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Comment by zellyn | Hacker News Reader

It's been fascinating to watch every online environment almost inevitably turn to mush over time.

Of particular interest to me are Wikipedia and StackOverflow, where the pedantic rule-following, rule-enforcing insider group eventually squeezes all joy and then all productive life from the the system.

Actually, I have little hope for Wikipedia's solving the problem, due to their governance model and political structure, but StackOverflow has economic incentives to solve the problem, so I follow them with interest.

Reddit seems to remain vibrant, albeit often a wretched hive of scum and villainy depending on subreddit…

Add Tildes to the list of projects I'm watching with keen interest. I believe the question of how to keep a massive online community healthy is actually a key problem of our times.

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> albeit often a wretched hive of scum and villainy depending on subreddit…

I'm more concerned about the opposite effect -- that the default subreddits have become pointless and boring, focusing mostly on "funny" images and cat gifs. Gone are the interesting askreddit threads or useful world news commentary, replaced with content designed to keep you browsing and staying on the site longer.

At the same time, I think the useful content often falls victim to Gell-Mann amnesia, giving votes to anyone who sounds like an expert. It's hard to identify when someone is really an expert or whether they're merely writing like one... The worst I saw was an explanation of laminar and turbulent flow that was 100% wrong, but highly upvoted until a few hours later people pointed out why it was wrong

> Gone are the interesting askreddit threads or useful world news commentary, replaced with content designed to keep you browsing and staying on the site longer.

I'd totally forgotten how that era felt. Thanks for reminding me!

I make a point of actively curating my subscriptions–it's easy to get lulled into thinking the whole site is garbage when it's really just a few noisy subreddits. As any subreddit with a clear topic grows large, there needs to be strict moderation or it will devolve into crowd-pleasing gifs/memes/jokes, upvoted by people who aren't engaged in the original topic, in which case I'll unsubscribe.

I find that even a highly curated subreddit subscription adds little value to my life. A subreddit often looks appealing at first, but after a few weeks I notice a pattern in the submissions, and I notice the echo chamber in the comment section. Reddit has become an okay place to occasionally visit and explore, but it's not a daily read for me anymore.

Reddit no longer has default subreddits. New accounts show /r/popular and have no subscriptions.

/r/popular is /r/all but with some more controversial/niche subreddits filtered out.

I'm talking about whatever shows up when I go to reddit.com without an account (which is all of the time)

I think you also get /r/popular. They essentially switched from a whitelist model to a blacklist model.

If you haven't seen yet, reddit itself is also tilting heavily towards prioritizing funny/quick content (even more than it did before) as well. The new desktop redesign that's in progress has infinite scroll, auto-expanded images and auto-playing gifs/videos, and so on. They also added a new default frontpage sort (that you can't change) that tries to hide any posts you've seen before every time you load it, which kind of destroys the ability to have an ongoing discussion thread.

The whole redesign has been painful. At first I liked it, but some of the things you've mentioned here as well as the lagginess of the site have really soured me on Reddit.

> Of particular interest to me are Wikipedia and StackOverflow, where the pedantic rule-following, rule-enforcing insider group eventually squeezes all joy and then all productive life from the the system.

I can't be the only person that still finds both productivity and joy in StackOverflow and Wikipedia. I've had mixed reactions with the moderator class on those websites, but overall the websites are fantastic.

I do too. But it saddens me how often the most enjoyable StackOverflow discussions also contain notices that they're closed for being offtopic, allowed to continue to exist only because grandfathered in, etc.

I found myself more and nore hesitant to use stack overflow and I think a big reason why is vecause of all the useful questions I've seen crushed there.

"This could have been my question, even after reading stack overflow for years I cannot see why this is should attract flags. Better be careful." Or "If this really useful question is not productive, what will my be." Or "They'll certainly find a question about something related and call mine a duplicate."

I'm working on a concept for a q/a site for people who would enjoy answering questions and/or get answers to questions more than they like playing teacher, mod or what do I know.

> I'm working on a concept for a q/a site for people who would enjoy answering questions and/or get answers to questions more than they like playing teacher, mod or what do I know.

Isn't that sort of what Quora is? I've only visited Quora through links from HN but the threads there that have been linked here seem to be that kind.

(The main reason I don't use Quora directly is that I dislike the way they always try to force visitors to register in order to browse the site. Same goes with Pinterest.)

Thanks to pedantic rules, Wikipedia and StackOverflow are the two most useful sites online right now.

Indeed. Say what you want about the bar for contribution, but those sites rarely disappoint me when I visit.

Until you try to correct simple mistakes on Wikipedia a couple of times, and learn that you should just give up, and accept things like broken grammar, repeated sentence fragments, etc.

I believe they are surfing on the strength of past contributions, and very dedicated in-group contributors, not by harnessing the world.

> Until you try to correct simple mistakes on Wikipedia a couple of times, and learn that you should just give up, and accept things like broken grammar, repeated sentence fragments, etc.

Counter-example: 99% of my Wikipedia activity is fixing typos here and there and I never got any issue.

Wikipedia is a lot better now, but any site that has hundreds of thousands of words of discussion over which dash to use and when is obviously toxic.

Here is an n-dash, an m-dash, and a hyphen. –,—,-

We expect discussions about wars to be tricky, but we don't expect discussion about the punctuation used in titles to be so hard: Read the "Mexican–American War" / "Mexican—American War" discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_...

Here's several thousand words of discussion. (Closed with no consensus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy...

Look at the word counts for these meta discussions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre...

Dashes and hyphens made it to Arbcom (this also has links to various Ani threads): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...

Wikipedia is useful, no denying that.

StackOverflow might as well just be put into read-only mode at this point. Asking new questions is more likely than not going to end up with your question locked for some reason. It's a super useful archive of questions and answers from back in the day when they still let people ask questions, but as far as I can tell no new useful content is being added. A few of the stack exchange sites are still allowing questions, but on the programming one the "ask a question" button is just a decoy.

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