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In the midst of the social media meltdown and exodus to nowhere,

11 points by miles ↗ HN
just want to take a moment to thank dang and the entire HN community for maintaining such a high signal to noise ratio. As a moderator (who failed miserably) of nickb's NewMogul, I have the tiniest inkling of how hard dang's job must be. While I don't always agree with him or the moderation on HN, I have the utmost respect for what he's trying to accomplish and the success with which his efforts have been attended. Any new platform will have a very tough mod act to follow.

8 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 26.6 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
Try tildes.net. It's better than Hacker News even, in the sense that "Ask HN" is mostly a failure in that the vast majority of "Ask HN" questions go unanswered but I see people asking questions there and getting answers whereas here it is all too often crickets.
lunaticneko
It needs an invite, however, and I'm still trying to find how to get one (that isn't just directly mailing them -- I'm not prominent enough to justify bothering busy people).
PaulHoule
I sent an email with a few sentences about how I found out about Tildes and what it means to me and a discussion I wanted to participate in and got an invite in less than 12 hours.

Despite having about 10% of the karma of the highest karma HN users I am a bit of a nobody, I mean Klout thought my expertise on “white people” was enough to earn me a one year subscription to the Red Bulletin.

onlydateteacher
I have 5 invites I'd be happy to share. How is best to get it to you?
miles
What's your read on these submissions and related comments?

Why Tildes May Not Be The Best Place To Migrate To. https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1473jeh...

A Word of Caution: I Was Just Banned From Tildes https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/147qyno...

PaulHoule
Don't care. I can appreciate that the admin wants to spend 0% of the time arguing with people. The software is open source and if you want one with a different moderation policy you can go moderate it.

For a large platform like Facebook getting kicked out could be a social death sentence but if you get kicked out of a little platform you can get kicked in to another one.

codingdave
> a failure in that the vast majority of "Ask HN" questions go unanswered

Is that bad? HN isn't a Q & A site. I think it makes sense that only the questions that interest the community get upvoted and answered. If every single question did get answered, are you sure this wouldn't look like Quora?

PaulHoule
Not sure if “the community isn’t interested” or “y’all are dogpiling the front page and the new page doesn’t get sampled enough to determine if the community is interested or not.” See

https://tildes.net/~hobbies/161y/any_boxers_out_there_that_c...

I think that one is exceptionally good but if you want to compare Tildes to Quora I'd compare it to Quora at the very beginning when somebody would ask a question about what Jack Welsh did at GE and they'd get an answer from Jack Welsh! (Which of course was not accidental at all)

Contrast that to the cynical Quora of today where if not logged in you get a page that looks a lot like a page from reddit where the answer is promised in a small part of the page and the rest is an irrelevant confusing mess designed to make you click randomly and hit an ad.

As for HN there is good discussion but frequently I see a subject where there might be three major viewpoints on the subject and one gets represented over and over. I'd point to

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36129991

in which the unbroken consensus seems to be that sexual satisfaction is only a function of l-arginine metabolism (e.g. the effect of drugs like Sildenafil) and not something that only starts with having an erection.