Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

The inadequacies of Reddit make me miss the message board days of old. Around 2001, I was active on a niche message board for a Gameboy Advance game. The board was only vaguely about the game itself; most topics were just random news and conversation. At its peak, there were probably a few hundred posters, tops, but everyone had an avatar, a screen name and a recognizable identity. I never met any of these people in real life, but nearly two decades letter, I can still remember the various screen names and personalities. This sort of thing just doesn't exist anymore, simply because the subreddit version of X would destroy a (non-Reddit) budding community before it had a chance to grow.

Reddit is a reflection of the broader societal trend away from local or small communities toward an anonymized, faceless megacorp one, replete with all the problems that usually entails. I hope that somehow we can get back to the human feeling of the early internet.

View on HN

I miss forums too, I really like reddit for finding interesting stuff, but the community aspect isn’t there so much.

Back in the late 90s early 00s I was a member of a forum for a chain of video game stores in the UK, it was an amazing community. The store went bust in ‘05 and one guy created his own forum software where most of the displaced members flocked to.

That forum is still going, although there’s probably only 10 or so regulars left - but we still talk on it every day. I’ve even met a few of them in the real world.

EDIT: I think you've hit the nail on the head, the thing that was so great about forums is, while the original point of the forum was to bring together people with a like minded interest (video game(s)/whatever) - the forum would also have separate boards to discuss cross over topics or something completely unrelated. This meant you were talking to people who you might recognise from other areas of the forum and share other common interests, so could build that sense of community.

Whereas reddit just feels more siloed, I wouldn't recongise anyone who visits subreddit X who also happens to be on Y etc

I believe this is the dividend and curse of Web2.0. Things can be so easily mixed, matched, shared and are federated. Boundaries have been eroding in the digital as in the real world. We've lost the sense of closed group, community and with it some natural short feedback loops.

There are huge benefits to this like minorities gaining scale to be heard. But I feel a lot of benefits are of the type of taking something very good and scaling it up to a global level. What is less seen is the destruction of a lot of other good solutions elsewhere which might have had a chance to develop into something even better with a little more time. We are loosing diversity in products and ideas.

Finding ways to restore smaller scale in some areas may be beneficial but it is not clear how to make it work. Arbitrage across boundaries levels differences. The benefits of tearing down the boundaries accrue with the rule breakers who gain scale. Google+ was an attempt to stem the tide. It may have been flawed but it also tried something fundamentally hard.

The best part of forums was that they didn't have much temporal dependency. People posted things there, and it was expected that other would reply days or months later. It made for a much more calm and lively discussion.

When Reddit puts something on the hot tab, there's one hour or two for anybody to say what they want to say, no time for anybody to reply, and it's gone. HN is slower, but not very different. It's a completely different kind of site.

This is also what I fucking hate about Facebook's desire to make you spend all your time there. They do the same sort of thing.

Also my lamenting the loss of newsgroups for just that effect.

Used to be in alt.callahans and I can't imagine how many threads I just collapsed and moved on because I knew that conversation wasn't a topic of mine. And still managed to ping in at least a few dozen messages of varying size/quality a week.

Eternal september is more powerful than any form of site design or BBS format.

i think this may be strongly correlated with the end of dialup and the rise of always-on internet, and then again in the rise of always-on-hand smartphone internet usage (and its pervasive push notification capacity), each stage raising the ground state of expected response times. speed then proceeded to kill everything in its way.

Forums have a dark side though. It's a full-fledged social context. Lots of drama can take place in one. Over 10 years ago I got involved in forum drama and it changed me as a person. I got too close to some people there. I've never been comfortable in online communities after this. It's become a lot harder to open up and meet people online. Privacy and anonymity became a priority for me because of stuff like that.

counter anecdote - I met people on gaming forums in the late 90s and early 2000s I'm still very close to today. We all talk with each other every day in a Whatsapp chat, and we still play games together. We meet up about once a year in person to hang out. They're by a wide margin my best friends, and they live all over the US and Canada.

Made some great friends on IRC in the 90s. Made some enemies, too - but the friendships last longer and cross over to real life, whereas the enemies typically stay online and fade away.

College football messages boards are still alive and well. Especially the paid ones that keep out most of the trolling.

If you head over to rivals.com there's a paid site for each team with a private board. Obviously, some are more active than others and there are competitor sites out there as well...but it's the same experience that you're describing.

I've been on those boards for about 20 years now and it's exactly what you describe. Regulars who talk some sports, but also news, random conversation, recommendations for contractors (since many of the members live within 100 mile orbit of the Clemson), advice on investments and fiances, restaurants, etc.

It's worth every penny for the resource it's been.

I don't know what it is, but college football fandom is one of the most fun, entertaining fandoms out there. So many memes (not an image macro, but shared consciousness ideas).

I'm only a casual cfb fan, but during my forays into the online representation of the cfb fandom (mostly through reddit/r/cfb) I always marvel at the depth and breadth of the creativity, humor, and information in the fandom.

I could see where some people (and let's be honest, it's mostly men ages 18-30 or so) could immerse themselves in that subculture and have a lot of fun.

I imagine there are multiple subcultures that are large and immersive enough to totally lose yourself in and I think it's great.

(Of course there's also an element of avoidance of the real world in there, but that's more on the individual than the community)

I'm not much of a cfb fan but somehow I started tracking a Univ. of TX Austin board called "Shaggy Bevo"[1] and found the banter surprisingly entertaining as noted in this subthread. The creative taunting of rivals (mainly A&M) especially.

[1]http://shaggytexas.com/board/

CFB has this great mix of alumni loyalty, in game competition, storylines and then all of the actual university rivalries with it. Other sports, state rivalries, academics, conspiracies about rival school grads and their influence.

It’s an affiliation you never lose and so many people end up coming back throughout the season for games that it turns into a large family gathering.

I’ve never seen it’s equivalent in anything else.

This was my experience with early 00s subject-based message boards as well.

It seems to me like Discord provides a similar experience for today's kids. But of course the medium itself is quite different (long-form vs quippy, preserved vs ephemeral) and informs the experience accordingly.

Much as I somewhat romanticize the BBS experience I think it's going to occupy less and less of this type of social space, just by the nature of the way people communicate now.

> long-form vs quippy, preserved vs ephemeral

I learned a lot by browsing years old posts in forums and usenet but with ephemeral messaging I would not be able to do that. Makes me wonder how the new generation will deal with that.

It is also about centralisation vs each community hosting their own servers and not having to adhere to the arbitrary rules that some company enforces upon them.

Most established Discord servers have moderated channels that have strict on-topic guidelines, have slow modes, as well as pins, etc. The result is that a spectrum of long-form content to rapid messaging is achievable in Discord.

If you don't like Discord managing your chat data, Matrix.org is an option.

At its peak, there were probably a few hundred posters, tops

This is mostly the crux of the matter. It doesn't matter if you're talking about Reddit, phpBB, discord, imageboards, whatever. As a community grows, it becomes harder to deal with and more "faceless". I've been in great sub reddits. I've had to leave message boards on other platforms for the problems you describe (and others).

Agreed, subbredits with mere hudreds of posters often create similarly deep social connections

If I remember correctly trying to fix this is what killed Digg. A high percentage of their content were the same power users rushing to post content from the same well liked sites. They tried to do away with it by just dumping the sites RSS feeds into their site. Everyone fled and because Reddit didn't make those changes it became where they fled too.

I think the main improvement of reddit over message boards was just the small but extremely useful concept of messages being ordered by votes in a tree format. Nostalgia aside, navigating a flat, chronologically ordered message board post is extremely frustrating once you've tried the better way.

To a lesser extent, the lack of friction caused by not having to register individually to each message board to stop lurking, and the lack of friction creating new communities also matter, but none of those improvements require a centralised site to exist - niche reddit communities should be relatively easy to move from the site if such tooling existed, much easier than moving people from social networks at least.

I disagree that organizing by votes is inherently better than a chronological view. You simply end up with different problems. I’d probably argue that diversity of thought is much penalized in a voting system, which might be worse in the bigger picture. A better way forward would somehow combine the two.

Perhaps I should have clarified that I meant better in a UX sense.

Those cons you mention definitely do exist, they're an emergent problem of the conversations and communities that arise, but opinion bubbles never seem to be a bottleneck for a platform gaining popularity - which makes sense since they, by definition, favor the majority's opinion.

I'm also not convinced that chronological ordering is better for diversity of opinion: comments might not be hidden directly, but they can be drowned. In a reddit-like system each user can downvote you just once, while in a message board system each user can post N times, with each post making your opinion a smaller portion of the conversation.

What chronological posts are better at is favoring power users over casual users: there is a clear advantage for those who can post early and/or often. For everything besides the starting post of the thread, it also rewards short and not very thoughtful posts (since posting later is punished in visibility). The result is also a bubble, and one dictated by the people that spend their lives on the boards.

And in my personal opinion, there's not a lot of overlap between the people that lead interesting lives and are great at their fields and those willing to spend a great portion of their life in a message board.

Hmm. Maybe a solution to this is a limited number of posts per day/week. Or a limited number of upvotes/downvotes to give out. It would (helpfully) people to be concise and thoughtful with their comments.

I'm still active on a forum for those types of games. They're still probably about as active as they've ever been. It's obvious why it would never work on a large scale though. Each post got the user profile next to it, their signature, and a lot of space.

I would not call reddit anonymized, that title would fit something like 4chan a lot better. On reddit it is common to attack someone based on their comment history or karma.

Maybe anonymized is the wrong word. I mean more that Reddit lacks a sense of enduring identity; while a log of past posts does exist, the site is designed to prioritize the content of a comment more than the identity of its author.

This leads to shallow takes and groupthink, IMO, as comments become upvoted or downvoted based only on what's in that specific comment and not the overall identity of the author. If Reddit were the real world, it would be like starting an entirely new conversation with every single person you meet (even close friends or family members), a kind of endless first impression, in which small things are over-magnified.

> the site is designed to prioritize the content of a comment more than the identity of its author.

The site design is similar to HN on this front. I think that it is culture that separates the two instead.

> as comments become upvoted or downvoted based only on what's in that specific comment

This is desirable imo. It should not matter who makes a post but rather the quality of the post itself.

Regardless, I think that groupthink is an inherent problem of upvoting/downvoting and that this is the main cause of it. The best system that I have seen so far is the one that slashdot and its clones use.

> and not the overall identity of the author

This instead leads to personality cults, where for example tptacek's comment will get to the top regardless of its contents and bury superior comments by "irrelevant" users. Plus it is not like groupthink does not exist in HN either.

> it would be like starting an entirely new conversation with every single person you meet

I do not see what you mean by that. Repeating the same things? If so, I do not see how this would be the case. Rather, I think that being able to discuss with others and evaluate what they post in face value without letting your prejudice and opinion of the person itself get in the way is ideal.

> The site design is similar to HN on this front. I think that it is culture that separates the two instead.

Agreed. Culture is important.

Regarding my comment on identity: I'm trying to make a more subtle point, which is that it's difficult to build a long-lasting relationship via an online community if every comment is essentially speaking to a broad, new audience. I can't say, "Hey User-X, you mentioned this last week and I was thinking about it yesterday, and wanted to say this...". There is no continuity and no relationship-building.

Another (poor) metaphor would be: imagine your job is a traveling elevator repairman/repairwoman. You go from building to building, working at each for a few days. Sometimes, you go back to the same building. Maybe you strike up a conversation with each building's maintenance staff, but the fact that you have no enduring identity, means that you never quite get to know anyone, even if you recognize some of the same faces.

Forums didn't have this issue, largely because of avatars, signatures, and basically being forced to read every comment.

> This is desirable imo. It should not matter who makes a post but rather the quality of the post itself.

I think this makes sense at first glance, but the downsides (personality cults) are a separate issue that arises from the voting system. If you had comments/posts organized chronologically, 'cult leader' comments wouldn't be at the top. This also only seems to happen when the community is large enough for an individual to be anonymous within it.

I wrote a Python script to delete my comments every other day to take care of people pulling small quotes out of context and attacking me for it, or worse what boards I posted to and gatekeeping me based on that alone.

So in other words you never write anything worth keeping. People deleting themselves is massively annoying and a major dick move to the rest of us who have to guess what was said to understand the context.

Maybe he wants some control over what a large corporation keeps about him.

Just don't give them anything then. What he's doing now is like handling the corporation a piece of writing on paper, letting people take pictures of it, then grabbing the paper back, ripping in up and dropping the paper thrash on the street. It doesn't serve anyone.

This is a great example of why they had to write a python script to delete comments to prevent getting attacked later. People want to throw fits over everything

So what? What other people may chose to do is their issue. Dicks are easy to ignore, but don't be a dick to others in order to prevent potential dickiness reaching you.

Wow. I feel like this is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, at this point. I delete all of my comments, popular and hated. Equally. I don't pick and choose. There's a 48 hour clock on it. No one cares about a conversation 48 hours later on Reddit... No one cares 12 hours later, really. But if you want to think I'm a "dick", because I only give someone 48 hours to have my opinion on Reddit, well I'm old enough to live through that =) message boards don't have to be as permanent as they want them to be.

> No one cares about a conversation 48 hours later on Reddit

I do. All the reddit threads that I look at are from online searches regarding some sort of question that I have. Most of them tend to be months old, some even years. You just make the experience of people like me significantly worse. I wish that services like ceddit stored the content of user-deleted posts.

> Dicks are easy to ignore

Deleted comments are also easy to ignore. Deleting your comments regularly might be construed as a dick move by some people, but as you say, dicks are easy to ignore.

It serves them, which is why they do it. They get to have converaations without them being used against them.

It serves the user; that's why the user is doing it. Whom the hell else should ever be served?

Dumb analogies are dumb. Carefully curating one's online content is in no way similar to "dropping the paper thrash on the street".

It's very similar, you leave thrash around for others to deal with. And it's just not "one's online content", you also degrade the online content of the ones who spent time replying to you and participating in the thread.

I mean it's quite simple. It serves the user at the cost of the community at large.

HN has similar problems because you can edit your post after people have replied to it. This means you can retroactively change history and how prior arguments were framed, which can make other people look like idiots or completely destroy a comment chain.

If you're really concerned about anonymity or your history being used against you, then create throwaways. Otherwise you're not stopping corporations from keeping tabs on you, the moment you hit post that data's already been scraped and stored somewhere.

Does reddit actually delete posts from their systems? Or do they just flag it as deleted in their database? I always assume websites keep deleted data around.

If you really want to be safe, you probably need to utilize multiple online identities. Give the squeaky clean one to your employer if they ask.

I regularly run an extension that first edits, then deletes all my comments.

Yes, I have a similar concern but I just make a new account every now and then.

I used to do this more frequently but they started requiring an email address.

No just click through. No address required.

They also need a captcha if you use a proxy.

I make a lot of HN accounts because of this. Every reply includes more information that can't be deleted but can be used to tie it to my real-life identity. I don't want to have to precede every reply by pointing out it's my views and not my employer's.

Mind sharing this script?

The following is a good write up of how to do it and then I just set up a cron job on my Linux box to do it every 48 hours:

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/aoq9yj/reddit_...

The efficacy of such scripts is questionable considering there are sites that archive comments within seconds/minutes of them being posted.

Do you think this is because no one was profiting from your message board community? I'm sure there's several factors, but it takes people who love something to build a presence without motivation for profit.

Don't disagree with what your saying but I did find this an interesting take on Reddit: Smarter every Day Reddit - https://youtu.be/soYkEqDp760

Facebook also killed these forums too, but it's much more daunting joining a group using your real name and identity.

Reddit's too anonymous and Facebook is not anonymous enough!

My understanding is that Aaron Schwarz created it as a platform for free speech. So, did Reddit degenerate after he passed away?

Without doubt

I believe he joined as a late founder, he wasn't on the original team.

What was the GBA game?

http://tacticsogre.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com