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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Twitter has really turned into an absolute sewer

Content-wise, I don't think any service is immune from that - Reddit can be pretty horrible and I was shocked by some of the stuff posted to HN Tuesday & yesterday (though it was quickly cleaned up).

My problem with Twitter is that the brevity and emphasis on the present moment makes for bad social interactions; the faux-urgency of social media in general elevates sensation above substance. It's so easy to get the Internet Hate Machine going, and offers such large ego rewards for people who feel they are able to shape and direct it, that it's become a regular part of discourse. Back in pre-web days when NNTP was in regular use, discussions of contentious subjects were just as vigorous but nowhere near as vicious or reductionist.

Our ability to project our own ideas has significantly outpaced our willingness to consider those of others, it seems.

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> I was shocked by some of the stuff posted to HN Tuesday & yesterday

As was I, but it got taken care of. I still wish people wouldn't have downvoted Richards' comments into oblivion though.

However, what's really different on HN is not that sometimes bad things happen, it's that there are a lot of people here capable of considering a balanced opinion and, perhaps most importantly, willing to question the premise of things. Users on HN often did not simply fall in line behind the stereotypical camps that feed on this kind of issue, and I don't see that same capability for actual thought anywhere on Twitter.

By and large we may disagree (hopefully with civility) on conclusions, and those are productive discussions to have, but we're as a community able to examine the issue as a whole. That's a pretty unique and valuable trait.

I'm still marveling at how ridiculously easy it is to create fake wedge issue drama like this, and all of a sudden it's #teamadria on the one side, and creepy macho assholes on the other, without a single neocortical neuron to share between them.

Users on HN often did not simply fall in line behind the stereotypical camps that feed on this kind of issue

Oh god, they do. There are certainly dissenting voices but Hacker News has proven itself time and time again to be unable to examine the issue of gender, or more tellingly, unwilling to. These posts disappearing is not a one-off, there have been numerous instances of people flagging 'difficult' posts on HN, so that we can all continue arguing about semi-colons.

I must confess my knowledge into things that got unfairly flagged away is pretty limited, so you may well be correct. But as I said, the point is not that bad things happen here as well. It's that this is the only place where I actually found worthwhile opinions, whether they may be surrounded by bad ones or not. Maybe the signal-to-noise ratio is still too low, and we need to fix that, but at least it's not quickly approaching zero as is the case on, say, Twitter.

Users on HN often did not simply fall in line behind the stereotypical camps that feed on this kind of issue, and I don't see that same capability for actual thought anywhere on Twitter.

Our definition of "often did not" seems different. And the majority of the response that I saw seemed pretty knee-jerk. (Disclaimer, I actively tried to take a balanced look at the issue, and immediately got downvoted into oblivion for it. But over time people seem to be calming down.)

On the Internet, there is no place to go drink and talk quietly with the reasonable people about complex subjects while the inpatient people, polarized to one side of a multifaceted issue, try to out shout each other. So when I don't say something in a thread that has degenerated, nobody sees me leave.

I do try to leave something in such threads. But nobody is reading them for carefully considered takes on the issue.

I respectfully disagree, but that's because I'm in a couple of communities that are very, very cleverly moderated and have very rigid curation guidelines that the mods are careful about.

You still get people trying to shout at each other, but they usually do so from a distance, and not within the community. I'm perfectly happy with that.

HN has moderation (flags/upvotes etc.) but a much less rigid set of curation guidelines (see "Six Degrees of Hacker News"). This results in a much wider set of "well I think HN should be X", and therefore more meta-arguments about the different Xs rather than staying on topic, whatever "topic" means to each individual.

On reflection, you are right. I am actually in an online community that does do this, and even has a Metatalk section intended for talking about such things. I suppose I was engaging in hyperbole, born out of a sense of frustration. Thank you for pointing that out, and if you want to tell me (perhaps privately) about your communities, I'd be interested.

What startup opportunity lies in channeling discussions in a more productive way? Is there a smart approach to this?

Reddit for adults basically, with ruthless moderation. Attract a good audience, then sell ads to that desirable audience.

Lots of people who are sick of the juvenile content and comments on Reddit would leave, but there's nowhere to go. Build an awesome community by tolerating absolutely no shit.

"with ruthless moderation"

Yea, but that seems to just push the problem one degree away..."Quis custodiet ipsos custodes"-type situation. I've been part of a few niche forums over the years that have ruthless moderation, and it's not a fun place to be a lot of the time.

http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/ is a forum for primitive skills discussion, and by far the most civil and "adult" forum I've been a part of...I have no idea how they do it.

I love their rules though: http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/topic/16448/Welcome-to-the-...

If it's for adults why not charge to get in? It works for somethingawful.

Their funnel is an absolute scream: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=322...

Note: this is not meant to imply somethingawful is for adults. Just that they charge to get in and moderate ruthlessly.

http://www.well.com/

I ruthlessly moderate a reddit - to the limit of my free time. People that need moderating exceed my ability to read and delete comments. Our ban list is huge. The eternal September is, truly, eternal.

Now there's a nick I haven't seen in a few years. #distributed, right?

Indeed.

If you don't plan to provide significantly different mechanism for discussion, I don't see why you'd want to build completely new site instead of utilizing Reddit by making your own subreddit with the "ruthless moderation" you want. That's the real power of reddit, that it is as much a platform as it is a community.

There are shitloads of other general interest forums on the web that have strong moderation and less juvenile content. They're all just small forums - they don't get the critical mass of Reddit so they stay small. It's far from a wasteland out there.

So, metafilter?

Depends. I closed my account last fall because I got tired of the personal abuse that pervades political threads. I'm pretty argumentative, true, but I found that forum to be increasingly aggressive and negative in tone.

Doesn't ruthless moderation just lead to rebellion? If HN had let this story go instead of censoring it the world wouldn't have ended. But now people are wondering (at least I am) about the mod's motives.

If they're willing to remove stories they don't like do they also promote their friend's projects or squash competitors?

In this case I have some sympathy because they were worried they were spreading false rumors but honestly it does sort of make me think twice about what I read here.

Isn't that Quora?

Which HN hates?

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