Show HN: Meta Almanac – Reddit for programmers

Well, ya got me, I bit. I think a small part of me bit because the domain, if you look at it really quickly, appears to almost be 'metalmaniac'. And while I'm far from the metal head I was as a teen, there's still a small part of me that will check out any service that at least appears as though it might be 'metal'.

In all seriousness, though[0], here's a couple of observations:

Where does the 'Reddit for programmers' originate? I was pleasantly surprised when I visited the site that it didn't feel at all like Reddit. Maybe part of that was the lack of redditors (no, that was the biggest part -- and a bit of a selling point, IMO). But I wonder if branding it in that manner is a good idea. Personally, I have very few positive feelings about Reddit and when I read that, initially, I almost didn't click the link. That said, I really hate it when people offer criticism without any suggestions for improvement. Unfortunately, that's me right now. The problem I kept running into was that the things I wanted to replace 'Reddit' with were things like 'Hacker News' and 'Stack Overflow', which highlights a different problem -- things like this kind-of already exist. In addition, Reddit has sub-reddits that cover the topics you're offering on the site, so it is almost this product. Fortunately, Reddit does a pretty terrible job. Sub-reddit quality has a pretty large range, post counts on those subreddits is often low, posts tend to focus on 'How do I do this really simple thing that (a) was already asked (yesterday...twice) and (poorly) answered, (b) has a very high ranking solution on StackOverflow with several (very good) answers, and (c) a quick google search of two of the most specific words related to the problem yields more than three pages of (mostly good) posts on other sites?'. Of course, the answer provided is usually a single-line link to StackOverflow, or a snarky 'Here, let me google that for you' with a google search link. Or it's just unanswered, the answers are minimalist/unhelpful or just completely wrong. And since that, also, sounded like my highlighting a problem without offering a solution: I think a way of helping this problem is to set solid guidelines, have good moderation in place, and focus on topics that are more niche in the programming community and are less likely to be riddled with very green developers providing unhelpful responses.

Looking over the sites features, I really liked the idea of the chat part of the site. I think with the right participants (and actually with some participants) this might be a fun feature. That said, I can't remember the last time I participated in a group chat outside of internal company Slack channels and I really haven't been all that interested in doing so for at least a decade when I left my favorite IRC client off of a machine re-load[1]. Chat experiences are ruined by the same kinds of problems -- trolls/jerks -- but instead of having long delays between response/trolling, where moderators can step in and vote people's poor behavior down (or, in the case of parts of Reddit, vote it up!), moderating chat is almost impossible. I've been around these parts long enough that trolling rarely bugs me, but at the same time, I know I left IRC because valuable 'signal' was so drowned out that it basically made using it a chore[2]. Personally, short of full-time staff pouring over and dropping (preferably shadow) ban hammers[3] on offenders, or a breakthrough in ML that reliably can moderate this, I don't think there's a good solution to this problem -- the trolling is rapid/real-time.

It's a tall order, sir (or madam), but I wish you success.

[0] And since it doesn't always come across properly in text, I mean this respectfully -- I recognize that this is a site with a social element, so it's not going to have terribly much content in the early days, so it may not be possible for me to pass any form of judgement this early. All that to say, these are my observations and I offer them as opinion, not as an attack on a site that I'm guessing you put a lot of time into.

[1] And it's been so long that I can't even remember what my favorite was!

[2] I always reveled in how one could spend such a long time carefully wording a question so as to avoid taking flack only to have the first several responses be exactly what was trying to be avoided. After a while I just went with terse and somewhat rude, which received the same amount of flack but with less effort on my part. Then I wondered why I was bothering at all when I could find an answer elsewhere, more easily, and I didn't have to interact with that kind of individual.

[3] I wrote about a form of shadow banning in a comment on another post a long time ago that would work well in this case (once you solve the problem of finding enough moderators to make the banning effective). It works like normal shadow banning -- stop the toxicity from being received by all participants but make it appear to the troll that their posts are getting through -- but take it a step further. Bundle all of the banned participants together so that their trolling posts do get through to others who are shadow banned, but don't appear to anonymous or authenticated users. This provides solid feedback to the troll. Trolls will respond to trolls. And it also tires them out quickly and, hopefully, keeps them away for good.