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Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the Third point, I can already see part of this movement.

I've become disenchanted with the quality of the discourse. Specifically as I've entered a more senior stage of my career, I'm looking to mingle with like-minded folks in similar situations.

Thing is, these folks don't usually lurk online, and even if they do, their voices get overwhelmed by the flood of (mostly low quality) content. I'd be happy to pay a fee to become a member of a community with vetted participants.

View on HN

> I'd be happy to pay a fee to become a member of a community with vetted participants

You better start believing in vetted online communities Miss Turner, you're in one!

It may not be vetting by moderators, but HN's dated frontend definitely acts as a forcefield against many kinds of people.

I feel like Lobsters has better quality discourse nowadays though, due to its much more explicit vetting system. I am not part of that website, yet I love reading the comment section there.

What is this? My Google-fu is weak.

lobste.rs is what I can find. Likely tries to make its SEO as bad as possible to avoid discovery, which is kinda funny.

Was lobster.rs ways invite only? I thought I remembered having an account a long time ago...but my email isn't registered when I go to reset my PW. Because it's a much smaller community it does suffer from low comment counts on posts. Comments are the best part of HN.

Invite only to write, open to read. But the main trick is tracking the invite tree - if the person that invited you gets banned, you get banned too (or need to appeal to have your “branch” of the invite tree adopted by someone else).

So if jcs somehow gets banned, the whole place shuts down?

I find the idea of the site intriguing yet I'm not sure what I could contribute.

It is largely the same as HN

Except HN is a mix of tech-bro entrepreneur types and developers, whereas the other site is exclusively developers (with an emphasis on open source).

jcs started the site, so him getting banned would be quite a feat indeed!

(although it would be an amusing way to shut the site down if he gets tired of maintaining it...)

Just looked at lobsters and there are zero comments on almost all posts.

Q.E.D.

Signed up day one with a one char username. Tried to use it a few years later and by then it had been deleted. Understandable I guess, but I'm still salty about it. Just had to get that story off my chest.

Reddit when they had their old frontend and bad mobile expierence was much better than it is now.

Genuinely, what do you see as dated? My only other point of comparison is Reddit so I suspect I’m behind the times.

Do you use old or new interface?

Old, I think? I saw a friends and his was this stream of pictures and gifs, whereas mine is entirely titles with the occasional thumb nail.

That would be the “dated” interface, then. I prefer it too.

Mainly the interaction (though the graphical design itself definitely isn't what you'd call modern). No notifications or gui animations, no thumbnails or header images, being as hard to navigate as possible, scroll position gets reset all the time, can't even reply to a comment while looking at the rest of the thread because everything is its own separate page, nothing has outlines so text has no clear separation, etc. In a nutshell it feels like a site made in the 90s entirely with HTML forms without a line of javascript.

I mean I do absolutely hate the new reddit redesign and almost exclusively use old.reddit, but the functionality there is still on another level when compared to HN.

> scroll position gets reset all the time

Actually, HN is the only social media site where my browser can consistently keep the scroll position. Animations and endless scrolling are what breaks it.

> their voices get overwhelmed by the flood of (mostly low quality) content

I have the same issue. People place so much trust in their preferred sources of information and don't question anything they read. Because of this I have a hard time discussing anything beyond the most basic things with many friends, since they just repeat talking points and opinions of others.

It's so enlightening when I do find someone who's well read on a subject and can have an actual conversation about it. Even better if they have a different opinion and give you some new bit of information that makes you think about your opinions or perception of knowledge. Or, when you can agree to disagree because you have the similar understanding of a subject, but have different values or preferences. Moments like that can make me really happy sometimes.

I don’t think the root cause here is excessive trust in preferred sources. What’s actually at play here, is most peoples weakness at perspective taking. Truly understanding a given issue requires the ability to have your own perspective and to give equal credence to the other plausible perspectives. Many people do not pause to consider alien perspectives, and are disoriented when confronted with them. Therefore, they don’t seek out alien perspectives in order to avoid the sense of disorientation that would result, and that’s why they stick to media that share their perspective, and even punish said media when it offers alternative perspectives.

People have always been this way, but the Internet and social media are really not helping.

The opposite is also true. People who love seeking out alien perspectives have a virtually unlimited amount of ability to find and commingle with whatever community they can think of online.

I think the optimism of the early internet was due to a dominance of users with that kind of personality. It wasn’t apparent to that type of person that others are not excited by that perspective hopping opportunity and not only would not take advantage of it once being online was more accessible, but would actively use the same technology to further silo and entrench themselves.

I ran a private online bookclub a few years ago, really tried to filter and vet the people who wanted to join. Ended up with a decently sized group of wonderful people and lots of long form written discussion—we read good books and talked about good books, it was lovely. I approached the screening/vetting process as if I was hiring. I got some angry emails about the approach, made it seem "exclusive" and elitist, but it worked out well for the group.

I'll launch the next iteration after the first of the year, this time there might be a fee attached, at least a minimal amount to pay for the SaaS product we'll use to organize and collaborate.

Paying a fee is a great barrier for weeding people out. I was a on a pool team for several years and one season I drew the unlucky lot of being the captain. This mostly involves texting everyone on a weekly basis to ensure they would come out, and they had the $10 they needed in cash on hand to pay me when they showed up. I hated it and chased people all the time to pay, they owed me from last week, didn't show up, etc.

The next season I told everyone to pay up front. $120 dollars, cash. Same price as every week in total, but up front.

Turns out when people paid up front they came more often and we had no payment issues from there out.

Can you say more about how you organised and structured it? E.g. what practices, rules, and tools you used (And any chance you have a write-up online somewhere?) I've run a few groups like this and love learning how others approach it. Haven't found a great format for writing-based discussion that works as well as in-person / zoom calls.

Yes, I've been working on a write-up, will post and send it your way when it's finished!

I've long had a theory that services that demand an upfront payment for an ongoing service will find the payment works against their growth goals and remove it.

For example, businesses that involve $$$ reusable delivery containers don't work well because they want to give first-time customers a discount not a surcharge. Whatsapp was ridiculously cheap - something like $1/year - but they still decided that worked against their network effects.

There are some markets where you pay upfront and on an ongoing basis, like buying a printer and ink or a games console and games - but they often subsidise the upfront cost with profit from the ongoing costs.

I'm not sure how well a $5-to-join social network would work for that reason. Sites like metafilter survive - but with five moderators and one coder, they're not going to be replacing twitter, facebook or HN any time soon.

> $5-to-join social network

if those site could convince important/popular people for exclusivity, they could pull it off; i imagine it can work like spotify exclusive podcasts, or some such, since most people don't actually produce content, but consume.

I feel like twitter is trying to do this? $8/mo for premium members, all the celebrities are there already.

Well, with Twitter, the $8 ($11 on mobile) "premium" members are pretty much all people I would rather avoid.

>will find the payment works against their growth goals and remove it

Their mistake is having growth as a goal rather than a happy community.

Quality over quantity. Not everything has to appeal to the masses to make a good business.

Sometimes, growth isn't the point (I too point to metafilter). Cash up front is a barrier.

Metafilter is a pretty interesting case -- deliberately limiting growth seems to have worked out pretty well for the site over most of its existence, and growth goals have always been about other qualities than sheer numbers. It doesn't need to compete with anybody else on scale.

I'd say HN is one of the few forums competitive on quality of discourse vs metafilter, but its business model is essentially loss-leader for VC/incubator activities, so it's a bit of an odd duck itself.

> Whatsapp was ridiculously cheap - something like $1/year - but they still decided that worked against their network effects.

My boss of a multimillion dollar company took offense at being charged $1/year to use Whatsapp back when it came out and started getting popular, so it did have an effect

My eyes practically rolled out of my head when I heard him complain but that really stuck with me

You don't become a millionaire by spending a million dollars ...

It's a matter of mental model. I'm thinking more "private members club" than social network.

For me it's not about a business, it's about a community. The fee is just a barrier to entry to filter participants.

I believe even a nominal amount would keep most people out, and that's by design. Also you don't need huge numbers to build a personally interesting community. Even a few dozen dedicated people can be plenty.

This used to partly happen by age.

Most notably, kids were in school with people their age, adults were at work, etc. 1st grader intellect and emotional interactions partitioned from 5th grade, partitioned from 9th, partitioned from college, partitioned from post-college.

For another example, the "grownups' table" and the "kids' table" at a holiday dinner.

Though, as a kid, I definitely benefited from listening in on the grownups on the Internet.

A key part of the Something Awful forum's success was the $10 registration fee required to create an account.

Discussion can't scale beyond a certain number of active user accounts without a large drop in quality. It's kind of hard to tell what that limit is because every forum has a large number of mostly quiet lurkers who simply want to read and follow the discourse. SA's $10 fee created a barrier to entry, and the culture of bans being regularly handed out to bad posters encouraged people to lurk until they were ready to make good posts. Upvotes and downvotes as popularized by reddit and reddit-like forums served as a kind of substitute for that effect but they don't work well with as many users as those websites have.

If you want a sustainable vetted community, pick a channel, build a funnel, skim the cream.

Like startups, communities are growth and sucessful ones grow at an incremental replacement+ rate, where ones that grow explosively fall over on their own weight, and ones that sustain a base level just die. A plan for a vetted community is a system of harmonious growth that requires a funnel and conversion scheme that yields vetted members. I see orgs spinning their wheels and arguing over the merits of individual candidates when their real problem is they have no funnel to simply select the best n% from.

It isn't so much about vetting participants than about moderating the discourse , which is hard to do right, and usually relegated to the few people who are willing to do it for free , which is bad quality (like reddit)

Ai can be used to moderate discussions however , if it is trained to remove low effort in an unbiased way

Why does it need to be 'unbiased'? This would work as well:

> Ai can be used to moderate discussions however , if it is trained to remove low effort [or otherwise undesirable content]?

OK, but i wouldn't participate in such discussion. i believe most people like to keep their minds open to ideas

Maybe. Though what's perceived as 'unbiased' differs from person to person.

See https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-i-... for more on this topic.

I don't think the discussion between carefully vetted participants needs to be moderated. We go for moderation too quickly these days. Of course if someone goes crazy they should be banned but in less extreme scenarios a well chosen group should behave, just like it's but necessary to moderate a social gathering in real life.

but it s exclusionary which defeats the purpose of the internet as an open forum

What is the underlying purpose of an open forum? Is it the openness itself, or something that openness allows? I think it’s the latter: allowing people with common interests who wouldn’t otherwise connect in real life to interact meaningfully.

If that’s the case, 100.00% open might not be optimal if 99.9% open yields better results for the resulting community.

different forums can have different purposes. Personally i prefer the public kind, which expose me to different ideas. The common interests i prefer to discuss in real life

> the purpose of the internet as an open forum

The purpose of the internet hasn't been to be an open forum since sysadmins were blocking the talk.* hierarchy and kicking entire nodes off of usenet for spam or abuse.

yet here we are

yet here we are and "here" is not an "open forum"

> It isn't so much about vetting participants than about moderating the discourse

Vetting, moderating ... none of them scale well when done manually. The solution I see is that everyone have their own AI filters, customised as they see fit. You can include or exclude specific people and topics, make it as diverse or narrow as you like, allow challenging opinions or not. One of the filters can be to detect AI bots. Don't make the world conform to you, be selective and just skip the bad parts.

I think people are going to trust their own AI tools that are running on their own computers more than they trust other people and especially other AI. We already know we can't face the future onslaught of information with the old methods, we need help. User controlled AI is going to be our first line of defence and our safe space, "a room of one's own" where there is no tracking and thought policing.

With the advent of large language models we already have that, indirectly - the LM is a synthesis of everything, but we let it generate only conditional to our intentions. All the view points are in there for us to reach, it depends on us how we relate to them.

AI should be like a cell membrane separating outside from the inside. It should keep the bad stuff out, take the necessary nutrients and nurture the life within.

> none of them scale well when done manually.

Then maybe we should reduce the scale of the megaphones. Current networks are just unpleasant because it's mass hysteria on global level. Scale isn't everything.

I think future forum owners will be continuously finetuning their AI filters to fit their community standards.

Yeah, I really want this to happen.

I follow really interesting people for their thoughts about one topic (say, Movies), but whose tweets about topics like politics I really dislike (not necessarily things I disagree with, usually I just dislike the tone).

Shouldn't be too hard to fine tune a LLM to do this, definitely something worth a try.

In my experience, the more you vet participants the less you have to moderate.

The third point also made complete sense to me. My family has been using a Discord server to communicate for years now, and at first people thought that was strange. It's social media for people you really know and interact with, not a BS news feed. Think of it as a real network, not a fake network or an entertainment network. And a dozen other services function in the same way.

But I get invited into discord servers for developers I work with, interests, I share, and I think it is getting to be more and more common. Some people will spend time in fake networks and probably not get a lot of value out of them other than entertainment. And others will gravitate to real networks for communication.

> I'd be happy to pay a fee to become a member of a community with vetted participants.

FreeMasons and premium golf clubs!

Problem is, both can still be filled with less than bright people.

If you have an interest in, say, the math behind various AI techniques. Or maybe an interest in digging into the differences between different, (but seemingly similar), cancer therapies. (Think TIL v CAR-T). You won't get that at the golf club. You will need some kind of vetted discussion group.

Looks like you want to make a post-grad.

Golf clubs do the job, but I don't think I'll find many like-minded folks in there.

I find a lot of this on Mastodon's branch of the fediverse. It's getting worse with the migration from Twitter, but I'm optimistic that the fact that it isn't Twitter and doesn't want to be Twitter will deter most of the more obnoxious people and help those that make it through blend their uniqueness with what's already there in a healthy and prosocial way.

I recently have been discussing pricing models for quality curation rather than profit per se with a friend. The obvious advantage is that it's a simple, objective, broadly applicable means to distill a baseline of quality. The obvious disadvantage is that it is biased towards those with the most disposable income (and willingness to spend), which depending on the topic of the forum may or may not correlate with quality of insight/opinion. Based on what I've seen of /r/lounge, I conclude curating a community with price mechanisms alone doesn't lead anywhere interesting. But perhaps it can amplify quality on top of some other mechanism.

These closed groups seem to be too inbred, too like minded. For some things that's probably ok and good, but for creative solutions, I find I need to hear it all and see it from many angles.

The trick is to find a broad enough frontier that you still have a mix of discourse, while still excluding people who will tend towards unproductive garbage. For example, my service organization at university: As a whole, the group leaned firmly socialist (selecting for people who were enthused about feeding the homeless tends to do that), but the firm "someone will veto this person's membership nomination" line was somewhere around the middle of the Democratic party: "We need to fix things, but maybe that doesn't require revolution". Thus we ended up with a perfectly wide range of discourse, between the just-left of Obama and the anarchists, without including people who were fundamentally at odds with the groups mission of affecting positive change.

I don't know when it happened exactly, but I have noticed the top comments on youtube/instagram/fb are always something completely inane like 3 heart emojis or something. It was always baffling that any kind of meritocratic system that ranked comments would result in something so useless being placed at the top.