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Comment by zt | Hacker News Reader

My best friend and I actually run a ~100 person listserv to this end. We call it "Feed Your Brain" and people send out interesting articles, music, poetry, etc, they find on the internet. Sometimes there is a great discussion or debate, sometimes not. It is very private and intimate and it feels closer to early Reddit or HN than anything else I have found.

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seems you stumbled on the secret of keeping a good online community: don't let a person's contacts exceed the network's dunbar number[1].

non-default subreddits can still be quite good, but many/most/all of the default subreddits are wastelands ravaged by a silent majority of up- and down-voters while the huddled masses of commenters cling together for safety. of course, there's the same phenomenon within the commenters community, where insightful comments are buried amongst puns and prejudice and adolescent jokes that get upvoted much quicker.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Path tried that in the social network format but it doesn't seem to be catching on.

Speculating here, but that's probably due to the fact that small and private isn't compatible with VC money.

Would you mind adding a few details on how you set this up (I'm assuming that you're using 'listserv' as a generic term)? Is it on your own machine, through a web host, etc?

I've thought about doing something just like that, but haven't spent the time to figure out a "good" way to set it up.

i would love to see this, too.

You could use google groups (it's basically a mailing list). Pretty straight forward.

We had one for our 'post-college' social circle. It was a good way to spread the word about happy hours and parties, without spamming everyone on facebook.

I would caution against using a service like Google Groups for this, actually. There's been too many changes to corporate-backed services like this (Yahoo! Groups' 2010 mess, remember Google Groups was originally a usenet reader to begin with) and moving a community is a pain. Host it somewhere that won't pivot.

That's exactly my concern about google/yahoo/zoho/whatever.

A friend/former co-worker runs FreeLists[0], which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

[0]: http://www.freelists.org/

Sounds like this group could use a private subreddit on reddit.

I use a private group on Facebook to share and talk with my closest friends.

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