Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

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Some problems with Reddit (like it having a lowest-common-denominator general user base due to its size) are avoidable by going on smaller subreddits.

The real problem with Reddit is that even small subreddits tend towards beginner or introductory content because that reflects the level of understanding of most users.

Having separable, more focused forums can allow for discussions at a much higher level of knowledge and expertise than Reddit. You can see plenty of examples of this today with HN having better content and discussion in its niche than anywhere on Reddit, and plenty of complicated high-skill-ceiling discussion topics like vehicle maintenance or travel hacks still being discussed at high quality on oldschool forums.

I don’t see a benefit for Usenet because it wasn’t obsoleted by Reddit, it was made obsolete by forums. Honestly I just wish those would make a resurgence. They allow for so much more customization than Reddit, Usenet, or Facebook and don’t have centralized policies constantly messing with them. And I really don’t think there is a need for a one-stop-shop site or tech stack for focused discussion. Reddit and FB may have replaced forums in most cases for most people from 2010 to now, but as they’ve become more commercialized with more rules, maybe we can switch back

My issue with reddit is that it has become way over moderated. Don't conform to the narrowly approved hive-mind viewpoint? Shadow-banned.

Echo chambers are boring. I don't need reddit to be an affirmation of my opinion on a subject, I want real discussion with alternative viewpoints.

Have you thought about just making your own subreddit?

You can technically do that, but you will probably never succeed, because 90% of voters never or rarely post (so they have no idea how over moderated their subs might be) and probably 99% of users will just go straight to /r/myhobby or /r/mytopic instead of doing extensive research regarding whether /r/realmyhobby or /r/freespeechmyhobby is better and what drama lead to it being created.

From what I understand all mods also get a lot of bullshit requirements foisted on them by Reddit itself to remove content that infringes various sitewide policies. Which contributes to the supermod problem as it makes moderating time-sensitive in a way that regular people can’t consistently uphold.

I agree, I mean voting literally hides comments, and if someone is being mean or rude it at least tells you other people think they’re being unreasonably rude. Which hopefully makes you feel better about it and consider that it may not dignify a response.

Moderation is complicated by sitewide moderation requirements (which result in the sub being banned if not followed or inherently part of the topic, or the moderation replaced if followed but too slow) and cabalistic supermod groups. If we instead used the web then typical DMCA and other procedures could be followed, and European users wouldn’t get American laws (eg Reddit bans discussion of some kinds of grey market drug vendors because the drugs are illegal in the US, despite being legal in many European countries) foisted on them.

This like the most shallow take of reddit over moderation.

Karma limits, account age limits, even surving "new", automoderator deleting things based off some word in a title, needing a email verified account to post,unresponsive mods.

Then yes, there's the downvotes when you say something different or isn't a joke.

> reflects the level of understanding of most users

It’s also this elitist mindset that makes HN boring often.

I’m not trying to be elitist, there’s certainly a need and place for content aimed towards beginners or people very casually engaging in a topic, and when I’ve been getting into a topic I’ve found Reddit quite valuable. It’s just that after a few years as you get more into the topic you start wanting a different kind of content and discussion, and don’t want to keep reading the same rehashed advice or beginner-oriented content any more. So there has to be (or should be) a place for content aimed at more experienced people.

> don’t want to keep reading the same rehashed advice

Rehashed, sometimes outdated, advice is what you'll often find here, though.

I don't think wanting to have a space that's not flooded with beginner-type questions all the time is "elitist". That doesn't mean you're against such spaces.

I wrote an entire thing about this a few years ago: https://www.arp242.net/elitist.html

It’s hard because you don’t want to be overly exclusive of beginners either. In the real world various mechanisms like cost, hiring, applications for membership, referrals can work. But online, unless you’re running a very small community, there’s way too much process and overhead in that, and it comes across as sanctimonious given it’s not standard practice at all.

Honestly I think one of the biggest reasons Reddit fails to work for experts is how voting affects visibility. When the majority of users are beginners, they’ll vote on things that appeal to and are understandable by beginners. Because voting affects the likelihood something gets seen, stuff oriented towards experts doesn’t get as much visibility, so discussion doesn’t happen, and it seems like that content isn’t there. In your example, at least there wasn’t a voting system making it so all the highest ranked questions at your meet up were from absolute beginners.

Somehow HN avoids this but I think it’s because they do both manual curation of bumping/upranking/downranking content and have some heuristic for vote:comment radio deranking posts. Plus low effort posts get banned or hidden.

Without the ranking:voting relationship, like in regular forums where ranking is just based on the last time a thread had a post, beginners would just ignore expert-oriented posts or be ignored if they contributed in a non constructive way. IMO that’s perfectly fine

I think that for many subs the volume would be low enough that voting would be somewhat superfluous if beginner questions would be taken out of the equation: you can just check it once a day (or even once a week) and catch up on it all.

There's some "newsletters" and such which primarily seem to source "the best of Reddit this week", but then you're almost always too late for actual discussion, and the curation also isn't always to my liking.

> it comes across as sanctimonious given it’s not standard practice at all.

I can almost guarantee you that it will on occasion no matter what you do. I've had strangers both email and post GitHub issues asking for help on random stuff that's completely unrelated to any of my projects. I've usually answered some of the more open-ended ones (why people ask me for career advice is beyond me), but I answer the "plz fix my codez" with "no, I don't have time, sorry" and the reply is usually "okay, no problem, thanks for answering" but on a few occasions some gobshite got angry for "not helping the community" or some such nonsense.

It's probably very hard to run a technical $topic-specific community without having an endless stream of beginner questions because the expectation is that's accepted behaviour. This is something where better tooling can help, but e.g. Reddit is pretty ill-suited for it right now.

I'm a big fan of old school forums as well, and still regularly find useful information there. I think the reason for their decline is that the single point of entry on these social sites is just too convenient to pass up. The phone gets unlocked, and one tap on the home screen pulls up all the aggregated content. Forums are separate and isolated from one another. The need to specifically navigate to one site for permaculture, and another for beer brewing is a blocker. I may not even think to do so. Open up a Reddit or Facebook app, and all the things I'm subscribed to just magically show up.

This other side of the coin to this benefit is the centralized control that we're lamenting. I'd also add that there is a real parallel to be drawn here with regard to government. Centralizing functions at the Federal level has it's benefits, but also drawbacks, in much the same way.

Maybe a partial solution in the former case could be an app or service that aggregates web based forum content?

This is untrue. Even the smallest subreddits are beholden to Reddit’s ever changing “rules”.

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