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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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