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Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

Are there many sizable communities out there left that rival HN’s s/n ratio, civility and substance?

I can think of some with one or two of those attributes but not many that match it all the way around.

Lots. And they are as unknown to you as HN is likely to be to the users of them.

I run a number of forums, the largest yielding 250k monthly visitors. It's not huge... But it's 15 years old, very civil, and more interestingly has near zero moderation.

The ones I operate I do so on a simple basis... This forum is default dead, if you as users run it into the ground I'll turn it off as I make no money from it do not have any incentive to tolerate your bs. Make of this space whatever you want, but if you want it to exist then that's something that you all need to make happen by figuring out how to be adults.

It works.

I kill 10 sites for every one that makes it, and the ones that make it are great.

This is fascinating and I'd love to hear more about it. I generally despise heavy handed moderation as it changes the feel of a community from "a bunch of people talking about X" to "a group of power-mad narcissists and their groupies". Do you see ways of seeding forums that are effective? What kind of moderation do you have (I noticed that LGSS has moderators) - is it just "remove spam and illegal stuff"? Do you have rules for the forums? How often does a long-running forum suddenly, or not so suddenly, go bad? One of my lifelong "addictions" is tabletop RPGs, but the choice of forums just kinda is poor, mostly because of moderation, and so I always have in the back of my mind starting a new one, but I'm always concerned about the moderation effort, so the concept that you can take a different "moderation-free" path is tantalizing!

>I kill 10 sites for every one that makes it, and the ones that make it are great.

That's interesting, a sort of Darwinian selection pressure towards actual discussion. Though as I type that out it occurs to me that that could be a decent working definition of "good moderation"

Team-BHP.

It's a car enthusiasts' website in India.

Their forums section[1] is phenomenal.

Their official new car reviews [2] page is thorough. There are owner-reviews of most cars as well [3] (like for instance there's a dozen owner reviews for the BMW X3).

There's no membership fee. You don't need to be a member to read the content; you have to be a member to post content though.

It does not do advertisements of cars themselves (and openly calls out manufacturers who approach them with rewards for favorable reviews) because they believe it's difficult to be critical of manufacturers after accepting money from them for ads.

However, there are ads for non-car products so you might want to keep your ad-blockers on :D

Their moderators have other proper day-jobs. Like, they're doctors, entrepreneurs/business-people, dentists, teachers, pilots, software engineers (!) and everything else under the sun. The reason I mention this is because this website isn't really a source of income for anybody.

Content is moderated heavily, and people in violation of their guidelines [4] are banned (as long as you're civil, use proper English, don't use swear words etc you'll be fine).

[1] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/

[2] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/official-new-car-reviews/

[3] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/

[4] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/announcement...

I feel like places like tigsource have better civility and high signal to noise ratios.

There are a lot of forums that are good cuz they just ban annoying people (and that self selects a lot too). When you try to do mental gymnastics to justify removing people from a community suddenly a certain kind of person can show up and ruin it for everyone. (EDIT: that can be a valid choice for a community! Just has consequences)

But HN feels pretty unique in the quality despite being filled with a looooot of people who are, honestly, pretty agressive! The mod team seems to do a pretty good job.

A lot of my early experiences on the web involved being banned from places (forums) until I learned to be civil or at least contribute something interesting.

The bans weren’t designed to be an excommunication but an inconvenience. I’d sign up again with another username which they knew was me, and I could stay until I acted like an idiot again and they banned me, etc.

Yeah, people complain about censorship and bans on social media now, but honestly I don't see it. Seems like you can pretty much spit out nothing but hatred and personal attacks on Twitter or Reddit for years and nothing will happen.

The problem at least for Reddit is consistency and quality of moderation. Moderators will play favorites, and they'll spitefully punish people they don't like. There's no rules on Reddit - paid moderation is the fundamental difference with HN.

Twitter completely banned The Babylon Bee for this [1] article/joke. This is among countless other similar decisions on their part. In this case Elon Musk even contacted them (The Babylon Bee) before starting his current crusade, because the ban there is so overtly political.

As Noam Chomsky said, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."

The reason I give that quote is because you're not wrong. In other topics you can express all of the absolutely vile and hateful things one might like, all while acting like an absolutely horrible person. So just stop making fun of the political ideology largely espoused by the political establishment and corporate elite, and you'll have no problems. It will be quite interesting to see how history ultimately records the times of today.

[1] - https://babylonbee.com/news/the-babylon-bees-man-of-the-year...

Yes, this is a good thing. I don’t like real name policies or accounts tied to a phone number or LinkedIn account for this reason. We all benefit when the young or inexperienced get multiple chances to figure things out.

It's not just the young or inexperienced. People saying unpopular things or things that could hurt their career also need anonymity.

Very good point.

It depends how you define "communities". If you treat each of Reddit's subreddits as a separate community then there are a lot of small-to-medium sized ones that qualify.

(A lot of awful ones too, of course.)

Not sure to be honest, but it feels like if HN never goes through a redesign, we'll still be enjoying it in 2050.

HN is somehow the most mobile-friendly social network I use, and I'm not sure how that works. The prev/next/parent links are genius.

Well, HN isn’t a social network. It is a forum.

It’s not directly monetized so the design is meant to serve the user. In contrast social media design principles are about controlling user behavior to maximize revenue. This means HN is fast, simple, and information dense. Those are desirable properties on any device.

> HN isn’t a social network. It is a forum

With all due respect, this isn’t a restaurant it’s a McDonald’s.

Precisely

(Except in this case, it would be the other way around)

I chose this way around deliberately thank you.

Those links are great, I just wish there was a way to get back after clicking parent.

In long threads, it's easy to loose track of which parent a given comment is replying to. So I'll click `parent`, which gives me the context I need. But then I have no way to get back to the reply I was reading previously.

Click on the time stamp of the comment first, then you can use the back button of your browser.

The lack of a redesign I think is a big part why the community remains (if it ain't broken, don't fix it!), plus HN's heavy moderation -- towards these very guidelines.

Does it really have heavy moderation, though? I always feel that the team here has a rather light touch.

For sure it’s very carefully moderated, dang works very hard to keep conversations civil and away from flaming, especially around politics. “Heavy” has some negative connotations though. I think the moderation is appropriate.

Yes, perhaps that was a bit strong of a word. On a related note, a good opportunity to repost this article for those that hadn't seen it:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374040

Dang tends to be fair in his assessments. The first and last time he called me out he made it clear that I ran afoul of the terms and that I should go read them again if I had not. I stopped posting and went and read them. Like another poster said above this is a place where people get chances and when those are given even multiple times to the same person before getting "heavy" there is a high likelihood that people can turn around for the better and permanently. This is now the only place I come due to it being laid out by dang in the way that he did and my active decision to take the advice and become a better poster. There are a lot of very intelligent people here and sometimes I am in awe with the breadth of knowledge that is shared in the comments. I agree that the moderation has been appropriate and effective at that. Things are changing for the positive in my life all around thanks to that reminder and my choice to be a better person because of it.

Because probably dang and company tries to nip the bud when the link is posted. Since that most that pass that filter are relatively uncontroversial (they're things that interests some and silently ignored by others), they only need to actively monitor those with inherently high-level controversy (like partisan politics).

The moderation is quiet but very firm. For example, I can't post more than like 8 comments per day without getting blocked by rate-limit errors because dang has decided I get in too many flamewars.

This is actually rather clever. It's the internet equivalent of having a buddy pull you back in a brawl, as opposed to kicking you out.

I think it is like 5 comments in the same hour and then you have to observe for the next 3 hours (or something like that, I don’t know exactly).

I love this feature. I’m of a personality which really easily gets baited into flamewars (which is against the guidelines). Being forced to stop after 5 posts forces me into a cooldown period where I can reflect on my behavior. When the shutdown is over I will probably be demotivated enough to continue this recklessness and the probability of me being yelled at by dang goes down with it.

If I have something important to say, it can wait a couple of hours.

I posted something that got traction and they changed the title considerably and also changed the URL. So yes, they definitely moderate lol.

Between actual moderation and community moderation, yes. The way moderation works on HN is somewhat hidden though: dead comments will disappear, post titles and such are edited with no (publicly visible anyway) history, etc.

Inspired by Stalin, I imagine. I'm nervous to say 'it works', since we don't know really know what's being suppressed or changed.

HN is more heavily moderated than all the sites people complain about on here. If you browse the front page you’ll frequently find titles which make no sense at all because they’re stripped of the adjective which meant anything.

If you browse any of it chronologically with showdead you'll find tons of completely innocent stuff moderated out from ever showing up before it would’ve ever been visible, quite often on first post for no apparent reason.

Unlike other communities where excess moderation is a concern (a frequent discussion here), you can’t object to a decision publicly. I’m knowingly flouting the abstract version of that fact because I think it objectively contributes to the discussion. But I have every reason to believe even this is going too far.

more heavily moderated than the evil non free speech places

Not a full redesign, but there are quite a few UX issues that really need to be addressed. These 2 stand out most for me:

- mobile issues: text too small, up/down vote not usable

- post text almost unreadable, it should not be lighter than comment text

What phone are you using? It’s perfectly workable on my phone, and a breeze compared to the cancer that is crappy sites and apps like Reddit.

It’s so bad on mobile that there’s a market of HN clients.

Myself I am writing this from an app I’ve bought on the App Store.

The main issue I notice is that the up/down arrows and other UI elements are too tiny to easily/accurately tap with a touchscreen. Thankfully touchscreens are pretty good at guessing which HTML element my fat fingers are touching, but it still leaves me a bit paranoid about e.g. whether I upvoted or downvoted.

After you vote, look for whether the text next to the timestamp says "unvote" or "undown". That will tell you whether you upvoted or downvoted.

In tiny, gray text, with words that look similar to those with imperfect eyesight. It could easily be improved without breaking the site's entire aesthetic, IMO.

I never noticed "unvote" was exclusively used for upvotes. I had been thinking there was no way to check. Thank you.

The first issue, I'd have to disagree. I think it's perfectly usable. Second issue, it doesn't bother me but fair point

> text too small

I am acutely nearsighted so I can still read 2mm tall characters unaided and am well past the point when most humans require corrective lenses for reading.

It's sort of a super power right about now.

So it depends. I dislike large text on my phone. old.reddit.com works just fine for me as well.

For mobile I use GLIDER for Hacker news. It a pretty good experience :)

On iOS, you can set the text size to be larger using the Aa button in safari.

If you are looking for an app, I am the developer of HACK which is available on both iOS/MacOS/iPadOS and Android:

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h...

> If you are looking for an app, I am the developer of HACK

A little off-topic, but I'm totally blind (use VoiceOver) and just tried the app on iOS. A few issues:

* Several buttons are unlabelled, so I'm not sure what they do. * Navigating through posts isn't the most efficient (I need to swipe several times to move from post to post). * The relative level of comments within a thread isn't announced (i.e. replies to OP are at level 1, replies to those replies are level 2, etc). Are these indented visually? * Accessibility actions should be added to quickly vote, reply to comments, etc.

Happy to provide additional feedback/model apps that do this well, but I'm not an iOS developer.

Thanks for the feedback. It’s my fault and I apologize because I hadn’t taken accessibility into account while development. I will look into making the app accessible in updates.

Text size is perfect for reading, even on my small hi-res device. I do agree with the UI elements though.

Post text is pretty bad, sometimes even on my PC...

That post text is the same color as a downvoted comment is truly baffling to me. What benefit could that possibly have?

I miss two things: inline `typewriter font` and

- bulleted/ordered

- lists without making each entry its own paragraph.

While I agree that the UX on mobile could be better, it might actually be beneficial to comment quality that HN encourages desktop use.

Probably not so useful for mobile, but have a look at Refined HN extension: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news

I discovered it a few days ago. It seems to include a "override CSS" box in the menu, allowing anyone to customize the look of HN.

The Financial Times comment section is surprisingly civil and useful despite it’s size. Not sure if that is the kind of community you had in mind.

Is that just a benefit of being behind a paywall though?

WSJ is a cesspool, so no.

I add the Washington Post comment section, which has to be the most mindless thing I have ever read.

Unless it relates to Brexit/Covid/whatever the current flavour of the month is.

Generally, the less commented upon articles are pretty excellent.

Various well-manicured gardens tucked away in Reddit are quite nice. And honestly I don't think HN is as nice as it used to be now that more and more culture war topics are creeping in.

I hear people say this all the time but even the “well-manicured” gardens like the neutral news subreddits suffer from the fact that Reddit as a platform is just not a proper solution for actual discussion. HN is a bit better even and only due to not showing comments karma.

It is rare (in fact I’ve never witnessed this) that I see someone on Hacker News spout paragraphs of completely inaccurate information and be rewarded with hitting the top of the page. The culture on Reddit is so bad that on more than one occasion I’ve had someone respond to me with nonsense and provide sources that don’t even mention the topic at hand. But because people see links they upvote (and once a post has a positive upvote rating inertia kicks in since people want to agree with the karma score.)

So I disagree, you can manicure rotten eggs all day and they’ll still be rotten. Reddit is rotten and it gets worse every sprint as they introduce more and more Facebook features. The problems with Reddit have only been magnified by the fact that a majority of its users today use it as an app similar to tik tok, and the company is encouraging this. Mainly because what the platform was initially designed as (a top site + forum for the whole internet) isn’t as profitable as being just another gamified and over advertised platform where people can argue about whatever the topic of the day is.

If every reddit user had a tag displaying their age, it would help shed light on why that site is such a joke. I suspect it's largely teenagers and young 20-somethings playing expert in a wide variety of fields.

It definitely is, the demographic seems to completely have changed from when I began using Reddit a decade ago. It use to be fairly technical in nature similar to HN. That has completely changed as even the commentary is so poor compared to just a couple years ago that I can’t believe a company would be so hostile to the user base that initially built it in favor of becoming an application the market has little need for.

There’s plenty of social media companies out there already I don’t see why Reddit decided to become a worse version of Facebook when it could have charted a different path. I’m bitter I guess, as every other social media company is realizing they need to take a step back and add ways to make discussion more civil Reddit is doing the opposite and their karma system actively helps bad faith actors due to how much it affects the perception if a given post.

I’m completely done with Reddit, the last two times I’ve reinstalled it the UI has added improvements that I don’t want and I haven’t a productive conversation there in over a year.

I've definitely seen this happen in a slightly different form on hacker news. For example, sometimes someone will reply to a dissenting post simply with a link to the original posters profile as if their history and karma somehow justifies not arguing with them.

I'm genuinely not sure what value the karma system adds

Culture wars topics have always existed on HN. Today it is landlord/motherboard, a few years ago it was master/main, and who can forget Donglegate?

Actually HN used to be libertarian as hell with a significant Rand contingent inherited from the Startup community. I feel that HN has mellowed politically over the years as a greater international audience has joined.

Don't forget how it's fast as heck!

That is nice. I’m worried I somehow damaged my phones wifi radio (it sits infinitely looking for SSIDs while never finding any now) and my mobile network is screwy, constantly switching networks between low-bar LTE and 5G. Sometimes HN is the only site that wants to load

I don’t want your limit for “sizable” is, but yes, but they’re semi-hidden on places like Slack, Reddit and Discord.

This comment made me think of a local online social network that was used predominantly in Umeå, Sweden. I can't speak for what happened in DMs but all the public facing content was very civil. And hardly any noise whatsoever.

But I don't think local online communities will ever managed to get established anew again.

Apberget? It was fairly outstanding in being mostly clean and professionally ran without attempting to go national or sell out much. Until they did get bought.

That's the one. Yes, post buy-out it went poorly but that fallout was a given considering the company that purchased it.

Some finance forums come close, but they're heavily moderated, just like HN is.

Still, your point is a good one.

Which forums

I participate in 8 or 10 like that. They aren't especially rare, in my experience.

I feel that people who find HN good, do so for a reason.

They are the kind of people who are in majority in HN. They have similar views and when they comment here on HN their views are accepted and prompted more readily.

This makes it a kind of an echo chamber.

All deviants get banned or their comments are greyed out.

Dissenting is not allowed and dealt with severity and finality.

That’s fine though. It’s ok to have communities with shared interests and goals. Sometimes that means keeping out people who prefer something different. That’s ok too; they can start a forum for their community and impose whatever conditions they like. HN is just an Internet forum. It’s not a massive social media platform or a country where exclusionary rules can be damaging to large populations.

Sizable I doubt, however I have been in smaller circles that do better.

Lobste.rs (I'm not a member) seems pretty good; civil and focused. I guess it's not sizeable.

Metafilter, by a general sense.

Metafilter has always been well moderated. This is an odd one but boards.straightdope.com also works well thanks to good moderation.

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