I completely understand your comment and found the reference to eternal september fascinating and how it happened 35 years ago and people were talking about internet being too crowded. thanks for reference, learnt something new.
> there are all sorts of crackpots who try to preempt by colonizing new ones early hoping that they can sway the thing once it gets big
I do wonder if software can be used to prevent this tho. I mean Hackernews came after reddit and its community doesn't have crackpots (well ahem, maybe sometimes but definitely fewer than reddit maybe)
I do think about hackernews from time to time and think about how the ethos around it is Curiosity >> everything. I mean sometimes small comments/low value comments can be rewarded but usually its the well thought out comments which get value. (Well, this explains why my comments don't get +1 haha, self roasts are fun!)
I do think that in HN this intentional change plus the fact that pg spearheaded the project personally as a personal project for the first few years set the mood around it here to be like this (which is usually civil, even in disagreements)
I think that even in HN guidelines or in some important place, there is this thing called HN is not reddit and such comparison. I find it funny right now but I think that they wrote this to specifically prevent some aspects of what you are talking about right now.
I do wonder if this can be replicated with the communities that you mention tho. It would be interesting to hear what dang comments about it maybe if dang's here about such moderation.
Also out of curiosity but when you mention shit show, do you mean the discussing turning into something (un-civil?) or lacking etiquettes as in say, the community turning into gifs posting as such or similar with low quality comments?
Or what exactly would you classify as "shit show"?
> I mean Hackernews came after reddit and its community
HN is a weird thing. I think it just managed the perfect storm of improbabilities. It managed to find just enough audience for it to be interesting, but didn't reach a critical mass that sees it going exponential (possibly its subject matter repels popular interest and especially youth interest). It has a one-man (or at least tiny moderation) team that (somehow) resists the urge to do anything but put the smackdown on bad actors (possibly the hard rule against political stories helps). And as the last refuge of people who hate Facebookization, it's also possible there is zero demand for it to be swipe-able and phone-centric.
But, in truth, it is also sort of fossilized, and will die once our generation (and -a-half) retires and has little time for it. So we've got 15 or 20 years more, and it will shrink as it goes, and then one day it'll just be gone. It won't even be here to memorialize its demise.
>I do wonder if this can be replicated with the communities that you mention tho.
Maybe someone is more clever than I, and can figure it out. But I've spent nearly 20 years at this point, and I've come up with squat. I think the forums that people did enjoy (for awhile) were completely organic and just can't be artificially created.
>Or what exactly would you classify as "shit show"?
It's difficult to even describe what you're missing, if you weren't there to see it for yourself. It didn't start with reddit, it didn't start with Slashdot, I'm not even sure what it did start with that's before my time. Are you even aware that many of these websites didn't even require an account to post? That was only if you wanted your name attached to some comment that was really clever. There was this sweet spot though, where it all converged. It was post-internet-boom, so some of the people who were posting had hobbies besides the internet itself... making for conversations about anything and everything. And, as a rule, people weren't jaded about it in general... people weren't expecting you to be rude or have some agenda. If they could even imagine that, then it was you were a spammer trying to sell something which was more junk than scam. There was the idea that if the software/website itself were bad, eventually it would be improved. Everything was text/typing/reading, so it was literate and not 10 second tiktok garbage. Phone-texting hadn't quite spoiled everything with text-speech. People managed to get fed up with bad design and bad behavior, there were so-called exoduses. And, from time to time, it was possible to be noticed without Russian mafia connections or Illuminati endorsements.
What we have now is quite possibly the worst possible timeline, so to speak. All of the points I've mentioned don't even quite begin to describe what's changed.
> there are all sorts of crackpots who try to preempt by colonizing new ones early hoping that they can sway the thing once it gets big
I do wonder if software can be used to prevent this tho. I mean Hackernews came after reddit and its community doesn't have crackpots (well ahem, maybe sometimes but definitely fewer than reddit maybe)
I do think about hackernews from time to time and think about how the ethos around it is Curiosity >> everything. I mean sometimes small comments/low value comments can be rewarded but usually its the well thought out comments which get value. (Well, this explains why my comments don't get +1 haha, self roasts are fun!)
I do think that in HN this intentional change plus the fact that pg spearheaded the project personally as a personal project for the first few years set the mood around it here to be like this (which is usually civil, even in disagreements)
I think that even in HN guidelines or in some important place, there is this thing called HN is not reddit and such comparison. I find it funny right now but I think that they wrote this to specifically prevent some aspects of what you are talking about right now.
I do wonder if this can be replicated with the communities that you mention tho. It would be interesting to hear what dang comments about it maybe if dang's here about such moderation.
Also out of curiosity but when you mention shit show, do you mean the discussing turning into something (un-civil?) or lacking etiquettes as in say, the community turning into gifs posting as such or similar with low quality comments?
Or what exactly would you classify as "shit show"?