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Every guild or community should have a high quality discussion forum like hackernews. But assuming you can translate the learnings from Hackernews to another pl

Every guild or community should have a high quality discussion forum like hackernews. But assuming you can translate the learnings from Hackernews to another platform, how exactly would you ensure high quality?

all2 2y ago
Buy a clone of dang. Or several.
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  Get OpenDang from Github and run it locally.
  - DenisM 2y ago
    Well, you jest, but what if we could create an LLM that follows dang behavior? He’s pretty low-touch on substance and mostly moderates style. An LLM should be able to copy that. If I didn’t have to work for a living I might pursue that, that would be a huge benefit to humanity.
- baxtr 2y ago
  This might be easier today than before with the help of AI.
- close04 2y ago
  This is missing the elephant in the room that HN is not the (or maybe even a) money bringer for YCombinator. Were this the golden goose for a publicly traded company, the decision process could quickly shift to "make me money or GTFO". Being a "benevolent dictator" moderator is the ideal model: you have clear values, a clear strategy, an overview over everything, and the unbridled power to execute. Benevolent dictatorships don't scale the moment you need more than exactly one such benevolent dictator. dang's clone will have all I mentioned above except probably slightly different of everything and now exactly half of the power to execute. And that's where it gets close to impossible to exercise the "correct" and desired level of power to support the individual values, overview, strategy. When you need 1000 moderators it becomes a crapshoot if the moderation you get is any good. And the community is only as good as the worst mods and users that are allowed in it.
  - richardw 2y ago
    I’d say HN has generated them a huge amount of money. It’s a massive center of high quality tech discussion and HN posts have priority. Every other investment company would kill to own and run HN. What’s the value? Try set up a competitor and guess at how much it’ll cost to get all the seriously top shelf users on there.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
langsoul-com 2y ago
A ton of moderators
- snowpid 2y ago
  yes. On military topics r/credibleDefence is its own value but it also heavely moderated. Good social media needs good moderation.
DeathArrow 2y ago
Hacker news is great but it's not a social platform. Hard to follow someone, hard to chat, hard to form groups discussing various topics. It would be nice to have features of hacker news and reddit combined.
- holoduke 2y ago
  No it attracts certain kind of people. Which in result degrade the level of discussions. It is near perfect as it is right now
- Etheryte 2y ago
  HN not having those features is a feature in and of itself. It does one thing and does it well, not having the same features as Reddit is exactly why it's better than Reddit.
  - Semaphor 2y ago
    It’s also why old reddit is still mostly great, because it also lacks those "features".
  - aurareturn 2y ago
    I think HN is far less accessible than Reddit. This turns away the casuals, leaving behind the more hardcore users. Every subreddit with a large following eventually turns into a complete meme fest with low quality comments and trolls. But the smaller subreddits still offer good value.
    - the_duke 2y ago
      Some subreddits managed to maintain pretty high quality in the past, with pretty aggressive moderation. eg: r/askhistorians or r/politics. No idea how the situation is nowadays, I haven't really been on there in years. But that requires a lot of effort from the moderators.
      - aurareturn 2y ago
amadeuspagel 2y ago
A paid, full-time moderator.
thinkingtoilet 2y ago
As others have pointed out, the answer is moderation. High quality, diligent moderation. Reddit is the ultimate proof of this. A highly moderated, focused subreddit can be a wonderful place. A loosely moderated subreddit quickly devolves into memes and lowest common denominator posts, which is totally fine for specific subjects, or even meme-based subreddits for a given topic. If you want quality, you have to invest in it. It doesn't just happen. The good news is that it's self reinforcing. Once you have something good, people start policing themselves and others. This can go overboard of course, but it can be a good a really good thing. I often see comments here along the lines of, "comments like this are not welcome here".
- swayvil 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - canadiantim 2y ago
    I bet your POV is more common than traditionally thought
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - pjc50 2y ago
    > (Let's not fool ourselves. We have moderators and downvotes, not because they work well, but because it's a convenient lesser evil) Well, indeed. This is just anarchism vs. policing but for text. It gets re-litigated over and over again; different places move the boundary to different places. But very few dare to have no moderators or no police, and those that do are usually fairly immediate disasters. I'm sure you could find Bakunin quotes that accurately describe the moderation dilemma from 100+ years foresight, if you were so inclined.
    - swayvil 2y ago
      The most palatable solution (historically speaking) is democracy. Yes I'm being dictated to but at least we're all doing it to ourselves. A modern technologically enhanced refinement of that is the best that I can think of.
throwaway22032 2y ago
Elitism. You need to keep the quality of discussion high. That means prioritising individuals with critical thinking skills over emotional hot takes. I disagree with political opinions on here a lot of the time, but the individuals expressing them are usually at least able to articulate logically why they make sense from their vantage point. By contrast, somewhere like Reddit is obviously made up of far less inquisitive individuals on average which makes everything a "hot take", often using buzzwords.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
BlockerBrews 2y ago
I would a list to see a list of high quality discussion forums for various communities.
Nextgrid 2y ago
Do not have a business that relies on "growth & engagement". The problems of large-scale social media are all due to them making money from "engagement" - it doesn't matter how disruptive someone is, they are "engaging" and producing content that others will "engage" with. Bonus points that harmful and divisive content tends to produce more engagement (from others being angry and arguing) than constructive content, so there's this perverse incentive where they have to pretend to forbid such content but often look the other way when it's posted up to a certain threshold (there's probably a formula that calculates the "optimal" exposure time for harmful/divisive content that maximizes engagement while not letting it stay too long for the media to get wind of it and cause a PR/regulatory issue). Given the above, it's no surprise that any large-scale social media platform eventually devolves into a cesspit. The "moderation" they have is purely there to placate regulators but its actual quality is terrible, both in terms of false positives but also false negatives because investing into good moderation would be bad for business for 2 reasons: 1) it costs money and 2) it would catch a lot more harmful/divisive content that currently generates plenty of engagement. Being a cesspit is actually profitable as long as your competition is also a cesspit (which it will be as long as it has the same business model and incentives). If your business model doesn't depend on engagement, then you can be much more selective and restrictive in the types of content you allow, and make rule breaking more costly (you can even charge for accounts which would make permanent bans cost more than just a new e-mail address). Encouraging quality over quantity also means there's overall less work for the human moderators. Moderation is not some impossible problem despite what the large-scale social media platforms say. It's only impossible if you intentionally open the floodgates and encourage everyone to piss in the stream. But you don't have to open the floodgates. You can encourage quality over quantity and make it costly to break the rules. The reason HN works isn't because they have some secret sauce, it's just that they would rather have no content than bad content, while every social media website out there would rather have bad content than none at all.

all2 2y ago

Buy a clone of dang. Or several.

DeathArrow 2y ago
Get OpenDang from Github and run it locally.
- DenisM 2y ago
  Well, you jest, but what if we could create an LLM that follows dang behavior? He’s pretty low-touch on substance and mostly moderates style. An LLM should be able to copy that. If I didn’t have to work for a living I might pursue that, that would be a huge benefit to humanity.
baxtr 2y ago
This might be easier today than before with the help of AI.
close04 2y ago
This is missing the elephant in the room that HN is not the (or maybe even a) money bringer for YCombinator. Were this the golden goose for a publicly traded company, the decision process could quickly shift to "make me money or GTFO". Being a "benevolent dictator" moderator is the ideal model: you have clear values, a clear strategy, an overview over everything, and the unbridled power to execute. Benevolent dictatorships don't scale the moment you need more than exactly one such benevolent dictator. dang's clone will have all I mentioned above except probably slightly different of everything and now exactly half of the power to execute. And that's where it gets close to impossible to exercise the "correct" and desired level of power to support the individual values, overview, strategy. When you need 1000 moderators it becomes a crapshoot if the moderation you get is any good. And the community is only as good as the worst mods and users that are allowed in it.
- richardw 2y ago
  I’d say HN has generated them a huge amount of money. It’s a massive center of high quality tech discussion and HN posts have priority. Every other investment company would kill to own and run HN. What’s the value? Try set up a competitor and guess at how much it’ll cost to get all the seriously top shelf users on there.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

langsoul-com 2y ago

A ton of moderators

snowpid 2y ago
yes. On military topics r/credibleDefence is its own value but it also heavely moderated. Good social media needs good moderation.

DeathArrow 2y ago

Hacker news is great but it's not a social platform. Hard to follow someone, hard to chat, hard to form groups discussing various topics. It would be nice to have features of hacker news and reddit combined.

holoduke 2y ago
No it attracts certain kind of people. Which in result degrade the level of discussions. It is near perfect as it is right now
Etheryte 2y ago
HN not having those features is a feature in and of itself. It does one thing and does it well, not having the same features as Reddit is exactly why it's better than Reddit.
- Semaphor 2y ago
  It’s also why old reddit is still mostly great, because it also lacks those "features".
- aurareturn 2y ago
  I think HN is far less accessible than Reddit. This turns away the casuals, leaving behind the more hardcore users. Every subreddit with a large following eventually turns into a complete meme fest with low quality comments and trolls. But the smaller subreddits still offer good value.
  - the_duke 2y ago
    Some subreddits managed to maintain pretty high quality in the past, with pretty aggressive moderation. eg: r/askhistorians or r/politics. No idea how the situation is nowadays, I haven't really been on there in years. But that requires a lot of effort from the moderators.
    - aurareturn 2y ago

amadeuspagel 2y ago

A paid, full-time moderator.

thinkingtoilet 2y ago

As others have pointed out, the answer is moderation. High quality, diligent moderation. Reddit is the ultimate proof of this. A highly moderated, focused subreddit can be a wonderful place. A loosely moderated subreddit quickly devolves into memes and lowest common denominator posts, which is totally fine for specific subjects, or even meme-based subreddits for a given topic. If you want quality, you have to invest in it. It doesn't just happen. The good news is that it's self reinforcing. Once you have something good, people start policing themselves and others. This can go overboard of course, but it can be a good a really good thing. I often see comments here along the lines of, "comments like this are not welcome here".

swayvil 2y ago
[flagged]
- canadiantim 2y ago
  I bet your POV is more common than traditionally thought
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- pjc50 2y ago
  > (Let's not fool ourselves. We have moderators and downvotes, not because they work well, but because it's a convenient lesser evil) Well, indeed. This is just anarchism vs. policing but for text. It gets re-litigated over and over again; different places move the boundary to different places. But very few dare to have no moderators or no police, and those that do are usually fairly immediate disasters. I'm sure you could find Bakunin quotes that accurately describe the moderation dilemma from 100+ years foresight, if you were so inclined.
  - swayvil 2y ago
    The most palatable solution (historically speaking) is democracy. Yes I'm being dictated to but at least we're all doing it to ourselves. A modern technologically enhanced refinement of that is the best that I can think of.

throwaway22032 2y ago

Elitism. You need to keep the quality of discussion high. That means prioritising individuals with critical thinking skills over emotional hot takes. I disagree with political opinions on here a lot of the time, but the individuals expressing them are usually at least able to articulate logically why they make sense from their vantage point. By contrast, somewhere like Reddit is obviously made up of far less inquisitive individuals on average which makes everything a "hot take", often using buzzwords.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

BlockerBrews 2y ago

I would a list to see a list of high quality discussion forums for various communities.

Nextgrid 2y ago

Do not have a business that relies on "growth & engagement". The problems of large-scale social media are all due to them making money from "engagement" - it doesn't matter how disruptive someone is, they are "engaging" and producing content that others will "engage" with. Bonus points that harmful and divisive content tends to produce more engagement (from others being angry and arguing) than constructive content, so there's this perverse incentive where they have to pretend to forbid such content but often look the other way when it's posted up to a certain threshold (there's probably a formula that calculates the "optimal" exposure time for harmful/divisive content that maximizes engagement while not letting it stay too long for the media to get wind of it and cause a PR/regulatory issue). Given the above, it's no surprise that any large-scale social media platform eventually devolves into a cesspit. The "moderation" they have is purely there to placate regulators but its actual quality is terrible, both in terms of false positives but also false negatives because investing into good moderation would be bad for business for 2 reasons: 1) it costs money and 2) it would catch a lot more harmful/divisive content that currently generates plenty of engagement. Being a cesspit is actually profitable as long as your competition is also a cesspit (which it will be as long as it has the same business model and incentives). If your business model doesn't depend on engagement, then you can be much more selective and restrictive in the types of content you allow, and make rule breaking more costly (you can even charge for accounts which would make permanent bans cost more than just a new e-mail address). Encouraging quality over quantity also means there's overall less work for the human moderators. Moderation is not some impossible problem despite what the large-scale social media platforms say. It's only impossible if you intentionally open the floodgates and encourage everyone to piss in the stream. But you don't have to open the floodgates. You can encourage quality over quantity and make it costly to break the rules. The reason HN works isn't because they have some secret sauce, it's just that they would rather have no content than bad content, while every social media website out there would rather have bad content than none at all.