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

I’ve never moderated, but participated a lot in forums and boards. First thing to know is that bad players are a lazy impulsive attention-seeking mob, so if you want them to back off, then restrict their abilities and feedback. Old users (even if sometimes misbehaving) are the core that is (1) conscious of their role and status, (2) assimilated and can decide what’s right or wrong for themselves.

For example, if a forum allows voting for everyone, it allows voting wars (+457 -371). But if it doesn’t have a score at all, there’s no feedback for a user. HN only allows downvoting after a good while, and I suspect that it amortizes upvotes after some limit. Some forums allow for weighted voting - this creates score monsters and wars between their armies. Forums that do not rank posts by f(time, score) suffer from “first” syndrome when most active neet users mark the tone for every discussion.

Moderation and self-moderation is a second important thing. Moderation should not be offensive or too strict - that simply enables a counterattack. Self-moderation allows to leave bad posts without attention. A moderator should advise good users to avoid bad discussions every time they appear and leave them as is unless the post is really destructive. Silent moderation isn’t future-proof because the message becomes hidden. But silent deranking works, because it’s unclear to abusers if their content was moderated or was simply not interesting.

Reddit is a classic “anyone up-down score” forum, it never ought to be successful in this regard, considering the scale. Boards provide no feedback at all except for illegal content.

I'll provide a different view to the "it's the moderation" answer that I typically hear...

Honestly, I think it's mostly IQ.

I remember a time when Facebook was good, but that was back when the average user was a university student. I remember when Reddit was good, but again, that was back when the average user was probably a nerdy 18-30 year old.

I saw a similar trend with the internet more generally too... My first memories of the internet were so positive. For the most part everyone was lovely. But again, you have to consider who the average internet user was at the time (2002ish). It was mostly just nerds...

I remember everything turning to crap around 2014-2016. This was around the time your gran probably joined Facebook and YouTube began fill with content for kids. It was a trend in place for a while, but my guess is that the smart phone had something to do with the acceleration of the trend during this period. The smart phone turned the internet into more of a casual media platform than a place to do research or connect with people.

I see people point to the moderation of HN as a reason for the relative quality here, but I think it's mostly that we're just a weird community – always have been and probably always will be. Generally people here are well educated, career focused, 20-60 year olds, and we come here to talk about topics like science, technology and business.

And unlike communities on Reddit or Twitter, HN is a completely segregated community so there's no risk of contagion from adjacent low-IQ communities.

I hold this opinion, in part, because it's true in my real life too. Something that shocked me growing up, coming from a trashy working-class background is how nice upper middle-class people are. If you upset them they won't swear at you. They seem genuinely curious in the things you think. They're not cruel or judgemental to those who are different...

I feel what I'm saying here will be seen as very elitist, but it's probably the same reason you want to live in a nice neighbourhood or send your kids to a good school... Sure, having good police, teachers or moderators can help, but it won't change the people.

HN definitely step above reddit.

reddit mess of angry people and rage bait articles. every other post on /r/popular is hate towards non-progressive/us conservative or something about lgbt/trans or black americans.

agree people marginalized and society should fix. but they view only they exact position is acceptable and nothing else to be tolerated. No nuance discussion. honestly every other post someone complaining about something.

reddit like dirty water pond on internet.

personally think HN overall good productive discussion on many topic. do not see it shifting into reddit.

I'd say the main thing to keep in mind is the topic. Put simply, the more niche/specialised the topic, the higher the quality of discussion will usually be.

And this is because those niche topics tend to draw in people who want to be there, and who want to discuss the topic at a reasonably civil level. So instead of being a megaphone for every crank with a Twitter or Facebook account to rant about flat Earth style conspiracy theories, they tend to be for folks who want to actually come to an agreement about things and discuss the intricacies of the topic.

It's why Hacker News topics on highly technical issues tend to have much better standards of discussion than those on political ones.

Of course, some topics are just gonna be hell regardless; any site or community dedicated to discussing politics, religion, conspiracy theories or other such hot topic subjects is going to devolve to Reddit like standards in a matter of days, if not hours. If your topic is something that's central to everyone's life and which large groups disagree on to the point of thinking their opponents are 'evil', then it's probably not going to be practical to hold a reasoned debate online.

You'll also want to think about incentives in the design of the system. Twitter for example is basically designed for quips and pile ons due to the character limit, quote tweets, various communities who hate each other being forced to interact, etc. Meanwhile something like Reddit can become an echo chamber due to the voting system, since anyone the majority disagrees with will be downvoted into oblivion and driven away.

So it may be worth looking at other setups here. Make voting more granular and based on aspects of the content (like whether it's informative, funny, creative, etc) rather than just 'is this good' or 'is this bad'.

Finally, moderation is hugely important here, and most sites get it horribly wrong. Have people with experience in the topic and decent people skills do the moderation rather than outsourced contractors, be consistent with how you enforce the rules to avoid favouritism and other clique related issues, and (potentially) be willing to actually hire your staff to do this full time if need be. Also be willing to come on and make changes here if things aren't working out, and you feel the team isn't doing a good job.

As for your questions at the end:

1. Yes it's possible for an online community to keep itself in that sweet spot, so long as it's fairly niche and isn't dedicated to sensitive or controversial subject areas.

2. Hacker News is somewhere in the middle, though getting closer to Reddit as time goes on. Dang does a really good job here when it comes to moderation, but the increase in politically charged topics is certainly bringing in some less than intelligent discussion, especially for more mainstream areas.

If you like hacker news but are concerned you are reading dang's personal filter bubble try /active