Amazing that a popular site can be shut down for a year, and then come back on top after that, without getting its lunch eaten by new competitors that use that whole year to catch up to them.
This kind of forum is hard to develop from zero, and it's don't have much financial potiential, the roi is low for new competitors. I think that's why there is not new competitors during this year.
Every guild or community should have a high quality discussion forum like hackernews. But assuming you can translate the learnings from Hackernews to another platform, how exactly would you ensure high quality?
As others have pointed out, the answer is moderation. High quality, diligent moderation. Reddit is the ultimate proof of this. A highly moderated, focused subreddit can be a wonderful place. A loosely moderated subreddit quickly devolves into memes and lowest common denominator posts, which is totally fine for specific subjects, or even meme-based subreddits for a given topic. If you want quality, you have to invest in it. It doesn't just happen. The good news is that it's self reinforcing. Once you have something good, people start policing themselves and others. This can go overboard of course, but it can be a good a really good thing. I often see comments here along the lines of, "comments like this are not welcome here".
I really dislike forums nowadays but I'm part of a /r/$car subreddit along with the $carforum.com and there's no comparison between using reddit vs the forum for quality data and not losing things to the ether.
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.
Using a password manager negated the whole signing up thing from me and I actually like it better because I'm signing up with a site specific email and random password instead of using a third party account that they might not support or that I might not use in the future. Mostly I just don't want my major provider identities associated with individual third-party sites. A password manager basically provides the same click to login experience without the side effects of using SSO.
Yeah you're not wrong, I use password managers for everything. The forums that require an email sign-up are typically always the ones with the annoying (to me) sign up process where I feel like I'm doing the equivalent of putting my resume information in line by line on a job application that didn't auto-input it. Age, required. Gender, required. Car model and year, required. etc.. etc.. etc.. Just got old to me after being on a thousand car forums over my lifetime.
I couldn't tell you how many birthday messages I get from 10-20 year old forums every year.
I only once tried to participate to a subreddit /r/instax.
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.
Thanks for contributing to the good days on efnet.
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.
reddit is lame too. it's facebook for millennials.
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.
Unfortunately reddit-style "moderation" causes other problems. In particular it creates the worst kind of echo chambers. I put moderation in quotes because on reddit they are more like tyrannical overlords. Places like HN and traditional fora work much better.
I’d guess when you consider all the people who have the free time to sit down on a site like reddit and post and comment, they are probably like 12 years old on average.
Subreddit numbers have got to be bs and inflated now adays. 800k people in the community and five new posts a day the highest with a couple hundred votes. Seems legit.
I don't think this is correct - this is an extremely common view, in several senses of the word. It's especially popular among people who have never tried to use an unmoderated forum with more than a few members, and the sort of people who make moderation a necessity in the first place.
>because it's a convenient lesser evil
This is the true in the sense that pretty much all of society is a convenient lesser evil than "everybody agrees generally what the right thing is and does that all the time without exception".
I dislike censorship but I dont mind* moderation. Twitter is impossible to use because you have 0 buy in and common ground. I have no problem with a subreddit that wants to show beheading videos that moderates non-beheading videos from being posted. This is how I believe the town square should work. There is room for everyone to have a space, but it's NOT the SAME space.
Moderation of bots and some content makes sites useable as long as everyone agrees what is OK and what is not OK. Thats how HN functions
Honestly, I just don't get this view - moderation provides clear, obvious value. You know what, we can have an experiment. I'll provide a list of things that are handled by moderation, and you pick which ones you think should be moderated.
All of those require the interpretation and goodwill of an authority that I do not trust (and certainly does not express my own will as well as I can do it myself).
If you're incapable of trusting some sort of authority on this, why are you here? Go host your own community. Everyone else in the world is willing to make some sort of sacrifice on this front so their community is, in fact, a community, and not a pile of trash.
As for trust - I'm not really sure what trust has to do with it. I evaluate communities based on their content, and what I don't see is often just as important as what I do. If I like it, I'll stick around - if I don't, or if it changes, I'll leave. The community is operated by the people in charge of it, it's theirs by default. Do you visit people's houses and refuse to take your shoes off because they're the "authority"? Seems like an odd thing to get hung up over.
> (Let's not fool ourselves. We have moderators and downvotes, not because they work well, but because it's a convenient lesser evil)
Well, indeed. This is just anarchism vs. policing but for text. It gets re-litigated over and over again; different places move the boundary to different places. But very few dare to have no moderators or no police, and those that do are usually fairly immediate disasters. I'm sure you could find Bakunin quotes that accurately describe the moderation dilemma from 100+ years foresight, if you were so inclined.
This subreddit is actually moderated. And it contains a quite heavy handed rule:
> To avoid disappointment, do not post AI-generated work here.
Which is kinda absurd if you realize the direction generative art is going. (in 50 years, do you think the discussion between generative art with code vs generative art with AI will make sense?)
But, such a rule helps maintain the space on-topic and avoid re-litigating the AI discussion every time someone posts an AI-generated picture.
HN looks lightly moderated but there is a reason why the front page is not full of the latest and greatest political flamewar stuff like all the other media sites.
Never had a comment deleted on HN and only one submission flagged (link to a scientific study on p** sizes). At reddit, I had hundreds of comments deleted simply for stating the facts. It got worse, now I am shadow banned very quickly after creating a new account and posting a couple of comments. So just reading it using redlib now, wonder how long redlib lasts after those AI deals.
HN makes it look casual but it has a very active and diligent moderation and a whole automated system to detect spams, self promotion, hateful comments...
The basic design is on purpose, but the backend doesn't match the front.
i think the overton window is quite large for ideas you can discuss on hn unlike reddit. you can go anywhere really but if your bot-ing or selling something you get swatted. also overtly political takes get nuked but it's both sides
You can't even make a joke on HN without an entire subthread being created to chastise you for it. Most political stories get flagged by default because they tend to degenerate into flamewars, to say nothing of any subject even tangentially related to race, gender, religion, physics or medicine, when the bigots and cranks come out of their crawlspaces. And plenty of people flag any non "technical" subject because they believe (erroneously) that HN is only for programming, CS and startups.
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.
FWIW I agree with almost everything you said, but I think there's a few things that HN has that Reddit doesn't. Reddit's larger American user base tends to dominate most subs with American perspectives but HN seems to have a decently large EU population, especially during EU daytime. Reddit also has a pretty strong anti-capitalist bias in most medium sized subreddits that HN doesn't have, and I perceive that Reddit's average user age is in university while HN's average user age is probably approaching middle age (which probably contributes to the political differences.) I generally think your criticism is spot on.
Hacker news is great but it's not a social platform. Hard to follow someone, hard to chat, hard to form groups discussing various topics. It would be nice to have features of hacker news and reddit combined.
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.
Yes, but… there were a half-dozen people here whose comments I alway enjoyed for the deep and nuanced perspective. I haven’t seen them in a few years now, sadly.
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.
In truth, I've noticed Reddit refugees here who think they're community cops, and it's distracting enough that it's decreased my enjoyment of discussion.
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.
HN not having those features is a feature in and of itself. It does one thing and does it well, not having the same features as Reddit is exactly why it's better than Reddit.
I think HN is far less accessible than Reddit. This turns away the casuals, leaving behind the more hardcore users.
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.
To me the No. 1 reason HN is successful is that it doesn’t have to monetise its users.
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
depends on how you want to define ad because every new apple product is going to have a post up about it. apple doesn't pay for that placement but its totally an advertisement for the product.
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.
Compared to specialized sub reddits, HN is huge. I find the content to be generally extremely accessible. Of course, there are some specialized subjects and links to research papers few will understand. But even for those, if you ask nicely, there will be a kind soul who will try to explain.
Some subreddits managed to maintain pretty high quality in the past, with pretty aggressive moderation. eg: r/askhistorians or r/politics. No idea how the situation is nowadays, I haven't really been on there in years.
But that requires a lot of effort from the moderators.
Aggressive moderation can be very toxic. The /r/toronto and /r/askTO subreddits are modded by essentially the same people. They remove comments/posts without explanation as to what rules were broken, and then when you critique them in the comments surprise, surprise, they remove them too!
I’m 21, have been following HN since I was 18, from Asia.
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.
There is hipster UI, and there's not handling pagination, having buttons bordering on the unusable on mobile, commenting requiring a new page to be opened, etc.
thankfully, due to the simplicity of this site, it's easily parsable, and Daniel Wu made an iOS app which addresses some of those issues, called Octal.
I have a 11 inch tablet for HN casual reading. And I moved over to the laptop for serious discussions. My phone is for checking only because it’s always near.
I'd actually really love the ability to follow just the 'Show HN's of a particular user, for those who consistently post interesting projects. It would at least lessen the FOMO causing me to check HN a little too often.
I’d at least like to be able to choose colors for posters, and auto-collapse some. There are a few very-active posters who basically never post anything aside from confident but poorly-informed flamebait on a wide range of topics (but “HN nice” enough that they don’t get moderated for it, though their threads often get nasty). Making it easier to spot and ignore them would solve most of my problems with HN’s comment section.
[edit] and, flip-side, there are some I’d like to easily be able to spot in large threads, because they’re consistently good.
I think it's better than Reddit because it doesn't allow user moderators. That is the downfall of Reddit, as it ultimately turned it into a site where only certain viewpoints are allowed. Downvoting doesn't even matter, they just ban dissenters anymore. This is apt to happen with any user moderated site.
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.
This isn’t a reasonable critique of the unpaid moderation model — the same model we’ve had since long before Reddit.
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.
> I can’t think of a realistic business justification for a paid moderator to curate forums for some of my incredibly niche hobbies.
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.
I didn't see good moderation anywhere on reddit. From 2012-2023, nothing close to dang and I'm being generous with my criteria for moderation. Okayish for 'free' perhaps
HN focus on the quality of content and underestimate the concept of user compared to reddit, I think that's why HN don't open the feature to follow, chat between user.
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.
It kinda went the other way - HN has a calming feature that prevents you from quickly replying to a comment on your comment. That was clearly on purpose.
I actually like the calming feature but what's a bit sad is missing thoughtful replies and only noticing them a day or 2 later when I know the person who left the reply won't see my reply to them. So, I think both could be complimentary, the notification doesn't need to be instant :)
Do not have a business that relies on "growth & engagement".
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.
This is missing the elephant in the room that HN is not the (or maybe even a) money bringer for YCombinator. Were this the golden goose for a publicly traded company, the decision process could quickly shift to "make me money or GTFO".
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.
I’d say HN has generated them a huge amount of money. It’s a massive center of high quality tech discussion and HN posts have priority. Every other investment company would kill to own and run HN.
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.
Well, you jest, but what if we could create an LLM that follows dang behavior? He’s pretty low-touch on substance and mostly moderates style. An LLM should be able to copy that. If I didn’t have to work for a living I might pursue that, that would be a huge benefit to humanity.
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.
Most people still use WeChat, even for tech news reading. You have everything inside WeChat, which is like an OS.
Some young people also use Hupu(a basketball app and forum but you can also discuss other topics).
I have WeChat as a EU user, but I can't post for some reason. In Douyin and Weibo it's even worse - I'm unable to create an account. Do you know how to overcome it? I rent Hong Kong number, but it's not enough to create accounts on those platforms.
On iOS, if you download Alipay from the Dutch app store it's a different program than the Alipay from the Chinese app store. A lot of features require that you download Alipay with a Chinese Apple account. I suspect the same applies to WeChat (I wish I remembered better).
IIRC, you also need to validate a Chinese phone number for some features. None of it is intuitive.
>Unlike most platforms today, Jike does not use in-app ads to lure users or algorithms to push content, but encourages active engagement through carefully curated topics and in-depth discussions across the app.
That's something I would like to take a part in. Unfortunately I don't know Mandarin.
FWIW, Hacker News itself appears to be blocked by the Great Firewall. Techies, of course, will have no problems getting through, but I’m genuinely confused as to why it’s banned in the first place…
Users in these kind of platforms usually do welcome English posts according to some experience with Xiaohongshu, but registering an account from outside is challenging.
I didn't find Japanese grammar to be hard, reading and writing is much harder, what with the different readings of many kanji. I found French and German grammar much harder to learn.
