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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment sections in exist to drive page views. Online publishers want flame wars to break out, because flame wars mean traffic.

There's no money in quality comments. Reddit is a vast money-pit for Conde Nast. Kevin Rose might have got paid, but Digg is going down the chute. HN serves as a recruiting ground for YC and I believe that Slashdot is treated as a loss-leader to support other Geeknet properties.

Personally, I think we need to take a lesson from the granddaddy of them all, WELL. Mandate real names and charge admission and you'll get quality interaction. Contrary to what internet culture might have us believe, exclusivity and accountability are generally good things.

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Reddit is a vast money-pit for Conde Nast.

Really? How much does CN lose annually on Reddit?

Hey, they recently doubled the headcount of their sysadmin team!

Fair enough PG, that was bang out of order.

That said, Reddit does look to be in a bad way. They're experiencing chronic and severe downtime, mainly as a result of technical debt - AWS can only take so much blame when firms like Netflix got through the outage fine. Even when AWS isn't undergoing major outages, "emergency read-only mode" has become rather too common.

When two members of a three-man developer team quit at roughly the same time, that's a warning sign.

Reddit looks to me to be in a similar situation to 4chan - a huge, highly influential user base that is actively hostile to monetisation. It looks to me like the best case scenario is that Nast is deliberately smothering Reddit - all the other explanations for their current problems bode much worse.

Usenet, which had real names, was filled with non-quality interaction.

SA, which charges admission, is self-obsessed and psychotic.

If you have enough posters or your topic invites people who aren't motivated to debate rationally, your comments are going to be stupid.

EDIT: one thing that Usenet did have was the killfile. Now that's solving social problems with technology!

I agree. I think a sense of community is the main driver of quality comments: that's why news sites and YouTube have such poor comments, because most people followed a link to that specific article/video and have no long-term relationship with the site; whereas forums on a site devoted to a single topic do much less badly.

But I don't think real names are strongly causally connected to a sense of community.

For a good example, see advrider.com, which has free and (mostly) pseudonymous accounts but a great sense of community.

Reddit created Reddit Gold specifically because they were so cash starved.

I also question how much revenue they generate from ads considering the number of users who use Ad-Block.

However, there's quite a few people that disable AdBlock specifically for Reddit.

Actually there were rumors that Reddit Gold was about internal Conde Nast politics -- CN takes paid subscriber count very seriously, so they get a lot more respect at CN now that they have lots of paying subscribers.

It's true that publishers use comment sections to drive page views, but that doesn't mean they don't want quality discussions. Essentially, what they want are civilized flame wars. I know, I know ... crazy, right?

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