I don't think reddit's problem is harassment, I think it's groupthink, extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading. I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. Maybe that's just not possible?
I really love how self-enforcing the community is here towards snark and lazy comments, which have absolutely destroyed Reddit. Edginess is much easier than proper discussion.
While I definitely enjoy more nuanced and interesting discourse, I don't actually think that reddit has any problem.
There is a self declared "elite" group of users on reddit who are always echoing exactly your sentiments to the point that it's almost a chant: groupthink, low quality comments, uniformed discourse! Of course, recognizing that there is a need and desire by some for a place to have more detailed and nuanced discussions is not bad in of itself. Arguably its' a very good thing.
Where it turns bad is in their approach to a solution. Instead of "hey, people want a place where they can have more interesting discussions, let's go create one, promote, and moderate it!", they think "hm, these people with their memes and images, that's a problem. They shouldn't do that. We need to stop them and show them the right way to run a subreddit!"
This latter thinking is incredibly intolerant, arrogant, and dangerous. It's the same type of thing that leads to laws being passed based on a particular religion or other philosophy that tries to ban thoughts different to theirs.
This is why I say that reddit doesn't have a "problem" with low quality content. That's what a lot of people enjoy and they should have a place they can do that. If you want to change peoples minds, use words, not force.
All that being said, I recognize that you didn't actually advocate that reddit be changed. More to your point, as others have said, one of the great things about reddit is that people are free to start their own subreddit and make it into whatever they wish. There are a lot of smaller more heavily moderated subreddits that have great discussion. People who are upset with the bigger subs should look for these or even create their own.
I upvoted you because for a moment I thought you were talking about the political censorship that happens on reddit. Which I agree is awful and I hate that. Mods censor opposing political opinions all the time and get away with it.
But just standard moderation of content? That's absolutely necessary. Without moderations subreddits degrade into memes and low effort comments. You only need to look at web archive to see the quality of many subreddits vastly decline as they got big.
As a mod of a default subreddit, we remove joke comments and image posts. And it's not like it's a new thing, we have always done that. And the quality is still far from perfect, but it's much better than other subs.
Sometimes I click on the comments of a reddit post looking to see more discussion about it. And instead it's just a bunch of jokes. Often by a handful of people that lurk in the rising posts, and make sure they get their comments there first, and so beat all the other comments (reddit's comment sorting algorithm is god awful and easily exploited like that.) Even if they don't have anything to say, or any insight into the subject.
Another problem is there are two different types of users. "Serious" users, for lack of a better name, and "entertainment" users. The users there for entertainment upvote images, jokes, etc. Serious users are looking for discussion and debate and whatever. These two categories aren't easily separated and often mix. The users looking for entertainment often take over subs about serious subjects, e.g. worldnews.
The top posts become whatever pleases the lowest common denominator, or requires the least effort to read. Short articles are easier read the long articles, and images are even easier, and provocative headlines even easier. So image posts and headlines like "mildly important official says something politically unpopular" take over entirely.
I'm not at all against moderation. I'm against the idea that subs that don't moderate out memes and jokes and images are somehow "bad" and should be removed. There have been more than one hostile takeovers of more popular subs, driven by the idea that these subs need to change. To me, this behaviour is wrong, these people should be making new subs instead.
In short, we should stop saying that "low quality content subs" are a problem. They really are not. The problem is instead a lack of well moderated subs, and/or a lack of promoting these or inability to discover them.
As long as this is true, what's wrong with taking over a sub, if that's what the people want? Making a new sub requires getting everyone to change.
You might as well ask those who wanted the old sub behavior to make their own sub.
There's no inherently right decision as to what the default should be, and in particular that decision isn't "just do what the original mods/creators want".
Honest question: How do you (or whoever is doing the takeover) know "what people want"?
After all we are talking about subreddits that somehow got popular with what they were doing... So why does a popular subreddit have to change and why do the people who made the subreddit into the popular thing it was have to find a new place instead of whoever has a problem with how things are done making their own and new place?
Well, democracy answers this by asking people directly. So one way to do it is poll the sub's members. Or, you could see whether the stuff that gets deleted was highly voted before it was deleted. If people don't like certain content, it won't get voted up.
I'm not sure which cases of hostile takeovers they're referring to, so I don't know what happened there, but presumably they either had a mod on their side, or got an admin to step in. The mod's behavior must have been pretty bad if an admin intervened.
If you pull the "the majority decides" card then there is no decision necessary. Each subreddit is defined by the majority of its users. Simple as that.
Not necessarily. The algorithms that do the sorting might be biased toward certain content (for instance, if it highly values quickly upvoted content, it would be biased toward short memes and against long-form articles). Reddit voting isn't just a straight majority vote.
A subreddit is not a democracy. As a moderator, I can do mostly whatever I please and you're welcome to stay or start your own subreddit.
I don't understand why you'd say that if an admin did something then the mod's behavior must have been pretty bad. Define bad? Bad for reddit's public image? Bad for monetization?
Ironically - The lack of sub discovery is directly related to the development of auto mod.
If you remember when r/trees broke out of r/weed, people found out about the new sub because there was no auto mod bot which went and removed key words.
Echoing this 100%. People clearly enjoy memes, cat pictures, and so forth, or else they wouldn't wind up with thousands of imaginary internet points (and sites making nontrivial amounts of money off this exact content, like the cheezburger network) on a daily basis.
Those that want their heavily moderated spaces have them within easy reach, those that want their low effort internet junk food, likewise.
So what's the problem, again? It sounds like the system is working mostly as designed.
I think defaults are necessary when someone is not logged in. When an account is created, suggestions are given based on interest, such as it is with meetup.com - News, politics, sports, local, tech, animals, humor, etc. are recommended in their own categories, and people sub as desired.
I HATE it when I sign up for a newsreading service and the first thing it asks me is to pick topics I like. I just want to try out the product / interface.
Don't road block me with some set of tiles and vague "business, technology, fashion, music" screen.
Reddit has it right that a new account should have some baseline. Their discovery tools however are not intuitive, if you can even call them tools.
The designation of a sub as a default on reddit dooms it to be trashy and political, and reddit admins would never come out and say "avoid these awful communities, go find your local reddits!". So it goes.
This is actually what we're doing on Imzy! We ask people their interests and then show them what communities they may want to join based on that. Then they choose which ones they want to join. Hopefully by doing that, we'll decrease the circlejerking and increase the quality of conversations, since people only get there if they actually care about that topic and want to talk about that thing.
Sorry for posting in this thread, but I think you might want to know about this bug: I have a (completely valid) .coffee domain and you're actually the first to refuse my e-mail address. It's not just valid, it's got coffein!
I'm not at all against moderation. I'm against the idea that subs that don't moderate out memes and jokes and images are somehow "bad" and should be removed.
Obnoxious moderation is just as big a problem on reddit as the aforementioned.
Reddit is just a platform. If mods of a subreddit are seen as being heavy-handed in their moderation then people a free to create a competing subreddit.
For one, the worst behaved subreddits moderation wise are often the "default" ones, meaning the ones that everyone sees when logged out. They have a favored position on the site, in other words. Every user is subscribed to them by default, which also means their content is going to wind up on /r/all more often.
Also, once a subreddit gets that size, crap mods can get away with a lot more because the volume of submissions make it hard to tell that something untoward is going on. And the people who pay attention (perhaps a few thousand on a good day) will easily be drowned out by those who do not.
Community forks happen, but never at that level. The deck is hilariously stacked towards the entrenched communities.
I don't think the parent was saying that you shouldn't take over a subreddit in response to moderator behavior. The thread has been saying two seperate things: that you shouldn't try to take over a subreddit for how its users behave, and that inappropriate moderator behavior is a problem on reddit. If you can convince a subreddit's subscribers that the moderators are shit and you'd do a better job, then you should certainly take control of the subreddit.
Usually it's easier to just make a new subreddit and convince people that yours is better.
What about splitting comments into two sections:
1. Comments: Imgur / youtube etc style comments with jokes etc.
2. Discussions: Questions, arguments, details, references etc.
You would need some moderating, but it "could work".
Lots of unknowns, such as how much moderating, how do control moderators etc. Its not really a solution to the actual people "problem" but more a UI/ presentation solution to compensate both sides. Now, trolls will always exist, and will always try to crash the party, does not matter what you do.
That's possible. The only issue would be the mixing I mentioned. Serious comments often get joke replies and vice versa. But yes I would like to see that tried.
How about side-voting joke replies to serious comments. They all still exist in the same tree, but you would gain another dimension to sort/filter/display comments by.
You could actually moderate the discussion threads heavily, and then do only NSFW style moderating on the comments. But like i said, it does not solve the who monitors the monitor problem.
>But just standard moderation of content? That's absolutely necessary. Without moderations subreddits degrade into memes and low effort comments.
And that's bad because?
(My question is a rephrase of the parent's comment).
It's perfectly OK for people to have memes and low effort comments. Not everything should be a "high-bro" discussion, with nuanced arguments and evolved though policing.
Anything pro-trump or pro-clinton gets censored in /r/politics, the default subreddit for politics. /r/politics might as well be /r/SandersIsGod
Oh by the way they don't say they're removing the submission because it's pro-trump, they just enforce rules that are so broad that there can be a wide discretion in how they're enforced. These rules are heavily enforced for pro-trump and pro-clinton sbumissions, but not pro-sanders submissions.
I can understand Trump's acolytes being banned considering their recent slap fight with /r/Sweden. The folks that run /r/The_Donald have shown they're not good folks in general, so having jerk mods in /r/politics ban them is amusing at least for me since these are the same dorks that thought writing IRC scripts to spam racist epitaphs made them "hackers."
Umm what? a few bad apples do not represent all trump supporters. By the way what you said has nothing to do with why normal news submissions are being censored.
> While I definitely enjoy more nuanced and interesting discourse, I don't actually think that reddit has any problem.
You might not think it's a problem, but it's still a problem for Reddit: the conversation is generally inferior to the standards required for it to see mass adoption.
A lot of people want to create and consume low quality content. I don't dispute that. But a lot of people don't want to and the way Reddit is organized unfortunately pushes the low quality to the top.
Over the years, I have frequently tried to get into Reddit. I've found smaller subreddits and interesting communities, but even in them I'm confronted with low-effort comments too often. Structurally, the site just doesn't do enough to incentivize high quality contributions.
It's fine for there to be places for low quality content. There's plenty of them on every social network. The problem for Reddit is that they're front and center, not at the fringes.
>Structurally, the site just doesn't do enough to incentivize high quality contributions. //
As the parent intimated people don't all want your idea of quality. Reddit seems perfectly capable of quality within its structure - AskScience and AskHistorians seen like good examples. In other subs [SERIOUS] tags seem to work quite well.
>The problem for Reddit is that they're front and center, not at the fringes. //
It's primarily for entertainment the low SNR subreddits being most prominent seems to be a consequence of that.
> Reddit seems perfectly capable of quality within its structure - AskScience and AskHistorians seen like good examples.
I've seen people point to specific subreddits as quality before, but I've never found it to be true.
To verify, I just did a quick peruse through /r/AskScience. While the questions themselves are generally good and the SNR is definitely higher than Reddit overall, I hardly think it's an emblem of quality. There are plenty of drive-by comments with low substantive value and the combination of Reddits norms and algorithms don't seem to do a good job of burying those—even on the "best" subreddits.
It's choice. I prefer the looser moderation of AskScience to that of AskHistorians. On HN the downvoting of dissenting views pains me (that non- normative views are treated the same as spam).
>You might not think it's a problem, but it's still a problem for Reddit: the conversation is generally inferior to the standards required for it to see mass adoption.
Judging from the kind of statistics Reddit has, I seriously doubt that this is a problem for them.
The notion that there are untold millions (more than currently) waiting to get into Reddit but don't because they don't like the memes and jokes doesn't really strike me as accurate.
Where are the competing "serious" sites filling that niche?
It's rather the contrary -- the "serious" and high traffic comment threads, from the Guardian and NYT to CNN, -- get increasingly more (rather than less) Reddit like comments.
In fact killing those memes and jokes will more probably alienate Reddit's largest user base than do any good.
What is stupid memes and jokes for one, is the ability to discuss trully and freely for another.
"You might not think it's a problem, but it's still a problem for Reddit: the conversation is generally inferior to the standards required for it to see mass adoption."
Absolutely hilarious comment. It's the 31st most popular site in the world. You may struggle to use it but they're clearly not suffering.
> You might not think it's a problem, but it's still a problem for Reddit: the conversation is generally inferior to the standards required for it to see mass adoption.
Uhm, what? Low quality comments have never been a barrier for a website reaching mass adoption. In fact, mass adoption has been what has crippled the discussion in the biggest subredits. In any case, when discussing the quality of the comments, mass adoption is beside the point as far as we (average users that have no financial stake in reddit) are concerned.
My problem with Reddit is not not that COC and heavy moderation enabled group think and promotes censorship (both regular and self kind) is that it's conflict resolution model promotes segregation of ideas rather than discourse.
Reddit is the place that instead of having /r/redvsblue you get /r/red and /r/blue 2 gated communities that simply live in their own little world happy with the perfect echo chamber they've created and that anyone who strays to post in the other camp's subreddit is automatically classified as a troll.
I think it might actually be the other way around. To a large extent, Reddit's competition for user attention consists of more typical 'social media' sites like Twitter and Facebook, where people only see content shared by their friends and thus most will have little if any exposure to alien political viewpoints.* It also includes smaller forums/sites which support a single, relatively cohesive social community, with associated groupthink - such as this one. Reddit is relatively uncommon in being large enough to support many separate communities - including ones that literally hate each other - coexisting on the same site, yet more centrally structured, less individualized than social media, giving those groups more visibility and exposure to each other. I claim that this visibility is responsible for much of the impression that Reddit is especially prone to echo chambers, but in reality does the exact opposite: it nudges users in the direction of looking at the other side's subreddit and seeing what they think.
(Not all of that impression; certainly upvote-downvote systems tend to exacerbate groupthink. Even so.)
* Twitter in particular has the problem that if you want to interact with the other side, you have to pick a particular person to interact with; yet having someone you don't know initiating conversation just to disagree with you is rather unpleasant, especially if you're "famous" and end up with a lot of such conversations. On Reddit at least you can address an entire subreddit and avoid targeting anyone personally. You will probably be downvoted, which isn't great, but...
>yet having someone you don't know initiating conversation just to disagree with you is rather unpleasant
Eh why is that exactly? This is pretty much like calling people who object to the ideas that others present on Twitter as harassment.
When you go on a public forum and present your ideas you open yourself to a public debate, hearing things that might be "unpleasant" should fall well within the realm of expectation in this case.
Several reasons, including effects of scale on both sides (someone popular retweets a tweet of yours they don't like, and all their followers challenge you at the same time, or you are popular enough to get a constant stream of negativity), lack of moderation (no filter for low-effort flames from people who don't actually want a discussion), difficulty of having a debate in 140-character bites (the format in fact encourages aforementioned low-effort posts), etc.
But the main one is the blurred line between public and private. Posting here definitely comes with the expectation of a public debate and so people who aren't in the mood for it will not post. But on Twitter everyone is encouraged to publicly post everything from random status updates to highly personal matters to idle chatter that is meant to only circulate among friends (and may not be fully thought through). You can avoid this by setting your account to private, and many do, but this blocks the spontaneous spread of posts through the social graph by means of retweets and replies, which is IMO the best thing about Twitter. There is no granularity, either: only one account toggle between all your tweets being visible to the entire world or to just your direct followers. (Including replies, which makes private accounts an imperfect shield: if you have a private account but chat with a public account, people can still see their replies to you and infer the content of the conversation, plus your username.) Also, whereas you can easily leave HN or Reddit or some forum altogether if you get fed up with it, leaving Twitter may be tantamount to losing contact with friends; you can make your account private but it's not the same sort of mental break.
The biggest reason is tone and the motives of the person who is disagreeing with you.
The worst arguers on the Internet don't just disagree; they bring a moral judgment along with it. "You're wrong for believing in X, and the fact that you believe in X makes you a bad person." If you have enough people who agree with this, (and this often has absolutely nothing to do with broader support for X or whether X is actually bad or not) you actively feel hated, demeaned, etc for believing in X and voicing your opinion. Even being polite will provoke an enormous amount of vitriol simply because it's very easy to lump in a polite X-believer in with preexisting ideas that all people who believe X are assholes.
A lot of people react to this with, "Well, good. There are a lot of shitty Xs that people believe, and people really should be afraid to say those things out loud."
That's all well and good for some opinions; I'm not advocating being polite to, say, neo-Nazis who are denying the Holocaust or advocating genocide. But people rapidly expand X to "whatever I disagree with," and the result is that we treat disagreement on legitimate, reasonable issues that people will naturally disagree on as equivalent to endorsing genocide and believing that the Holocaust didn't happen.
It doesn't help that the Internet naturally magnifies hatred because it's very, very easy for 5,000 people to get ahold of something and leave one really nasty comment apiece. They spend 10 seconds writing a comment, but the person who originally posted X gets 50,000 seconds of written vitriol. It's overwhelming.
As a result, there are certain issues on the Internet (and in real life, for that matter) - vital issues, important issues, that I will not touch because they are far too likely to dump a massive amount of vitriol on me. I have better shit to do. As a result, the best possible outcome for me is not to engage entirely.
And then those exact same people who dump anger and hatred on all believers in X complain that said believers in X are "avoiding them." Well no shit they are, who would volunteer for that?
> That's all well and good for some opinions; I'm not advocating being polite to, say, neo-Nazis who are denying the Holocaust or advocating genocide. But people rapidly expand X to "whatever I disagree with," and the result is that we treat disagreement on legitimate, reasonable issues that people will naturally disagree on as equivalent to endorsing genocide and believing that the Holocaust didn't happen.
This is the core problem: what is "legitimate and reasonable" and what is closer to neo-Nazis (to pull your example)?
Painting a target on myself here for the sake of illustration: I am a Christian, and I believe in the literal truth of the Bible. This means, for example, that I believe homosexuality is a sin. (which, for the sake of clarification, does not mean that I hate other humans who are gay).
Where does that put me on the spectrum from "legitimate, reasonable issues" to "neo-Nazi"? The answers to that vary far and wide, and the way I get treated online varies accordingly.
I've been treated as another person at the conversational table ("so why do you think that?", "what does that mean for how you treat others?"), and I've been told I'm "objectively a terrible person" (and much worse) for believing what I do.
The problem is often less "how do I treat people who have reasonable disagreements with me" and more "what constitutes a reasonable disagreement?"
Echo chamber is a symptom of a deeper issue. If you want to have a quality opinion on something, then you need to do serious work on often-gated information.
Without that hard, often-gated work, how is anyone supposed to form an independent opinion on something like global warming, models of crime, economic policy, intimate relationships, pedagogy, and so on? So what you're seeing is not the discussion of ideas, but rather the negotiation of clan policy and identity.
There's no policy that you can implement to stop this "echo chamber" or "groupthink", which are merely symptoms of a deeper issue: that the antecedents of independent opinion on a wide range of phenomena are simply not there, and that obtaining quality is resource-intensive with non-trivial opportunity cost.
This isn't just a problem with Reddit. It's possible for a person today to get their news online, on TV, on the radio, in magazines, etc. without ever hearing an opposing viewpoint.
It's a perfect echo chamber because people who cross the line are downvoted and or banned on the account of being "trolls" quite often without any real justification for that, and the most common reply is you should go to /r/yourowntribe and stop "spamming" our sub Reddit.
I truly miss the open forums (and even IRC, although that tended to be more focused) of the late 90's early 2000's yeah they could get vile some times but that's a bargain price for getting a public forum in which anyone can express their mind no matter how "wrong" or "offensive" some one can perceive that opinion to be.
Today we get people claiming getting PTSD over twitter and every online community adopting a COC which often leaves no room for discourse that would make some one uncomfortable all and all forgetting that ideas that make some one uncomfortable are the ideas most worth discussing.
60 years ago it was "uncomfortable" for way to many people people to hear that blacks should be allowed to use the same bathroom as they are and thank cthulhu we didn't had Twitter and Reddit back then.
I'm curious, what do you think could make this better/possible?
An obvious first step is removing downvotes so you can't completely obliterate someone who crosses sides to try to have a conversation, but after that, what else would help?
In my mind, some kind of code of conduct would help further those conversations, because it doesn't prevent people from expressing their opinions, it just makes them express them civilly. And if they express an opposing view without being overly antagonistic, then hopefully the other side wouldn't start insult slinging, and if they do, then that's what the COC would be there for.
I think there's a difference between having a "wrong" or "offensive" opinion, and expressing it in an offensive way. Do you think there's a way to achieve that balance, so that people can feel comfortable to express their opinions on either side, regardless of right or wrong, without it devolving into mudslinging and pure animosity on both sides? How do we accomplish that?
People should be reminded that taking offense is a privilege of living in a society with freedom of speech.
It's not anyone's place to define what a "wrong" or an "offensive" opinion is, this is how we gotten into this mess in the first place.
People mistake being challenged for being offended, having a discussion especially on a polarizing subject isn't supposed to be comfortable, but sadly we have too many people that have been cuddled to believe that it's their right to only hear the choir of angels reinforcing their opinions.
Heck even if some one decides to make a comment about ones maternal employment preferences I would not see a reason to moderate that, because unless you are discussing prostitution it most likely has very little to do with the actual argument and so would not score one much points in a debate.
It's very difficult to have an open discussion between dozens of parties because every discussion is subject to tactics that dissuade an exploration of the topic. The pigeonholing of "challenge" vs. "offense" into separate boxes of "good" and "bad" is one such mechanism, as it premises the audience and opponents to be professionals engaged in a formal discussion, not laypeople who are there because they're curious and want to be entertained and cheer for "their" side and feel good about themselves. The ground truth is that you keep returning to Reddit or HN because it's fun enough not to quit, not because it does you any good. You can come up with all kinds of rationales why it actually does you some good, but the underlying mechanism making me write this comment is that there is a game to play here, and it's not driven by my sense of virtue or collaborative spirit.
Skilled debate in a venue like Reddit requires an understanding of esotericism, of not simply laying out facts and implications based on your own assumptions, but presenting a fascinating puzzle to the reader that leads them to challenge their own assumptions without being challenged by anyone in particular. When successful, such a puzzle glides beneath the surface tropes of the discussion, presenting the perspective without provoking hostilities. The karma system does not reward this very well, as those carefully crafted puzzles tend to get middling scores, while simple agreement, rationalization arguments(why your assumptions are right and the critics are wrong, from Someone Smart), and congratulatory joking trigger the instant upvote response. But putting in the effort into that dialogue is essential to engaging the community.
I think moderation should be done in the open. It's more an issue of people allowing their content to be filtered by others, I think. A downvote is only as powerful as the user's moderation privilege.
If Reddit has a problem, it's not the low quality content, which I'm totally fine with, depending on my mood. The problem it has is that it was targetted as a recruiting ground by hate groups. The red pill/gamer-gate types and stormfront guys are toxic.
Also, for the first few years of its growth, the most popular search term that lead people to the site was 'jailbait'. That's the kind of community they nurtured and catered to.
You're right, people shouldnt be silenced for posting superficial content. At the same time, the ranking algorithms could be more flexible besides TOP, BEST, HOT, to let people more easily filter out what the types of posts they dont want to see.
Reddit would benefit from some way to put it in "intellectual mode" or "picture mode" that weighed certain post types and subs heavier.
The frustration comes from the fact these two types of users create a bimodal distribution of interest in posts.
If you just separate upvote buttons into funny and intelligent/insightful, then let users sort by the type of comment/post they prefer, wouldn't it solve this?
Slashdot does that, why hasn't that caught on? Complexity?
I always think how sad it is that Reddit does so little with their users data. They know a lot about people who sign in - comments they vote up or down, subreddits they visit and subscribe to, types of comments they leave, and so on... and it seems like they do nothing with that data to make the individual experience better.
Yeah, I was always waiting for prediction engines to kick into high gear on aggregators, recommending posts, subs, or even filtering comments based on what you seem to like.
They could also harvest data on how often people click through a headline, how long they scroll through a comments page, how long until they move to the next item...
So in addition to having more voting options on an aggregator, I also want a separate aggregator that's purely driven by behavioral data, like average clickthroughs and time on page.
Agreed. It seems beyond a certain amount of users, enforcing guidelines becomes almost impossible and the quality of content gets subjectively worse, if you belong to the original group of users. Reddit is a victim of its own success.
The only real problems I see with Reddit are political censorship in default subs and corrupt mods.
When you add all that together, Reddit (or at least the most visible part of it) really has become a bad place for open discussions.
This latter thinking is incredibly intolerant, arrogant, and dangerous. It's the same type of thing that leads to laws being passed based on a particular religion or other philosophy that tries to ban thoughts different to theirs.
And that's the same type of thing as brigading.
All the above is intolerance. We've forgotten as a society what that word really means.
HN is incredibly focused compared to Reddit. That's what keeps HN clean.
My idea is that if the user karma was removed, and upvotes on links were used to merely weigh and sort links, and downvotes on comments were removed, Reddit, and also HN, would improve. Many attention seekers spam many subreddits, and also HN, merely for the karma. Instead, give users some lives, as in games, and each time the user is seen spamming/harassing, take away a life, and when he runs out of lives, ban him. Though I have no factual experience to back my thoughts, but mailing lists and bulletin boards are mostly run similarly to what I describe.
Really? It seems to me that downvotes are used very negatively, as they are put a strong incentive (for most people) not to express unpopular opinions, even if they are good comments. If they were used only to discourage low quality posts, it wouldn't change a lot, since the most upvoted comments would still be to the top.
He suggests to remove lives for spam/harassment, not for shitposting. So basically, positive loop+ draconian enforcement of essential rules, and no negative loop.
I don't like downvotes because people mostly downvote what they disagree, not spam and whatnot. Having some ideas and habits contrary to what's popular, I experience this first-hand here on HN. And probably this is a reflex, most often when one sees someone disagree him, he feels a spontaneous whim and thinks that his argument is not reasonable. And only after a bunch of seconds does he understand that the other one actually poses a sound argument, criticism, etc. The HN's upvote-downvote sytem lacks undo, so unfortunately when you regret a downvote, there's nothing to do.
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect." -Mark Twain
I wonder how much karma Mark Twain would have if he had a Hacker News account...
Anyway, I, too, find downvoting very distasteful. IMO it should be reserved purely for low quality comments. When the crowd downvotes unpopular opinions, the place inevitably becomes an echo chamber, which is unquestionably harmful to honest, open debate and discussion.
Not only unpopular opinions, but since here on hn we can receive down-votes for "low quality" comments, people who are not native english speakers might shy away from expressing their views (I speak from my own perspective here). I often find that anglophones can have lengthy posts ranting about the same stuff over and over, but when non english natives comment they tend to be more concise and thoughtful. I'm actually kind off miss grammatically incorrect sentences that have a valid point, those are much more common on other forums, in those cases the person didn't had to feel pressure to be down-voted just for bad grammar.
As a non-native speaker, I've observed this, too. Lengthy, well written posts get far more upvotes and are treated more leniently with respect to downvotes regardless of their content.
Actually interesting posts are often grumpy four liners written during a short break from actual work (e.g. while waiting for a compile to finish).
Imzy actually has removed karma for users, precisely for that reason. It's usually something that ends up only being there for people to game and creates more negative consequences than the good it's intended for. You can like/upvote comments and posts, but there aren't downvotes, and how well a post does doesn't reflect on the users in any way.
That's nice. Actually the efficiency of karma in the context of online forums should be statistically studied, maybe comparing Imzy to Reddit for amounts of spam, clickbait, attention-seekers, etc., but Imzy is invite only now.
What do you (assuming you are someone from Imzy, sorry if not) do with spam, when there are no downvotes? Do you have a flagging system, automodding, spam filters, etc.?
We have a report flag on every post and comment to allow items to be escalated and reviewed. Users are required to explain why they are reporting something so that it's hopefully not just used as a downvote. (And, tbh, downvotes don't really help with catching spam since most of the time they're just to show disagreement or make sure comments that aren't worth being seen don't get seen as much.)
We have the nascent stages of algorithms that will help us with tracking spam and such, but those take time and data to become better, and we're pretty small right now. They will grow as we do. That's one of the reasons we're invite-only right now. Dumping a whole bunch of people into one place all at once turns into a free-for-all, and we want to make sure we're able to moderate communities to have the kind of quality interactions we want rather than a bunch of circlejerking, and that our technology is able to evolve at the same rate our userbase grows.
> HN is incredibly focused compared to Reddit. That's what keeps HN clean.
I'm not sure that fully explains why HN is so much better than Reddit.
Obviously HN is more focused than Reddit overall, but it's ostensibly less focused than many dedicated subreddits. Yet the quality of conversation here is invariable superior.
I don't think karma is the culprit. It exists on HN and works quite well—I put effort into my comments to ensure my ideas are clear and when a post is downvoted it makes me reconsider my writing.
I think it's more focused in the sense that you'll have many more "serious" people looking at what you write, at least some of them will be domain experts in the topics being discussed. This causes people to post much more conservatively and less frequently than they would do on reddit.
The flip side of that is that reddit will throw up discussions on things which would never in a million years show up on HN, this one today for instance I found very interesting
I think that a huge part of it is simply the amount of people here. There are some pretty unfocused subreddits that are decently small and end up with a lot less BS than you might have in HN (esp. threads about Uber, Code of Conducts, etc.)
The moderation, of course, plays a huge part too though.
The quality of the subreddit is directly proportional to the moderation. The Ask subreddits (/r/AskHistory, /r/AskScience) are consistently cited for having high quality due to actual, transparent enforcement of the rules.
That said, moderation works as long as it doesn't modify the sentiment of content. Moderation for positive content only leads to groupthink which helps no one. (case in point, Product Hunt, where commenters get upvoted just for saying "cool!" with no additional insight)
Agreed. I'm learning that the use of the word "positive" on our homepage may not be conveying quite what we had envisioned, and maybe we'll need to change it. (Hey, everyone learns.)
We absolutely don't think Imzy should be a place where people can only say nice things and anything negative gets removed. That defeats the point of talking at all.
Our vision is that communities enrich people's lives in a positive way. That doesn't mean every comment, post, or discussion is positive. It means that I come away a better, more informed person from the discussions I have, or maybe I just enjoy my time there.
What that means is that harassment that makes people unhappy, fear for their lives, or feel like they can't participate isn't okay. But disagreement and even voicing opinions that are very unfavorable can still exist. We all become better people when we can share our own perspectives and hear the perspectives of others. Otherwise you end up with an echo chamber.
Hope that helps explain our thinking. I'm happy to elaborate further if you have any questions.
That's something we're making a huge priority--to give our community leaders a really awesome experience to be able to do everything they need or want to. We've built the whole platform to be as flexible as possible so that communities can exist and have the function the way they need to (or build it using our developer platform if it's not there), and a big part of having healthy communities is allowing the leaders to manage their communities well.
There are definitely private communities! We also allow you to have different usernames in the different communities you participate in to partition your identity if you need to be anonymous, or post anonymously when you need to, all from one account, so you don't have to have throwaways and create different accounts just to be able to manage your privacy and online identity.
So will you allow neo-Nazis, white nationalists, misogynists, and other bigots to spread their bigoted views on your site? Because if you do, it's gonna turn into Voat.
Heavy moderation also creates a meritocracy where reputable users who post a lot will have their content passed through the filter seamlessly and new contributors will be walled off completely in order to support the status quo. Let's not forget reddit has a deep history of moderator abuse.
I think that's one of the biggest problems on reddit: There's no way to remove moderators, and so subs can easily be subverted by having a small group of bad actors enter the mod team, or just having the mods get burnt out.
Also Minor thing: I think you guys are taking about r/Askhistorians, not r/Askhistory
Of course there is. Any moderator can be removed by another moderator higher on the list. There's just no way for non-moderators to hold a coup d'état and remove moderators they don't like.
Imo AskHistory can be boring as hell because of the heavy-handed moderation. I get the effect that they're going for, and it works, but it's frustrating to go into an interesting topic to see every comment deleted and a mod warning at the top.
And they take their rules to the point of absurdity. I've seen many occasions where a commenter had direct personal experience with the event being asked about, and provided proof they were whom they said they were, but their comment was still deleted because "no personal anecdotes."
It's AskHistory, not AskForPersonalAnecdotes. History has the advantage of multiple personal anecdotes being cross-checked and compiled into a more or less reliable account. A personal anecdote may be interesting but not representative of anything.
> The quality of the subreddit is directly proportional to the moderation. The Ask subreddits (/r/AskHistory, /r/AskScience) are consistently cited for having high quality due to actual, transparent enforcement of the rules.
/r/AskHistorians is an Ask subreddit with strong and active moderation and has high quality.
We've actually done a few things to try to deal with those issues. We don't have any "default" communities or a universal front page or anything like that, because we believe that does lead to a lot of low quality conversations and groupthink. Instead, you only join communities you specifically opt into, and hopefully that way each community only has people who are actually passionate about those topics and discussions become more in depth and informed.
(Cofounder here, btw, happy to answer any of your questions.)
Edit: I just converted over from being a lurker and created my account to respond here, and apparently I'm commenting too fast. I'll respond to other comments when I can, sorry. :/ Feel free to email me at kaela@imzy.com if you want to talk more though!
Hey! I'm the author of Nodal [1] and I think this could be a really neat platform for open source communities. Gitter / Slack tend to be the default for live, realtime chat and GitHub is central for issues and contributions, but I'm looking for something fun to direct developers towards where we can organize community events and the like. I'm a startup founder myself and would love to connect with the founding team, is there an ideal way to reach out?
If you consider Reddit as a whole, with millions of users, I don't think there's any behavioral change you can institute that will lead to high quality, informed discourse. High quality discussions take hard work, not just in the discussion process, but in all the things that come before it. Also, the information gathered by hard work is often gated.
If you are looking for high-signal discussion, then most people in or out of Reddit don't have anything good to say on most subjects. Reddit is the wrong place to look for that kind of talk. Reddit is the right place to listen for community temperature about a narrow range of subjects which communities would be good for, such as user reviews or product discovery.
Groupthink is also not the main problem. How are you supposed to have your own individual opinion on a wide range of phenomena -- unless, of course, you make yourself informed via hard work and gated access? So these people cannot be expected to have their own opinion.
If you want elite opinion, then join an institution with institutional access to elite literature, and join an academic or professional community.
Reddit is fine as it is. It's not supposed to be an elite source of information on a variety of phenomena. It's a place for humor and community discussion. I actually dislike the segment of Reddit users asking for "citations" because unless you have institutional access, then I think that this call for citations is a dishonest way of shutting down conversations.
I don't get why people think hacker news is this little utopia of internet discussion. Yes, it benefits from being smaller and well-moderated, but it suffers from the same group-think, the same "circle-jerks" (har har Golang/Django/Theranos), etc. There are plenty of snarky and lazy comments, we just up-vote them because we agree with them.
It's amazing that a former executive of reddit thinks a) it's easy to build a large online community b) it'll be easy to monetize (the hardest part) community and c) it'll be easy to moderate (hey people will do that for free, right?).
HN still has some groupthink, but it has less snark and laziness than any other online community I've seen.
Drive-by wit doesn't get upvotes, even when it reflects HN groupthink.
More importantly, on contentious issues HN will still reward quality participation. Take ad blocking for example—you'll invariably see a lot of comments decrying advertising and associated upvotes. But you'll also see well-reasoned defenses of advertising that can also rise to the top.
HN has managed to allow different groups to interact somewhat civilly without resorting to tribalism.
>on contentious issues HN will still reward quality participation
Maybe the problem is what you consider "contentious"? I certainly wouldn't put ad-blocking in that boat. I would put "sexism in tech", "H1Bs" and "finance crimes" in that boat. How do they fair?
I'd put those in there. Also promoting old tech like Ada, criticizing popular things like Rust/Web/Cloud, shifting blame to women on sexism posts where it makes sense, discouraging use of VC tech for anything critical, countering pg on economic inequality, countering white privileged concept from angle of white minority in black-controlled areas, and countering mainstream security in general.
I'd say that's a nice collection of all the reasons my account would disappear somewhere else. As dang and tptacek described, there is an effect where they get hit with significant, sometimes massive, downvotes followed by more thoughtful people who valued a counterpoint that at least presented arguments or evidence. Plus a handful that agree with it probably. The sloooow upvote, but rapid downvotes, of some of those comments which would be popular elsewhere shows the site bias in action.
Critical to a parent's claim, though, is that those comments all survived with positive votes and sometimes continuing discussion. It's rare that I delete one for being totally ineffective. For me, high in dissent in contentious topics, I scrounged up 5000+ karma in a year without actually trying to get karma. That's clearly due to culture and moderation here that pushes for higher-quality discussions that are more tolerant of dissent than critics elsewhere say about HN.
> I would put "sexism in tech", "H1Bs" and "finance crimes" in that boat.
For the latter two, you see a diversity of perspectives. There are plenty on HN toeing the populist line (H1Bs = evil, HFT = evil), but also people willing to go into the nuance and give oppositional evidence. Well-substantiated comments rise to the top even when they defy the populist thinking.
I'll concede that the former doesn't have good discussions, but I'm not sure it's possible to have a quality discussion about "sexism in tech" in any online forum. Saying the wrong thing will lead to you losing your job, but full anonymity brings out the trolls and the sexists.
Their contributions to crypto software, as controversial as they may be, would exceed 3 arguments alone.
And as much as a lot of us here (myself included) think they're a net negative on the world, that doesn't mean they don't come with positives. They may not catch all threats but it's highly doubtful they catch none.
I'd wager that if you broke it down to the core elements, people aren't against the NSA but against the techniques they use: lack of transparency, gag orders, mass surveillance, etc.
And just to give you an actual third separate argument, the NSA existing keeps security in check. The threat of an entity that turns theoretical attacks into actual attacks means you can't get away with the "it'll never happen" excuse when building a secure system.
I'm not asking you to generate arguments a hypothetical NSA proponent might use, from a person who assures us (s)he finds them unconvincing. Far from evidence against groupthink, that's evidence in favor of it.
I'm asking you to recount specific instances when an NSA proponent did make arguments here, that they themselves held, at the risk of their own social capital.
I agree that there is some group think at HN, but it is significantly better than most other sites. I believe it's impossible not to have group think as society is conditioned to favour certain beliefs and values, particularly through media, law and education.
As an example, I dislike prejudice and believe in a level playing field. This often puts me at odds with Political Correctness and feminism (eg. I disagree that sexism is a male behaviour (eg. The use of the term misogyny to reenforce this belief) and I condemn sexism by anyone). About 50% of the time I am modded down on HN. Challenging sexism from a feminist a guaranteed mod down at The Verge and a near certainty of being modded down at Ars Technica.
So, I consider HN to be more open minded than almost all other forums, save one. Many users on this other forum are mindful of the PC trap and discourage sexist terms like misogynist (instead of the more balanced, less political term - sexist)
>I don't get why people think hacker news is this little utopia of internet discussion.
I don't think anyone thinks that. The point isn't "HN is a utopia." It's "HN provides better discussion than most other places on the internet." On reddit, your comment probably would have been downvoted to hell by people who disagreed with you.
I think it's because HN has a single theme. Like you said there are many annoying cases on HN too. Let's say your chance of coming across one is 1%. On Reddit you have many of these communities, so the chance of coming across annoying posts become N% (depending on how many subreddits you read)
HN doesn't have a single theme, and if people think it does, we're doing something wrong. On the front page right now are posts about elephant brains, Nazi propaganda, and aphantasia, for example. That seems like thematic pluralism to me.
The single theme is that of intellectual stimulation, which attracts a certain crowd. We don't see any content in the entertainment space, or the politics space, for example, unless said content is stuff that hacker types find intellectually stimulating.
And yet people often complain that this site is becoming too mainstream, too inundated with content of low intellectual value, and that there are few actual "hacker types" here. To the point that accusing the site of turning into Reddit is specifically pointed out in the guidelines as something not to do.
Does a "hacker type" correlate strongly with a certain race, gender or nationality? Is one political point of view more valid for "hacker types" than another? The guidelines of the actual site uses the qualifier "a good hacker," implying one should not only be a hacker, but "good" Good at what? Programming, startups, or conforming to an archetype of a "hacker" personality?
Even "intellectual stimulation" tends to lead to the belief that only intellects of a certain type should be considered valid. Dang has to constantly correct people who assume that content which is intellectually stimulating, but not explicitly about startups or technology, is off topic or detrimental. Hacker News is not what some people assume it is. The "good hacker" archetype itself is the problem, as people differ wildly as to their interpretations of it, and by extension, in their belief in what the true theme and purpose of Hacker News is.
Yet what really separates the average Hacker News user from the average Reddit user? I don't know how many users HN has, but Reddit has tens if not hundreds of millions, so one can assume the average Reddit user is not necessarily less intelligent than HN. Reddit also has a number of high quality subreddits which are heavily moderated and used by experts in their field, so I'm not certain HN possesses more technical acumen than Reddit, either. Quality of articles? Many things posted here also appear on Reddit.
Why, then, do Hacker News users seem to detest Reddit so much? Because among the few commonalities in the various interpretations of the hacker archetype are elitism and a distaste for mainstream culture, and new users want to appear to be "good hackers" and hating the mainstream is what people think "good hackers" do. Yet read the comments here, especially in controversial, non-technical threads where posturing as a "good hacker" has less value. Most are no better than, or even worse than, comments in similar subthreads on Reddit.
It's interesting comment coming from the moderator. I know what you mean, but it is "Hacker News" after all. That's why when sometimes people see irrelevant posts they say "why the hell is this on the front page of HN?". The reason I said "Theme" instead of "Topic" is exactly for the same reason. I think the theme of this site is something that would interest people with curiosity (which comes from the "Hacker" theme).
I run lots of forums, on many technologies, and the only way that I've achieved long-lived peaceful forums is to have virtually no moderation and no moderators.
As soon as you have moderators, the users defer responsibility for confronting the bad stuff and it represents the start of the decline, "If that was allowed, why isn't this?".
Without moderation, and with the community possessing some tools to enforce, most communities will take on that responsibility and do so. i.e. the flagging on here or on Craigslist that allows multiple people to moderate where an individual's signal is weak but collectively it becomes strong.
Of the course the only thing that this doesn't address is broken group-think across the whole forum. To that, I've found making the admin of a forum the legal buck-stop for the forum works well. This is compatible with EU law, where you generally need someone to be responsible for complaints of a libel/defamation nature, and so I designate the forum owner as that and I move myself into the "mere conduit" role.
This method of "everyone is a weak moderator, we have no strong moderators but we do have a strong leader who is liable" has been very effective at producing decade old, healthy and growing communities.
HN has a totally different userbase (though there is some cross over) than Reddit. To me Reddit's trollish uninformed arguments are what makes it funny. For instance, /r/The_Donald and /r/SandersForPresident are basically parodies of themselves. Frankly, I'm going to go to Reddit for a laugh, and maybe a few sorted threads with insight into live events unfolding...but if I want something serious I'm not going to go there. Reddit to me is like Something Awful used to be but on a much larger scale, and that's why I like it. If Reddit ever matured to be like HN, I would probably stop going there. It's a happy medium between dashing moments of HN like insight and 4Chan like stupidity.
They did mention groupthink. I used to think Metafilter was pretty decent, but the shift over the years with regards to certain topics like identity politics has been really quite insufferable.
i think the problem is link-focused discussions over two hours rather than people- and comment-focused discussions over time (same as hn). The true experts aren't writing blogs, they are busy building. A four sentence HN comment from a recognized expert is more valuable than a hundred blogs from a hundred nobodies. We need to figure out how to extract content from those experts. Give visibility into the identities of the participants. Identify the experts and give visibility and longevity to their content. Moderate the shitposts over to a peanut gallery below the fold.
Some subreddits are heavily moderated, AskHistorians for instance. If you feel there is demand for a heavily moderated subreddit about bikes or your local news, you could create it and be the moderator.
But the prevailing zeitgeist is anti-moderation, and I'd be in competition with the other biking subreddits. I do wholeheartedly agree with you about the quality of AskHistorians, but that's a good example _because_ it stands out in a see of crappy, snarky, shallow communities (like r/NYC or r/politics)
But you don't need the prevailing zeitgeist. The low quality content can live in /r/bikes with all the crap tha t a front-page sub endures, and the high quality content can be happily moderated in /r/pedalpower
The drama ebbs and flows on reddit and then settles for a bit then up again.
Maybe it's my imagination but in my 9 years there it's like you can almost see the next wave of new users arrive. It's subtle at first but you soon see the common culture of that age/culture group, cohort or whatever it is.
What I don't like is the new (~6 months) locking of threads I think that's a cop out of moderators or the admins. You don't like the conversation? Slam the door shut.
HN can(which is in question) maintain a relative high quality discussion towards a focused and limited subset of topics (tech, science and certain social issue like surveillance) is because it is a niche forum by default.
It is HACKER NEWS, rather than popular news. Reddit is just too board. However, certain subs are still pretty interesting and informational, until....it becomes popular.
So yes. Popular means low quality. It is sad, but inevitable..
>I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation
What evidence is there that HN is any better? Everything looks good when you're on the right side of the groupthink. There are certain subjects here that have atrociously one-sided discourse.
Personally, I think Reddit is just as informative as this place (besides the point that there is no monolithic "reddit")
> I think it's groupthink, extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading. I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. Maybe that's just not possible?
It's possible on reddit. reddit.com/r/AskHistorians is a Q&A subreddit for asking historical questions. They have a very high standard for answers, comments, and even the questions you can ask. and they actively enforce it. As a result it's a very high quality resource.
It can be done, if there's the will for strict moderation, from the mods and the users.
Low moderation and high level discussion is very possible and very common, but it depends on the topic and maybe the language. Just yesterday I've been on a French language forum on gardening, and this kid of dedicated community do not seem to struggle to keep away trolls and memes. Must be much harder for an English language forum on mangas, or a French language forum on politics. I'm not sure about Reddit, the subs I visit are either monocultural and barely interesting, or full of trolls and memes.
I don't think those are reddit's only problems. The blatant racism on display in the comment sections of some of the site's most heavily trafficked areas, such as /r/worldnews and /r/news, does quite a number on its reputation.
> I don't think reddit's problem is harassment, I think it's groupthink, extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading.
HN isn't immune to these. It suffers just as badly as Reddit. It's just that the cultures are so different. HN is elitist and thinks technology will improve our lives, Reddit is racist and thinks pictures of cute kittens and in-jokes will improve our lives. Both are filled with ignoramuses who get upvoted to the top of a page for catering to that website's niche the most (HN = most elitist comment, Reddit = funniest comment). Anyone else barely sees the light of day, and get downvoted to smithereens. As long as there's an upvote button, I don't think any website can truly solve this. HN tried to fix it by using more algorithms on top of upvotes, but it just doesn't work.
>Anyone else barely sees the light of day, and get downvoted to smithereens.
Hey look, you're down-voted.
I agree. Look at some of the "top-posters" on the HN scoreboard. Much of their commentary is tepid oatmeal that panders to the "easy" things that HN likes.
>HN = most elitist comment
I'm not sure I agree with "elitist", but there's definitely a thing, which is well defined by things like "Shit HN says".
Shit HN says? You mean that twitter account[1] that posts one-off comments, devoid of any and all context, and then attributes it to the entire site as if it were one person? Or representative of the site's users in any way?
Nothing positive, or useful, or interesting has ever come out of a "Shit (community) says" group. Those types of (what's the word here.. articles? groups? Whatever, things) are always crass, point-and-laugh-derisively-at-the-stupid-people-ha-ha-look-how-stupid-they-are affairs.
Reddit's instance of this cancer (and I don't believe I've chosen the wrong term for something this awful) even functions as a more or less sanctioned voting brigade.
There's something to this: reddit is a place where you can write things about things. Why does it need to be controlled, moderated, or anything really?
The argument against this mindset is usually along the lines of, "Well, we don't want the KKK organizing rallies on our boards!" Which, is true; you don't want that. But banning them from reddit moves them from a public forum to their own, more private, areas of the internet. You can't censor shit.
Their private areas of the internet, namely Stormfront, predate Reddit. Before Reddit allowed racists and moot created /pol/, they didn't have a real platform to spread their propaganda, so you had to look pretty hard for sites like that. If they only had private forums, events like the Charleston shooting wouldn't have happened.
Moderation helps weed out the spamming, trolling, and general trash-posting that can quickly crowd out any real discussion. That stuff lowers the value of the site for anyone other than the basement-dwellers, and therefore lowers the value of the site as an advertising platform. The only reason the site owners would care about the KKK is in terms of whether they increase or decrease the total number of clicks.
The problem is thay it's not even as extreme as the kkk, if your opinions don't mesh with the current progressive groupthink, you will be downvoted, ignored, and bullied.
The same happens to a lesser extent on HN, but without the bullying.
The end result is content that leans in only one direction because everyone else has been silenced, they don't bother posting, or they left.
The irony is that this behavior is exactly what progressives have claimed to be fighting (discrimination and online bullying)
That applies to the comments more than the articles; you can still learn stuff there. And it's possible to ignore group think, you know, like if you've got a mind of your own.
Comparing Reddit, a community where specialists can setup a little fiefdoms and generalists can cheery pick from whatever fiefdom they can find, with HackerNews, a singular monoculture that just happens to attract people with a huge diversity of interests, is a challenge unto itself.
Both deploy a wide variety of strategies to enforce quality content: crowd-vote mechanism and individual ignoring. These two mechanisms should be more than sufficient for even the most obsessively compulsive and curiously unaccountable of curators.
The question isn't comparing communities based on content or upon curator strategies. One should question should take aim at the unspoken epistemological assumptions every single curator engages in.
Suppose Poster 1 puts topic A into Community A. There are many overlapping relationships between topic A and community A.
Now lets suppose Poster 2 puts topic B into Community A. There are few overlapping relationships between topic B and community A.
"Overlapping relationships" is a very complex topic. Users might find topic B to be on-topic in an esoteric or meta way, and the moderators will find it off-topic. Users might find topic A to be off-topic because the topic is to frequently discussed, and the moderators remove it. However the dice roll, the concept of "overlapping relationships" between topic and community is not a guarantee of topic survival.
The selection mechanism of topic survivability is divided between the collective hands of the crowd-vote mechanism, individual ignoring, or moderation termination. And notice I say "divided" , and not "sequentially evaluated". Agents of topic survival operate in parallel. This means that posters have to appeal to not only just three different selection criteria in order to survive, but eight different scenarios that have different highly targeted payoffs.
Two rules of the topic lifecycle:
* The topic must pass/fail three moderation phases.
* The topic always has influence on the hardcore communtiy consumers (HCC), the average community consumers (ACC), and the moderators. (M)
How topic lifecycles can still influence a community even via multi-phase curation:
Case | CrowdVote? | Mass ignore | Deletion? | Outcome
1 | Pass | | | HCC get skeptical of ACC and M
2 | | Pass | | ACC get skeptical of HCC and M
3 | | | Pass | HCC and ACC think M is lazy
4 | Pass | Pass | | HCC and ACC think M is aggressive
5 | | Pass | Pass | HCC hostile to ACC and M, may fracture community
6 | Pass | | Pass | ACC get skeptical of HCC and M
7 | Pass | Pass | Pass | No effect
8 | | | | M gets skeptical of HCC and ACC
The point is that having topics curated epistemologically only appears to work because it fails the slowest. No outcome of topic enforcement actually bolsters or adds to community value over time because all topic consumption is a destructive process (destruction of time). Thus, entropy always wins.
I don't know how to phrase this in an HN-approved positive way, but I think it needs to be said: the graphics are disturbingly infantilizing if this site is supposed to be for anyone over the age of 9.
Everything about their homepage seems to signal that it is in fact a social network for 9 year olds (or people with the social maturity of 9-year-olds).
* "Fun" graphics? Check.
* Cartoon characters? Check.
* Whimsical name? Check.
* "Safe space" marketing? Check.
* Close control of who can access it? Check.
Literally the only thing they need to add to be a children's website is a note about parental controls.
“To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. ... When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” - C.S. Lewis
Cute whimsical silly graphics are fun. Feeling like I've walked into a padded room/kindergarten when I hit their homepage due to the visual/copy combination is not fun.
We made something that makes us happy. Will it appeal to every single human being? No, of course not, nor should it. And that's okay! Nothing on the internet has that power. Not even cats.
We chose to go in this direction because it made all of us happy to go to work every day, and whenever we showed people different versions of our site, whether it was family and friends or in more formal user testing, people tended to like it more with the dinosaurs than without. It's okay if you don't like it, or even if a lot of different people don't like it.
Though, fwiw, once you got off that page it looks more like a regular site and there aren't as many dinos.
If this is the Reddit for 9-year-olds, spot on! I also think there are some other (older) demos who would be attracted to a space like this, but I'm interested in who you think it is.
Also, I'm sorry for the negativity (some of it from me). While I largely agree with the commentary here (that the world doesn't necessarily need a safe space community), I know how hard it is to put anything new out there and commend you for trying to improve upon Reddit. I genuinely wish an HN for "other things" existed and hope you can succeed.
It sounds like there's definitely some stuff we could be doing to improve our branding--we're new and we're learning, and the word "positive" seems to have been misconstrued by everyone from what we meant it to be to who we are as a company.
One thing, just as a note, is that we're not trying to be a "safe space" community, and we're not trying to censor disagreement, remove negativity, or even get rid of all hate and mean comments. Those all have a purpose, and without them it becomes an empty echo chamber and there's no point in actually talking.
Also, the fact that we're trying to take a stronger stance on harassment is just a tiny, tiny bit of what we're doing differently. We're not trying to be a safer Reddit, or even trying to be a direct Reddit competitor.
What we've built is in response to issues we've seen in all different platforms--Reddit, sure, but also Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, and more. We've tried to build a really broad, flexible platform that makes it so communities can do all the things they want to in one place, with a developer platform to make sure that's possible. We've built in a payments system. We've designed it to be more user and mobile friendly instead of an outdated forum style. Those are honestly the things that I care most about, and the possibilities they open are what I think will have the biggest impact on hopefully making Imzy a really viable community platform that I want to work on, not the things that we're trying to prevent.
> we're trying to take a stronger stance on harassment
Do you believe it's possible for Anti-GG people as well as GG people to harass?
I ask because the prevailing culture at Twitter and Github is that harassment only comes from one direction: from white men. They don't want to act on claims of "reverse-discrimination".
However, many other people like myself believe that there is an equal or greater amount of harassment and threats from the Social Justice world.
I'm genuinely interested to know your attitude about this.
Yes, absolutely. Everyone can get too entrenched, and it's really easy for anyone to divide it into an "us" and a "them," and once you do that, it's too easy to really villainize the other side. Once you decide that the other side has absolutely nothing positive to contribute, then communication breaks down and it turns into snowball throwing that can escalate into grenade throwing.
It doesn't matter if it's GG or anything else. People tend to have valid complaints on both sides, regardless of how small, and both tend to have some guilt. People on both sides oversimplify the arguments of the other side and overgeneralize their actions as all black people this, or all white people this, or all men this, or all women this, or all... etc. And when that happens, it's bad regardless of who the group is and which side they're on, because it's guaranteed to be inaccurate about a vast number of people who are being unfairly characterized as something they're not.
There's a reason the term "social justice warrior" has come into existence, and it's because the people on what might generally be seen as the "good" or "right" side of the issue can also become way to militant, and when you become militant, you stop trying to work together to fix things, get people to see your way, and bring the sides together and start just trying to kill off the other side in order to win. (Now, I do think that term gets thrown around WAY too loosely for anyone who does anything you don't like and is often not accurate, but that goes back to the above paragraph.) Social justice is good. Social justice warriors are not.
Sorry for lots of rambling. It's hard to talk about such a complex issue concisely.
Honestly, I don't even think there is consensus on what social justice is. If you asked ten people who love social justice to define it, you'll get twelve answers, especially if you ask about specific reforms and initiatives.
And you'll get glaring omissions. Complex tax codes and opaque regulations are great for the powerful and awful for the little guy. Fixing them isn't considered social justice for some reason, though.
> Though, fwiw, once you got off that page it looks more like a regular site and there aren't as many dinos.
IMHO, I feel like you are doing it the wrong way around. When I open a website for the first time, I usually only have a very general idea of its purpose. When I see the home page of Imzy, I do not think “Oh this is ridiculous, no serious general purpose forum for good conversation should look like this”, but rather “Oh, I guess it's more targeted at children-specific topics, like simple games, learning a first language, and basic maths, at most. Probably not for me, I'll go look elsewhere.”.
OTOH, if you have a less ambivalent home page, I do not really care what the actual website looks like, as long as it is usable (design is first about usability). So, sure, dinos all the way!
I see you have put a few screnshots that illustrate the kinds of topics that should interest the Imzy's community. However, most users won't ever bother to scroll, and those who will, won't scroll that far. Putting the examples so that they are visible with no scrolling (and maybe including discussions in addition to article/self-text) would go a long way
Also, your <noscript> elements (that you use for storing sending static data to the client) are visible when Javascript is disabled. I see you have a CSS rule to hide them and it seems to work well in Chromium 49.0.2623.108, but not in Mozilla Firefox 45.0.2
I'm legitimately sorry for singling you out, in isolation it's not that big of a deal at all, sites can try different things and that's great. My complaint is more that this seems to be happening a lot lately, and there is already a pervasive criticism that "safe spaces" (which in principle I approve of) are infantilizing people (I think they often do.) If it's just a fun theme, that's cool.
No worries! Thanks for the kind words. I do think the dinos set a happier tone, which probably helps people to converse in a more civil way, but we definitely don't want to infantilize people. We just like dinos ourselves. :)
Also, just as a note, "safe space" was the author's words, not ours. We're taking a stronger stance on harassment, sure, but there's still plenty of room for negativity and disagreement. You can read more in my other comments if you care to hear more about our philosophy.
I'll make the politically incorrect sacrifice for you:
The internet was not built to be, or should it ever be, a safe place for every single human being on Earth. Contradictory and radical ideas are a necessary part of progressive discourse and they will make people feel uncomfortable and angry. Deal with it.
I disagree. I think the extreme stance of "safe places" we have today are rather stupid, but I would much rather these people make their own communities and exclude those who are deemed undesirables, than try to take over an existing platform.
Just to put it out there, we never said anything about warmer or fuzzier. We had no intention of having any press coverage for a few months, perhaps that was a mistake for this reason exactly.
But is it an unfair characterization? I mean "healthy", "positive", "safe space" - and then images of childlike cartoons frolicking around the water? If "warm and fuzzy" wasnt what you were going for, I think you need to rethink the presentation.
Yeah, I think it is an unfair characterization, because it's extremely narrow and oversimplified. And yeah, we're learning today that maybe we do need to rethink our presentation, and especially the use of the word "positive" on our home page. (Fwiw, we've never used the wording "safe space" or tried to claim to be that--those were the author's words.)
I'm going to do a little bit of copy/pasting from some of my other comments on this thread to help respond to this one, so I hope you'll forgive me, but here's why I don't really agree with that description.
Why I think it's oversimplified and not really representative:
Our goal, and what we meant by using the word "positive" is that Imzy, and the communities on it, enrich people's lives in a positive way. That doesn't mean every comment, post, or discussion is positive. It means that I come away a better, more informed person from the discussions I have, or maybe I just enjoy my time there. Maybe we messed up using that word, and we'll need to change it. We're young, and we're learning how to describe and talk about who we are and what we're trying to do. What that does mean is that extreme or sustained harassment that makes people unhappy, fear for their lives, or feel like they can't participate isn't okay. Communities that exist solely for hate aren't cool. But disagreement and even voicing opinions that are very unfavorable can still exist. Saying mean things to people is okay, unless that's all you do all day following around a user or something. We all become better people when we can share our own perspectives and hear the perspectives of others, especially when they are different from our own. Otherwise you end up with an echo chamber.
Why I think it's extremely narrow and offbase:
This is the tiniest bit of what we're actually doing. We've focused on creating really diverse tools so that communities can exist and share however makes most sense for them and do the things that they need to do all in one place. We've built in a payments system. We've tried to give leaders AWESOME tools for making their communities exactly what they want and managing them the way that makes sense for them. We've tried to make things a lot more user and mobile friendly, as the places you referenced can be intimidating and not intuitive to a lot of people. Those are the things I'm most excited about--all the things we're adding to community functionality, not what we're taking away.
Perhaps. However, many people here walked away with that impression...mostly from looking at your site.
I think it's highly likely this isn't just HN, and first impressions count. I would do a focus group or similar[1], and make sure your site is conveying the message you want.
You're right. We're learning that we need to probably revisit some of how we present ourselves. To be fair, though, we did do some extensive user testing through several different methods. And interestingly, people generally always liked our site and us better, thought we were more trustworthy, and were more likely to try it when there were lots of friendly dinos and colors on the page than when it was a more traditional "professional" site. Of course, not everyone did, and the HN demographic probably falls into that not everyone, but we can't appeal to everyone no matter what we do, so we went with what made us happy and what our research said had the largest reach. There are still lots of areas for us to improve (this is the first people have really been seeing our site with no context, and the first press we have gotten, so we're learning), but that's why we went the way we did.
We'll probably take the "positive" part out. But if people want to come here looking for help, that's totally fine! We already have some support groups started.
How about playing up "creative"? From your own description here it sounds like that is what you're looking for, and from the author's description of your business model it sounds like that's the type of contributor you'd like to attract.
I haven't really looked into it as I'm not interested in joining at the invitation-only stage, but I really like some of the ideas you laid out on your home page! Good luck!
Thanks for the suggestion! That's a good one. The other word I'm thinking about is "limitless" to suggest the flexibility and the open developer platform.
Our business model will definitely have tipping and probably attract more creative people, but we'll slowly be adding more and more financial features to allow people to use money however they typically need to in a community structure, whether that's buying items, crowdfunding, paying for entry to an event, donating to people, putting rewards out for information, selling merchandise, and a whole bunch of other things. Hopefully as we do that, it'll start appealing to an even wider base as they'll be able to do all the things they want to on Imzy rather than using a combination of forums, Facebook, Slack, Paypal, Meetup, IndieGoGo, etc.
We'll probably leave invitation-only status and open things up a little later in the summer, but we want to make sure we establish a good tone for engagement and get our technology and features good enough before we do that.
You didn't say warm and fuzzy.. you just put this invite-only site out there that screams those two keywords "silently". I think I understand perfectly.
This comment is confrontational and, putting myself in OP's shoes, would sound as if you are questioning my intelligence. Can a moderator please flag this?
How does this statement jibe with your previous posting of "Contradictory and radical ideas are a necessary part of progressive discourse and they will make people feel uncomfortable and angry."
Hey, don't let negative comments get to you. Always happens on HN. Best example being DropBox launch, top comments said something along the lines of "this will never work".
As a long-time reddit user, I like what I see so far. I submitted my email for invite, how long does that usually take?
We're trying really hard to purposely grow things slowly to keep them at a scale we can manage both on the community and technology side. Dumping a whole bunch of people into one place all at once turns into a free-for-all, and we want to make sure we're able to moderate communities to have the kind of quality interactions we want rather than a bunch of circlejerking, and that our technology is able to evolve at the same rate our userbase grows.
Right now the only way to get in is if you get invited by another person who's already a member (there are usually people on Twitter sharing their invites if you search for them), or requesting to join a specific community, and then the leader of that community can let you in. Otherwise, we'll be slowly letting people into Imzy in the order they signed up in, and unfortunately that may take a while if you just signed up, since the list is pretty long right now. :/ We really want to do this right rather than explode quickly and die a week later.
> Hey, don't let negative comments get to you. Always happens on HN. Best example being DropBox launch, top comments said something along the lines of "this will never work".
<meta name="description" content="Experience community and find where you belong. All you care about on a single platform as flexible and diverse as you are. We want to make you happy."/>
My biggest complaint with reddit and hn is that there is a down-vote button. It serves no purpose the way I consume and participate in discussions. If I don't agree or vehemently disagree with something I pass over it and that's it. I've had the opportunity to downvote and even when I had a strong opinions against what's stated in a comment I never once downvoted. In fact, I've never used the downvoting link at all. Also, I find it enlightening to read opinions of people who are on the opposite end of some belief spectrum. It broadens my view and helps me better formulate what I think.
Hence, you either ban accounts for disturbing discussions repeatedly or just let everyone say whatever they think. A voting system that tries to hide comments is a bad idea.
I guess my issue is with what JBReefer calls groupthink and brigading. I personally would have called stuff-people-don't-like-to-hear.
Slashdot's systems used to work very well, but it's fallen apart due to the current occupants of their comment sections.
HN already is an echo chamber of sorts, so trying to filter that even more is wrong.
I think that the point of the downvote button on HN is to reduce the visibility of comments that don't contribute to the discourse, not to dismiss dissenting opinions.
This is helped by the fact that it's used sparingly and is only available to people with a certain karma threshold (an imperfect metric, but one that's worked reasonably well so far)
Agreed, the karma barrier does help a decent amount. But even on HackerNews I see the same "downvoting mob mentality" occasionally where all comments expressing certain views or disagreeing with comments of more popular users are reduced in visibility because of down voting. In a way, it gives the higher ranked users a platform to push their own posts higher/other posts lower, not unlike the way capitalism can widen economic gaps between the rich and the poor.
While it is helpful to hide comments that don't have much to do with the discussion, upvoting related comments has the same effect without the downside of making the comment invisible to people who want to see it and without impacting the user's status on HN.
We actually thought the same thing about downvotes, which is why we removed them in Imzy.
One of the things we've tried to do to decrease the groupthink/echochamber is get rid of any kind of "default" communities or a universal front page or anything like that, because we believe that does lead to a lot of low quality conversations and groupthink. Instead, you only join communities you specifically opt into, and hopefully that way each community only has people who are actually passionate about those topics and discussions become more in depth and informed.
I'm curious, because I came around to Slashdot after its peak had passed--what parts of their system did you think worked best, so I can make sure we try to do the best we can on our platform?
Not OP - I was on slashdot back in the day and I did enjoy the reason for the moderation on the post. I'm also a bit convinced that the rule you could moderate a discussion or post in it but not both made for an interesting dynamic. The moderate the moderator was nice too.
Downvotes do come in many forms, twitter didn't have downvotes until they added lists, then lists became a way to downvote.
Got it. Thank you for the response! It's always helpful to be able to learn more from all other platforms. We do require community leaders to enter a reason whenever they remove a post or comment, ban someone, etc., and the OP is always notified of the reason (and soon we'll be adding it so that it's visible if you have a link to the removed post/comment as well).
That's really interesting about the decision to be able to moderate or post but not both. One thing we're doing in order to be able to help with moderating the moderator is that soon there will be a public leader log that shows what actions leaders have taken in their community and why they did it, so that people can see how their leaders are behaving. Hopefully as we grow we'll be able to add more tools that help leaders manage their communities and help the communities manage their leaders. :)
This is probably WAY more than you want to know, but this is a very nuanced issue that can't be addressed briefly to do it any kind of justice, as made obvious by the headline of the article we're commenting on describing us as a "warm, fuzzy, safe space." I'll copy paste this from a post we made on our site that elaborates on our community policy where a lot of this is also located, then summarize some more:
> You are welcome to express your opinions, even if they are offensive to some users. We want honest and open discussion to happen on Imzy from all sides. However, these opinions cross the line into malicious speech when they specifically incite violence or hatred, or make people fear you will act against them in a violent manner.
> Don't encourage violence or hatred on the basis of things like race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation.
> Don’t harass others. Harassment is defined as "a course of conduct directed at a specific person that causes substantial emotional distress in such person and serves no legitimate purpose" or "words, gestures, and actions which tend to annoy, alarm and abuse (verbally) another person". Do not engage in or provide a platform for harassment of users or communities. Harassment will not be tolerated.
Paraphrasing the rest of our post so this doesn't get too long:
Things like "I think all [race/religion/gender/other demographic] are [rude opinion]" or "You’re a [rude comment here]" is okay, but "All [race/religion/gender] should [have something terrible done to them]" or "I’m going to [specific threat against an individual]" is not. And even in the "okay" examples, if you continually and repeatedly engage in these actions against an individual and follow them throughout Imzy to do so, this crosses the line into harassment.
Beyond that, there's a big gray area. We know there are things that will come up that we won't quite fit anywhere in the policies we've written, and we'll have to make some things up as we go and refine our policies and understanding as the community evolves. And yeah, we're human, and we'll probably make mistakes sometimes. But we're working hard to set a tone of transparency and fairness so that our users will always know why we're doing things and be able to give feedback on how they want Imzy to function.
Please do not call it a "safe space". I've witnessed occasions where any and all differing voiced opinion motivated people in the US to organize loud "where's my safe space" protests. I don't claim to understand how/why they feel that way, but looking from the outside, I cannot follow their reasoning. So, having that in mind, your use of "safe space" makes it sound like it'll attract many of those who don't want different opinions to be voiced.
- It's the world's biggest jailer of its own populace; for many a police state.
So some ensure "safety" for themselves by having all the state's violence on their side of the debate. I personally get to be pretty safe. But others want a little safety too, which is a prerequisite to freely express their opinions.
To be clear: we're not talking about shutting down dissenting opinions on math. We're talking about shutting down the violence that supports one side's mediocre, backwards ideas. No wonder why some struggle to maintain that lopsided advantage.
We've actually never used the words "safe space" to describe ourselves, fwiw. It's an extremely polarizing term that has evolved to mean very different things to people, and the image it triggers in most people's minds of SJWs and crazy trigger warnings all over the place and no dissension allowed ever is not what we're trying to build. Those were the author's words.
I usually just downvote comments that are factually wrong, because they sink to the bottom of the page and people are less likely to be confused by them.
I think the best thing you can do is explain why they are factually wrong in that case and try to teach them/correct them. Otherwise, they just start to dislike the community and don't gain any new knowledge.
Precisely, if I disagree but do not counter a comment, then why should I be allowed to silently hide their comment? It's fine to upvote but downvoting makes no sense, especially anything below 1 discourages contributors, seeing how they're silenced for unpopular opinions.
Agreed. I really found it annoying that Github decided to include -1 on PRs and issues because it encourages people to just pick the cheapest cost option and not express their argument against a change, which is probably one of the best possible ways to block new contributors.
What if downvotes were a limited resource (maybe time limited)? It could help if downvoters had to think twice about pushing that button, in case something else deserved their downvote more.
EDIT: or a downvote requires a comment of why the parent was downvoted and/or a selection of pre-defined reasons e.g. factually incorrect, misleading, trolling, spam, etc (similar to Dota2's report system).
My thought is downvote, but it will take away from your karma (-1 point). The only way it wouldn't or you get that point back is if you left a comment, possibly responding why you downvoted in the first place (factual, wrong, not relevant to the discussion, etc). Quid pro quo.
I think putting "real" value to karma would be a bad idea. People already karma whore even if it has no real value (although it has perceived value). I imagine it would be worse if it has some actual (limited) value.
How would you combat spamming or obvious admissions of astroturfing? Seems like it would be easy to game the system by bombarding it with "shit posts."
Hmm, how about one user downvotes, provides the appropriate reason, then others can "join or agree" with that user's downvote by upvoting his/her comment. Maybe this could somehow count as multiple downvotes with the same reason?
Also anyone who downvoted without commenting should have their hn-name displayed on the right side or below in a list of silent downvoters. It should of course adapt if you comment later or remove your comment, by removing or adding your name to the downvoters list.
I think the existence of the #nevertrump movement and the lack of downvote in presidential elections shows the need for a downvote button.
To bring it back to social media, I think Facebook conversations are especially poor in quality and a way to politely disagree would be good for the site and, as facebook grows, good for discourse generally.
As someone outside the US, I never understood the fixation on candidates, given that they can tell a lot but the ones who make policy are still the same think tanks, lobbyists and bureaucrats working in DC their whole life. Sure, Trump, may try to push through one or two bad things, but he doesn't control the direction of the ship at all. Without the crew of a sail ship on his side, as a metaphor, Trump can rant whatever he wants. It'll go down in the books just as the escapades of other POTUSes. What I'm getting at is that the important, life-changing stuff happens behind the curtains and POTUS is merely the pony to entertain the masses and sometimes represent the policy created by the large government body. There are thousands of things a POTUS was against but had to defend, because the POTUS was there to represent the whole in the form of someone approachable. To me this is all some weird psychological game used to manage the population, and I like to think humanity has enough experience/knowledge to aim for a reasonable world without stupidity and sentiment-based ruling. Every logician must be very sad at how the world is managed.
In summary, who cares of Trump is POTUS, he'll be just another show piece without real control in a much more complex game of power dynamics.
That said, if someone wants to filter trumpology, they can ignore or flag them in their personal SPAM filter and statistics will do the rest. If that doesn't work, I'm sure you can silence certain Facebook profiles for you personally, just like one doesn't attend certain social circles in the real life.
I don't know. The DREAM act, the changes to the healthcare laws, stimulus-oriented recession recovery, the sequestration, digital surveillance, and the TPP are all very important and very much results of decisions of the President.
How sure are you that these are things he personally pushed through without them being things lobbied for by others? That's what I mean. Trump can talk about a wall he wants the neighbor to pay for, but it won't happen, so who cares.
If anything I'd be more concerned about Hillary, since she is perceived as the good one, but she has ulterior motives, in part of course due to campaign money. In any case, she's not an example of a female leader who looks for peace and happiness, like some female presidents have claimed all females power figures to be in contrast to male leaders.
HN is different in that the user needs a substantial amount of karma before they can downvote (and I think theres additional levels for flagging etc). I'm not sure of the amounts and it may also take into consideration account age.
Should people be striving to remove friction in discourse in the first place? I mean, if something hurts to hear, surely that should sound the alarm that it's worth confronting, rather than running away from, right?
Reddit already moderates discussions quite often, and the conversations there don't often reach the level of those here at HN, but still I wonder if maybe too much is too much when it comes to moderation.
I could say something totally offensive and uncalled for on HN, so long as I back it up with why it needs to be said. In other words, I'd argue that the narrative isn't all that matters when it comes to discourse.
Somewhat offtopic, when I look at their material and theming, I think about whether or not I think I'd find people there worth talking to, and that answer is no. ycombinator's landing page, or hell, even Reddit's front page, looks leagues more professional than the weird children's book graphics of Imzy.
I just don't understand what's to be gained in the utilitarian sense by telling people what they can and cannot contribute to a discussion. I really like the idea of just throwing it all out there and then gathering up and working on whatever sticks. Maybe that's why Reddit is semi-appealing.
> Should people be striving to remove friction in discourse in the first place? I mean, if something hurts to hear, surely that should sound the alarm that it's worth confronting, rather than running away from, right?
Not necessarily. I personally prefer Scott Alexander's criteria for commentary at SlateStarCodex (http://slatestarcodex.com/). A comment should be two of: True, kind, necessary.
Plenty of things cause near-visible sparks when you put them in discourse, and most of them are mean, pedantic, or just not true. You're interested in the set of comments which are true and necessary, this is a tiny subset of the comments which cause friction.
I guess it's just how I look at things. When I'm debating an issue with someone or at a conference or whatever, when someone says something totally incongruous, it always surprises me and I always feel like I've missed something. I try and understand what would make a person feel so strongly about it that he felt like it needed to be said.
Some comments cause more friction than others, definitely, but are they of lesser merit for that reason alone? If something is true but not critical to know, and not 'kind', that doesn't mean that it just doesn't matter, right? Ugly truths are out there, and they can be of great use if confronted maturely, understood, and conquered.
No, definitely not, and we're not trying to remove that. Our goal, and what we meant by using the word "positive" is that Imzy, and the communities on it, enrich people's lives in a positive way. That doesn't mean every comment, post, or discussion is positive. It means that I come away a better, more informed person from the discussions I have, or maybe I just enjoy my time there. Maybe we messed up using that word, and we'll need to change it. We're young, and we're learning how to describe and talk about who we are and what we're trying to do.
What that does mean is that extreme or sustained harassment that makes people unhappy, fear for their lives, or feel like they can't participate isn't okay. Communities that exist solely for hate aren't cool. But disagreement and even voicing opinions that are very unfavorable can still exist. Saying mean things to people is okay, unless that's all you do all day following around a user or something. We all become better people when we can share our own perspectives and hear the perspectives of others, especially when they are different from our own. Otherwise you end up with an echo chamber.
We're also okay with Imzy not being a platform for everyone—nothing is! And if HN and Reddit work for you, great. We're not trying to replace them.
What we are trying trying to do is build something for people for whom those aren't working. And most of the things we're doing different don't actually have anything to do with harassment or positivity. We've focused on creating really diverse tools so that communities can exist and share however makes most sense for them and do the things that they need to do all in one place. We've built in a payments system. We've tried to make things a lot more user and mobile friendly, as the places you referenced can be intimidating and not intuitive to a lot of people. Those are the things I'm most excited about--all the things we're adding to community functionality, not what we're taking away.
The article doesn't really explain how anything is actually going to work in practice. By 'warmier and fuzzier' do we mean it's targeted at kids (as the graphics might suggest)? In that case, will they be moderating profanity and whatever they deem inappropriate for children? Or is it just going to be based on reducing harassment (as they mentioned in the article)? And in that case, what would constitute harassment and how would it be dealt with? It seems like the idea is very broad without an actual target at what it should be. I don't think Reddit was the right model to base it off of for what they're attempting to do.
1. We're not trying to be "warmer and fuzzier"--those are the author's words.
2. We're not trying to be a children's site--we just wanted to make something that made us (and hopefully others) happy, and that included cute dinosaurs.
3. We're not based on Reddit, nor are we trying to replace them.
(As a note, the author of this article didn't talk to us, and they haven't actually seen any more of our site than you have.)
Here's what we ARE doing. We're building a community site based on issues we've seen in all different platforms--Reddit, sure, but also Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, and more. We've tried to build a really broad, flexible platform that makes it so communities can do all the things they want to in one place, with a developer platform to make sure that's possible. We've built in a payments system. We've designed it to be more user and mobile friendly instead of an outdated forum style. Those are honestly the things that I care most about, and the possibilities they open are what I think will have the biggest impact on hopefully making Imzy a really viable community platform that I want to work on, not the things that we're trying to prevent.
Hope that helps explain our thinking. I'm happy to elaborate further if you have any questions.
Thanks for reaching out to answer my questions. I was really confused visiting the website after I read the article because barely anything matched up with the descriptions they gave.
Here's the challenge: No community aggregator will ever be able to filter and promote exactly the stuff you in particular want to see. Everyone has different tastes and opinions and the only thing that can possibly come from community-driven aggregation is list of the most popular stuff in that community. You'll have to actually research and filter content yourself to get any better results.
The best crowdsourced results seem to come from specialized communities (HN, subreddits, maybe this new site).
For anything better you'll have to go through the volumes of unwanted content yourself, or have a trusted curator do it for you.
It might also be because people tend to be more interested in joining a site if the barrier to entry is higher. It comes across as like that exclusive nightclub where only the 'coolest' people manage to get in.
Do that, and your community can get a lot of attention due to all the people desperately asking how to become a member of it.
The highest-quality discussion that I've found on the Internet generally came from "phpBB"-based website forums, built around specific interests or communities.
Part of the reason for that is the common interest in a shared niche. However, I believe that most important factor by far is the lack of up or down "voting" buttons.
On any platform with voting, the "imaginary Internet points" tend to drive the user experience. Upvotes trigger reward behavior, just like the social aspect of Farmville-style mindless freemium games. Downvotes trigger social anxiety and drive behavior also. Trolls relish it, while normal users are often insecure about it. Even on an "elite" platform like Hacker News, how many comments basically boil down to, "Hey guys, why did some of you downvote my last comment???".
Basically, voting turns a discussion platform into an MMO video game for a large portion of the userbase. It leads to groupthink, "brigades" and manipulation, low-quality memes and running jokes, etc. I think its negative impact on high-quality discussion easily matches or exceeds its positive impact on self-moderation.
Ultimately, I think the ideal model of discussion platform governance is a "benevolent dictatorship" of active mods, without user voting. It doesn't scale very well, but it's the common denominator among the highest-quality communities I've ever seen. The problem is since a micro-generation of Internet users is now accustomed to the MMO model, online discussion without voting is just... well... boring. Going back to that is like trading processed corn syrup for organic vegetables. Most aren't going to do it.
This is a great comment. I'll expand it with a few other points that are along similar lines to what you mention.
Most (if not all) platforms suffer from 2 extremes, open discussion involves conflict which is seen as bad but can end up with insightful discussion and robust conclusion. Secondly, forums suffer from prejudice of the moderators. There was a good example recently of this in a HN posting on moderators. I'll illustrate with a topical example for modern times.
Why do people use the term misogynist instead of sexist? It's to reinforce a belief that sexism is a male behaviour, which, in itself is sexist. If you read the recent article on moderation, sexism didn't rate a mention but misogyny did. In other words, certain types of thinking are forbidden and some forms of prejudice are encouraged.
When I read about this new spinoff, my first two thoughts were on avoidance of robust discussion and the prejudice and politics of the founders and moderators. Here's hoping they don't make the same politically correct but prejudiced mistakes that most sites make.
Well, I have to say I disagree that a voting system always harms discussion. I mean, Invision Power Board, XenForo and Burning Board forums all have a built in likes system (and commonly used plugins to extend it). I haven't noticed forums running those scripts being less civil or having worse quality. Or the various vBulletin forums switching to XenForo losing their existing community feel and atmosphere.
Of course, there is a difference here when compared to platforms like Reddit and Hacker News though. Namely, the likes don't affect how comments or discussions are shown. There's a number of likes and dislikes under the post, and maybe a small icon on the topic list, but a heavily disliked post doesn't get hidden or removed for it.
It's also been a thing long before that, with various add ons. For example, vBulletin had a post thanks system mod which worked like likes/upvotes:
Did quality get hit on sites with those mods? I didn't really notice it.
On another note, it does make me want to see a study in regards to what sort of like/reputation system keeps a forum or social network a more civil place.
Does only upvotes/likes work better than having downvotes/dislikes?
How about the inverse, where you can only dislike content rather than like it?
How about a private reputation system, where only the user giving the reputation and receiving it knows they've done so? That's how vBulletin's version used to work.
Does having more possibilities for votes help more than just like/dislike? How does Facebook Reactions or XenForo Post Ratings compare to Reddit up/downvotes?
On Imzy, we've removed karma, removed downvotes, and turned upvotes just into more generic likes kind of like they are on FB, Twitter, or IG, that do not roll up or affect your account in any way, because everywhere we saw that had that, it tended to turn into purely something to game and didn't actually contribute to higher quality discussions. I think there is some value though to being able to sort by which comments might have more merit in a post, or which posts have more merit in a community, which is why we left likes in, just disconnected from anything besides that post/comment, and it's more just as a way of giving users positive reinforcement for posting good stuff than doing any kind of real moderating.
We also have then have leaders who create their communities who hopefully are benevolent in their dictatorships, and we've also given them lots of tools to be able to manage their communities well and also be really transparent about what's happening so that all users can learn and be a part of that process.
The other thing you mentioned is that it tends to be better in forums that are built around specific interests or communities. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what we're doing on Imzy, relative to that. We've noticed the same thing, and also that anywhere where there tends to be a "default" community or "front page" or something like that, is where there tends to be the lowest quality discussion, because you get too many people all dumped into the same place who didn't actually actively choose to be there, and lowest common denominator stuff tends to appeal. So what we've tried to do is preserve the quality of individual forums but the convenience of something like Facebook or Reddit where you get everything from all different sources in one place. When you join, we ask you what you're interested in, and then based on that, we show you a bunch of communities you might want to join. Then you specifically opt into those communities, so that hopefully only people who really care about those topics end up there, and they stay a little bit smaller but much higher quality for everyone across all interests.
Curious to hear your thoughts on this model and how well you think it'll work!
> Part of the reason for that is the common interest in a shared niche. However, I believe that most important factor by far is the lack of up or down "voting" buttons.
You may be underestimating the positive impact of "niche" context and overestimating the negative impact of karmic systems.
If it were the case that the more significant factor was the karmic system, then comment threads on specialized blogs and newspapers would have historically been about equally weighted in terms of a metric of quality content density.
My expectation based on anecdotal memory is that we would find a much more significant ratio of high-quality comments on specialized blogs than on newspaper websites.
In this case, it would be the context of the opportunity to comment that makes the difference. I wonder even if the technical stodginess of phpBB systems contributes to the quality of discussion by presenting a higher inconvenience of usage.
My thought is that a newspaper or aggregate site tends to attract users who are seeking an opportunity to comment that is separable from any particular topic or community of interest, and that specialized discussion sites tend to attract users who are seeking detailed information and who (due to the relative obscurity of the site) can find the act of commentary rewarding only insofar as they imagine it to improve their social status within an imagined community with which they feel affiliation. If they admire recurring & recognizable users who produce good commentary, and imagine the other users to be like themselves, they will be motivated to seek reward and recognition by contributing substantively.
I want to recognize anonymous message boards, briefly, just to say that I have very little experience with them, and can't speak about them usefully. Useful commentary can occur in that context and my thesis as it stands does not account for that, but the topic isn't mine to develop..
I am not sure that aggregate commentary sites are inherently doomed, but there may be a threshold to the message volume where the comments become more akin to the roar of a wind. I can present as a relatively positive example the /r/spacex subreddit on reddit, which has had some reasonable success in terms of maintaining the quality of commentary. There are, of course, other such subreddits. In /r/spacex, the important factors seem to be (a) that people visit the subreddit for the sake of linked external information, (b) the recognizability and frequent participation of a key moderator, (c) the recognizability and occasional participation of identified individuals from SpaceX, (d) the pseudonymous participation of current and former SpaceX employees, and (e) the strength of the user contingent which has topically relevant work experience or education all seem like significant factors.
It was in /r/spacex that I first heard the phrase "low effort comment" used to describe the type of commentary that is discouraged. It struck me as especially pertinent in that it summarizes what I generally feel about making comments on yc news. One can of course put a lot of effort into comments that are not seen as very useful, and I have the bad habit of wanting to opine about things of which I have no deep topical knowledge. Such comments are inherently less valuable than they might be if I had such knowledge. However, if the imagination of a community can induce a degree of inhibition in the commentator, it allows a much greater opportunity to reflect upon the value the comment in a "listener perspective" mode, probably altering and informing both the structure and content of what is written, and it lessens the chance that replies will be posted simply so that the respondent can enjoy the experience of (imagining) having said something significant.
Significant meta irony is available to my readers across a wide spectrum of impressions and responses. My apologies and you are welcome, depending.
I find in some forums the issue is the group think enforced by moderators.
The StackOverflow forums suffer from this as they are community moderated and many questions get closed as Off Topic which basically are chats about something tangential to the area or opinion but are valuable none the less or I wouldn't have gone to the page to begin with. Effectively moderators promote group think.
Some bizarre things Ive seen in its computer science forum are questions being closed when about things like "what are the current areas of research in blah?". Somehow its gathered a bunch of crap mods and computer science doesn't really get discussed there.
If its truly out of forum then these forums need to allow some kind of "Open Discussion" tag or move to another forum ability.
We're building a similar type of experience over at baqqer for organic communities to exist for people to talk about the things they love. We could use some feedback from the community if you have some time. https://baqqer.com/explore/tags/startups
Really odd critique. You might get a lot of confusion from people seeing it as an underlined URL and mentally think "bagger" initially. Especially since the a and the first q kind of continue where the next letter's curl ends. Part of the problem might just be that two Qs in a row don't really mentally parse well when read - for me, at least.
Yeah, I see what you're saying. I wonder what would help? An entirely new name? It's been on my mind quite a bit, thinking about what can simultaneously convey community, prototyping, making, and growing. It's difficult.
There have always been heavily moderated forums for users to interact with representatives of media corporations. That's why Reddit and 4chan got so huge and influential (not being that.) I can't tell what the secret sauce is supposed to be from this article.
I disagree that there's such a thing as THE right mix. Some people will prefer the wild west, and others will prefer heavily moderated forums. From the looks of the cartoon characters on the home page, Imzy looks like it's targeting the infant-to-toddler demographic.
I have spent a good amount of my last 6 years or so trying to be happy and helping others online to be happy. What we wanted with our mascot was something that evoked happiness.
Admittedly it's a fine line to walk between cute/happy/childish and we need to find the right mix.
Ironically I always thought reddit alien was a teletubbie. Imzy looks like a fine site. I like their mascot, but the frontpage banner should be cleaner, otherwise it would not gain that many users older than teenagers.
Fine to me. Better to "err" on that side, as a signal to hate groups who fester on reddit. Furthermore, you can take it as self-mocking irony, if you prefer...
I think that if you attract movie fans your site might become big. I saw Star Wars group image on the dev page banner. The thing is there is another site that begins with the same two letters and is all about movies, but their community features are not that great. If you target your site to imdb regulars they would inadvertently also end up on Imzy when wanting to discuss something.
The problem with reddit is trolls and harrassment (as the article points out). I gave up on reddit a while ago, as it's just ridiculous. You can't have a reasonable conversation on a controversial subject the way you can on HN without it descending into personal attacks. Generally the moderators do sweet FA about this, although it depends on the subreddit.
The key to using Reddit is unsubscribing from all of the default subreddits and then finding smaller, healthier subreddits for topics you're interested in.
I only used reddit for a few subreddits I was interested in, but they all had the same problem. I guess the issue is that none of them were "healthy". However they are the subjects I was interested in.
Which ones, out of curiosity? I've found 20-100k subscribers to be the sweet spot: /r/coffee, /r/indieheads, /r/jailbreak, /r/longboarding, /r/vinyl, /r/skiing, /r/analog, /r/climbing
Exactly. Every social aggregator with a "libertarian" moderation policy eventually turns into 4chan. Reddit admins finally acted after making the news too many times for racism and illegal porn, but it's too little too late for their toxic culture.
Some of the subs are still good, but the defaults hit rock bottom and kept on digging.
I think default subreddit moderators should be reddit employees (at least the highest ones), the current model doesn't quite work in my opinion. But that probably costs too much.
You mean from /r/all? Personally I think it's quite strange that these submissions from highly polarizing subreddits often outperform stuff for general audience (like /r/pics), some normalization quirks perhaps (displayed scores are heavily normalized, real ones for top posts are 100 000+ [1]).
I'm not sure you even need that. I think all that is required are a few rules like "no personal attacks". Wikipedia and HN work very well due to having a few basic rules like that which everyone follows. They would obviously need to have some kind of reporting mechanism which is followed up on. That could also be done by volunteers.
>Wikipedia is notorious for entrenched and highly partisan volunteer edit staff.
That's not really my experience. The main problem is newbies coming in and not understanding MEDRS and other policies.
In fact, there should never be an issue with partisan editors because you can always get outside assistance (from admins, or from other editors outside the page in question).
Anyway, that is a separate issue to the civility of discussion.
I was an active WP editor for a couple of years before I gave up on it. If you're editing highly technical or boring stuff, it's going to be mostly fine. Anything that a normal person has an opinion on is a nightmare.
WP is a giant turf war. Whoever has the most time to piss down the hole of uselessness wins, which means that minority viewpoints (meaning viewpoints that are held by a minority of WP's editors and admins, not necessarily viewpoints that are held by a minority of WP's readers) are not fairly represented, despite WP's obsession with "NPOV", and anyone who can afford a PR company has their page professionally managed to keep it as on-message as possible.
I think you might be misunderstanding how wikipedia works. It most certainly should NOT fairly represent minority viewpoints of editors. There are quite a lot of editors who believe in weird conspiracy theories, but that doesn't mean they should be given prominence in the article.
The policies are designed to fairly represent significant minority viewpoints of scientists. (Talking about medical/science articles here, which is what I mostly edit). When there is a significant controversy (e.g. chronic lyme), that is covered.
I've never seen any kind of PR company on wikipedia, although I don't tend to edit company articles.
>I think you might be misunderstanding how wikipedia works.
I don't think so.
>It most certainly should NOT fairly represent minority viewpoints of editors. There are quite a lot of editors who believe in weird conspiracy theories, but that doesn't mean they should be given prominence in the article.
The problem with only accepting "reliable sources" is that that leads, essentially, to only parroting what is frequently heard in the mainstream media. The articles are thus only "fair" if you consider the conventional treatment of the topic at hand "fair". If you believe this, most likely you are just terrible at detecting bias and should avoid editing WP anyway because you can't spot NPOV violations to save your life. I think it's a mistake to claim mainstream publications are de-facto sources of truth and/or that they should always be favored over other sources.
Perhaps the most egregious demonstrations of the absurdity of WP's source policies are that Wikipedia will often reject primary sources because a) they aren't published by a mainstream outlet or b) they believe the primary source is "too biased" to comment on an issue involving itself.
The reality, however, is that no matter how right you may be, even if you have prominent mainstream sources to overcome the site's contrived reliability test, which is in fact often the case, it really comes down to which camp has more time to edit war (admins included here). This is how we get badly biased articles on even slightly controversial subjects; WP is not really self-policing, it's just mob territory. Of course, if we believe that the relevant mob's opinion always comports with reality, there is no problem. I believe that believing this, about almost anything, is naive.
>I've never seen any kind of PR company on wikipedia, although I don't tend to edit company articles.
A single Google search will bring you face-to-face with the evidence. While a lot of people seem to state that it's important to "not edit the article directly" but rather suggest changes on the Talk pages, it's safe to say that even among the people who repeat this mantra, it's frequently ignored. Like SEO, no matter what you say about how you use it, you have no option here but to compete or die. You'll also find results in Google's Top 10 that ignore this rule and offer to either help you edit your WP page yourself or take money for editing and monitoring it for you. WP is a staple of online "reputation management", which is something every company does, whether they acknowledge it or not.
>The problem with only accepting "reliable sources" is that that leads, essentially, to only parroting what is frequently heard in the mainstream media
That is the whole point of wikipedia...it parrots the sources without trying to determine what the truth is. If you accept that limitation, wikipedia works very well.
> I think it's a mistake to claim mainstream publications are de-facto sources of truth
Wikipedia specifically does NOT attempt to get to the truth:
>A single Google search will bring you face-to-face with the evidence
A single google search informed me that a wiki-PR company had been systematically investigated and then banned. Looking at the individual edits (e.g. on Naomi Campbell's page) shows that most of them have been reverted, proving that wikipedia works. (There will always be way more wikipedia editors than PR people for any particular article).
>That is the whole point of wikipedia...it parrots the sources without trying to determine what the truth is. If you accept that limitation, wikipedia works very well.
I thought that the goal was to represent "the sum of all human knowledge"?
I will agree that if you accept Wikipedia as a summary of contemporary news reports, then it's probably not that bad (but many articles will need to be dumbed down significantly to meet this standard). That's not my understanding of what an encyclopedia is supposed to be.
>Wikipedia specifically does NOT attempt to get to the truth
If that policy were followed, it would be fine; we wouldn't hear "oh, well, we can't trust Local County News, they're probably not big enough" or "Well, you can't trust $ARTICLE_SUBJECT to provide an accurate account" because it wouldn't matter. It would only matter that the account could be verified as authentic-ish with reasonable confidence. IMO that's a pretty low bar, but most Wikipedia source nazis seem to insist on a major mainstream publication like the NYT. This works out conveniently if you find yourself philosophically or politically aligned with NYT.
>A single google search informed me that a wiki-PR company had been systematically investigated and then banned.
This is really just intentional ignorance. It's like insisting there is no astroturfing on HN, reddit, or Facebook. WP is actively manipulated as a routine part of brand management and public relations. The first hit for "wikipedia page management" is http://www.prnewsonline.com/topics/pr-insiders/2013/04/16/wh... ; literally a howto on manipulating Wikipedia for brand managers. While this one repeats the rule not to edit directly, other hits on the first page interpret that for us to "never edit directly from your company's IP address", which I'm 100% confident is the method of 95% of WP-aware brand managers out there.
>most Wikipedia source nazis seem to insist on a major mainstream publication like the NYT
That is another basic wikipedia policy. Some sources are more reliable than others. Most people would agree that NYT is more reliable than the Drumheller Mail.
>It's like insisting there is no astroturfing on HN, reddit, or Facebook
I didn't say it doesn't happen. I'm saying it's not a significant issue, because there are more editors than PR people on each page. Can you give a single instance of this being a problem on a current wikipedia page? I've already asked DanBC for specific instances of problems, and he hasn't managed to come up with anything either.
There are lots of people complaining about wikipedia, but very few if any instances of actual problems.
Wikipedia is the posterchild for sites that have toxic environments - that's why wikimedia foundation spends so much time and money researching ways to stop the editor decline.
The fact that wikipedia is good is a miracle when you see the awful behaviour of many editors / admins.
Looking through your comments, the only prior example you give is of lengthy discussions of punctuation at the village pump. That isn't exactly my definition of "awful behaviour".
You also mention about male editors replace "rape scene" with "sex scene" in articles, but I can't find where that actually happened (and it seems like a pretty clear case of seeing what the sources say).
My big question: how do you deal with community leadership and moderation? Is the first person to create a particular community that community's dictator for life? How can large communities, with populations larger than many nations, achieve practical, representative, and accountable self-governance?
For one I'm glad that this guy is offering a "safe" place for discussion. Hopefully all the people who need to be shielded from "offensive" ideas will gravitate to this website. In a truly ideal world, sterilization would be part of the enrollment process.
What every social network effect platform or application ignores is group psychology.
All conflicts on these services can be boiled down to how human groups work.
If these services addressed group psychology up front and at the forefront of their solution, then we could see people being more aware of their group and groups and where they stand as individuals.
I'd like to see an attempt to reduce conflict and increase collaboration between groups, peoples, ideologies, for example.
The "problems" that all these sites are labeled with all boil down to a mass of different people clashing against each other. They are not problems, they are symptoms of how groups are behaving on the internet, many for the first time, and people within their groups do not have the tools to deal with other groups properly.
Because I am curious. I love to read about what stack each company chooses to use and why. And even more so for brand new companies that start from scratch and have so many options.
For example, did they use RethinkDB for the real time features? Or something more conservative like RabbitMQ?
How about their primary data store? Postgres? MySQL? Or something more trendy?
What about the language? Python? Node.js? Something more adventurous, like go? Why?
No, I am not affiliated in anyway with them. If you google my username you will see my project, which has nothing to do with them, and is a bit too Xrated for HN.
Looks like fun. And by fun I mean more toxic than tumblr in echoing the same "positive" thoughts and certainly criticism against those who don't share the same opinions
A healthy community has healthy and sometimes necessarily intense disagreement in its discourse (just as a healthy mind questions itself).
A "positive" community has no disagreement at all - or at least none that go deep enough to resolve really serious differences.
The only way to maintain a "positive" community the way they mean is to simply ban everyone with views outside a narrow opinion corridor. But whose opinions will define that allowed opinion corridor? From the euphemistically fuzzy language and focus on good emotions, I think I know.
I don't know. A lot of small communities about very esoteric subjects tend to be both healthy and pretty much entirely positive. My secondary forum about the Wario series has a very upbeat atmosphere without too much in the way of disagreement, but that's only a thing because the subject itself only appeals to a limited amount of people. Same sort of thing with the forums I've seen based on the Super Mario Bros movie and the Mario RPG games.
But that's always going to be impossible if a community has a mainstream appeal, since large communities will inevitably have different groups with different interests and opinions, and Dunbar's Number means people can only retain super close relationships with between 100 and 250 people.
I'll give you an "I don't know" back. IMHO the best communities are those that retain bitter rivals. The worst are the ones that have a high churn of beginners parroting received wisdom in an echo chamber without any of the necessary experience.
I love nothing more than when high level participants who have fundamentally irreconcilable differences have explosive but on-topic fights. Even better when they surprise themselves and agree. These are special experiences you can learn so much from.
Definitely. One of my favorite IRC channels is pretty much exactly this. Everyone disagrees about what their favorite technology is or what their political views are on said channel, but arguments are encouraged and often last hours at a time. Since all users (including moderators) are displayed as +v (voice), it helps create a sense of comfort disagreeing with people because there's no perceived risk to disagreeing with moderators/"power users" and in turn basically any discussion or opinion is welcome to be voiced. In a way, the friendships formed there are nicer than on other channels because you're comfortable bringing anything that comes to mind up without tarnishing your relationship and just arguing it out (+ maybe even changing your mind). This should be what online communities are designed to be like.
I'm copy/pasting this response that I shared with someone else; I hope that's okay, but I wanted to explain what we meant. I completely agree that negative content has a place and is valuable. Not being able to disagree or only being able to say nice things defeats the purpose of conversation.
Our goal, and what we meant by using the word "positive" is that Imzy, and the communities on it, enrich people's lives in a positive way. That doesn't mean every comment, post, or discussion is positive. It means that I come away a better, more informed person from the discussions I have, or maybe I just enjoy my time there.
What that means is that extreme or sustained harassment that makes people unhappy, fear for their lives, or feel like they can't participate isn't okay. Communities that exist solely for hate aren't cool. But disagreement and even voicing opinions that are very unfavorable can still exist. Even saying mean things to people is okay, unless that's all you do all day following around a user or something. We all become better people when we can share our own perspectives and hear the perspectives of others, especially when they are different from our own. Otherwise you end up with an echo chamber.
Trying to avoid "extreme or sustained harassment" is in it's mission something much more narrow than clearing a place until it's "positive".
While I could agree with "We all become better people when we can share our own perspectives and hear the perspectives of others, especially when they are different from our own.", I don't think that the overemphasis on perspectives makes it a particular trustworthy statement. It feels like it's a preparation for the demand of a relativist language. A conversation where everyone feels right, even if they aren't. Which appears to me to be some kind of a no-grow area.
>My secondary forum about the Wario series has a very upbeat atmosphere without too much in the way of disagreement
...but that is a niche topic about a fictional universe. When a discussion forum must deal with real universe topics, like funding community projects, dealing with violence, etc., the forum will import all of the existing viewpoints, many of which may be at odds with each other and/or not "positive" in relation to each other.
Of course, that's another good point. Some topics are more inclined to drama and disagreements than others. Put two people in a room and have them talk about politics or religion, and they might well want to kill each other before the hour is up. In cases like those, even a small community will have to deal with different viewpoints and drama. So yeah, point taken. Less serious topics tend to be more civil.
That said, a lot of such topics do sometimes end up drawing their own vicious disagreements and flame wars and drama outbreaks. Just look at sports. Not a topic with a lot of impact real world wise, unless you're participating in it. But various fans of different teams are very much at odds with each other and discussions can easily turn heated. Same with fans of certain fandoms, with My Little Pony, Sonic the Hedgehog, Five Nights at Freddy's and Harry Potter being good examples.
So it's probably based on two sets of axis':
1. The size of the community
2. The 'seriousness' of the topic
A small community about a less important topic will be mostly rather calm. So lesser known games, lesser known sports, less known social activities, etc.
A small community about a 'serious' topic will often be prone to disagreements, though they might turn less toxic.
A large community about a less important subject will be about the same as a smaller community about a more serious one, assuming its fans/participants are not absolutely insane.
A large community about a deeply political/religious/ultra 'serious' topic will probably resemble a war zone.
A large forum based on a fandom with a lot of drama will be fairly similar to a political forum.
And if it's meant to have no rules, is aimed at trolls or certain types of hackers or about a subject which is about fifty thousand miles off one side of the political spectrum, abandon all hope ye who enter here.
Maybe "positive" wasn't the right word for us to use.
Let me explain what we meant, because it's not that at all. I completely agree that negative content has a place and is valuable. Not being able to disagree or only being able to say nice things defeats the purpose of conversation.
Our goal, and what we meant by using the word "positive" is that Imzy, and the communities on it, enrich people's lives in a positive way. That doesn't mean every comment, post, or discussion is positive. It means that I come away a better, more informed person from the discussions I have, or maybe I just enjoy my time there.
What that means is that extreme or sustained harassment that makes people unhappy, fear for their lives, or feel like they can't participate isn't okay. Communities that exist solely for hate aren't cool. But disagreement and even voicing opinions that are very unfavorable can still exist. Even saying mean things to people is okay, unless that's all you do all day following around a user or something. We all become better people when we can share our own perspectives and hear the perspectives of others, especially when they are different from our own. Otherwise you end up with an echo chamber.
As an aside, this article also makes a big deal out of the "warmer, fuzzier" part of Imzy, and they're also the ones who used the words "safe place," not us. Are we trying to make things a little less toxic than we've seen some other places? Yeah, absolutely. But that's honestly a really small part of why we built Imzy and what makes us different from other platforms.
We've tried to build a really broad, flexible platform that makes it so communities can do all the things they want to in one place, with a developer platform to make sure that's possible. We've built in a payments system. We've designed it to be more user and mobile friendly instead of an outdated forum style. Those are honestly the things that I care most about, and the possibilities they open are what I think will have the biggest impact on hopefully making Imzy a really viable community platform that I want to work on, not the things that we're trying to prevent.
Hope that helps explain our thinking. I'm happy to elaborate further if you have any questions.
Which is all good, but currently your graphics are defining your brand. And the brand at the moment seems to be selling cutesy niceness for kids and younger teens.
The platform sounds great, with solid potential. But if I found it as an outsider I'd be unlikely to explore it, because as an adult the site doesn't look like it's intended for me.
Personally I've found Quora conversations both interesting and useful. The branding is adult and the comments in my feed have genuinely fresh insights based on experience. There's some random opinionation, but not much, and conversations are rarely adversarial - possibly because they're more like monologues, and everyone gets a turn, and there's little incentive for drive-by commenting or flaming.
The point being that it's not just about moderation, but about the structure of the exchange and the culture. Quora seems to work because - ironically - there's very little direct interaction and challenge. I doubt that's the only way to run a community, but I wonder if it may actually be impossible to have public debates on difficult topics like politics without having to choose between heavy filtering and moderation, or one-sided communities with echo-chamber levels of agreement.
Thanks for all the input! We're pretty young and still figuring out how to talk about ourselves and present ourselves to the world, and we'll be refining things as we go.
Reddit seems pretty adolescent in general. What comes to my mind when I think of it is cartoons/comics, video games, celebrities and mainstream news. So does warm and fuzzy mean they are catering to a more mature audience or what?
Created an account because my friends use it and I'm getting more involved with programming, no plans to astroturf involved. Though I have been thinking about a part-time job over the summer…
This is a pattern for new sites/services that suddenly get press and then get noticed in random aggregators (like HN).
Since the site is new, it doesn't get that much attention from the aggregator's core audience, and any negative comments are swiftly downvoted after 10-20 employees register and downvote them via central command. This has happened to me on HN before; I guess because I take a perverse kind of enjoyment out of sabotaging astroturfing attempts.
All of this makes perfect business sense; I would probably do it too if I were in this kind of position.
It also makes sense for HN to build better defenses against attacks like this.
I guess that's why it has taken a couple of hours for my comments to heavily downvoted (comments that were initially quite heavily upvoted) in my previous attempts at smashing obvious astroturfs - their @all-employees mail needs to get to the employees who happen to have that amount of HN karma.
I do realize that going further than this in terms of defenses would be quite a complicated thing.
Or perhaps there are people who disagree with you, and are not affiliated with that company. People who think that accusations of astroturfing are actually pretty mean, and shouldn't be made without evidence.
I expect you're getting downvoted because you're pushing this too hard, making claims that exceed the evidence, and generally turning the thread into something less interesting.
We share your dislike of astroturfing, but people who feel this way need to guard against their own biases as well. Taking the accusatory impulse too far is also destructive.
Anyone else get reminded of Eugenics when hearing about stuff like this? It's not entirely a history of violence, but of keeping the "undesirables" out and congregating people with attributes they agree with in order to strengthen those attributes in the general population.
I really love how self-enforcing the community is here towards snark and lazy comments, which have absolutely destroyed Reddit. Edginess is much easier than proper discussion.