[TheOtherHobbes]

It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends.

There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.

[3form]

It's sorting by score rather than anything else, in my experience. Makes it largely opinion-forming on the participants.

[anal_reactor]

Once I've seen a website where you couldn't downvote, only upvote. That was actually a great thing, because it promoted posts that at least a significant portion of people agreed with, not just posts that simply everyone agrees with.

[mantas]

So… FB with like and no dislike button?

[esafak]

Youtube does not expose the number of down votes any more. LinkedIn has no dislike button and I find it positively toxic.

[m_fayer]

Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that aren’t (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.

[closewith]

HN is just as much of an echo-chamber as anywhere else. You just like the opinions being echoed.

[m_fayer]

HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong.

Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.

[diggan]

> to me the difference is plain to see.

Agreed. HN isn't 100/0 signal/noise or even 100/0 politeness/rudeness, but I get the feeling most people discuss things with a relatively open mind here, and it's not uncommon for people to either be corrected by others and accepting it, or correcting themselves if they've found something out after submitting their comment. Just seeing that happening makes me hopeful overall.

It's a huge contrast from basically any mainstream social media, where the only time you'd see something like that is when you're talking with literal friends.

[closewith]

> HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong.

That's is due to active moderation, but it's orthogonal to being in a bubble. There are also some very similarly moderated, polite communities on other platforms, even Facebook, but they're still bubbles. People on HN are already self-selecting to an extent, and if you stray to far from the core audience, you'll be downvoted to dead.

That's how the forum is designed to work, but it is definitionally a bubble.

> If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.

It is no different to the other well-moderated communities on the other commercial platforms. The only difference is that you like this bubble more than the others.

[awesome_dude]

> That's is due to active moderation,

Just, FTR, there's always been the problem of how much moderation is required to keep the discourse (in a group) flowing without being so restrictive as to only be about the moderators.

See IRC, which (IMO) can be over-moderated, channel ops used to be very much about themselves, vs Usenet, which had no moderation at all (and was "destroyed" by google groups making access trivial for troublemakers), through to current things like Reddit which have some moderators.

It's (IMO) exactly like governance IRL - some countries overdo it, and some underdo it.

[esafak]

Please describe what it would be like if it were not a bubble. If everything is a bubble, the concept is worthless.

[closewith]

Old-school fora and mailing lists could avoid being bubbles when moderation allowed dissenting views to surface instead of burying them. Of course, biased moderation could still create bubbles by pruning dissent.

Social platforms built on voting, like HN, will almost always drift into bubbles of like-minded posts and comments. The only variation is in which views get upranked.

That isn’t necessarily bad. YC clearly prefers HN to filter for a certain entrepreneurial mindset. Bubbles can serve a purpose, but it’s worth recognising that this is a manipulated environment - in many ways hollow - and not a reflection of the broader world.

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

It seems like paid communities might do a little better than the rest by filtering out bots and people who would rather not torch cash and get banned repeatedly each time they misbehave.

[diggan]

> It seems like paid communities

Yeah, I've been sadly thinking about similar things. Something like a web-forum where it costs $1 to signup, and your account gets active after a day. Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" since regulations around that seems to be creeping up, and would hopefully lower the amount of abuse as people have to spend actual money to get an account.

It just sucks because there are plenty of sub-18 year old folks who are amazing and more grown up than people above 18, not everyone who has access to making internet payments and also not everyone has the means to even spend $1 on something non-essential.

Not sure if there is anything in-between "completely open and abuse-friendly" and "closed castle for section of the world population" that reduces the abuse but allow most humans on the planet.

[latexr]

> Would serve as an automatic "You're 18"

You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws).

https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/

https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-a...

And there are banks and fintech companies which give you pre-paid cards which function as credit cards for online payments. You top them up whenever you want and that’s your spending limit. Parents can just hand those to kids for day-to-day operations.

In short, being able to pay 1$ online is not sufficient age verification.

> It just sucks

I agree. One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts. People lurk in more than one forum, so if you meet someone which seems to have their head in place and would be interested to join, you gift them the membership. Keep the association between accounts in a database for, say, one year to see how it goes. If someone repeatedly gifts accounts to people who end up being spammers, you revoke their gifting privileges.

[diggan]

> You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws).

Yeah, I had one of those myself when I was under 18 too, I think it was called Maestro or something similar. However, it didn't work like a normal credit card (which I think only 18+ can have), platforms were clearly able to reject it, as most things I wanted to buy online didn't work at the time with it (this was early 2000s though), only with my mom's debit card.

Probably the same is true for those cards you linked, they're special "youth" cards that platforms could in theory block? Then requiring credit card "donation" of $N would still basically act as a age verification. I think debit cards might in general be available to people under 18, so filtering to only allow credit cards sounds like a start at least.

Newgrounds literally employed the same strategy for automatically validating a bunch of users, from https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1548205:

> 2. If your account ever bought Supporter status with a credit card and we can confirm that with the payment processor, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be 18 in the UK to have a credit card.

Basically, filter by the card type, assume credit = 18+, any other might be under 18.

> One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts

Yeah, referrals ala Lobste.rs. I feel like they get lots of stuff right, from transparent moderation to trying to keep it small but high-quality. The judge is still out on if they got it right or not :)

[latexr]

> Probably the same is true for those cards you linked, they're special "youth" cards that platforms could in theory block?

Nope, there’s nothing “youth” about them, they’re more like safety features. The cards I’m talking about act as real credit cards. Plus, I forgot to mention but there are also services (even provided by the banking networks in the countries themselves) which allow you to connect an account (or deposit some money in) and get temporary credit card numbers for online payments. I’ve used them and know multiple people (also adults) who still do.

> Basically, filter by the card type, assume credit = 18+, any other might be under 18.

My point is that maybe that’s enough in the UK (is it?) but you probably wouldn’t be able to rely on it for every jurisdiction.

To be clear, I like your idea in general and would not want to discourage you from it—quite the contrary—I’m just alerting to the fact it might need further though so you don’t end up sinking time on something which wouldn’t work.

> Yeah, referrals ala Lobste.rs.

I wasn’t aware that’s how they worked. I’ll have a read. For anyone else curious:

https://lobste.rs/about#invitations

[diggan]

Thanks a bunch for describing it in more detail, actually very helpful!

And no worries, nothing discouraging, discussing the idea with others no matter their reaction tends to do the opposite for me, so thanks again for taking the time :)

[awesome_dude]

And people that are not in the "cool kids" group are economically disadvantaged because, even if their contributions are valued, they get on the offside with the powers that be?

When you have people with power over someone else, power to ban, power to economically injure, you end up, almost without fail, with sycophantic groupings.

People only praise those with the power, and anyone foolish enough to disagree, no matter how accurate, are punished.

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

Something Awful pulled this off with a $10 lifetime subscription, cheap enough that most can afford it, but it's expensive enough that a bot farm wouldn't bother, and the admins are quick with suspensions and bans if you act like an asshole.

[Jordan_Pelt]

I'm not so sure. Every so often I browse Metafilter (remember Metafilter?) out of morbid fascination, and it's a total trainwreck. I don't think it's a model for success.

[awesome_dude]

When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media.

That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now)

There were even "wars" - the Meow Wars were long dead history when I were a Usenetter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars

I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.

[diggan]

> I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.

We still have "flame wars" I think, they're just less intelligent, is more about spamming than insulting, and is often called "brigading" instead, basically one community trying to "overrun" another community one way or another.

[awesome_dude]

> is often called "brigading" instead

Yeah, I think that you're right - Reddit is often referred to as being the Usenet of today, which is where I see the term brigading coming up the most.

[RossBencina]

I never heard of the Meow Wars, but I do remember antiorp, a net-art mailing list disruption organisation:

https://everything2.com/title/antiorp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author)

EDIT: clarity