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Comment by kspacewalk2 | Hacker News Reader

You're on a site where at least half the commenters are anonymous, and evidently the discussion level here is good enough for you to stay. Conversely, Facebook is not any less cancerous because they have a real name policy. So no, I'd say the least N years have not shown that.

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I think the most important aspect of a community is its members. Reddit, Facebook, etc have all tried hard to grow their communities and have reduced the quality of them as they increased the headcount.

The best communities don’t strive for the hockey stick growth.

Reddit and Facebook are not a single community, they are many communities some of which have a very high bar for quality, and some of which are a free for all that tends toward low quality memes and trolling.

I found that removing any community of more than 100K subscribers from my reddit experience made it much more tolerable.

In the old design you could go to /r/subredditname/comments and see an ordered list of comments regardless of which post they were associated with. It really livened things up and let you track the conversations going on given that there wern't that many new posts in a given day. That's gone with the new design unfortunately.

You can opt out of the new design and still access that.

Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/

I have disabled the new design entirely in my user preferences, so I get the old design even if I don't put "old" in the URL.

Psuedonymous, not anonymous.

People change these logins like gloves despite what the "spirit" of HN is supposed to be. In fact, an anonymous community that is strictly moderated for quality is better for being anonymous (or at least pseudonymous). If the average quality of contributions is reasonably high, you judge comments on their merit and aren't excessively reverent toward some and excessively skeptical toward others purely based on the contributor's history (and therefore set of beliefs). And people self-censor a lot less.

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