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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

Combine that with the toxic people inhabiting every popular sub reddit, it's some place I unfortunately no longer visit.

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Reddit is an interesting phenomenon. The home page has been a toxic mix of memes and trash for much of its life (I looked at it a few times, but don't go there any more).

The subreddits vary from highly toxic to well moderated (spacex for example), but most are so lightly moderated that they have some good links but little interesting comment content. The contrast with HN is interesting - I think the moderation here is much better and the culture is more welcoming as a result, but the home page here now just goes past too fast for it to function as a firehose on specific subjects.

HN is just more niche. HN is 842 on US alexa. Reddit is 7. The criticism that reddit gets is so naive. What other site of comparable size, where the users are mostly anonymous, has better community? Compare reddit comments with comment threads on youtube or national newspaper sites, and re-calibrate your humanity baseline.

>The criticism that reddit gets is so naive

It's perfectly valid to criticize something for sucking even if there isn't a better alternative.

It's also perfectly valid to criticise the criticism for having too high standards. If you expect a car to fly you to the moon, your standards are too high. If you expect Reddit to be like HN, you're also a fair bit off.

No, it's not really valid to come back saying that nobody has done better so therefore your sights are too high. If someone is complaining about the CO2 output of the lowest emissions coal plant, it's a perfectly valid criticism even if it is the best coal plant.

Reddit is a cesspool, and there is no proof that's the only thing that can happen with large online communities. There is plenty of room for innovation there. It's not like online communities have been around for thousands of years and this is clearly the best solution as proved by extensive research.

It may be a cesspool but it is a cesspool with a lot of valuable and interesting content and discussion, along with the shit.

There's criticism, and there's not knowing what you're talking about. Unless one has run an online community like Reddit before, it's more than likely that that individual is playing armchair CEO.

Unless you're the CEO of Reddit, you're by definition playing armchair CEO. I don't need to be Cristiano Ronaldo to have a legitimate criticism that he needs to fall back and help the defense sometimes. I mean, he's the best, but he doesn't have to score all the goals.

Disclaimer: I'm a Madrid fan, not Barca.

Ah, good ol argument from authority. Unless you are the CEO you may not critique the CEO.

I run an online community like Reddit.

This response always drives me crazy. The "well why don't you make something better" has to stop. If everyone had to be on the same level of what they were criticizing, then there would be absolutely no feedback. I'm not a director, but I've studied film enough to know the elements of what makes a good movie. If you've never been displeased with something, then I applaud your saintly hood, but please understand that often the most passionate users, are the most vocal. Regardless if they are are singer/guitarist/artist/ceo/presidentoftheus/whatever.

Because you're going to more or less make the same dumb decisions that the person you're criticizing made once you're in that same position dealing with a thousand different angles, people, and pressures your limited mind could not imagine before, and that's a fact.

Sure, but you're not saying anything that's not already common knowledge and you're not adding anything to any discussion by just saying that. :|

The parent is saying that the blame lies with humanity rather than any particular site's methods of operation. The fact that HN is virtually unknown to trolls is probably the only thing that keeps it solidly on the good side of the temple/cesspool gradient.

I wouldn't be so sure that this place is unknown to trolls. Pretty sure I've seen some trolling.

I would argue that most of the large subs are actually `over` moderated. Mostly along the lines of view point diversity kinds of issues.

> most are so lightly moderated that they have some good links but little interesting comment content.

Isn't that just Sturgeon's Law?

I have no idea how many subreddits there are, but I'd wager there are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of Hacker News equivalents - albeit tailored to different interests.

I tend agree with you that the default homepage is a flaming trashcan, but I honestly haven't seen it in years - I just see my curated subreddits.

Would just like to say, that as a moderator of r/SpaceX, I appreciate your kind words.

Reddit really is a hit and miss barrel of communities. We (r/SpaceX mods) tend to find that a lot of our users don't even bother commenting in other subreddits. I certainly don't. Some of communities and the stunts they pull are downright embarrassing, and being hosted on the same platform sometimes feels a little ugly; so having our own little island that's peaceful and courteous is a big breath of fresh air.

Thanks for the good work, I really appreciate the subreddit and the work done moderating it. People undervalue good moderation because if it's working well you don't often notice it.

The problem of all support professions. No one sees the immense amount of work needed for a good status quo, only when something goes wrong people notice the people that work all the time in the background.

The idea of a community where anyone can create a subreddit is interesting.

Back in the day the SomethingAwful forums were hugely popular largely because they had subforums covering a big variety of topcs. They're still somewhat popular but Reddit has taken a huge amount of that traffic.

One big problem with Reddit though is ongoing discussion. Anything older than a few hours and you may as well not comment. Whereas traditional forums excel in that area.

I feel like there'd be a use case for a more traditional forum, but where users can create and moderate their own subforums. In fact I wonder why no-one's done that already.

That's not quite right, in that at least the person you are reply to gets an orangered notification (and how I wish HN had this) so, although everyone else may disapear, you may find yourself having a prolonged conversation with that person.

Yeah, it'd be a good feature here. I saw your reply because I use HN Replies: http://www.hnreplies.com

It's basically a third party equivalent.

Ah - handy, thanks.

The problem with reddit, IMO, is that there is a unified identity as "redditors" that brings conflicting communities too close on a routine basis. That makes some sense based on the site's early history when it was basically targeted at the same audience as HN, and the unified identity has been fading more and more over the last couple of years, but it's still a large part of reddit's design.

Contrast with Facebook, Twitter, or other massively-accepted social networking sites. They start you out with ... a blank page! This not only allows but requires the user to craft an experience that will make them feel comfortable, and there's no need to confront them with things that may not be palatable.

I think you can only get away with a real "front page" if you're targeting a specific niche. Otherwise, you have to go really generic. Twitter usually recommends that new accounts follow very generic things, like late night talk show hosts, sports stars, and popular singers.

A lot of reddit's growth problem is that if a Republican or a religious person or someone over the age of 40 hears about it and decides to check out reddit.com, they're likely to leave angered, offended, shocked, or all of the above, and that's before they try to participate/comment, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.

Combine with occasional news stories about reddit's less-savory underbelly and the prevalence of pornography and profanity, and it really is no wonder that reddit struggles to find mainstream acceptance. The issue that reddit must now deal with is to become mainstream-acceptable without destroying its existing userbase in the process.

That's just how large pseudonymous forums work. Remember Usenet? The popular newsgroups were wastelands, but the smaller ones were often decent (unless, like comp.lang.lisp, they had their own specific diseases).

Agreed, reddit has mostly replaced Usenet for niche subject discussions.

s/sub reddit/place/

and you've got basically all of human civilization there.

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