[vehemenz]

I think the toothpaste is out of the tube on creating good communities like the Reddit of yesteryear.

Between lowering the barrier to entry (and average age) with phones, astroturfing and bots, and the overall impossibility of moderation, I just don't see it happening anymore.

We need to go back to purposely small communities.

[samtho]

I don’t think the lowering of the average age is necessary one of the problems, but the fact that some of the new users are posing this problem is a symptom of a bigger one. They tend to comprise of many of the armchair-experts because a good deal of them learned very early to value engagement and good messaging over accuracy.

Part of this has to do with the gauges of success. Other first generation of this appeared on older forums, basic info like join date and post count served as an indicator of engagement and implied trustworthiness by the content creator.

The next big innovation was “karma” or “likes” which required very little effort on the part if the viewer but was a strong signal of audience engagement.

Both of these indicators of engagement are inherently flawed because they incentivize quantity over quality. The only thing I can think of that’s different is something like the famously meritocratic GitHub, which is it’s own dystopian ecosystem.

I don’t know how to solve this exactly, but as long as incentives to create reward those with pure eyeball counts and not material quality, we will constantly run into this problem of low-quality, high production value content that serves as useless trash to sift through. I think GPT programs will be created to make a greater and faster tsunami of shit that will grace the internet and we will eventually be totally and completely overrun with shallow pieces masquerading as quality.

[vehemenz]

I'd agree that age by itself isn't a problem. It's the correlates. Younger people are more likely to be using the mobile app, where the engagement is lower quality. They are less likely to have completed their formal education, let alone to have attended college. They are more likely to practice an intolerant form of politics and activism, which makes discussion on certain subjects nearly impossible outside of niche subs.

> Both of these indicators of engagement are inherently flawed because they incentivize quantity over quality.

The karma system has other arguably worse side effects. It incentivizes people to downvote things they disagree with and upvote things they agree with. I'd wager many of Reddit's longtime users think this is the point of karma, rather than a signifier of a post's effort and/or quality.

I agree that the incentive structure needs to change if Reddit or any competitor can remain viable places for discussion.

[johnnyanmac]

Moderation isn't impossible. FREE Moderation probably is, yes. I wouldn't call myself a power user here on HN, but from my understanding the moderation here is done by one admin who is part of YCombinator.

I think that's really the only way for this to work going forward if you want a reasonable volume of quality discussion. It's a job so mods need to get paid.

>We need to go back to purposely small communities.

I'm not against it. But I haven't seen an example of a modern (~last 10 years) small community that just ends up having a dearth of discussion. I'm talking less than one post and 5 comments a day kinds of discussions. It's really hard to find that sweet spot, and arguably harder to maintain it without ballooning out of control or stagnating and losing users.

Discord seems closest to this, but it has the same problems from server to server. either you are part of some small guild server and discussion only ramps up for large events or you have a larger general server and it's just a hose of random quips, barely different from a chat stream.