Jike: The obscure social media app beloved by China's tech scene
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
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I tried signing up - couldn’t get pass the sms verification - I am in some European country.
owari da
But yeah, that was my first thought as well. :(
Didn't know about it, looks like a great smolweb concept!
There are so many subreddits where great posts get lost, subreddits that don't allow commenting on old posts, being notified when old posts are updated, things like that. $Carforum has tags I can follow, just so many QOL features that reddit will never implement. You can sort subreddit by top, google search for something specific but all of those QOL improvements forums have lead to such better growing conversations. I guess reddit has flairs now that I think about it but I rarely see that used as a search mechanism.
With that said I absolutely hate having to sign up for forums. If they don't have a google/apple/whatever auth I can use there's a 70%+ chance I'll never make an account. And even then it's a consideration because you never know if after creating an account with an SSO you'll next be asked 20 questions, be limited from posting for X amount of time/karma (which does happen on reddit but less frequently IME).
Subreddits need .. sub-sub reddits or something similar. /r/$car/wheels, /r/$car/engine..
Also, as cliche as it is, I have never had a worse experience with moderators than on reddit. I used to be an ircop on efnet and none of us were anywhere near as rude and quick to assume the worst as my reddit experience.
I couldn't tell you how many birthday messages I get from 10-20 year old forums every year.
I could leave comment but I could not post to ask a technical question or share my own instax shots. My posts were just commented by a bot saying they were moved to a temporarily queue waiting for approval and later were deleted. No communication about rules that would apply, nor the reasons of the deletion.
I just never bothered anymore. To me reddit is pretty much a dead platform.
I tried to ask the same in the gbatemp. This time my post was just ignored by the community, which I guess is better than being deleted immediately.
3ds Discord community and iFixit communities did interacted with me.
There are tought times if you want to be part of a community that is more than memes.
I gave up reddit after (although not because) I was banned for not riding a mod vigilantism hype train. If you're not part of the hive mind, you're really worse than nothing to them.
facebook: boomers posting cringe rightwing/normie (back in my day we worked hard!) stuff with occasional wholesome bits
reddit: millennials posting cringe leftwing/normie stuff (my dog might be gay, am i the asshole? btw i like ukraine) with occasional wholesome animal photos
I barely know a single person IRL outside of tech who uses reddit and I'm a millennial. Like, they know about it, and occassionally reference a post on it but they aren't on it anywhere near like my friends on instagram. My millennial friends are on instagram 24/7. I might make a story once a month and as soon as I post it I have 100+ people who have looked at it. And I have so many friends who post stories every single day. They're on it non-stop during any idle time.
Reddit has an atrocious new user experience. That's why Digg was so much more popular and reddit was incredibly niche until digg died. I didn't use reddit pre-digg-death because I had no idea how it worked it looked so confusing.
All the really really big subreddits are well moderated, cordial, etc and nonetheless full of complete philistines with no taste.
The basic design is on purpose, but the backend doesn't match the front.
And God forbid javascript runs on the site hosting TFA, or it's behind a paywall, or it has too much whitespace or uses the wrong font or margins or there's a typo. Because if so, that is now the entire topic of conversation.
Compared to the entirety of Reddit, including all of the topic-specific, well moderated subs? Hacker News is unfortunately a dismal place to discuss most topics.
Maybe that's one reason why you have such great quality time here.
I think the problem about social medias is that people have flaws, and social medias puts a great focus on individual people, exposing their good side as well as flawed side. But, most people are not well-trained to handle such level of influence (including being influenced as well as to influence the others), and don't clearly know the power/stress such influence might hold (one misstep, the whole thing can crash to hell).
Also, people change. One day you believe one thing, then the next day you believe something completely different. But if your follower follows you exactly because you are advocating one belief, wouldn't that in turn encourages you to lock yourself out from all other beliefs (and risk become more extreme in the process)?
Hacker News puts the material itself in the focus of discussion, rather than who posted it. Which in my opinion, is better, at least most the time.
Maybe some light-touch people focus would be a nice compromise. Like, highlight the discussion where my favorite people participate? That could avoid the bandwagon effect. I dunno, maybe not.
Because they don't discuss. They downvote to disagree, they don't reply, and they karma farm like that gives them street cred to be miserable. It's like they're not even people outside of their accounts.
Every subreddit with a large following eventually turns into a complete meme fest with low quality comments and trolls. But the smaller subreddits still offer good value.
This leads to much stronger alignment of incentives between users and the owners of the platform.
That’s not to say it’s not valuable to YC. It provides them with very good marketing to a core demographic they are trying to market to.
Kinda like sports teams run by petro states.
For social media platforms it means that HN’s existence isn’t driven by the need to grow [1], leading to a focus on quality. Hackernews does this using the HN guidelines, which are rigorously enforced.
[1] insert graphic comparing HN growth vs other social media
What it isn’t, is dependent on an ad marketplace. It’s more like a industry digest published by an investment firm active in that industry.
depends on what you mean by accessible - i assume you don't mean accessibility (for blind/disabled people), but ease of access.
HN is way more easily accessed by someone. You are not nagged by a dialog to get you to download the mobile app. HN has way less clutter in their UX (even compared to old.reddit.com). HN has fewer call to action in the UX to do things like submit, vote etc.
Niche content will yield niche audiences. As long as you have thoughtful consistent interaction between at least two people that is what matters.
But that requires a lot of effort from the moderators.
not sure if serious.
HN is perfectly accessible for younger folks, if you make it more accessible for casual unserious people, you’ll start getting more and more casual and unserious conversation.
The UI is a good filter to remove folks who need hipster UI to just use a platform.
HN is fine.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/octal-for-hacker-news/id130888...
[edit] and, flip-side, there are some I’d like to easily be able to spot in large threads, because they’re consistently good.
For a list of good commenters, consider using https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717598
The other factor is that the mod(s) here are excellent and, and I rarely say this, rather neutral. No, it doesn't mean I agree with them, dang has knocked me in the head a few times over the years, but meaning I get to see both sides of arguments uncensored, so long as respectful and interesting. Really rare experience here, and I fear for the day dang leaves.
Reddit has had several notable high quality subreddits entirely because of user moderation, and is able to host niche interest communities.
I can’t think of a realistic business justification for a paid moderator to curate forums for some of my incredibly niche hobbies. These were formerly hosted on different phpBB boards, which were also moderated by unpaid volunteers. As a bonus, generally one or two of them actually had to pay to host the forum.
meh. I 'member the old phpBB etc. days... it was decent, but once Metasploit and Shodan entered the scene and you could buy DDoS attacks for cheap on the "darknet", the workload got so much harder for operators. Not staying up to date on patches? Your server got pwned in days if not hours - or in the worst case, you'd get someone trying out their newly discovered 0day, and there were lots of these in phpBBs code base. Some troll and/or pissed off user deciding to spend 10$ on a DDoS attack? You got yourself days of fighting cat-and-mouse to keep your server up. And that's before you got into the legally nasty stuff such as people using your board (or your server) to store warez or CSAM, and before "concerned parent" and anti-sex work troll groups made waves panicking about groomers, prostitution and drugs and got incredibly dumb regulations passed, not to mention the newest batch of anti-terror legislation requiring 24h response time throughout the year.
Moderation essentially became a full day job even for small communities and carried significant legal risk, which led many small boards to close shop because a bit of swag, events and occasional donations didn't cover the expenses by far. Reddit in contrast deals with CSAM, DMCA and DDoS stuff paid for by advertising and VC money, so unless you're a corp sub, you don't need paid mods just to keep the lights on.
> These were formerly hosted on different phpBB boards, which were also moderated by unpaid volunteers. As a bonus, generally one or two of them actually had to pay to host the forum.
Being hosted on a bunch of different boards also meant that the influx of "junk users" was waaaay lower. You had to discover it in the first place, usually by word of mouth, so organized trolls just looking for fights didn't even stumble upon them.
Subreddits in contrast? They get recommended by Reddit these days, right on the frontpage of billions of users. It's on the one side awesome for new niche subreddits, but on the other side it is an insane challenge for the mods of smaller subs to keep up. Once a sub gets recommended to users, work explodes, alone from the countless onlyfans spammers.
“Bad moderation” complaints vary widely. Without elaboration, a person complaining about it gets lumped in with people also complaining about:
- “I was banned” (and the community didn’t like the behavior)
- “I used language that should be allowed” (that offended the community and automod removed it)
Quality ofcontent is the key of platform.
IMO: Good. The harder it is to shout "look at ME" for clout and profit, the more productive and on topic the discourse tends to be, and the easier it is for moderation to weed out the trolls and off topic/hateful/spammy discussion. The fact that this place isn't about who any one given poster is, but what they have to say, is part of what makes it such a vibrant and valuable and informative place to have discussions.
> hard to form groups discussing various topics
Why is this necessary when various topics tend to get substantial discussion already? Sure, some more than others, but that activity tends to form a rather organic filter without facilitating echo chambers and mob mentality that tends to emerge when you start erecting walled gardens. Sure, that still happens to an extent, but much less than on say reddit or twitter.
I fail to see how making this more like platforms succumbing to the enshittification of the internet is a path to improvement here.
The problems of large-scale social media are all due to them making money from "engagement" - it doesn't matter how disruptive someone is, they are "engaging" and producing content that others will "engage" with. Bonus points that harmful and divisive content tends to produce more engagement (from others being angry and arguing) than constructive content, so there's this perverse incentive where they have to pretend to forbid such content but often look the other way when it's posted up to a certain threshold (there's probably a formula that calculates the "optimal" exposure time for harmful/divisive content that maximizes engagement while not letting it stay too long for the media to get wind of it and cause a PR/regulatory issue).
Given the above, it's no surprise that any large-scale social media platform eventually devolves into a cesspit. The "moderation" they have is purely there to placate regulators but its actual quality is terrible, both in terms of false positives but also false negatives because investing into good moderation would be bad for business for 2 reasons: 1) it costs money and 2) it would catch a lot more harmful/divisive content that currently generates plenty of engagement. Being a cesspit is actually profitable as long as your competition is also a cesspit (which it will be as long as it has the same business model and incentives).
If your business model doesn't depend on engagement, then you can be much more selective and restrictive in the types of content you allow, and make rule breaking more costly (you can even charge for accounts which would make permanent bans cost more than just a new e-mail address). Encouraging quality over quantity also means there's overall less work for the human moderators.
Moderation is not some impossible problem despite what the large-scale social media platforms say. It's only impossible if you intentionally open the floodgates and encourage everyone to piss in the stream. But you don't have to open the floodgates. You can encourage quality over quantity and make it costly to break the rules. The reason HN works isn't because they have some secret sauce, it's just that they would rather have no content than bad content, while every social media website out there would rather have bad content than none at all.
Being a "benevolent dictator" moderator is the ideal model: you have clear values, a clear strategy, an overview over everything, and the unbridled power to execute. Benevolent dictatorships don't scale the moment you need more than exactly one such benevolent dictator. dang's clone will have all I mentioned above except probably slightly different of everything and now exactly half of the power to execute. And that's where it gets close to impossible to exercise the "correct" and desired level of power to support the individual values, overview, strategy.
When you need 1000 moderators it becomes a crapshoot if the moderation you get is any good. And the community is only as good as the worst mods and users that are allowed in it.
What’s the value? Try set up a competitor and guess at how much it’ll cost to get all the seriously top shelf users on there.
You need to keep the quality of discussion high. That means prioritising individuals with critical thinking skills over emotional hot takes.
I disagree with political opinions on here a lot of the time, but the individuals expressing them are usually at least able to articulate logically why they make sense from their vantage point.
By contrast, somewhere like Reddit is obviously made up of far less inquisitive individuals on average which makes everything a "hot take", often using buzzwords.
Good social media needs good moderation.
Article spends more time describing how it's like a tech utopia than actually saying wtf is happening
IIRC, you also need to validate a Chinese phone number for some features. None of it is intuitive.
I don't think there's a direct Chinese equivalent to Hacker News, but https://v2ex.com/?tab=all might come closest.
What do you mean by "un-HN-like parts"?
That's something I would like to take a part in. Unfortunately I don't know Mandarin.