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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Reddit has some pretty powerful tools at its disposal to re-enable those subreddits and then they can ask who wants to moderate them instead, I think there will be plenty of takers, if the community is in sync with the mods then the mods' play will succeed otherwise the mods are just putting themselves out of business.

This whole thing is a nice illustration how when you use someone else's website for your community you don't actually own the community.

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People should just go back to forums. It was better when I didn't know about the absolute nutcases and always felt like forum information was superior to the stuff I find on Reddit.

This is what I want to happen although I know it never will. Communities used to be spread out across the internet on individual sites that were maintained by enthusiasts as a hobby. I found the interactions among such communities to bar far more enjoyable. Once any community reaches a threshold of users it starts to get unpleasant.

I think the other thing that made forums a better place was the absence of a upvote/downvote system. It reduced the motivation of just chasing attention with little jokes and threads could stay on the front page so long as there was active conversation going on.

Forums were also dedicated to "mostly related" things (like a subreddit) and it was a bit of effort to create a new account on a different forum, and you were obviously new at that point.

So "brigading" and such weren't really much of an issue (and the issue has always been people barging into a community, knowing nothing about it, pontificating on some post/issue, and promptly leaving).

Forums still exist, but you need a slightly strange sort of person to continue to put the effort into them when Reddit is "free and easy".

I wonder if online discussions will shift to Discord channels. Sure it’s another centralised “forum” but it does seem like a credible alternative - a lot of discussion already seem to happens there.

Much already has, and it's very sad, as Discord creates an entirely different "feel" for a community, and is not visible to the Internet at large.

There are lots of solutions to needing to create an account now. There's social logins, and the prevalence of password managers if you want to use an email and can't remember if you already have a login.

Reddit is easier because you already have an account, but creating an account on a random site has never been easier to do or manage, so it's not that much harder (and importantly, people already do it because not everything is on reddit so it's not "new" to learn how to create an account somewhere).

The voting system is gamification of forum posting. Instead of posting when you feel you have something to say, people end up chasing a number for the dopamine hit.

There's nothing terrible about downvotes as such if they are done right, but this is one thing Slashdot did right: you can never be more than +5 or -1 on any post.

While I miss forum days as well, reddit has permanently shifted the space. For someone with a lot of interests, are you going to sign up for a forum for each one and keep tabs on those? It's difficult to even think about how I want my online "community" to look without reddit, even though I'm glad to be leaving.

Reddit already lets you take over someone’s subreddit if they haven’t posted in N months which happened to me when my subreddit was humming along nicely with no need for me to log into my mod account.

Just giving a subreddit away fits right into that ethos of temporary ownership.

We had a supermod (someone who mods hundreds of subreddits) try this on a small subreddit I was active in years ago. They must have had a watchlist of subreddits to claim because literally the day the only mod's N months was up they posted to try to take it over.

It was a small sub and we were all well behaved so there wasn't really any need for moderation, and we didn't want some random outsider coming in and taking it over as part of his supermod powertrip or whatever. We organized against it and the Reddit admins ultimately denied the request.

I was so bitter about the experience that I wrote a script that crawled the top 10000 subreddits looking for possible takeovers, and my friend and I took over a few dozen lucrative subreddits*. Think generic words like r/skateboarding (not one of them). Just add a spammy automoderator account to your modlist so it can't get taken back over.

It goes by the "last activity" timestamp of your creator/modlist, so even if you are actively moderating your subreddit (like attending to the mod queue), your subreddit can still get taken over if you aren't posting.

The system is so, so stupid.

* If you search the takeover requests subreddit you could even see that we weren't even stealing the subreddit from the original owners who did all the work to grow the subreddit, but rather from other takeover bots.

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