[Stratoscope]

> the text and link based format helps - this might change quickly if e.g. HN allowed posting photos of vintage computer equipment, which could disproportionately gain upvotes

That's an interesting point. The ThinkPad subreddit has been taken over by "Thinkstagram" photos. People seem to love them, based on the votes, but I'd hoped for a place to have actual discussion of ThinkPads.

Of course even being text-only may not help. I used to be an active participant in the old ThinkPad mailing list. A small group but very knowledgeable people with interesting discussion of ThinkPad issues.

But then one person turned the list into his own tech support channel. He would ask things like "How do I do X in Microsoft Word?" People would tell him "That's not really a ThinkPad question." And he would say "Yeah, but you are the smartest people I know, so I figured I would ask here."

After that went on for a while I kind of lost interest in the mailing list and unsubscribed.