Hacker News Reader

Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

Developed/ran a message board software for 4 years.

Running a large message board network is one of the worst experiences I have ever had. You are constantly wasting time moderating people, blocking people, recalculating algorithms, dealing with attacks and explaining to the police you don't have the IP address in question. Every large message board I have developed or managed revolted or sued us ([1][2] random example revolts). One of the largest being niketalk.com. THIS, while making NO MONEY. Users that use generic message boards are extremely hostile towards ads and refuse to pay for anything. EVERYTHING done by the moderators is overblown and people working there are publicly quartered.

Yeah no thanks. I would have removed the boards too - then got a coffee.

[1] http://mashable.com/2010/08/30/users-revolt-against-new-digg...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/07/reddit-re...

View on HN

I developed and ran social networking features for a fashion site with an almost entirely female audience, age range 20-50. I was fully expecting bad behavior but was surprised as it grew that people were unfailingly nice, supportive and encouraging to each other, with only a few exceptions. Of course I'm aware that females, like anyone else, can be nasty to each other, but it barely happened here with membership in the thousands. It would be an interesting social experiement to replicate that on a larger scale while limiting the demographic by gender, age, and so on to see how it affects the behavior of the group.

I would guess fashion-interest is a better selector for positive interaction than female. Try an all-female board about veganism and watch them eat each other alive in a race to the righteousness bottom.

Seems pretty civil and reasonable to me: https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/4hnzyz/why_are_most_...

Reddit doesn't really work like a traditional forum. In a traditional forum everybody has the same visibility, in reddit it's very easy to create like-minded communities because anything controversial gets out of view very fast.

> I would guess fashion-interest is a better selector for positive interaction

Wow, I would have guessed the opposite. Devil Wears Prada? Mean Girls?

Oh well, that's what I get for forming opinions without real-life evidence.

This seems like odd and unsupported speculation to me...

> membership in the thousands

This is pretty tiny, by Internet messageboard standards.

Even a tiny subreddit has tens of thousands of users, and "smaller" subs have over a hundred thousand.

I suspect that your good experience had more to do with the small number of people than the topic or demographics.

I've noticed the same thing on Reddit in subreddits where women make up 50% or more of the population. When I'm posting in these communities, I tend to be given the benefit of the doubt and receive a lot more supportive or cheerful replies instead of walls of text/sarcasm/"well, actually". It's made me unconsciously change my posting habits.

I can confirm that the general quality and civility of discussion in TwoXChromosomes spiraled downward extremely quickly once it was made a default subreddit. It was designed as a haven for women to discuss women's issues with other women on reddit, and has become one more public pool for gentlemen to tip their fedoras and "raise a debate" on paternity law, when the community was never meant for that sort of discussion in the first place. The day it went public every thread was full of long time community members begging for it to be reverted immediately, and pretty much everything they predicted came true.

That just shows that any time you open stuff to participation by the general population and lift it out of obscurity, it turns to shit. Just look at our elections. We'd be better off just having a monarch.

I think the factors that make, or break, an online community are: The number of active users, the visibility of posters (so reputation is at stake), and the ability for the community to self-moderate.

There seems to be a magic threshold when the user base size crosses it and suddenly people are more disruptive. Based on my observation of a few online groups I've participated in.

As an additional data point, I moderate a forum that's coincidentally mostly male (a function of the industry it serves), and they too are (at least on the forum in question) pleasant, friendly and supportive, with only a very few exceptions.

it barely happened here with membership in the thousands. It would be an interesting social experiement to replicate that on a larger scale while limiting the demographic by gender, age, and so on to see how it affects the behavior of the group.

If you want the results of that experiment, you'll find it in the conventional wisdom among reddit moderators and dedicated users. Subs with under 10,000 subscribed users are not only good interpersonally, the content of the subreddit is in it's heyday. If the userbase balloons, or the content quality nosedives, then you get bad interpersonal interaction.

I ran a popular blog and message board for Dave Matthews Band fans called WeeklyDavespeak. Anecdotal, but I put an all female staff in place in charge of the boards and there was effectively no drama.

I ultimately had to take to boards down due to waning interest in the band and the continuing attention cost of keeping the server and message board software up to date.

A fascinating proposition!

Agreed. I used to moderate the largest English Starcraft forum. We had a pretty low tolerance for poor behavior, and people would cause shitstorms on other forums about our allegedly heavy handed moderation style.

I'm no longer active on staff duties but the site is going strong so I'm guessing we did something right.

As far as online games go, Starcraft seems to on the less toxic side in my experience.

I agree with this, the Starcraft community experiences losses as a learning opportunity.

Team liquid is what I think of when I think of active moderation done right

That's a name I havent heard in a long time. Some of my best gaming experiences were with people I met there. Agreed 100%

Those guys and the DAD clan from TFC (now disbanded) had some of the greatest mods. They kept the places in check but they had a sense of humor about it.

What was your TL ID? :)

TeamLiquid has some sensible rules[1] that are being carried out by a numerable sensible staff members[2]. Its longevity speak to the effectiveness of this formula.

[1] - http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/tl-community/17883-tlnet-ten...

[2] - http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/TeamLiquid.net_Staff

Hi 2pac! ;)

Thanks for the compliment :)

Interesting to read your post. I had always thought running a forum would be hard work but somehow rewarding.

What where some of the reasons you would get sued?

Not quickly responding to DMCA complaints[1], subpoenas[2], death threats [mainly just working with police], illegal content. With one forum, the owner sued saying that content was 'theirs' and wanted us to provide the mysqldump as a settlement.

[1]http://www.dmca.com/FAQ/What-is-a-DMCA-Takedown

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_subpoena

Thanks for replying. I guess hosting something successful will result in these becoming a daily reality.

Great point.

They're just much harder than people thought.

It's weird that people thought you could just bolt comments onto a webpage without problems, because we had all those years of Usenet to show that it wasn't that easy.

...he posted, on an online comment system.

edit: before the parent comment was edited, the most charitable reading of the comment was that internet commenting systems have a net negative effect on humanity

That's an awfully big generalization to post on an internet commenting system.

His comment made me slightly sadder than I was before I read it, so from that viewpoint it is accurate.

I can not agree with the "making NO MONEY" assertion. Many users come here to get the opinions of others about a movie. Another example: The success of Amazon is for a part to the positive/negative comments because you need the experience of users about their product. The money do not come from the comment, but they bring visitors... and their money.

Seems like a lot of that can be solved by simply not moderating or censoring anythng.

Sure. Just have boards filled with childporn and dick picks. Let me know how that goes.

CP is never welcome and gets removed. Even un- or barely moderated boards do so.

Dick picks, on the other hand, are tedious but not inherently bad.

The point is -- it needs to be moderated.

For a message board run extremely well see whirlpool.net.au

It's basically the forum for all of Australia. They seem to have found the perfect balance between moderation and creating a good culture.

^^ This comment is being discussed by Australians on twitter here: https://twitter.com/decryption/status/828462981096710149

4chan seems to do ok. Or maybe not, depending on your perspective. There are a ton of smaller chan style boards that are awesome and don't seem to have the problems everyone is talking about here.

4chan is moderated to the hilt.

It's moderated but far more permissive than the internet at large. Also, maybe they're really good at deleting complaints about the moderators?

It's not really comparable because their boards have a limited number of active posts and the bigger boards get so much traffic anything is gone within a few minutes. So if you complain about something and they don't respond within the hour, it's gone anyway.

Still they have big problems with spam, ddos attacks and moderator turnover and that is after they delegate the bigger problems to /b to be mostly ignored.

Yes 4chan is a mess, but I'm glad it's there.

Though 4chan does have moderators.

So why is there so much racism, doxing, and other horrible behavior? Or are only some of the boards moderated?

All boards are moderated in a completely different way. Most of the boards have a pinned post with the rules. Most moderation occurs stealthily.

Also, racism and doxxing are not comparable at all.

The double-edged sword of not moderating based on racism and other undesirable behavior is that your job as a moderator is much easier, but you have the terrible reputation that 4chan has. I am personally fine with boards that allow pretty much everything other than CP and other illegal content. I think this is how a number of chan boards operate.

Do they both not belong to "horrible behavior?"

Is this "If you can't beat em, join em" Nazi edition? Half the challenge of the other boards out there is keeping the waste of molecules that constitutes 4chan away.

Out of all of the people who would like to frequent message board, some of them can't stand boards with a lot of censorship; and others can't stand boards which don't have strong moderation.

Surely some forum hosts will desire to serve those users who desire strong moderation, and for these forum hosts, not censoring or moderating isn't a solution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com