Ask HN: Hacker News like forums for other niches?

I’ve been thinking about this myself lately. I’d like to create something that nurtures curiosity like HN but is more broad-based. In considering this, I suspect that moderation is far more important than any technical aspect of HN (thank you @dang, Scott, et al). There’s a challenge when moderation is more democratic and fungible.

Ruined? Not always.

For example, investment subreddits are generally very bad, yet the Berkshire Hathaway subreddit (r/brkb) is able to keep the rot out without becoming an echo chamber:

https://old.reddit.com/r/brkb/

This subreddit has literally dozens of value investor moderators, and the bubbles (cryptocurrency/ARK/Musk) are forcibly excluded.

The result is a forum where Buffett's principles of intrinsic value (discounted cash flows) and moats, etc., are explored for Berkshire and the many connected companies (e.g., Verizon).

Read the live chat history to see.

The headline of this site says "civil discussion" yet the current top post is a meme which describes a US politician with a slur.

This is something that has been a source of frustration for me.

There are many wonderful and incredibly in-depth communities on Reddit. They only get that way with substantial investment by passionate volunteers who spend the time to moderate, create on-topic original content, and cultivate a community. Many of these bemoan when they appear on the front page because of the sort of attention it attracts.

Yet the direction that Reddit is going with its design and new features is all about optimizing drive-by clicks and shallow engagements. I understand why. That's more ad impressions, and it's more revenue. But it makes the site generally insufferable, and I suspect, reduces the quality of user-produced content.

And on the subject of content, that is what draws the eyeballs, what produces the ad clicks, what drives the revenue. Am I crazy to think that there is a complex, nuanced ethical relationship between those profiting from the content and those producing it? Providing a place to put the content has value, little point in creating content if you have nowhere to put it. But creating content also has value, little point in creating a platform for content if there is no content to put there.

You can see this play out in another format on Youtube (which for a platform is hell on earth as far as I am concerned, even if amazing content can flourish there). At least they are able to share revenue with the content creators, and many folks make a living creating content.

I don't begrudge Reddit for seeking revenue. I want them to not just sustain, but to flourish. And I have no idea how revenue sharing would work in the forum medium. And to be honest, I don't really care to get paid for the words I write there, or the other OC I share. I just want to know what the balance is going to lead to. I have no agency over my content.

So here's a similar question -- as they continue to push the slider further in the direction of more ads and more dark patterns, I can't help but ask, how much is enough? Reddit users are both producers and consumers. I started using Reddit well over a decade ago, and I have a decade's worth of content I have given them. Meanwhile, I agreed to give my eyeballs to some ads, where the word some has a hazy quantification. I get the sense that some number of ads value is being ratcheted up. And I never agreed to that. We never bargained. I can't get my eyeball time back. But I want my content back. The content that Reddit is getting revenue from.

I have the same question for paid online newspapers. I'm more than happy to pay real fiat money from my credit card or bank account for the news. But these news sites, beyond their paywalls, still show ads. Tomorrow, will they show twice as many ads? Maybe. We never negotiated this. I never saw ads mentioned in the rate card. No guarantees were made. Measuring the value of the content is qualitative and a fool's errand. I can quantify the number, type, and size of ads.

I guess the most important question is: do people even care? If there was a forum that users (customers) paid for with a modest fee, transparently described, instead of some exploitative ramping up of ads, would that be an alternative that consumers would to choose?

And even that isn't even as bad as HN is "from the other side"