Comment by elevensies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elevensies | Hacker News Reader

This is my off the cuff opinion, I won't really try to substantiate it or anything.

Hacker News has a moderation policy and mod team that gives the discussion some very desirable characteristics:

- a sort of professional level of conversation is maintained. Roughly equivalent to a casual conversation with a co-worker, over lunch, is sort of the overall tone.

- general rejection of memes and shitposting as being against the purpose of the site -- the point is real discussion an exchange of information, not low effort karma generation

- Paul Graham's essay about different levels of disagreement: generally people attempt to discuss the core ideas of the posts and not just hammer away to trivilaties

Most of the programming related subreddits don't have anything like the overall tone, cohesiveness, or moderator activity/discipline of Hacker News. There are some subreddits that I would say are as good as Hacker News for discussions about their chosen topic, for example, http://reddit.com/r/spacex . But the overall programming subreddits are not equal to this.

As far as the moderation goes it is both pretty well moderated and the moderation staff unlike Reddit isn't involved in the "politics" of a specific subreddit.

Reddit moderation tends to boil down to camps and high school politics pretty darn quickly where it's more common than not for moderators to push their own agendas.

This is overall a pretty broken moderation model which only really works on private forums.

You need to have a "professional" (joblike) moderation where the moderator enforce rules rather than opinions and philosophies.

On the other side of the spectrum you can have a "detached" core-rules only extreme violations level of moderation which what makes places like 4/8Chan work even tho it seems that they aren't moderated at all.

The only subreddits in my experience that approach this "professional," disinterested standard of moderation are /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians. I know AH has a huge team devoted to enforcing their rules, and it's off-putting to newcomers from other subs but absolutely makes AH what it is. AS takes more of an unapologetic scorched earth approach to keeping focus on relevant discussion.

Absolutely right on with your points #1 and #2. I remember I lost half my karma with the first childish comment I made on HN. Now I only comment if I feel strongly and can speak intelligently on a subject, or have a question. It is a natural curation process.

Add to that is the sort of audiences reddit and HN attracts are very different. You have some users who enjoy both HN and reddit. I think the core users of reddit will not find HN appealing and the core users of HN can't stand reddit.

Great job, this hits on all the reasons I would state.

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