Ask HN: How to keep an online community from downgrading to Reddit like quality

The first thing for me is: moderators must not be chosen by the community but by the "admins", as it was in the old forums

Moderators chosen by the community contribute to the echo chamber of the community itself and bend the rule in that direction, making the whole subsection more and more polarized in that sense.

Moderators chosen by the admins should me more impartial, potentially taken from outside the community itself, paid for their jobs so they adhere to the general rulebook, and keep all the sections as neutral as possible, encouraging exchange of conflicting opinions without flame.

Nowadays I'm not sure I agree. the site is so angry in general and insults are not only common but seemingly encouraged as communtites are warring with each other. Small, niche communities can work but they fall into the same issue as the rest of forums: inactivity. on a sub with less than 10k subs you end up with barely a post a day. That sweet spot around 30-50k doesn't last too long either without either fizzling out or blowing up.

Like I had a simple reply asking someone what they think and their immediate reaction was "I'm not having this conversation with you". And then any response trying to defuse the situation that had no fuse to begin with just turned around to gaslight me with "see now we're arguing about nothing".

I can't ever imagine that happening on HackerNews. They'd at worst simply choose not to answer instead of feeling a need to get the last word in and profess how indignant it was for me to be inquiring about a user's post on a public forum. That just gets draining.

If I had to guess why you were accused of being ChatGPT, its probably because of your tendency to write longer form answers which tends to be the style ChatGPT uses.

I've thought about this a bunch. While endless variables I suspect the key one for HN is controlling the posts and the front page.

The more in depth technical & startup focused they are, and the lower the ratio of more community/political/front page news topics the less you are going to attract 'the downgrading type'. If a good ratio of the front page is for lack of a better examples, 'technical debates on java vs python' or 'algorithms you admire' its going to steer a bunch of people away, and probably the people you dont want for the more general conversations.

That said, I really enjoy the current news topics being discussed here as on the whole you get interesting takes, but the more you open that door, the more it will attract people focused on that side of life than tech/startup and the decline happens.

The other though I've had on this is rather than a voting up/down system, put a few checkbox tick/cross options for things like: adds value, polite, fact based, funny and 1) run user/page scoring algorithms on those plus 2) Have a exam for rules and maybe general knowledge for people that either have many negatives or vote in ways that dont support community rules/values. I suspect it would just steer people away in but Id be interested in seeing it tried and if it steered away the chaff alone, or everyone.

Great question, I've been thinking about this myself. Does anyone know the state of the research on this or can point to some sources?

I found one good article once but lost the link. The only thing that i remember is that having graduated levels of participation like HN or SO was positive.