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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

>hilariously awful moderation

I don’t see how anyone can hold this opinion in the current day. Early 2000s forums made a rule of ensuring things didn’t devolve into flame wars. Modern discussion technology incentivized them and turned our society into a giant flame war

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I'm always surprised by this when these types of threads come up on HN. A lot of people seem to remember these forums being moderated poorly, or being run by egomaniacs. My experience is the opposite. The internet forums I spent any time on were generally run by passionate people who cared about the community and donated their time to help keep them running smoothly.

I'd take small communities run by passionate people over today's mega-sized social media any day.

Norms against flame wars and the old "don't feed the trolls" made for some really excellent experiences growing up on forums as a kid (and instructive experiences when I ignored that advice). It's too bad we weren't able to bring that energy to social media, because wow is the alternative depressing to behold.

Social media owners wanted all the benefits of superscale communities with none of the responsibilities - it isn't surprising that moderation got worse.

Reddit vaguely has a workable approach with subreddits, but it's still high variance, and they have to discourage long-lived comment threads.

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