[godelski]

I think a big issue is inflation. As we have more users a niche forum turns into a more general forum. There's some good and bad to this. This has even happened on HN. But there's another problem. If a forum is too small then it doesn't serve its purpose of connecting the right people. I wonder if anyone knows the optimal size/range, or if such a metric exists (under certain criteria of course).

[caddemon]

This is what makes subreddits such a good idea IMO. Theoretically Reddit can be a massive community, while each subreddit can still remain niche. Then people can be connected to others across a number of topics without "polluting" spaces they are not interested in.

Of course if you are interested in discussing a broad or popular topic like politics or the NBA, you will probably have to actually just find a smaller group to get higher quality discussion. There's not really a way around the inflation issue in those subreddits, as far as I can tell.

The other problem is that Reddit seems to increasingly emphasize the generic popular subreddits in its UI and how the site is marketed/presented. There are still good, active subreddits for certain hobbies and communities, but I do worry that the more Reddit is viewed as just another large social media site, the fewer such subreddits there will be.

[godelski]

I think that the problem is that there's a fractal nature to this though. It then makes discoverability a much more complex problem as inflation continues.

[ItsMonkk]

The core problem with Reddit is that it calls them communities, but for 99% of the subreddits the name of the subreddit is based on the content, not the people. This leads Reddit into these fractal content relationships where you can only really discuss the things that have the goldilocks level of popularity. Looking to get some new headphones and aren't an audiophile? Sorry, headphones are to popular and the niche subreddit is to specific to you.

Hacker News on the other hand is based on Hackers, it's about the people. The topics are broad. When a new thing comes into existence that hackers are interested in, we don't have to move to a new place where maybe most of us don't realize it exists, we discuss it here and introduce it to others here. That's the correct view.

But the cause of the problem that reddit faces is population size. We want a small town community, not a community the size of New York City, where people are aggressive because they know they won't see that random person again. It's about seeing the same name, and treat those names with dignity. It's about caring about the people in the community.

So Hacker News in time will either deal with this problem or run into the same issue that large subreddits face. Once new users start learning behavior from other new users, there's no coming back from that. Eternal September is coming. I hope a resolution is discovered, because I really like it here.

[newman8r]

Dunbar's Number [1] puts a number of 150 as an upper limit for effective groups where everyone knows eachother - but these would presumably be active users, and it's not necessarily directly applicable to internet forums (but from my experience with irc and other communities, it does make some sense). I've been trying to start groups like this myself, but it isn't easy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

[godelski]

Yeah I think this isn't right for these types of communities because you don't actually want to know everyone. So that seems low. I'm wondering if we can find a decent upper bound.

[newman8r]

That's a fair point. I also feel like the numbers of subscribers to a subreddit-style community is deceiving - the real number to be looking at is the number of people participating in the discussion, and the number of regulars. I'd be interested in seeing these stats for individual subreddits.