which are generally positive about using bots to detect bad posts. If there is a controversy, I suppose SO would probably prefer it be hard to search for. I've thought many times about ideas for platforms which involve user-submitted content, and I've always given up on them quickly because I couldn't think of a good way to handle moderation. It's probably just wishful thinking that ML could significantly help with that.
ianburrell 3y ago
I think the most interesting thing about Reddit is that it can have so many different subreddits with different rules. There are unmoderated ones that still stay on topic, free-for-alls, niche discussions, and pretty heavy moderation that inspires new subreddit that is never as good. Then there is AskHistorians. AskHistorians has some of the best answers, and almost no discussion. It is pretty common to have posts with no surviving comments. I someti es wish it was less strict, but maybe it needs sister sub where unanswered questions and discussion can go. Can the replacement platforms have AskHistorians on them?
JSavageOne 3y ago
Fair point on the active moderation. I've never moderated a community before so I have no idea how much work goes into it, perhaps I'm drastically underestimating it. For example I posted this before going to sleep and woke up to see that someone had spammed the site with 300+ throwaway posts. Forgot there are people like that. I agree on the value of subreddits as private communities. I suppose private communities and tagging can still co-exist. Many different ways to design that.
- sverhagen 3y ago
  You are probably monumentally underestimating it, and with that it's not really a Reddit alternative... maybe rather a toy version of it? Not only is moderation going to be a huge task, but it would be so, even without worrying about much of the most basic spam, which I have to assume Reddit catches automatically, without moderator intervention. Your 300+ throwaway poster may be a malicious user, but on the other hand they may have set out to answer an obvious and important question about this Reddit "alternative", by seeing if it's up for the job :) See it as free user acceptance testing (fail).
  - JSavageOne 3y ago
    Yea that's why I'm not even mad about it. I think the route to go if the spam persists would be making it invite-only, and so that uninvited user registrations would have to be manually approved. Wouldn't eliminate the problem, but would potentially dramatically reduce the amount of moderation work vs. making it a free-for-all. Not getting enough usage now to justify it, but just an idea. I think with the right people, the platform doesn't really matter at all. I mean the best communities now are probably in random Telegram group chats. The main challenge is attracting a community of the right people in the first place, and that challenge is more marketing than technical. I think maybe the right approach here might just be creating and curating high quality content, then the people come. This is how most communities are built I think (eg. Indie Hackers). I'm admittedly more focused on other projects at the moment that I think have more obvious utility though (working on a self-hosted open source Notion clone at the moment)
amadeuspagel 3y ago
There's no cognitive dissonance in appreciating one thing and yet wanting to do another thing. The point of subreddits has been a failure. Most people do not understand that subreddits are individual communities. If you browse reddit from the frontpage, you get little sense that you are participating in different communities. Most people, for better or worse, perceive reddit as one community. So the question is: Should power mods have this immense power to shape the values of this community? This isn't HN (moderated) or reddit (individual communities) but HN and reddit already exist, a new thing should be different.

throwaway894345 3y ago

I upvoted your comment, but presumably the idea is to get to HN-quality commentary mechanically (rather than having a handful of human moderators doing all of the moderation). That said, I think the highest quality forum is currently lobste.rs. It might just be that smaller forums are easier to moderate, but also I think lobste.rs' moderation isn't vulnerable to some of the exploits that HN's moderation succumbs to. For instance, on HN if someone posts something mildly negative, they'll likely get moderated; however, if they post something that's pretty obviously hostile (to most people, anyway) but with the thinnest possible veneer of plausible deniability, they're not likely to be moderated (and anyone who challenges this plausible deniability may themselves be moderated for violating the 'assume positive intent' guideline). Lobste.rs' moderation lets users flag violating posts and too many flags will result in some moderation--I'm sure this could also be abused, but so far it seems to be doing a good job--maybe there's something Zsync could learn from their approach as well?

8organicbits 3y ago
Re. HN, the guidelines cover this: > Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
aw1621107 3y ago
> Lobste.rs' moderation lets users flag violating posts and too many flags will result in some moderation--I'm sure this could also be abused, but so far it seems to be doing a good job I believe HN moderation works similarly. Users can flag posts, which - given enough flags - (automatically?) triggers the [flagged] annotation. Moderators also see flags and can act further on them - adding/removing [flagged], warning/banning accounts, etc. In addition, dang has said in the past that the most likely reason some stuff doesn't get moderated is because the moderators don't see it [0], rather than them letting some stuff off the hook. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35971955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35971955
chmike 3y ago
I'ld love to login lobste.rs but we need an invite to join. How can we join if we don't know anybody ? This leaves good people out.
- cgeier 3y ago
  If you leave a way to contact you, people might be able to help you with an invite.
  - chmike 3y ago
    Thank you very much. Here is my email address: mail@chmike.com I have just set it up. It should work
  - cynix 3y ago
    Not GP but I’m also hoping someone can invite me. My email is cynix@cynix.org
    - cynix 3y ago
      Thanks for the invite :)

parpfish 3y ago

I agree that the tags aren’t going to work quite right. If you have multiple tags, the conversion will get dominated by the largest/most vocal tag. niche tags will be drowned out.

int_19h 3y ago

With respect to moderation and censorship, I would suggest the authors look at Aether (https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/ https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/). That project sadly didn't go anywhere, but their overall approach to moderation, I think, is the one that comes closest to reconciling the need to curate with decentralization and differing points of view.

b112 3y ago
Election structure Elections are always-ongoing affairs, they never stop. This seems absolutely, horrifically, terrible. Under such a system, no leader will ever lead, instead, a leader will grandstand constantly. You'll end up with moderators that spend all day, every day, playing a popularity contest.
- goodpoint 3y ago
  > Under such a system, no leader will ever lead That's the whole point. It elects spokespersons, not leaders. It's a wonderful idea.
  - b112 3y ago
    It's terrible. Peer pressure, eg popularity contests, are the cause of most of this world's ills!
    - goodpoint 3y ago
      Do you realize that on the Internet people can move to a different community if they don't like the BDFL-style mods? Besides, you are precisely claiming that dictatorships are better than democracies.
      - b112 3y ago
        Read carefully. I said no such thing.
- 3y ago

danudey 3y ago

I think most 'Reddit alternative' options that people are trying to show off are missing what made Reddit great. I've always described Reddit to new users as 'a community of communities', because that's what it is. Tagging posts with hashtags or topics or labels or whatever misses what actually made reddit great, which is the sense of community in (mostly?) smaller subreddits, and the ability for specific subreddits to have their own rules, moderators, and general sense of what that place was for and why people would want to be there.

phs318u 3y ago
> I've always described Reddit to new users as 'a community of communities', because that's what it is. Which is an interesting point to make because that's exactly the experience I'm finding with Mastodon, having joined a community-specific instance (metalhead.club) which gives me that feeling of being in a community, but having some access to users from other communities via following interesting people. That last thing is the key difference with Mastodon - discovery is different. There's no algorithm pushing things into your feed - you need to be much more active in your own content discovery.
- kaba0 3y ago
  What I find strange is that I don’t want to be part of only a single community. Yeah I know I can follow others, but to me it’s still somehow stranger than e.g. reddit’s model.
  - phs318u 3y ago
    Yes. I agree there’s more friction if you’re active in multiple communities. Lurking can sort of be achieved through judicious use of following tags.
zelse 3y ago
Nicely put. At its best and its worst, reddit reminds me of a more impersonal version &TOTSE's forums from the web of the 90s and early 00s: a community of communities, where you might see familiar faces from one spot to the next, but they were largely their own little worlds with their own norms, regulars, moderation, etc. It was infamous at the time for the Bad Ideas forum where things like explosives and shoplifting techniques were discussed, but it also hosted flourishing communities dedicated to books, literary criticism, movies, politics, etc. Many people were quite content never sticking their heads out of the nicer places into the more 'interesting' areas, and it remained markedly welcoming and collegial throughout most of its existence. It and reddit also had the benefit of easier discoverability: it's trivial to move around and discover new, related communities, which IMHO was also the charm of IRC and something rather missing from Discord and the like.

CivBase 3y ago

IMO, I'd rather see ML used to improve moderation rather than another opaque algorithm picking content for a social media feed. I wonder how accurate an ML algorithm could get at picking out moderation-worthy comments.

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
How is ML not also an opaque algorithm? You can still bake bias in, especially if you train it on the type of content to favor.
- CivBase 3y ago
  I wasn't trying to say ML makes an algorithm any less opaque - just that I don't like when such algorithms are used to populate content feeds. I avoid content feeds that aren't driven by algorithms with simple, understandable rules, like the HN's voting system. But I thought maybe there would be an application for using ML to help moderators more quickly detect posts and comments which warrent their attention. In that case, the "opaqueness" of the algorithm doesn't matter to me.
pasc1878 3y ago
You might want to look at the current issues in StackOverflow - both sides of the dispute say that ML is not good enough to detect bad things.
- CivBase 3y ago
  Do you have a good link? I think it's an interesting subject, but all I can find are posts made by SO mods and admins which are generally positive about using bots to detect bad posts. If there is a controversy, I suppose SO would probably prefer it be hard to search for. I've thought many times about ideas for platforms which involve user-submitted content, and I've always given up on them quickly because I couldn't think of a good way to handle moderation. It's probably just wishful thinking that ML could significantly help with that.

ianburrell 3y ago

I think the most interesting thing about Reddit is that it can have so many different subreddits with different rules. There are unmoderated ones that still stay on topic, free-for-alls, niche discussions, and pretty heavy moderation that inspires new subreddit that is never as good. Then there is AskHistorians. AskHistorians has some of the best answers, and almost no discussion. It is pretty common to have posts with no surviving comments. I someti es wish it was less strict, but maybe it needs sister sub where unanswered questions and discussion can go. Can the replacement platforms have AskHistorians on them?

JSavageOne 3y ago

Fair point on the active moderation. I've never moderated a community before so I have no idea how much work goes into it, perhaps I'm drastically underestimating it. For example I posted this before going to sleep and woke up to see that someone had spammed the site with 300+ throwaway posts. Forgot there are people like that. I agree on the value of subreddits as private communities. I suppose private communities and tagging can still co-exist. Many different ways to design that.

sverhagen 3y ago
You are probably monumentally underestimating it, and with that it's not really a Reddit alternative... maybe rather a toy version of it? Not only is moderation going to be a huge task, but it would be so, even without worrying about much of the most basic spam, which I have to assume Reddit catches automatically, without moderator intervention. Your 300+ throwaway poster may be a malicious user, but on the other hand they may have set out to answer an obvious and important question about this Reddit "alternative", by seeing if it's up for the job :) See it as free user acceptance testing (fail).
- JSavageOne 3y ago
  Yea that's why I'm not even mad about it. I think the route to go if the spam persists would be making it invite-only, and so that uninvited user registrations would have to be manually approved. Wouldn't eliminate the problem, but would potentially dramatically reduce the amount of moderation work vs. making it a free-for-all. Not getting enough usage now to justify it, but just an idea. I think with the right people, the platform doesn't really matter at all. I mean the best communities now are probably in random Telegram group chats. The main challenge is attracting a community of the right people in the first place, and that challenge is more marketing than technical. I think maybe the right approach here might just be creating and curating high quality content, then the people come. This is how most communities are built I think (eg. Indie Hackers). I'm admittedly more focused on other projects at the moment that I think have more obvious utility though (working on a self-hosted open source Notion clone at the moment)

amadeuspagel 3y ago

There's no cognitive dissonance in appreciating one thing and yet wanting to do another thing. The point of subreddits has been a failure. Most people do not understand that subreddits are individual communities. If you browse reddit from the frontpage, you get little sense that you are participating in different communities. Most people, for better or worse, perceive reddit as one community. So the question is: Should power mods have this immense power to shape the values of this community? This isn't HN (moderated) or reddit (individual communities) but HN and reddit already exist, a new thing should be different.