4 ms·

As others have pointed out, the answer is moderation. High quality, diligent moderation. Reddit is the ultimate proof of this. A highly moderated, focused subre

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.
- CommieBobDole 2y ago
  >I know that this is an uncommon view. I don't think this is correct - this is an extremely common view, in several senses of the word. It's especially popular among people who have never tried to use an unmoderated forum with more than a few members, and the sort of people who make moderation a necessity in the first place. >because it's a convenient lesser evil This is the true in the sense that pretty much all of society is a convenient lesser evil than "everybody agrees generally what the right thing is and does that all the time without exception".
  - trueismywork 2y ago
    As well all know thebcrration of universe is considered to be a mistake by most.
- instagraham 2y ago
  To riff a bit on Pirsig, those who recognise Quality seem to do a good job of finding and curating it in the wild
- wand3r 2y ago
  I dislike censorship but I dont mind* moderation. Twitter is impossible to use because you have 0 buy in and common ground. I have no problem with a subreddit that wants to show beheading videos that moderates non-beheading videos from being posted. This is how I believe the town square should work. There is room for everyone to have a space, but it's NOT the SAME space. Moderation of bots and some content makes sites useable as long as everyone agrees what is OK and what is not OK. Thats how HN functions
  - throw151123 2y ago
    [dead]
- nextaccountic 2y ago
  > A solution I saw in the wild is at http://reddit.com/r/generative http://reddit.com/r/generative This subreddit is actually moderated. And it contains a quite heavy handed rule: > To avoid disappointment, do not post AI-generated work here. Which is kinda absurd if you realize the direction generative art is going. (in 50 years, do you think the discussion between generative art with code vs generative art with AI will make sense?) But, such a rule helps maintain the space on-topic and avoid re-litigating the AI discussion every time someone posts an AI-generated picture.
  - swayvil 2y ago
    Trust me. The actual moderation is basically an automatic organic meritocracy. Your 2-second skim notwithstanding. And you clearly have zero experience with generative art.
- rndmize 2y ago
  Honestly, I just don't get this view - moderation provides clear, obvious value. You know what, we can have an experiment. I'll provide a list of things that are handled by moderation, and you pick which ones you think should be moderated. * Spam * CSAM * Gore * Porn * Doxxing * Threats * Libel * Personal attacks * Racism/other 'isms' * Flamebait/ragebait * Advertisements * Insults * Duplicates * Off-topic * Low-effort commentary * Swearing * Tone/sarcasm * Memes * Concern trolling/sealioning/etc.
  - throw151123 2y ago
    [dead]
  - swayvil 2y ago
    All of those require the interpretation and goodwill of an authority that I do not trust (and certainly does not express my own will as well as I can do it myself). Why do you trust this authority?
    - rndmize 2y ago
      If you're incapable of trusting some sort of authority on this, why are you here? Go host your own community. Everyone else in the world is willing to make some sort of sacrifice on this front so their community is, in fact, a community, and not a pile of trash. As for trust - I'm not really sure what trust has to do with it. I evaluate communities based on their content, and what I don't see is often just as important as what I do. If I like it, I'll stick around - if I don't, or if it changes, I'll leave. The community is operated by the people in charge of it, it's theirs by default. Do you visit people's houses and refuse to take your shoes off because they're the "authority"? Seems like an odd thing to get hung up over.
      - swayvil 2y ago
        You said that you trust them to provide this "clear obvious value". So, why do you trust them to do that? I mean, that's our difference here in a nutshell. So stop dicking around the bush and just tell me.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- throw151123 2y ago
  [dead]
symlinkk 2y ago
Moderation kills discussion. Hacker News and 4chan are lightly moderated and that’s why they’ve survived for a decade plus.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  HN looks lightly moderated but there is a reason why the front page is not full of the latest and greatest political flamewar stuff like all the other media sites.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    Never had a comment deleted on HN and only one submission flagged (link to a scientific study on p** sizes). At reddit, I had hundreds of comments deleted simply for stating the facts. It got worse, now I am shadow banned very quickly after creating a new account and posting a couple of comments. So just reading it using redlib now, wonder how long redlib lasts after those AI deals.
- krapp 2y ago
  Hacker News is one of the most aggressively moderated forums on the web, what are you talking about?
  - ineedaj0b 2y ago
    i think the overton window is quite large for ideas you can discuss on hn unlike reddit. you can go anywhere really but if your bot-ing or selling something you get swatted. also overtly political takes get nuked but it's both sides
    - krapp 2y ago
      You can't even make a joke on HN without an entire subthread being created to chastise you for it. Most political stories get flagged by default because they tend to degenerate into flamewars, to say nothing of any subject even tangentially related to race, gender, religion, physics or medicine, when the bigots and cranks come out of their crawlspaces. And plenty of people flag any non "technical" subject because they believe (erroneously) that HN is only for programming, CS and startups. And God forbid javascript runs on the site hosting TFA, or it's behind a paywall, or it has too much whitespace or uses the wrong font or margins or there's a typo. Because if so, that is now the entire topic of conversation. Compared to the entirety of Reddit, including all of the topic-specific, well moderated subs? Hacker News is unfortunately a dismal place to discuss most topics.
swozey 2y ago
I really dislike forums nowadays but I'm part of a /r/$car subreddit along with the $carforum.com and there's no comparison between using reddit vs the forum for quality data and not losing things to the ether. There are so many subreddits where great posts get lost, subreddits that don't allow commenting on old posts, being notified when old posts are updated, things like that. $Carforum has tags I can follow, just so many QOL features that reddit will never implement. You can sort subreddit by top, google search for something specific but all of those QOL improvements forums have lead to such better growing conversations. I guess reddit has flairs now that I think about it but I rarely see that used as a search mechanism. With that said I absolutely hate having to sign up for forums. If they don't have a google/apple/whatever auth I can use there's a 70%+ chance I'll never make an account. And even then it's a consideration because you never know if after creating an account with an SSO you'll next be asked 20 questions, be limited from posting for X amount of time/karma (which does happen on reddit but less frequently IME). Subreddits need .. sub-sub reddits or something similar. /r/$car/wheels, /r/$car/engine.. Also, as cliche as it is, I have never had a worse experience with moderators than on reddit. I used to be an ircop on efnet and none of us were anywhere near as rude and quick to assume the worst as my reddit experience.
- gpspake 2y ago
  Using a password manager negated the whole signing up thing from me and I actually like it better because I'm signing up with a site specific email and random password instead of using a third party account that they might not support or that I might not use in the future. Mostly I just don't want my major provider identities associated with individual third-party sites. A password manager basically provides the same click to login experience without the side effects of using SSO.
  - swozey 2y ago
    Yeah you're not wrong, I use password managers for everything. The forums that require an email sign-up are typically always the ones with the annoying (to me) sign up process where I feel like I'm doing the equivalent of putting my resume information in line by line on a job application that didn't auto-input it. Age, required. Gender, required. Car model and year, required. etc.. etc.. etc.. Just got old to me after being on a thousand car forums over my lifetime. I couldn't tell you how many birthday messages I get from 10-20 year old forums every year.
mhh__ 2y ago
Honestly I think subreddits go bad after about 150k no matter what the moderation.
- spoonjim 2y ago
  The scale of the moderation required may need more than volunteer labor.
  - mhh__ 2y ago
    Maybe but the population itself becomes retarded past a certain point. All the really really big subreddits are well moderated, cordial, etc and nonetheless full of complete philistines with no taste.
    - kjkjadksj 2y ago
      I’d guess when you consider all the people who have the free time to sit down on a site like reddit and post and comment, they are probably like 12 years old on average.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Subreddit numbers have got to be bs and inflated now adays. 800k people in the community and five new posts a day the highest with a couple hundred votes. Seems legit.
globular-toast 2y ago
Unfortunately reddit-style "moderation" causes other problems. In particular it creates the worst kind of echo chambers. I put moderation in quotes because on reddit they are more like tyrannical overlords. Places like HN and traditional fora work much better.

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.
CommieBobDole 2y ago
>I know that this is an uncommon view. I don't think this is correct - this is an extremely common view, in several senses of the word. It's especially popular among people who have never tried to use an unmoderated forum with more than a few members, and the sort of people who make moderation a necessity in the first place. >because it's a convenient lesser evil This is the true in the sense that pretty much all of society is a convenient lesser evil than "everybody agrees generally what the right thing is and does that all the time without exception".
- trueismywork 2y ago
  As well all know thebcrration of universe is considered to be a mistake by most.
instagraham 2y ago
To riff a bit on Pirsig, those who recognise Quality seem to do a good job of finding and curating it in the wild
wand3r 2y ago
I dislike censorship but I dont mind* moderation. Twitter is impossible to use because you have 0 buy in and common ground. I have no problem with a subreddit that wants to show beheading videos that moderates non-beheading videos from being posted. This is how I believe the town square should work. There is room for everyone to have a space, but it's NOT the SAME space. Moderation of bots and some content makes sites useable as long as everyone agrees what is OK and what is not OK. Thats how HN functions
- throw151123 2y ago
  [dead]
nextaccountic 2y ago
> A solution I saw in the wild is at http://reddit.com/r/generative http://reddit.com/r/generative This subreddit is actually moderated. And it contains a quite heavy handed rule: > To avoid disappointment, do not post AI-generated work here. Which is kinda absurd if you realize the direction generative art is going. (in 50 years, do you think the discussion between generative art with code vs generative art with AI will make sense?) But, such a rule helps maintain the space on-topic and avoid re-litigating the AI discussion every time someone posts an AI-generated picture.
- swayvil 2y ago
  Trust me. The actual moderation is basically an automatic organic meritocracy. Your 2-second skim notwithstanding. And you clearly have zero experience with generative art.
rndmize 2y ago
Honestly, I just don't get this view - moderation provides clear, obvious value. You know what, we can have an experiment. I'll provide a list of things that are handled by moderation, and you pick which ones you think should be moderated. * Spam * CSAM * Gore * Porn * Doxxing * Threats * Libel * Personal attacks * Racism/other 'isms' * Flamebait/ragebait * Advertisements * Insults * Duplicates * Off-topic * Low-effort commentary * Swearing * Tone/sarcasm * Memes * Concern trolling/sealioning/etc.
- throw151123 2y ago
  [dead]
- swayvil 2y ago
  All of those require the interpretation and goodwill of an authority that I do not trust (and certainly does not express my own will as well as I can do it myself). Why do you trust this authority?
  - rndmize 2y ago
    If you're incapable of trusting some sort of authority on this, why are you here? Go host your own community. Everyone else in the world is willing to make some sort of sacrifice on this front so their community is, in fact, a community, and not a pile of trash. As for trust - I'm not really sure what trust has to do with it. I evaluate communities based on their content, and what I don't see is often just as important as what I do. If I like it, I'll stick around - if I don't, or if it changes, I'll leave. The community is operated by the people in charge of it, it's theirs by default. Do you visit people's houses and refuse to take your shoes off because they're the "authority"? Seems like an odd thing to get hung up over.
    - swayvil 2y ago
      You said that you trust them to provide this "clear obvious value". So, why do you trust them to do that? I mean, that's our difference here in a nutshell. So stop dicking around the bush and just tell me.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
throw151123 2y ago
[dead]

symlinkk 2y ago

Moderation kills discussion. Hacker News and 4chan are lightly moderated and that’s why they’ve survived for a decade plus.

bobthepanda 2y ago
HN looks lightly moderated but there is a reason why the front page is not full of the latest and greatest political flamewar stuff like all the other media sites.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  Never had a comment deleted on HN and only one submission flagged (link to a scientific study on p** sizes). At reddit, I had hundreds of comments deleted simply for stating the facts. It got worse, now I am shadow banned very quickly after creating a new account and posting a couple of comments. So just reading it using redlib now, wonder how long redlib lasts after those AI deals.
krapp 2y ago
Hacker News is one of the most aggressively moderated forums on the web, what are you talking about?
- ineedaj0b 2y ago
  i think the overton window is quite large for ideas you can discuss on hn unlike reddit. you can go anywhere really but if your bot-ing or selling something you get swatted. also overtly political takes get nuked but it's both sides
  - krapp 2y ago
    You can't even make a joke on HN without an entire subthread being created to chastise you for it. Most political stories get flagged by default because they tend to degenerate into flamewars, to say nothing of any subject even tangentially related to race, gender, religion, physics or medicine, when the bigots and cranks come out of their crawlspaces. And plenty of people flag any non "technical" subject because they believe (erroneously) that HN is only for programming, CS and startups. And God forbid javascript runs on the site hosting TFA, or it's behind a paywall, or it has too much whitespace or uses the wrong font or margins or there's a typo. Because if so, that is now the entire topic of conversation. Compared to the entirety of Reddit, including all of the topic-specific, well moderated subs? Hacker News is unfortunately a dismal place to discuss most topics.

swozey 2y ago

I really dislike forums nowadays but I'm part of a /r/$car subreddit along with the $carforum.com and there's no comparison between using reddit vs the forum for quality data and not losing things to the ether. There are so many subreddits where great posts get lost, subreddits that don't allow commenting on old posts, being notified when old posts are updated, things like that. $Carforum has tags I can follow, just so many QOL features that reddit will never implement. You can sort subreddit by top, google search for something specific but all of those QOL improvements forums have lead to such better growing conversations. I guess reddit has flairs now that I think about it but I rarely see that used as a search mechanism. With that said I absolutely hate having to sign up for forums. If they don't have a google/apple/whatever auth I can use there's a 70%+ chance I'll never make an account. And even then it's a consideration because you never know if after creating an account with an SSO you'll next be asked 20 questions, be limited from posting for X amount of time/karma (which does happen on reddit but less frequently IME). Subreddits need .. sub-sub reddits or something similar. /r/$car/wheels, /r/$car/engine.. Also, as cliche as it is, I have never had a worse experience with moderators than on reddit. I used to be an ircop on efnet and none of us were anywhere near as rude and quick to assume the worst as my reddit experience.

gpspake 2y ago
Using a password manager negated the whole signing up thing from me and I actually like it better because I'm signing up with a site specific email and random password instead of using a third party account that they might not support or that I might not use in the future. Mostly I just don't want my major provider identities associated with individual third-party sites. A password manager basically provides the same click to login experience without the side effects of using SSO.
- swozey 2y ago
  Yeah you're not wrong, I use password managers for everything. The forums that require an email sign-up are typically always the ones with the annoying (to me) sign up process where I feel like I'm doing the equivalent of putting my resume information in line by line on a job application that didn't auto-input it. Age, required. Gender, required. Car model and year, required. etc.. etc.. etc.. Just got old to me after being on a thousand car forums over my lifetime. I couldn't tell you how many birthday messages I get from 10-20 year old forums every year.

mhh__ 2y ago

Honestly I think subreddits go bad after about 150k no matter what the moderation.

spoonjim 2y ago
The scale of the moderation required may need more than volunteer labor.
- mhh__ 2y ago
  Maybe but the population itself becomes retarded past a certain point. All the really really big subreddits are well moderated, cordial, etc and nonetheless full of complete philistines with no taste.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    I’d guess when you consider all the people who have the free time to sit down on a site like reddit and post and comment, they are probably like 12 years old on average.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
Subreddit numbers have got to be bs and inflated now adays. 800k people in the community and five new posts a day the highest with a couple hundred votes. Seems legit.

globular-toast 2y ago

Unfortunately reddit-style "moderation" causes other problems. In particular it creates the worst kind of echo chambers. I put moderation in quotes because on reddit they are more like tyrannical overlords. Places like HN and traditional fora work much better.