Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

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There are too many edge cases to throw out the baby with the bathwater though. Reddit has a lot of really great niche communities that work hard to avoid toxicity (although to be fair I don’t go to anything news/politics related there, just memes and machine learning for me).

Facebook, likewise, is a trash company with a trash product, but has completely replaced the town notice boards and meeting halls in rural communities, and is indispensable for working with them.

I’ve been thinking hard enough to get steam blowing out of my ears trying to figure out a way to slice out that essential function from Facebook and put it on a platform that isn’t predatory and dangerous, but I still can’t square that circle. So in the meantime, if people want to engage and stay engaged with rural communities, Facebook is a necessary evil.

Why can't reddit replace facebook as a notice board?

Fantastic question. The simple answer is that most people who are involved in community governance skew older, and older people primarily use Facebook as their social media fix, so getting updates about the goings-on in their communities or taking part in discussions about them is a natural fit between FarmVille updates and photos of grandkids.

Reddit works sort of all right for small and medium sized cities, but for most of small town rural America, people just use Facebook, not reddit, so it would likely be extremely hard to move people en masse out of Facebook for community organization. The network effects are simply far too massive to overcome no matter how good the other social network could be made.

Chicken and egg problem for people who work with chickens and eggs.

Why can't reddit replace facebook as a notice board?

I'm sure it would be a lot of fun, but a couple things would need to happen. (1) They're just not going to do it

(2) There needs to be a lot more attention being paid to this

It should be a community board. It's free. It's available to the public. And its a place everyone can get to. You could make it a free-to-enter-only place where people can submit content, but that kind of limits the content to reddit. It really should be a free-to-use board, like a forum.

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