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> I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result.

Of course, this completely depends on where you are on both Twitter and Reddit. There are bad and toxic parts of Reddit, and there are good and wholesome parts of twitter.

The one main difference though that's useful to compare between the two is that a post escaping the original audience, with the context collapse and everything else that brings, is a foundational feature of Twitter. It's a lot harder for that to happen on Reddit.

> one person can have hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers that basically encourages flamewars, short inflammatory comments

Honestly you just described reddit, too, except of course for the follower count—but the point is that reddit doesn’t have to have that many participants in a discussion thread for it to reach a level of toxicity same as Twitter.

Sure, social media did make information more accessible, but the vision of the internet before Web 2.0 was that it’ll democratize information without the trade off that comes with social media today—because that trade off is exactly what we hated then about the status quo.

I sometimes think the Internet is like the Mirror of Erised from Harry Potter. It can show us what we want: if what we want is knowledge it will show us that, if what we want is proof that we are right it will show us that and if we want to see how horrible other people are, that is what we will see.

It was just that people turned out to value less truth less, than being told they were right. You can fault the engineers who built this for it, but then you are faulting them for thinking too highly of people.

I think the problem is also that we also are shown what other people want to see. I genuinely don’t want to see political positions of my relatives, or my neighbors getting into heated internet fights. But I do want to see my relatives small joys, and I do want to know important neighborhood news and activities. That I can’t filter appropriately makes social media toxic, as I can feel my social animal brain see heightened emotions and want to participate in social heightened emotions online, even though it doesn’t do anything for anybody. Even fighting the urge to post and participate just makes my day just that little bit less fulfilling.

I have the same. So I stopped using it. Almost a year now since I uninstalled FB, and a few years for Twitter. It's amazing how you don't miss it.

Now if I could just shake my HN addiction...

Spot on! It’s so bizarre that people won’t bring up politics in person but feel it’s ok to blast their opinions to those same people.

I think it's a combo of physical distance and ease of commenting. Remember the old Penny Arcade comic that frequently made the rounds years ago (about the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory)?

Not a terribly subtle bit of commentary itself, but it was a humorous reference to something most of us had experienced. In person, there are reactions to see. The other person/people's humanity is on direct display and most of us have at least some degree of innate empathy that keeps us from being a complete asshole all the time. And even those who don't mind (or relish) being an asshole have to worry about repercussions.

In contrast, if I read something I disagree with, it's a lot easier for me to just fire off a smartass reply without the effect that socialization has on me to consider how appropriate the comment is or what effects it might have. I'm just countering some words that I don't like with some other words I do like.

Large-scale social media just turns into the comment section for the entire internet.

Not only can you not filter, the stream is purposefully toxic to increase 'engagement'. I have a lot of friends on my feed that post constantly. Memes, cat pictures, etc, a few posts are about 'libtards'. Guess which posts show up on my feed.

But you can filter. I do that all the time.

My filter list consist basically of football and religious proselytism, two topics I never want to read about.

During the last world cup, or last euro cup or some event like that I had to filter about 10 groups, and the thing is, it works. I never get any football content in my feed any more.

I wonder if there's a single Product owner in social media organizations advocating for these points, but they're being drowned out by optimizing for profits. I could easily imagine, at the top of the timeline, a dropdown toggle that lets me toggle politics, neighborhood news, etc. But of course, I can't, so I've left FB altogether. At least with Reddit I can browse by topic, which somewhat puts me back in the driver seat. I can go to r/MyCity or r/cooking, but what I don't have then is those small, non-political joys posted by family/friends. Texting and phone calls for small life updates it is.

> You can fault the engineers who built this for it, but then you are faulting them for thinking too highly of people.

Well, that's my argument against a communist society. It was designed only for perfectly altruistic people, and that's a kind of people I have never found anywhere. If we want something that actually works, we need something designed for the people that actually exist.

It's the same with the Internet. Once the spammers got the gist of it, it has been a constant struggle between spammers and anti-spam people. We have reached some form of equilibrium, but anytime a new person connects, it's a brand-new learning about avoiding potentially bad stuff. It can be very expensive learning.

That's actually my exact argument against capitalism.

I’m going to count HN as a social network. It’s one of my favorite places on the internet. It surfaces great content, and the comments are a gold mine of top-notch information and advice (by and large).

What general principles can we learn from HN that can be applied elsewhere? Does HN self-select its audience? No profit motive? Great moderation? (Thanks Dang!)

It's pretty obviously moderation. And the fact is: moderation hurts the bottom line.

Moderation, but also a community that is by and large more intelligent than the general pop. Add to that a set of common reference points grounded in tech. We almost al understand logic, math, have good language skills and tertiary education. This perhaps makes HN a little bit of an echo chamber in some respects but it also means there is space for well presented arguments that go against the grain.

> No profit motive?

There are profit motives and Y Combinator is being transparent on this. From the FAQ [1]:

> Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down and fall steadily. Only one is on the front page at a time. The rest are listed at jobs.

>

> What's the relationship between YC and HN?

> Y Combinator owns and funds HN. The HN team is editorially independent.

> HN gives three features to YC: job ads (see above) and startup launches get placed on the front page, and YC founder names are displayed to other YC alumni in orange.

But HN seems incentivized to keep the level of quality high and to not interfere too much with content beyond moderation, or people would leave. So it leaves us with good quality contents and discussions.

HN's incentives are well-aligned with serving its users best, and this is probably partly what makes it a good place.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

To me a few things:

- dang’s moderation and example

- no images

- no intentional sub-cultures

- smaller audience

- topical

- charmingly ugly

- a generally invested community that appreciates this is a special outcome

The interesting thing to me is that Slashdot shares many of these attributes, has a relatively sophisticated moderation feature and is a cesspool. It feels like a ship adrift in the Caribbean and the fourth generation of rats born on the vessel are at war.

The primary difference IMHO is dang. Anytime I think about the overall quality of HN, his efforts bubble to the surface of my mind as the primary causal factor.

The people who make Slashdot a cesspool probably pushed the reasonable ones out, and the refuge for these is HN. The same could probably happen here at some point, but people who want a civil forum could simply move elsewhere if that happens.

It helps that something like HN can be easily duplicated, so there will probably always be a space like HN where interesting and civil discussions happen.

> The primary difference IMHO is dang.

I certainly agree that dang's moderation is excellent and contributes to the uniqueness of HN. But "+5 Funny" on Slashdot was a big driver in the other direction, rewarding the endless hot grits and Cowboy Neal humour, which usually drowned out more sophisticated comments.

Totally agree. I think the intent was to let people focus on the types of comment they want, but it just ended up gamifying moderation.

Which reminds me of another HN feature that I think is material to its ability to sustain its culture:

- Private vote counts

I do think this website is still small enough to have decent moderation, but there are plenty of borderline toxic and/or trolling comments I've seen here that go unmoderated. I've also seen tons of blatant and dangerous misinformation posted in the comments section, you only have to look at the vaccine threads from last week to see that. Nothing is perfect anywhere and medical misinformation is really bad for everyone. Maybe we can blame Facebook for bleeding out into the rest of the internet and turning things toxic, but we still have to deal with the effects of it.

r/programming is pretty good in my personal opinion.

Also, niche tech subreddits tend to have great sources of information, even if some tend to become echo chambers over time.

> Maybe we can develop healthier forms of social media.

Sounds like "let's develop a healthier form of crack" to me.

Coffee :D

Yes, but imagine crack/amphetamines/stimulants without negative health effects. With no addiction, tolerance, or making people stop doing basic habits like eating, drinking water, brushing teeth etc. A healthy form of crack that would only have benefits of the crack that could make you into a real motivated, energised work horse or entrepreneur. You could be on it, you could be off it with no consequences, but if you want to be extra productive you would be on it.

I think OP's really onto something here.

Maybe something to reset the brain chemical state in such way that tolerance and addiction could not come up. It surely must be possible in some way.

A friend of mine had this idea but with opioids. He invented an opioid painkiller which was, IIRC, a positive allosteric modulator of the mu opioid receptor - I'm not an expert, but I believe the gist was that it enhanced your endogenous opioid system, and was therefore less prone to addiction.

He ended up finding a handful of papers scattered across the last decades where people had come to the same realisation, but nothing came of it. Now, it's very possible there was something wrong with the idea. He did synthesise the molecule and we both took it, but not for long enough to really assess - even in a Shulgin-like way - whether it was addictive. But he ended up suspecting that the reason nothing came of it is that a non-addictive drug is simply not profitable, and is dominated, in the game-theory sense, by addictive drugs which bring consistent and greater revenue streams.

Also, apropos of:

> reset the brain chemical state in such way that tolerance and addiction could not come up

You may want to look into ibogaine. It doesn't give you both the high and the 'resetting the brain' functions - it only does the latter - but it's a very interesting case in that it has a very successful track record in resetting addiction. Though research is hampered by the fact that its cardiotoxic properties have killed a bunch of people who didn't do proper ECGs etc to check for heart abnormalities before taking it.

Would it be bad to have a healthy form of crack?

By healthy I would mean physically non addictive and without any negative long term effects. If you used it right it would just give you euphoria, motivation, stimulation and potentially nootropic effects?

For many ADHD sufferers there’s literally a healthier form of crack. Well actually meth. It produces most of what of what you mention, except the sense of euphoria. The euphoria comes from quick rushes of dopamine and are what lead to many of the worse outcomes of meth/crack like dropping hygiene or eating properly. Conversely meds generally help ADHDers with basic hygiene, motivation, etc.

> By healthy I would mean physically non addictive and without any negative long term effects.

But how would something like work? It's the substance's ability to cause euphoria that makes it addictive. You cannot have one without the other. Addiction occurs when one loses the ability to regulate their dopamine-driven activity, causing something akin to an infinite loop. Adderall is basically legal meth, and it's easily the most abused medication in the US.

It should somehow be able to reset or configure brain's chemical state.

There's 2 addictions, physical and psychological. Psychological, could yes still happen of course even if you restored the balance of dopamine and other relevant chemicals, but in theory you could at least get rid of withdrawals if you were able to manipulate those chemicals. We don't have a way to do that, and may be we won't have, and maybe we'll invent something completely different first that would make something like this or drugs completely obsolete. But just in theory.

What you're describing sounds vaguely like some naturally occurring psychedelics, but again, those typically aren't addictive because the body often tries to reject them, even when you achieve an altered state of mind. They're not pleasurable to take.

I highly recommend reading the Molecule of More, which does an incredible job of explaining the brain chemistry behind addiction in an accessible way.

I've switched completely over to a well-moderated mastodon instance and haven't looked back since. Finding an instance that aligns with your values is the tricky part but once you have done that it's a lot of fun. The absence of any advertisements or algorithms really has an impact on the quality.

> I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result.

That entirely depends where you are. The big frontpage-able/default subreddits are strongly moderated (with at least some pressure on the mods to behave), but other subreddits have ended up as self-reinforcing cesspools, especially when moderators collude to ban any opposing viewpoint (as happens with r/conservative). And then you have the subreddits that were explicitly created for toxic purposes (e.g. T_D, c..ntown, fatpeoplehate, and a boatload of others listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...).

> Maybe we can develop healthier forms of social media.

I run a few social sites, nothing as major as Facebook, and this is something I struggle with daily. The problem isn't the tech, it's the people.

They post disinfo? So you put up a little warning saying this is wrong, they get upset and scream censorship, you push too hard and they just go to another platform.

People like being upset, they like having drama.

I have no answers, but I do think a friends-only feed, where you have to expressly opt-in to see posts works best, combined with easy discoverability (hashtags, interest channels and pages etc)

It does take knowledge to learn though sadly (and personal drive), I'm helping some family in an underdeveloped country and I stupidly want to be like "learn to code" but yeah... that doesn't really work. They have the time but not the ability to learn even though they have wifi/computer.

Anyway I too learned from the web and it has benefited me a lot.

“ It's easy to feel blasé about the internet, but it's also played a huge role in making information easily accessible. I learned about electronics from online tutorials. Taught myself programming. Also learned a lot about home repairs and renovations. Made a lot of contacts, landed jobs, etc. I met my partner through a dating app.”

All of this was possible before the internet.

>All of this was possible before the internet.

Sure, and before the invention of the telephone and telegraph you could just write someone a letter, and before the invention of the printing press you could just hire a scribe. Before the automobile you could just ride a horse. Before the cotton gin, just put some slaves in a field. Nothing is new under the sun.

Having all of this information available at one's fingertips and having the ability to communicate and publish globally, and practically for free, has been revolutionary in and of itself.

Revolutionary? By what measure? The pace of true core innovation has slowed by many measures. The largest and most valued businesses today are largely marketing organizations masquerading as “tech” companies.

Finally, I would argue that more, easily accessible information is not necessarily better information.

No, it wasn't.

If you genuinely believe it was, i suppose you're just incredibly unaware of how gated information was before the internet.

The poster said "easily accessible". The wealth of knowledge and information i have at my fingertips today was before hidden behind public libraries I'd have to plan a trip to, in courses i would have to attend, in the brains of experts i would have to interview in person, i would generally have to dedicate years of my life in order to match what I can today learn in a matter of days just because of the difficult process of sorting through the information and finding what I'm looking for.

Quite the exaggeration if I may say so. How were you born then? Did your parents meet on the internet? All of the mentioned tasks were not casual in nature. Most books are far better and more in depth than tutorials found online, so for true expertise you will most likely seek long form information found in books.

Sure, some online information may be “more accessible” but is it necessarily better information?