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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

> But that is still their userbase, and getting rid of the userbase drastically decreases their value.

Only if they wait so long to clean house that their user base consists mostly of the folks who give them a horrible reputation.

The most valuable online communities are those that aggressively clean house along the way. Losing a small amount of jerks is more than made up for by the non-jerk users who feel comfortable enough to join and stay.

That's why HN has grown as fast as it has. That's why the advice for normal people interested in Reddit is "unsubscribe from the defaults and find niche subreddits." Because the niche subreddits moderate aggressively.

That's why web forums beat Usenet in the first place.

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I'd argue that, while most of reddit value is in the niche and heavily moderated subreddits, it's not where most of the eyeballs (revenue) is. If they start moderating heavily, deleting the jerk subredits, they are risking the ire of most of most their user base.

I bet they checked it a long time ago: How many of the users that hang out or lurk in those "jerk" subredits also participate in more civil subs? If those people where in their own jerky Venn circle with little superposition with the rest of reddit, I think they would have deleted those subs by now.

Pretty much. Saying Reddit should be like HN is like saying that every car needs to be a four wheel drive monster able to handle actual offroad driving.

HN is largely a tech site geared toward mid-late twenties individuals (the start-up culture, really). Reddit is a social network geared toward late teens to mid twenties (males). Yes, there is overlap, but not to a significant degree.

No insult intended;

Uh... you know that there are vast VAST circles of "startup culture" that are much older than late-teens/mid-late twenties.

Where the heck do you think fucking silicon valley came from - you think all the people who built all this stuff are dead, gone and not connected to the pulse of technology?

so, I assume you're quite young - but may have a poor understanding of tech history. All the +30 people are still here.

You're right. In fact, late 30s and early 40s is generally when people traditionally started companies.

But when I say "start up culture" I basically mean "silicon valley startup culture" and HN is basically that and its fan club. Mostly the latter. It is the difference between being part of "the gig economy" and just a part time/contract worker.

Yeah, there are some older people around here, just like there are at reddit and the like. But just reading and engaging in threads, it is very clear that this also skews pretty young.

And a large part of it is that the people who are in their 30s and beyond tend to either not have time to hang out on a message board and discuss things with kids in college (in my defense, I am between projects and killing time).

That is a good insight...

I know that as I grow older (I am 41, working in tech my entire life) I lurk a lot more and more.

I am top mod of a subreddit of ~400K subscribers... I participate less and less as I get older - even if I have really strong opinions, I tend to just sigh and let the younger gen mods deal with it...

vocal minority and all that...

Someone will one day do a thesis on this phenom and put a name to it

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