Not sure why you'd expect anything except a list like to be of "any value".
It's like, say, talk.politics.theory back in the Usenet days. For a while it was fun, and then it wasn't. Too big, too wide .. it killed itself as a useful place to discuss/debate politics.
Not even the city-sized ones. My local ones (Seattle when I lived there, and Orange County ones now) are political cesspools full of intolerant people and outrage bait.
Back in the End Times of Google+, I had access to a data dump of all n-million Google+ Communities metadata (name, subscribers, and visible activity on the Community homepage, the last of which gave an indication of post cadence).
I noticed two odd things:
1. Taking a log-log plot of number v. size of Communities, there were far fewer very large communities than a straight power-law relation would suggest ... by a factor of 2--4 or so. This didn't look extreme plotted log-log, but when you looked at the raw values, there was something dampening the count pretty markedly.
2. In terms of activity, posting cadence fell off once a community hit (very roughly) about 10k members. Above that there still might be a lot of activity, but it was a lot less than size alone would suggest.
I've never been able to conclusively answer why either of these behavious should be the case, though I suspect that:
I suspect that the first has to do with the tendency of very large forums to go rogue (be taken over by bots / shills / spammers, or otherwise go off), to be moderated by site admins (excessive and pervasive violation of site policies), and/or simply put real people off participation because there's no genuine reward for doing so (questions aren't answered, or are responded to with incivility and/or spam).
The second (more activity in mid-sized communities) would probably relate to the last factor above: with ~10k members (give or take an order of magnitude), there's probably a core of a few hundred to a few thousand active participants, which is about at the threshold where associations and affinities can form. People still have conversations, at least part of the time.
Keep in mind that G+ (similar to FB) has a flat discussion format, so that the most recent comments are appended to the end of a post. Reddit, like HN, has a threaded discussion. For a long time I criticised G+ for not supporting threads, but I came to feel that this was actually a strength where discussions were well-moderated, as there was a sense of a real discussion occurring, where later respondants would often refer to an earlier comment (usually naming the author and quoting a bit of context) in replying. Conversations could and did last for days, weeks, months, and years. By contrast, on Reddit (and HN), a conversation is effectively dead within a day or so, if not a few hours. Comments are simply howling into the void.
This happens somewhat less on HN than Reddit, largely due to the finite size of HN's front page (infamously: 30 stories, though many might cycle through over a day). Odds are good that a top-5 story actually has some exchanges on it, and I've carried on a few of these for a few days.
But I'd long ago noted that Reddit was where conversation, in the sense of an exchange between multiple parties, goes to die, especially on any of the larger (million-plus follower) subreddits. Smaller (~50 -- a few thousand members) generally does far better.
In a similar sense, HN's quiet days (weekends, holidays, or during The Burn) often see far less activity but far more interaction.
lol. No. Every city sub is the EXACT same far left lunatic that needs to make everything about politics. Doesn’t matter if it’s a purple area, red, and reasonable-blue areas far reflected as bizarro versions of themselves if you go off their city reddits.
It's not just leftists. It's polarization generally, with scale.
The mid-range views leave. The extremes remain. Often a sub / moderator bias selects for one polar extreme or another.
This is where HN's (generally) political-neutral moderator stance, maddening as it often is to both sides (see dang's many, many, many, many comments on perceived bias), seems to have largely succeeded. Neither side dominates, and the middle isn't excluded.
Late reply: I'd intended to write "moderator removal", in the comment you're replying to.
That's a subtle but IMO meaningful distinction: HN's net moderation activity (participants, automated mechanisms, moderators) is not necessarily the same as that which occurs by staff moderators (admins) themselves, and much of the staff moderator activity is actually correcting for participant votes and flags.
This may be an overly fine point, but it seems worth pointing out. Particularly as any moderation system has its biases. But as I'd noted in my earlier reply(<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49021366>), what HN achieves is a reduction in polarized commentary across the political spectrum, to an extent few other platforms have managed to accomplish. People on either side of multiple political divides seem to find bias against their own view, when the reality seems more likely that there's just not a wholehearted embrace of their perspective.
(That's largely my own take as well, though I think I've also become more skilled at presenting my arguments, and that perhaps as a consequence they're better received. I see disagreement, but fairly often support, even when arguing against what seems to be a prevalent or even majority opinion.)
What HN's net moderation system does (user flags, automated moderation, direct admin-moderator actions, shadowbans, penalties) is limit all extreme views, to the extent that they conflict with HN's Prime Directive, "to optimize for intellectual curiosity": <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27901918>.
Challenges to conventional thinking are more than fair, but they've got to avoid falling foul of one of HN's guidelines, particularly increasing substantiality with time, thoughtful criticism, generic negativism, not fulminating, no personal attacks, not sneering (including at the rest of the community), good faith, responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of your interlocutor, avoiding flamebait / generic tangents / Internet tropes. And most importantly in this vein, not using HN for political or ideological battle (including nationalistic flamewars).
I don't always agree with mods, but I often do, and even where I disagree, I understand the underlying principles being employed. I've been an active critic / commentator on moderation for much of my time on-site (dating to 2011).
Exactly, for example, there's often two subreddits which are polarized in opposite directions, which unfortunately doesn't make it any easier to figure out the reality than if it was purely left-wing discourse allowed.
Different subs have it to different extents. The Texas sub was taken over last year by a left wing mod that made everything not merely a Daily Beast repost machine, but barely about Texas. They were finally removed to the pleasure of pretty much everyone.
Every sub has its far right trolls and agitators, too. Bots that respond automatically to any post with certain keywords in the title will lure accounts that have never posted there before, celebrating heinous things and trying to get a rise out of people. Pathetic attempts at destroying decency by celebrating murders by the government.
It's like, say, talk.politics.theory back in the Usenet days. For a while it was fun, and then it wasn't. Too big, too wide .. it killed itself as a useful place to discuss/debate politics.