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Comment by diN0bot | Hacker News Reader

/.'s comment system is awesome. it is gold.

one interesting thing is the inverse relationship between time and the usability and quality of the comment systems.

we start with /., which has--after lengthy iteration--a reasonable system of karma and crowd sourced filtering, plus a brilliant comment presentation system (open/close nodes, point threshholds with one-liners visible before google made that cool).

then we get digg, reddit, hn, each one providing less and less features. hn is the worst: you can't close discussion branches, there is no summarizing, the points are not capped. actually, these charges are against all the "accumulating-points" set. still, i noticed a real drop in features when i went from reddit to hn, predominantly in the lack of sub-domains or categorizations (/r/scifi, /r/python, etc).

anyway....very interesting from a social point of view.

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> hn is the worst

That is fine with me. I'm here because you guys/gals, not the software. It is the community rather than the features of the sites that gets me to f5 every 15min. I don't want critical mass here.

There is something to this, cause I did Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit.... All have gone from my daily reading.

Slashdot (staying on topic) more because I don't find anything fresh there because of the story moderation, the comments are where the quality is, but I don't have that attention span and the news seems a day late.

There is something to this though - an inverse relationship between quality and popularity.

I disagree that hn's is the worst. Slashdot has a fancy system because the signal to noise ratio is so low there. Even reading at the maximum post "quality" level of 5 there is a lot of spam, off-topic banter, lame humor, etc. In comparison, I find the S/N here to be orders of magnitude higher. I think the reason that is so is that the HN system encourages certain behaviors which lead to better discussions whereas the slashdot system is more of a passive filter on a noisy feed, which is inherently a losing battle.

In theory I have a slashdot account that's about a decade old, I have forgotten the password and no longer use the email address it's attached to. I haven't bothered going to extreme efforts trying to recover it (e.g. searching out old password lists I have written down somewhere) nor have I bothered creating a new account. Discussion on slashdot is just not worthwhile, at best it's like trying to have a conversation by yelling across a boisterous lunch room, at worst it's just spitting into the wind (which tends to be the average case). There are so many better alternatives out there now it's really not worth the time to visit anymore.

I think the reason that is so is that the HN system encourages certain behaviors which lead to better discussions whereas the slashdot system is more of a passive filter on a noisy feed, which is inherently a losing battle.

HN survives mostly by being small, self-selecting, and somewhat obscure. Slashdot, for all its flaws, is remarkable for being large, well-known, and of consistent quality. Most comparable sites would be well on their way into the gutter at a quarter of /.'s age.

I'm aware of only three viable means of maintaining stability in an online community: slavish adherence to the Peyton-Jones Law (viz. "avoid success at all costs"), iron fist moderators and a tangible cost to participate (cf. the Something Awful forums), or whatever secret sauce /. has.

HN almost certainly doesn't have the third, and the Powers That Be have better things to do than implement the second. I seem to recall pg describing the slow growth of HN membership in very positive terms, so I'm pretty sure there's a deliberate strategy here.

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