App.net: The Country Club of the Internet?

Vastly different platforms to compare.

I think this is true only with regards to sort of the 'classic' elements of HN; discussions of technical matters, startups, and overall just strong advice is wonderful and keeps me coming back to the overflowing well.

Discussions that include fanboyism of any kind (politics, education, and Apple v. MS v. Google chief among them) are aggravating. But bad parts don't negate good parts.

But what of it? It is not the job of any one site on the web to represent the whole world. That's what the rest of the web is for. Use that navigation bar!

Meanwhile, of course Twitter is exactly as diverse as you want it to be: It's much bigger, which is balanced because you control the mix of who you read. You can tweak your follower list to be fun and interesting. On the flip side, it's quite possible to tune your Twitter experience to be far narrower than HN ever has been. It's up to you.

As for App.net, yes, here in its earliest stages it definitely excludes people who can't afford $4.25 a month. [2] And that is too bad. Perhaps even unjust. However, dare I point out that in the USA it's pretty darned low on the list of unjust things: I literally just spent more than $4.25 in one day riding public transit, which suggests that Boston is, in a sense, at least 30 times more exclusive than App.net. [3] I'll reserve my supply of righteous anger for high rents, soaring medical costs, usurious check-cashing outfits, high broadband costs, and state university tuitions, I think.

(The biggest injustice of a $4.25 monthly fee is that it excludes people from places where US$4.25 is a lot of money. Here we must hold out hope that prices will fall over time. Which they almost certainly can do: It takes more money to invent a thing than to run it at scale.)

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[1] Flaw Number One of the "country club" analogy is that country clubs don't publish their internal discussions to globe-spanning message boards where anyone can read them, including those of us who aren't yet computer scientists and don't have YC startups.

[2] Flaw Number Two of the "country club" analogy is that country clubs are considered snobbish not merely because they cost a lot, but because you can't necessarily join one simply by paying the fee. They reserve the right not to admit you even if you pay. AFAIK App.net does not, although presumably they'll boot you for policy violations.

[3] Oh, you think you'll save money by driving? Have you priced the parking in Boston lately? Calculated the per-mile cost of operating your car?

Back when I was a reddit junkie, I found that my use of the site was actively making me unhappy. Sure, people came from more diverse backgrounds, but the structure of the community encourages rhetorical maneuvering and brutal riposte. The problem was that I was good at it, and I was really addicted to the absurd emotional attachment that I had to watching people agree with me. Of course, that attachment went both ways, but as with most experiences, the negative experiences were more mentally prominent than the positive. The result was that I felt bitter a lot of the time, and when I channeled that bitterness into acerbic responses, I was rewarded. This is not good for the soul.

This, I think, illustrates two important points about exclusivity.

First, the cutthroat nature of high-karma commenting on reddit is in many ways a direct result of the site's laissez faire voting. Anyone can downvote anyone, and the exact total of those votes is then shown to everyone. I made this problem worse by writing Reddit Uppers and Downers, which shows the upvote and downvote counts separately. Two subtle but important ways that HN elevates the discourse are by reducing the information presented by voting, and by regulating the downvote privilege. One could decry this as "elitism", but I think the positive effect it has on discussion should not be underestimated.

Second, my problem became worse as the reddit community became less exclusive. Arguably, this could have been my own inability to cope with a broader variety of viewpoints, but I think the famed Eternal September problem was the larger issue.

The most rapid decline was in the use of downvotes. The guideline that it should be reserved for unproductive comments became ignored more and more with time. This effect was infectious even for established users, and the result was that the downvote button became a "dislike" button.

And more gradually, the level of discourse suffered as well. When I joined, reddit was a place where unusual and/or controversial opinions sparked interesting conversation. When I left, soon after the advent of the "sexual content relating to minors" rule, arguing that maybe the rule was a tad too broad would often get you labeled as a pedophile.

And the thing is, I still like seeing a comment get upvoted on HN. But what makes me happy is when someone disagrees with me and is willing to put thought into telling me why, and, if I'm lucky, actually convinces me to change my position.

If you want to maintain that scenario, you need to make sure that new members of the community are instated gradually enough that the community's principles aren't compromised. If that comes at the cost of a little intellectual diversity, then so be it.