[donnachangstein]

What's ironic is this thread is full of comments agreeing that Reddit sucks because the voting/karma system is flawed and shadow banning is toxic and deranged yet all those very features and policies exist here. In fact, HN is mentioned in the Wikipedia article for shadow banning as an early adopter of the practice. (Yes I agree it sucks but that's not the point of my comment.)

So what changed or what makes this place different? I would argue it's not the forum software but rather run differently, not placing in charge of every subreddit a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.

Or maybe the forum software does suck and some just naturally migrated to a text-only low-bandwidth version of Reddit?

[Goronmon]

So what changed or what makes this place different?

Mainly it's niche/less popular. There is less of an incentive for outside interests to care.

Not having any real way for the audience to expand (there is only one "subreddit") definitely helps with that.

[sepositus]

> So what changed or what makes this place different?

It's an interesting question. Primarily, I think it's because HN doesn't allow you to downvote instantly or even after a lengthy period of time. I think it's tied to total karma, but someone would have to provide more information there. Regardless, that single change probably makes a big difference.

Compared to Reddit, I've had some comments go into the tens of negative karma points within five minutes of posting. It wasn't because it was low quality, but because it wasn't the "correct" view to have in whatever subreddit I was engaging in. The downvoting there is practically militant.

However, as someone who usually holds a minority view on HN, I don't think the system here is perfect either. Usually an echo chamber forms because the dissidents don't last long and leave. If you reward the ones that stay the longest with downvote capabilities, it would explain my general experience quite well. But again, it's nothing compared to Reddit.

Note: I recognize this is a conversation on karma, which has a rule associated with it, but I hope we can make an exception here given it's a good faith discussion between Reddit/HN :)

[intended]

There’s 4 things that are disastrous topics for any community, the horsemen of the apocalypse if you like. Politics, Religion, Identity, and Meta.

There’s several natural filters that promote healthy communities - Highly informed users, Active mods, Small community sizes, “Get stuff done” type conversations. In essence, communities where it’s easy to identify BS, and discourage navel gazing, have high signal to noise ratios. They are actively hostile to lazy posting.

A good example of this type of community is r/badeconomics, or was the last I checked, and askhistorians.

A separate note, There’s a 2024 paper that showed that that estimated that young adults spent a smaller portion their time online on high cognitive load reading. A majority of the time would be spent on “timepass” content.

[r721]

>I think it's tied to total karma, but someone would have to provide more information there.

According to https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented "After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment."

I often wonder whether "limited downvotes" scheme would work: (let's say) 30 downvotes per 24h are free to use and after that each downvote decreases your karma by 1.

[Tarsul]

My personal opinion is that downvotes, upvotes and algorithms are design decisions that often stick before the best one is found. It's a shame really, because I think it's not only really important (e.g. to combat fake news/users etc.) but most interesting. Nonetheless, HN did good with their version where the max. downvote of a comment is -4 and where the up/downvote of a comment is not listed publicly. All functions that help with community building. However, I fret the moment when AI users and shills take over (especially since throwaway accounts are so easy to create).

[layer8]

HN is okay-ish, but you still can’t have long-running discussions on it, or explore some topic in depth, like it is par for the course on old-style forums. One reason is the time cutoff (can’t reply anymore after a day or so), another is that there is no mechanism for tracking which comments you’ve already read and which you haven’t.

[d0gsg0w00f]

> a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.

Speaking of which, does anyone know if there are any good articles/documentaries/exposés on reddit moderators? I really just want to know what one is like.

[beAbU]

HN is not much different (or better) in my opinion

I dislike the voting mechanism here. It incentivises me to optimize my posting to things that will maximise the votes, rather than things I think will add value to the community, even if it's controversial.

On a forum, if I say something stupid/against-the-grain, I am called out by the forum members, or we have a debate about it. On HN and on reddit, I'm downvoted into oblivion with very little in the way of any discussion that helps me learn and improve.

The only thing that makes HN better than reddit for me is the community of like-minded people, a general respect for the rules, and the fact that here we have fantastic moderators.

But I maintain that the underlying _system_ that is managing discourse here is flawed in it's design. I wonder what HN would look like if voting was abolished, and /active was the homepage, where the most actively discussed posts are the ones that filter to the top of the list.

[ryandrake]

I basically have switched to /active. IMO it's a stronger and more relevant set of articles, and tends not to be clogged with all the "Here's a thing, but with AI!" blogspam and endless number of "I ported this angular script to rust" turds that always seem to make it to the normal front page.