[screye]

It's such a catch-22.

You want more people to want to use your favorite niche forum. But every niche forum that's gotten popular has been ruined.

Reddit has a few great subreddits. They aren't unpopular, but I also prefer not to market them. Let the people who really want it search for it, I guess.

[CharlieMunger]

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.

[screye]

I mean, there is not much discussion on there.

A sweet spot is a place where there are enough people to have long discussions but each person is deeply invested in the health of the forum itself.

My point was more about the difficulty in preserving the quality as quantity goes up. If you keep the quantity really low, then sure, you can enforce quality. But, then it feels pointless because there simply aren't enough conversations to engage in.

My favorite subreddit has thousands on comments on the weekly thread, yet I can realize familiar names, have deep conversations while the total sub count stays around 10k. Incredibly strict moderation helps (thanks dang), but it is a thankless job.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> But every niche forum that's gotten popular has been ruined.

Really? I'm not sure I agree with this. I feel like if the topic itself is niche or requires some baseline level of competency to contribute, then it actually resists this "crapification" because your average troll just doesn't have enough content/info to work with. It's the broader, general interest topics, usually that have some intersection with politics, that always go to shit.

I mean, I see this on HN itself, where the broad-topic posts often end up in a shit show (though thanks to dang the shit-level is kept under control), while the posts about specific technologies are usually pretty on point.

[chirau]

Random question... is hn_throwaway_99 your main HN name or you still maintain a main account? I know a lot of folks use a throwaways for controversial stuff or for 'anonymity', but it seems yours is quite prominent.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Heh - short of it is I originally created this "throwaway" account years ago, I just forgot to throw it away. The initial impetus was yes, I was commenting on something controversial, but then I just forgot/was too lazy to switch back to my original account so I just left it.

[screye]

I kind of agree. If the topic is niche enough, then it will never get popular.

My commentary was on niche community that cover topics of general interest to people. (Think Anandtech, Some meme subreddit or hot-technical areas like r/machinelearning or r/cscareerquestions)

[yewenjie]

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution | Meaningness

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

[krapp]

I can think of many examples to the contrary (gaming (particularly ttrpgs), game development, amateur filmmaking, anime, music, fan fiction) which have only benefited from "mainstream" acceptance (primarily through the web - which itself "ruined" the internet,) rather than having been ruined by it. Also the hostile dynamic between mops and geeks described in the article isn't something I've observed in the wild. As far as I can tell most of the time mops and geeks (and even the "sociopaths") turn out to be more or less the same.

One would expect all of these former subcultures turned cultures to be entirely populated by sociopaths and mops giving nothing of quality back to the community, and for the geeks to have long fled the stables, but (to use an example) the people playing D&D today are just as passionate and creative as the people playing it in the 70s and 80s were.

What the article describes is a tendency, it happens, but it's not an axiom. In my experience, gatekeepers paranoid about maintaining their status and ego do far more harm than "muggles" learning about it.