Ask HN: Other communities with responses as good as the submissions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Other communities with responses as good as the submissions?

44 pointsnotpachet25 comments

A friend and I were discussing what it is about HN that maintains such a grip on our attention, and I realized something which is probably obvious to a lot of you: I often spend just as much time reading through and digesting the comments here as I do the original posts. It isn't uncommon for me to learn way more about the subject matter from comments than from the post itself.

Are there other communities, online or off, with a similar balance between the quality of the original source material (whatever that means in context) and the responses to it? For example: an online forum dedicated to an esoteric interest; a book club or writing group; your local bicycle repair shop; etc.

(A lot of workplaces probably exhibit this balance, but let's leave them out of the definition of "communities" for the purposes of this post.)

View on HN

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/ is heavy moderated, no anecdotes allowed, some threads have half the comments hidden/deleted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians has high quality researched answers but sometimes the first answer comes after hours or days so you need to bookmark the interesting threads.

Related "Ask HN: Alternatives to HN for non-Hacker News?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25318880

A community is only as good as the quality of the moderation. HN is unique in that it has very dedicated people who read every comment and take time to explain why a comment isn't productive to the conversation. That minimizes trolling/dunking, which has sunk countless other communities.

I've also noticed that other message boards usually become "productized" once it has a large enough audience, and that tends to drive down the quality of conversation as well. Since the HN forum is an offshoot of YC, that hasn't happened. Well, I guess HN could technically be considered a job board for YC companies, but those postings are dwarfed by the regular posts.

What is "dunking"?

Tryna get "gotcha" on someone. Like finding their weakest point and then arguing from the opposite extreme; a weak attempt to invalidate their stronger points.

> A community is only as good as the quality of the moderation

True and the bare-minimum non-appealing UI that repeals casual readers. For example Reddit subs quality was way better before they modernized the site to attract general audience.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ and a good portion of his blogroll

Surprisingly, YouTube comments can have a high signal-to-noise ratio.

And be extremely nice and supportive in tone. The comments on amateur classical music performances are usually lovely.

Does anyone have a theory of why that is? I've noticed the same thing, which is why I pretty much stick to both HN and YouTube these days, even to the exclusion of Reddit except for a few select subreddits. The quality of HN makes sense to me, but I'm not sure I can explain YouTube. Maybe it's because YouTube is better suited for consuming interesting and thought-provoking content instead of short snarky snippets?

Don't get me wrong, it's not like there isn't a ton of garbage and vitriol on YouTube, but for example I can go to channels I don't really agree with like David Pakman and find both interesting videos as well as some good comments. Whenever someone is a jerk, usually they're called out and not taken seriously unless they have an extremely good point to make.

Contrast this with Twitter which, whenever I've been to it, seems to facilitate a lot of moralizing vitriol that gets a TON of positive attention. It even seems to be designed to make irrationality appear to have legitimacy.

I think for communities to work, there need to be a somewhat close-knit group with shared interests/expectations and people that are actively fostering and if necessary enforce the kind of culture they want to be in. Otherwise you just end up with lowest common denominator between whoever happens to come by.

I wouldn't say YouTube overall has good comments, but there are certainly channels with very high quality comments and it's in my opinion often due to the tone set by the content creators themselves not by any YouTube policy or algorithm.

Yeah it may be certain channels. I primarily watch intellectual content, which if I'm going to be honest is a sort of niche part of YouTube overall.

Although I still think in general there's a better sort of control against vitriol and snark on there. And now I'm thinking that may be because places like Twitter are designed to make everybody feel like they have some form of celebritydom even if they've never produced content beyond tweets. On YouTube, I'd suspect the vast majority of users don't have accounts of their own, thus no one can subscribe to see their comments; those comments can only be seen in the context in which they are relevant. An asshole in the YouTube comments may appear uncalled for in relation to the video and surrounding comments, but on Twitter anyone can be subscribed to and their comments are mostly standalone. If you're a jerk on Twitter, you will almost certainly be selectively reinforced by the cult you've created with your subscriber base. (I once did an experiment to see if I could amass thousands of Twitter followers with no meaningful content, and it was beyond easy. Anyone can start a cult on Twitter.)

I think part of this is just because of how much there is to learn on youtube. "youtube university", as i like to call it. with so much to learn, it brings good discussion.

Ugh, this is why it is so hard for me to hate YouTube despite how awful they and Google can be as companies (a company?). The amount of information on YouTube is just epic. Before YouTube I'd have either needed to buy physical copies of lectures or actually attend them in person. Now I can watch videos from professors on quantum physics and see people ask questions they might not have otherwise asked in a physical setting.

I might have some insight. I feel like it comes down to three things:

1.) Twitter is designed to keep us engaged so we keep feeding the eyeball economy. YouTube comments aren’t as directly monetized as active Twitter users.

2.) Irrationality is legitimate -if- you’re trying to sell shit. Then, it’s your best friend. I can sum up my entire marketing degree with the words ‘make people believes lies then take their money.’ I paid way the fuck too much for eight words of insight.

3.) This may be a touch of bias. Judging by how you write, I assume you’re drawn to higher quality content. Like tends to attract like…

The funniest comments are often the YouTube comments.

Heavily depends on the channel/video, I would say.

Sharing them is a catch-22 situation. If I tell you what they are, it might bring in more interesting people, but it also runs the risk of pushing it closer to an exponential growth curve that overwhelms the (usually volunteer) moderation.

What seems to keep HN from going too far off the deep end is:

1: A clear, minimal set of guidelines that covers all bases

2: A mod who seems to have a good sense of where to enforce it and, I hope, gets paid to do it

3: A community that mostly seems to check itself

4: A custom forum that allows experimentation with system-level experiments in moderation and someone to develop those features

Public service announcement: there are many, many awful HN comments. They just hide behind an authoritative tone, so it is much harder to spot the bullshit. This becomes obvious when you read comments about topics that you are an expert in. Even then we still tend to fall for the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

That being said, there are indeed many experts around here and I find it interesting to read their opinions (if they fall in their area of expertise :-)

> I often spend just as much time reading through and digesting the comments here as I do the original posts.

I think most of us spend more time with comments than articles …

It’s funny you say that; it actually took a couple years before I shook off my “what could the comments possibly have to offer me” pre-conception informed by how bad comment sections everywhere else on the internet are, to finally take a look at them and realize what I’d been missing out on all this time.

For personal finance and investing topics, I recommend the BogleHeads community.

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php

I‘d like to point out stackexchange.com

Variety of topics, highly competent answers, low noise

https://www.metafilter.com/ (and https://ask.metafilter.com/ ) has successfully maintained a high-quality community for decades through active, strong, and consistent moderation.

https://lobste.rs is pretty good

I'd argue not only are responses good, but very often the discussions are much higher quality than the submission itself.

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