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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the average Reddit experience.

This is exactly why such communities should remain on open newsgroups rather than Reddit/Discord/Slack or whatever other flavor-of-the-month service people want to switch over to for their shiny UI.

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Reddit will be 19 years old next month, it’s not flavor of the month.

Chocolate’s been around a while too, but it can still be the flavor of the month.

Digg is 19 years old as well, and was significantly more popular than Reddit at its peak. Where is it now? Or Myspace? Or Tumblr? Or Google+? Or Twitter?

Any open forum that is private and profit-focused is eventually going to destroy itself. Reddit is not an exception, especially after its recent IPO. How long do you think it will be before investors are no longer content with losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year and want more monetization and more user-hostile features built in?

> Any open forum that is private and profit-focused is eventually going to destroy itself. Reddit is not an exception.

Facebook is still around.

If we count the date commercial dial-up was first available (1992) to the Facebook launch date (2004), Facebook has been around for the majority of most people's internet experience.

I think you have the wrong mental model of this. Rather, when a community wins and reaches steady state, it becomes entrenched and almost impossible to dislodge.

Google+ tried to suck the air out of the room for Facebook and it failed.

Facebook is very far from an "open forum". You can't even view posts without creating an account. The service is useless if your entire social graph isn't also over there. Content you post is heavily moderated, both automatically and by paid humans. There's a reason there's no Java discussion happening there.

What exactly do you mean by open newsgroups?

Is there any language community using that kind of thing these days??

Google Groups shows that comp.lang.c is still used. (Note: the latest messages were posted in February because that's when Google Groups stopped supporting Usenet.)

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.c

Pretty much. Social media and related encourage cyberdisinhibitionism and tyranny through extremism including drama, fascistic policies, and a fundamental lack of compromise or benefit of the doubt. These tendencies aren't exclusive to one app or another, but are part and parcel of the medium. These tendencies tend to reward and encourage bullying and sociopathy while crucifying random people for trivial and arbitrary transgressions.

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