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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

> submit/upvote/downvote flow was so novel

What was the timeline again... Slashdot emerged in 1997, it developed voting on several different criteria, you could filter for "funny" or "insightful" posts, and it had a pretty sophisticated meta-moderation system.

Digg simplified that with up- and down-votes.

Reddit borrowed digg's model.

I'm not 100% sure what the innovation of reddit was at the time, but I feel like these three just had slightly different tones to their communities. Slashdot was the geek site, Digg had more jokes and politics, reddit was sort of... deliberative? The culture was a lot different back then, a bit more like this site.

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Digg was great for bloggers around 2005. I created software to add hundreds of friends per day (I think the limit was 250..and the only way to do efficiently was with software).

I only had to post a link a few times a week and the friends on my list would up vote it automatically (I never had to ask them). This would hit critical mass at about 20 Diggs and I would get to the front page.

Front page at that time would get me about 50,000 unique visitors and a good percentage of other blogs picking up my articles and coming back regularly. The trick was to write good content, not just top 10 lists.

I was just a student at that time and didn't have much business experience, but I was able to sell some custom PHP scripts. I think I made about $1000/month for an entire year.

Eventually they cracked down on it, and I got a job and stopped updating my blog.

I wish I would have been able to capitalize on it a lot more. I probably could have turned it into a much longer-lasting business.

I really liked Slashdot's moderation system. Not everybody got to moderate. You got selected at random. Being able to moderate felt much more like a privilege than a right and I took it much more seriously than I do on Reddit.

And I genuienly hated it.

Those one-off 5 mod points made you feel like scraps off someone's moderation feast table and made it absolutely obvious that you had no say in shaping the site. This sucked above all other issues with Slashdot and it was the reason why I jumped ship as soon as I discovered HN.

The other thing about slashdot that's nice is you can't moderate a discussion in which you're taking part.

So the fate of a conversation is shaped by the people who are most likely to know absolutely nothing about the topic at hand (or they would have contributed to the thread).

But is that a problem? You don't usually need technical expertise to judge whether someone is speaking in a productive way or not. The purpose of moderating a conversation isn't to try to remove technically incorrect arguments, surely? It's to stop conversations from being derailed by snarky, aggressive comments, or outright trolling, etc.

> The purpose of moderating a conversation isn't to try to remove technically incorrect arguments, surely?

... and this is why we can't have nice things.

Sadly, mainstream discourse works in exactly the same way. You can utter the most outrageous lies, as long as you whisper while smartly dressed; but if you shout the truth with uncombed hair, you will be sanctioned.

There are reasons why a calmly-spoken lie is more welcome than a shouted thing-the-shouter-is-really-sure-is-a-truth: the lie can be challenged in a productive conversation, the "thing" can't. We all _think_ we've got the truth on our side, you know: your opponents aren't going to be persuaded by you bluntly shouting your arguments at them, any more than you would be persuaded by them bluntly shouting their arguments at you. What can we do about this situation? We can either hive off into separate bubbles, where we rely on the "moderation" of like-minded friends to remove "incorrect" arguments of the opposition, or we come together and make an effort to talk to each other productively and understand each other. The second option is _really difficult_, particularly in anonymous internet forums. But I think it's worth striving for: one of the greatest advances civilisation has offered is the ability to consider which argument is best through rational discourse rather than a shouting match. This requires civility, though, because people shut down if they feel they are being treated dismissively.

tl;dr: Rational discourse is the "nice thing" that's worth striving for; treating those with different views with respect is the way to get it; none of us has a monopoly on truth.

Digg threads become too full and the model just didn't scale up. A thread with 10k up votes and 1000 comments is not inviting to new users. A stupid or insightful comment on such a thread will be completely ignored if it wasn't the first post.

In contrast Reddit has thousands of small communities that let new users be heard. Down voting and arguing over "bad" comments gives an impression of authority that make the user want to learn and impress the group. It is really all just a game.

> Reddit has thousands of small communities

Was that true at launch? I thought that was added later, but can't remember.

It was present during the diggsplosion, which is when it mattered.

It was added after about a year or so, and there was two real driving forces behind it. The first was that people started using 'tags' in their submission titles to do things like "Ask Reddit" and also that the main page started getting overrun with Ron Paul tributes because apparently he was the second coming of Christ and would be the panacea that the US needed.

And since most of us started visiting Reddit for the tech/programming/science content people saw that stuff as spam.

Still, the subreddit system is really the only reason I still frequent Reddit. The smaller you go, the higher quality the content becomes and the better the community is (in general).

IMO, 50 000 subscribers is about the tipping point for subreddit quality. Beyond that number things start to go down hill real fast. You also don't want too few subscribers, however, or there will be too little new content posted. At about 10 000 subscribers, the amount of posts should be high enough that there's always something to see.

The one exception to that, that I've found, is /r/homebrewing. It's >100,000 now, but is still a great community.

I think it's a much different demographic to the rest of reddit though, a lot of contributors don't really use any other subreddits and are older.

They didn't change the UX and tank their site. That was their innovation, if we are being honest.

That was a weird moment, Reddit's September as everyone flooded in.

I'm maybe the one person who enjoys digg more today than before. I like the curation they do on videos, there's far less variation in quality than when it was all user submitted. Really no social interaction there anymore though.

I think they killed something broken that a lot of people loved, and replaced it with something kind of neat for a completely different use case. Like if McDonald's started making electric cars or something.

Widely hated, I'm still not sure it wasn't the right call though.

Digg could have survived if it iterated I think.

HN simplified that with up-votes only.

Next: implicit up-vote by following link.

HN has downvotes once you have a certain amount of karma

On stories too?

Oops, no I don't think so

yes, that was my point. but i see some people weren't aware of it, which could explain the (demonstration of) downvoting.

I really like the idea of measuring content quality by objective metrics, like time on page, or even eye tracking.

I'm a little frightened by what we might learn about our implicit attitudes, but I think it'd be a fun experiment.

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