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And HN is arguably better for not being invite-only. There are so many articles on HN where the top comment is by somebody with deep domain knowledge who provides some kind of original insight that fits into the low length and polish expectations of a comment, but would never have become a formal blog post. Invite-only communities intentionally give up on that kind of discourse for... what? Easier moderation?
If you want an invite, email me with your username or some other places where you've commented and if you don't seem like an asshole I'll hook you up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Downvoting isn't the problem - it's spam flagging. There's no better tool for suppressing ideas and viewpoints you disagree with than flagging it. Only on HN can a story occupy #1 on the front page due to overwhelming upvotes, and 30 seconds later be sunk to the depths of page 2 or 3 by a handful of flaggers who disagree with the content that's presented.
Nah, you can do that on Reddit as well...
The invite-only nature will only benefit the site while it's small. It will either stay small or suffer the same users as other sites. The down-vote with reason feature is nice.
I'll be interested to see how they leverage the user tree. I'm no expert in social media bots, but it seems like the user invitation tree could be important to identifying not just networks of bots that are generating low-value content and trying to amplify certain viewpoints, but the people inviting those bots into the network in the first place.
Used on advogato, which is/was a blogging site rather than a news aggregator.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170327172245/http://advogato.o...
Is it better to limit access to limit access to only those you personally know? Sounds like a great way to limit exposure to differing thoughts, experiences, and opinions. If you’re only hearing from those in your friend circle, it’s just another glorified chat room... nothing new here
If you want an invite, email me with your username or some other places where you've commented and if you don't seem like an asshole I'll hook you up.
One popular tech site in Russian was invite-only for a very long time: https://habr.com I remember you could get in by someone inviting you or if you wrote a good guest post (there was a separate area for this kind of guest posts and no one could see who the author is). I got impression that invite-only system worked quite well as the site was known for high-quality content and discussions.
>huh, I totally disagree. The moderation on Lobsters is really self-interested and fickle, and there's little done to protect any opinions which differ from the mainstream. I've seen a lot of trolls and hateful threads go unmoderated just because they agree with the party line. The platform also has a censorship problem, in which they merge new posts into old posts even if they're tangentally related - for example, if an article spreading misinformation front pages on Lobsters, the rebuttal posted the next day will be quickly merged into the original thread which, by then, is on the second page and already passed through most Lobsters reader's purview.
>The HN mods go out of their way to try and make a community which is diverse and representative of a broad set of viewpoints. Sometimes this goes too far and allows really dissonant opinions to be surfaced, but on the whole I think this approach is better.
I also agree that HN has its share of problems, though. Someone else pointed out that HN has a problem wherein a small minority of users can flag posts out of existence.
The down-vote feature (for those who didn't read the article: you have to provide feedback to down-vote) is something I've spent years saying HN badly needs. These days I just don't bother posting most of the time because while I shouldn't be bothered by abuse of negative rep; you can't help be pissed off when you've spent a short while including detail only for someone who doesn't understand the subject or has a per…
I think that a better solution, at HN scale, would be to limit the number of downvotes in a 24 hour period. Not clear what the ideal number is; maybe 5 at 500 karma, and 5 more per 500, possibly up to some limit (25?). Otherwise, 'you must provide a reason' is trivially gameable, it just means downvotes are two clicks instead of one. I suspect that the recent trend to low-quality downvotes is because 500 is a relativ…
I’d think if your reply was something low quality you’d end up with more downvotes than the parent you just down voted. Or am I misunderstanding something?
My experience on HN is that getting 500 karma was not easy; it’s quite hard to get submissions past “new” and comment karma takes some time to accumulate. I think it took me about 7 years! Perhaps others have an easier time.