Ask HN: Other communities with responses as good as the submissions?
A friend and I were discussing what it is about HN that maintains such a grip on our attention, and I realized something which is probably obvious to a lot of you: I often spend just as much time reading through and digesting the comments here as I do the original posts. It isn't uncommon for me to learn way more about the subject matter from comments than from the post itself.
Are there other communities, online or off, with a similar balance between the quality of the original source material (whatever that means in context) and the responses to it? For example: an online forum dedicated to an esoteric interest; a book club or writing group; your local bicycle repair shop; etc.
(A lot of workplaces probably exhibit this balance, but let's leave them out of the definition of "communities" for the purposes of this post.)
26 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 64.0 ms ] threadhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians has high quality researched answers but sometimes the first answer comes after hours or days so you need to bookmark the interesting threads.
Related "Ask HN: Alternatives to HN for non-Hacker News?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25318880
I think most of us spend more time with comments than articles …
Don't get me wrong, it's not like there isn't a ton of garbage and vitriol on YouTube, but for example I can go to channels I don't really agree with like David Pakman and find both interesting videos as well as some good comments. Whenever someone is a jerk, usually they're called out and not taken seriously unless they have an extremely good point to make.
Contrast this with Twitter which, whenever I've been to it, seems to facilitate a lot of moralizing vitriol that gets a TON of positive attention. It even seems to be designed to make irrationality appear to have legitimacy.
I wouldn't say YouTube overall has good comments, but there are certainly channels with very high quality comments and it's in my opinion often due to the tone set by the content creators themselves not by any YouTube policy or algorithm.
Although I still think in general there's a better sort of control against vitriol and snark on there. And now I'm thinking that may be because places like Twitter are designed to make everybody feel like they have some form of celebritydom even if they've never produced content beyond tweets. On YouTube, I'd suspect the vast majority of users don't have accounts of their own, thus no one can subscribe to see their comments; those comments can only be seen in the context in which they are relevant. An asshole in the YouTube comments may appear uncalled for in relation to the video and surrounding comments, but on Twitter anyone can be subscribed to and their comments are mostly standalone. If you're a jerk on Twitter, you will almost certainly be selectively reinforced by the cult you've created with your subscriber base. (I once did an experiment to see if I could amass thousands of Twitter followers with no meaningful content, and it was beyond easy. Anyone can start a cult on Twitter.)
1.) Twitter is designed to keep us engaged so we keep feeding the eyeball economy. YouTube comments aren’t as directly monetized as active Twitter users.
2.) Irrationality is legitimate -if- you’re trying to sell shit. Then, it’s your best friend. I can sum up my entire marketing degree with the words ‘make people believes lies then take their money.’ I paid way the fuck too much for eight words of insight.
3.) This may be a touch of bias. Judging by how you write, I assume you’re drawn to higher quality content. Like tends to attract like…
I've also noticed that other message boards usually become "productized" once it has a large enough audience, and that tends to drive down the quality of conversation as well. Since the HN forum is an offshoot of YC, that hasn't happened. Well, I guess HN could technically be considered a job board for YC companies, but those postings are dwarfed by the regular posts.
True and the bare-minimum non-appealing UI that repeals casual readers. For example Reddit subs quality was way better before they modernized the site to attract general audience.
That being said, there are indeed many experts around here and I find it interesting to read their opinions (if they fall in their area of expertise :-)
Variety of topics, highly competent answers, low noise
https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php
What seems to keep HN from going too far off the deep end is:
1: A clear, minimal set of guidelines that covers all bases
2: A mod who seems to have a good sense of where to enforce it and, I hope, gets paid to do it
3: A community that mostly seems to check itself
4: A custom forum that allows experimentation with system-level experiments in moderation and someone to develop those features