Ask HN: HN-like forum for literature and cinema?
Is there any forum like HN where people discuss film, literature, etc?
Literature: https://www.gnooks.com/discussion/
Movies: https://www.gnovies.com/discussion/
There must be around 100k forums in there. It was a pretty crowded place back then with a lot of cool people. Moderation was a full time job though. And very stressful.
As ads became less and less of a way to make an income online, at some point it was just too much work to justify continuing it. So I closed them.
I still fantasize about reopening them one day. Maybe with paid memberships. That would allow to keep the work under control (because fewer people sign up) and to pay someone to do the moderation.
PS: Man, I haven't looked at the discussion boards for years. Now that I do, I notice how archaic it is to not have suggestions in the search bar. You have to type the exact author name to get to the right board. One moment, let me implement typeaheads ... I'll be right back ... done!
I've used your site gnovies.com and gnoosic countless times and recommended it to friends! Really great tool and I discovered both movies and music I otherwise wouldn't have found.
Example I input: Bladerunner, Inception, and Ex Machina into gnovies and discovered a movie called Upgrade that I thoroughly enjoyed, and otherwise wouldn't have known about. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6499752/)
Appreciate your work, thanks!
PS What do you work on in more recent times?
Bladerunner & Ex Machina are both in their own league.
I was just pondering yesterday "What would a sequel to Ex Machina look like?" "What would it be called?" "What sort of story line would be interesting?"
Gnod is still my main project. Combined, the Gnod projects for music, movies and literature are used by about half a million users a month now. I just closed the discussion boards because they caused so much work.
Other projects are Product Chart, which is a new type of product discovery tool, and illubots, which is an illustration agency where all illustrators are neural networks.
That makes sense re: discussion boards. Moderation is a tough problem. Years ago I worked at a regional newspaper and had to deal with the comment section on news articles, total mess. They eventually shut them down.
How did you get started, anything come before Gnod?
How do you plan to monetize illubots? Could see a use for that as an api for e.g. "generate collection of random but similar avatars"
The idea of illubots is that it provides the same service you would normally get from an illustration agency. For example a book cover. That means that the human work of selecting from the robot output, inpainting, outpainting, upscaling etc is included in the service. I am still fine-tuning the concept.
And what are your plans with sqwok? Feel free to shoot me an email or connect on Twitter if you like.
Upgrade is pretty mediocre forgettable movie, bit difficult to regimens l recommended good scifi movie, those are rare. From less known Mr Nobody, Her are decent.
Do you mean 100k posts? I wasn't able to grok the links, they had a search box that seemed to show individual messages without context and a general "closed" message.
It looked more like a guest book than a forum from my casual perusing.
Most 2000s-era communities have been swallowed by the reddit leviathan and are now made up of similarly low-quality, validation seeking type of discourse.
There's nothing saying that one can't create a community on reddit and moderate it severely. Yes, it will get some flack from being one of the subs where the moderators delete everything.
The community and moderation evolve together and with a few exceptions of being able to edit titles after the fact or change where links point to - reddit offers similar moderation tooling.
What is needed is the "create a sub, and moderate it to match the vision."
Be it reddit or grabbing a reddit clone and hosting it yourself, or finding another format that works better - the problem is similar. And the core problem there is that volunteer moderation is a thankless task that people only complain about and rarely praise.
Hosting a community on Reddit, is like having a shortest-path route between two buildings that cuts through a grassy field, and then sticking a sign up saying "keep off the grass" and writing tickets for anyone seen on the grass. Rather than being able to either pave the shortest-route path, or rearrange the buildings so that the route between them doesn't go through the field.
There's also no ability to enable any kind of "moderated mode" on a subreddit where only subscribers may post, or where posts/comments (of new users, recent subscribers, etc) must go through a moderation queue. So you're always getting drive-by posts from users who don't know where they are or what the rules are, nor are they going to stick around long enough to care to learn them. The classic "I just found this on /r/all" comment.
(You can make a subreddit invite-only, but then people can't even see posts/comments from the subreddit if they're not logged in — i.e. the subreddit is no longer a public website — which is rarely desired.)
Even the trivial posting of jokes and rather content free - it is the community and the moderation that the community does that is there.
You can make a restricted subreddit where only people who are subscribers can post (though anyone can read). https://www.reddit.com/r/modguide/comments/dt2qgr/private_re...
You can make a subreddit such that only people who have been flared can post more than once a day with external bots doing moderation and then as a moderator add/remove flares to people who contribute.
You can have a sub not show up in /r/all.
There is a lot of tooling that can be created and added to subs to get it to fit the moderation that is desired... it just takes work.
I would contend that it will take a less work to get a reddit sub to have the community and to match the moderation desired as it would be to launch a site with custom coding that has the desired tooling and community.
And if you scroll to the bottom of even this, rather innocuous ask HN question, there's one at the bottom.
I consider "one at the bottom" and "a handful out of 1300 comments" to be "few".
How would you define (non zero) few?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463908&p=6
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463908&p=7
Or you could pull up a new thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474681 has one... and if there's anything web3, you can be sure to find at least one there - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33469978
The structure of HN works to de-empahisize such posts. The Algorithm of HN is anit engagement after a certain point (compare to being able to sort by controversial on Reddit).
The thing is that flagged and dead posts are there, but they tend to be harder to find by design. In more "engaging" posts (pull up any hot web3 one) and there'll be some... or a post about any personality.
Ed: again, I didn't say "none", I said "few".
(Do you think, for example, that HK works differently because of software, because of moderation, or both?)
A Group is its own Worst Enemy - https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit...
Consider the lessons from LambdaMOO or Communitree in there.
The design of the software promotes and discourages certain types of interaction. Stack overflow famously doesn't have a great commenting system - and it was intentionally designed that way to make long running comment back and forth difficult and unpleasant because that was what Jeff wanted (incidentally, one of Jeff's mentors was Clay Shirky who wrote the above mentioned A Group and was on the board of directors of early Stack Overflow). And as much pain as comments on SO had, the alternative for moderation would have been much worse in the framework of Stack Overflow.
Likewise, there's code on HN (an algorithm) that down weights overheated discussions ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 ).
The technological and social cannot be separated and need to be built, cultivated, and grown in tandem with intention.
And this is where I get back to reddit... you can do all these things on reddit, just that it takes a bit more creative use of the features within reddit and use of external tooling to enforce it.
If I was to try to build something, I'd honestly start from Discourse ( https://github.com/discourse/discourse ) and then work to build the additional features to encourage the type of community that I'd want there and tooling for moderation.
As it is, I'm not that interested in building on discourse and reddit works. If I had to deal with a larger sub where I can't read all the posts each day or was a target of trolling / low quality content, I'd likely start spinning up things like a program that rate limits people who haven't participated much in the sub initially... possibly borrowing some sentiment analyzers to try to get a heads up where there's flame war brewing.
If I wanted something more "real time", discord posts are rather interesting... with the associated discord moderation bots.
Think about what you want, the community that you want, and then the how you want the community to mold the technology and the technology to mold the community.
https://sqwok.im/p/ReSGugPjqF4lhw - "Any recent interesting books, you've been reading?"
It's a search engine specifically for forums and discussion content (think message boards, Discords, Twitter, and ofc Reddit). If you try some literature/cinema queries, I think you'll end up with something interesting.
I tried "favorite books all time" and found a few literature forums: booktalk.org, forums.onlinebookclub.org, bookcrossing.com/forum, kboards.com, worldliteratureforum.com, proz.com/forum/literature_poetry-22.html, forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/43-literature-and-rhetoric-and-composition/
Open to studying obscure archival standards and peering.
https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/weekend-post/karagarg...