Hacker News Reader

Comment by AussieWog93 | Hacker News Reader

Reddit has tried this approach and, IMO, it's failed.

A new human user will spend actual time creating a thoughtful and helpful post, only to be greeted by "sorry, your post has been removed by automod because you don't meet criteria". They get disheartened and walk away forever.

The spammers, on the other hand, know how the rules work and so will just build their bots to work around this (waiting 30days, farming karma).

The net result is that these rules ensure that much greater proportion of new accounts come from bad actors - who else would jump through hoops just to participate on a web forum?

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It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way. Hacker News has three advantages. First, it is moderated by the same people who build the tooling, so the incentives are aligned. Second, it is an enormous source of soft power for a venture capital firm with the resources, incentives, and likely the competence and capacity to keep it running smoothly. Third, the scale is smaller and is not tied to hardline revenue constraints like CPM, user LTV and DAU-maximization which restrict what Reddit can do.

> It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way.

Not to mention reddit mass removed experienced moderators when all the moderators had a protest about reddit removing their access to good third party tooling.

That's the day the site started its death spiral.

I quit moderating because it was destroying my mental health.

Getting called a fascist and rehashing how “no, you’re libertarian politics are fine, but can you please just start your own sub” in a long, drawn out, hateful, back and forth gets exhausting after the 200th person who comes to the bicycling subreddit and feels they should be allowed to endorse harming cyclists with their vehicles.

Everyone got mad at spez for having the audacity to fuck with these kids, and there is a point there, but after living with it, I could see myself doing the same damn thing.

And on top of that, some of said "volunteers" are power-hungry, petty, useless fucking morons. Especially the large subreddits tend to be run by people I wouldn't trust to boil some pasta without triggering a fire alert, and yes I know people who manage that.

Moderating Reddit subs can be a huge money maker. I know people making $100K/year from it. There are cabals, especially in the adult sections. Reddit has tried to address this recently by limiting the number of subs a person can moderate, but that just causes these big accounts to create more user accounts and split all their subs up that way.

I must be old and naive but you can make money with subreddits?

Plenty of subs blatantly allow certain brands to advertise while banning anyone else. Kind of amazed Reddit themselves haven’t put more effort into to stopping it since it kinda sidesteps their in house advertising.

At scale they will. For now, someone else puts the effort into growth marketing, eyeball capture. Reddit eventually changes the rules, seizing control, thereby acquiring users for less human cost (as opposed to missed revenue opportunity).

Because said 100k'er are probably paying off someone inside reddit. Remember when Ebay sent some couple bloody pigs masks? Yeah evil people work at companies.

Corruption

On the adult subs, at least, menu links, sidebar links and banner ads, automod reply links, and by limiting your sub to only paying guests or your own managed models.

It’s worse than that. On r/news they shadow ban anybody who doesn’t have verified email. No message or anything. Just nobody sees your comments. I probably made 20 or more comments there over a few months before I figured it out. It felt humiliating.

It's even worse than that. They preemptively ban you outright on lots of major subs for posting on other subs. For instance, I can't interact with r/pics because I once commented on r/redditachievements. And a housemate once upvoted a pic on there which got us both banned for a week because Reddit thought I was trying to do a run-around on the ban.

I still love Reddit for all its flaws though.

There needs to o be a distinction between creating a post and replying.

IMO New accounts should be restricted from creating new posts, or at least certain kinds of new posts.

Replying shouldn't be restricted. That is how users interact with each other and learn the etiquette of HN.

I agree. I faced this in the psychology subreddit, forced to quit. They wanted karma to post comments, but without posting comments, how am I supposed to get karma specific within that community?

Literally me on a DIY sub. I needed some advice, got auto removed, never went back.

Same. Not DIY, but my first post was rejected and I was banned. LOL. I guess that is moderation in action!

"excessive moderation" is a fun concept to think about.

Yeah, basically my experience right now. Been a software engineer for fifteen years, working on a project for five months, very excited about it. Go to post it here, and I'm met with: "We're temporarily restricting Show HNs."

No information about what threshold I need to cross, what the requirements are, what I need to do to post my project.

Very cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim contains such information. It's vague, I know, but that's because we want people to be genuine community members, which is not a checklist process.

Same for stack overflow. I tried it once. Never engage with stack overflow ever since. Whereas I am active here. If this goes, I am not posting here either. This is then another echo chamber

> waiting 30days, farming karma

If "farming karma" is a thing, maybe that forum deserves what is coming. Either the karma mechanic is inappropriate given the demographic, or it is too hard for the users to avoid upvoting bots.

100% agreed on this

this is the reason I never was keen on StackOverflow etc

tried posting there several times, many times actually - every time some annoying condition was not met

well screw you too then! walked away and never bothered to contribute again

you are indeed describing my reddit experience, hence why I did not participate there while being a human

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