> Any time any single person does something positive, some armchair "expert" comes out the woodworks to tell you how it won't work or can't work.
All public forums go bad once they reach a certain size. Since everything is on a gaussian curve (fat mediocre middle, and two asymptotes, one for greatness, the other for the opposite end), it's just pure statistics that junk comments will start creeping in once the population grows beyond a certain threshold.
In some ways HN is designed to combat this. You need to "earn" downvotes with contributions, and the sites UX is designed in a way to slow down low effort comments, and to make comments sit for a bit before allowing replies (with workarounds if needed).
The things that aren't features (like the lack of notifications) also help.
There's also a quite-active, and largely effective, moderation effort by @dang and ... I forget the other mod, scbc or something like that.
I've been making comparative studies of a few communities (HN, Reddit, G+, Imzy, Ello), and it's interesting to see how various ones work. In particular, there's a tremendous culture against the types of even indirect personal attacks at HN which fly in spades elsewhere. I saw @dang inveighing against a comment which began with "<sigh>", on the grounds that that is the equivalent of an internet eyeroll.
On G+, discussion quality depends very much on the host and how they manage a particular thread. I've got problems with Google itself, but the platform can support quite good discussions. Overall participation has always been small (6-12 million users posting publicly per month, a value I'd had a hand in determining), but in corners, that's still a good crowd. The best circumstance is to cultivate a small group ~30-100 members or so, set firm expectations for participation, moderate aggressively (that is, promptly), though fairly and starting with social nudges. There's a balance between topic drift and derailment.
Reddit varies hugely by subreddit, the good ones are exceptionally good. The site as a whole has some faults that leak through even to the good subs though.
Ello has a very small (~10k or so daily, ~200k or so monthly visits) userbase, but it strikes me as quite well behaved for the most part, something I've commented on specifically to the site's admins.
Imzy, the "kinder, gentler Reddit" has largely proven not to be. For reasons not entirely suprising when you combine an on-tap, ad libitum anonymity access, lacking leadership, overtaxed / AWOL moderation, exceptionally ill-conceived notifications, threading, and response mechanisms, and a community drawn from SRS and similar beds of vitriol. It's not the issues advocated for, but the methods of advocacy, including ample amounts of friendly fire and hypocrisy, which generate problems.
I have tried most of them and feel largely the same.
HN seems in that sweet spot for me where it is large enough to have a good amount of discussion but still has very good quality.
Most "reddit but more free" sites turn into imzy or even worse voat. G+ communities are too small for me, and finding a good community is proving to be hard. And I've given up on reddit for any larger scale technical discussion (there's just too much vitriol and "my team is better" sentiment there. It always seems to focus on the negative, and creating a "positive only" subreddit seems like a bad idea, and it attracts the users that will fight that idea on principle)
I'll need to try Ello though. Have you looked at lobsters? It's much smaller than HN but also more technical (and with its own share of bias against anything newer in my experience)
G+ communities, as a rule, are simply broken. I created one of my one with a carefully selected set of members, and that worked well for discussion. It's limited in specialised knowledge, though not bad.
Ello is tiny, though there are again some interesting folks. I'm simply impressed by the healthy socialisation.
I've done some rigorous "tracking the conversation" studies, which are based on terms I have interest in, across numerous sites. Blogs are still surprisingly relevant.
Lobsters is another technical-oriented HN-like site.
You need to be invited by someone there, and they actually show the full invite graph, and I believe will somewhat hold you accountable if you invite spammers or trolls.
That being said, if you won't cause trouble I'd be willing to send you an invite if you email the account in my userpage on HN ;)
<sigh> and what level of derailment would you call this thread? it has probably two comments on the video contents, and all the rest is about which community stays on topic better.
I'd comment on the video itself if I could watch it, but local systems aren't cooperating.
That said: discussions can be about the nominal topic, or they can drift, naturally, to other areas of interest. I find the meta-topic of "where is a good place to discuss the things I'm interested in discussing" to be generally on-topic. HN isn't a bad place for that.
With the ability to collapse threads baked into the HN page design, if you're not interested in a discussion, you can simply collapse it an move on.
On which: I'm increasingly hitting long threads from the bottom, for a few reasons:
1. The top-ranked post often isn't particularly on-topic, and attracts diversions posted for visibility.
2. It's easier to tell if a thread is of little concern if you follow it from the bottom.
3. It's easier to track a conversation from bottom to top and collapse going up, than it is to backtrack back to the top and collapse that. There's a subreddit which runs the collapse bars down the side of the thread, allowing a subthread, or entire thread, to be collapsed in one go.
4. There are often downvoted or flagged items which I feel are incorrectly tagged. It's usually faster to assess if something has some merits than to see if it's solid, and I'll nudge stuff up -- even if I substantially disagree with it -- if it seems it's been overly penalised.
HN, as with other online discussions, does poorly for deep and complex posts. One standout was The Edge Question issue a few years ago. There were a handful of comments on the first few essays, but given that there were ~100 - 150 total responses, it's not the sort of thing you can digest quickly.
I've tracked down other issues of the Question and gone through it. I have to say on balance I'm fairly disappointed in the quality -- much is narrow self-promotion of research, another large set is rampant speculation. The short an humerous responses are often disarmingly refreshing. And every so often there's something quite good. Sturgeon's quality estimate though seems generous.
And there is an aspect to that ability that I know people don't like.
The ability to collapse means you feel less bad about somewhat-off-topic conversation, which in a way can create worse discussion for the actual topic.
But at the same time some of my favorite HN threads have been offshoots of the submission's topic.
Pedantic point: not everything is Gaussian. Income, for example, doesn't go below zero. It may not even be log-normal, but rather a power distribution.
Pedantic point aside, you bring up an important point. Can behavioral incentives be aligned to avoid the bottom side of participation?
This is less of a pedantic point than might be assumed.
The Gaussian depends upon a notion of independence and identical distribution: independence can be dispensed of when one thinks about power laws.
If you can soberly state the assumption that the effects of a comment on any other comment is completely negligible, or falls into a couple of other strange exceptions that leads to the universal phenomena that generates the Gaussian, then and only then can you state that any quantity associated with comments is Gaussian. I do not think that this can be soberly stated as such.
If you measure income as change in net worth minus expenditures, it could go below zero. That might not be an appropriate definition in all cases, but, for example if you incur debts without acquiring an offsetting benefit (maybe by being compelled to pay damages to someone for something you did that you didn't derive much or any value from, like causing an accident?), it might be reasonable to say that you had negative income. Or maybe due to capital losses -- you own something that gets stolen or destroyed or damaged, or whose market value falls a lot.
(That doesn't mean that it will follow a Gaussian distribution, just that it could be defined in a way where it makes sense that it can sometimes be negative.)
This is what happened with Reddit. It used to be a lot more enlightened discussion and now it is a gutter of memes, paranoia, puns, and debased comments.
It's the puns. Some are funny, but it's just not funny anymore. I go on that site a few times a year, and the jokes never stop.
It's a pretty old website now. I thought the hilarious banter/play on words would have run its course. There must be some psychological thing going on?
I am reminded we are just monkeys, hitting buttons when I'm there. (No offence to monkeys. I like you guys. I think you're better than us.)
Some fads just take longer to run their course? Skinny jeans for men--done. Guys buying $500 tennis shoes--still going on. Guys that have the semi-Mohawk. Just enough on the sides to get a job--almost done. I can't think of anything that doesn't have a beginning, and end. All I can think of, right now, is life is too short. Depressing. This summer went by way to quick for myself. I wasted it.
All public forums go bad once they reach a certain size. Since everything is on a gaussian curve (fat mediocre middle, and two asymptotes, one for greatness, the other for the opposite end), it's just pure statistics that junk comments will start creeping in once the population grows beyond a certain threshold.