[bird_monster]

I think HN and Reddit are closer to blogging/microblogging/RSS. Seeing what other people are saying about a topic. Maybe asking a question, maybe getting a response etc.

> Hacker News has done a good job of formalizing certain things and that keeps the signal-to-noise ratio high here even though the sense of community it once had when it was smaller is no longer something it seems to have.

Yeah, I think that this is essential to a successful forum but also brings up exactly what the issue is, I think. If you're optimizing for signal to noise, you're already beyond the scope of "community", in that you've already got too many people and too much content to ingest. Optimizing signal to noise on a forum is great with the microblog/RSS lens I apply, because it means I'm not seeing offtopic or irrelevant content in my feeds.

I also kinda think that a part of community (when thinking about community being defined as a group of people that are connected and feel involved in eachother's lives to varying extents) _is_ offtopic conversation. "How are you doing?" "How's your grandpa", etc. You can't allow this type of post/behavior on HN, because if you open those floodgates you're getting way too much noise to handle, but I also think that's why the shift has gone the way it's gone. You can't learn about eachother beyond subject matter that's attached to the topic of an individual post.