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Ask HN: Anyone Feel Reddit Style Forums Are Soulless?

11 points by CM30 ↗ HN
This is a weird thought I know, especially given Hacker News uses the same sort of format.

But I feel like the format of forums like that really dehumanise the folks posting there, and feel almost nothing like a community due to their design.

I suspect part of it is because the lack of identifiers for accounts make it hard to tell anyone apart, and the strict separation of 'communities' about a particular topic mean you never really get to know anyone in particular, they're just names that occasionally crop up when you're reading threads about something or another.

It feels like a system designed to treat members like interchangable content producers, where no one would notice if any one user left or was kicked out.

Anyone else feel this way?

15 comments

[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 53.6 ms ] thread
pmontra
I don't want to establish a relationship with someone on those forums. I usually don't even write there. I land in some random page following links from a search engine when I look for solutions to a problem. When I do write in a forum or the comments of a site I really don't care who's writing the other comments. There are too many people and I don't know any of them. Even here on HN after about 9 years I remember less than 5 nicks and that's not a problem.
CM30
That's fair. I think this is the appeal of stuff like Reddit to many people, because like yourself they merely want the information they came for or an answer to their question rather than a community.

I guess some people go on forums and community sites to talk about the topic first and foremost, and some others because they want to make friends/be part of a community first and foremost.

It reminds me of the split between people who watch YouTube videos/Twitch streams because of the creator and those who watch them because the topic being covered.

OnionBlender
I feel the opposite. I hate discussions that show comments in a flat list in the order they were posted. I much prefer the tree structure that reddit and hacker news uses.

Examples:

The Ars Technica comments. People that want to reply to a comment have to quote the other comment, which makes following a discussion more trouble than it is worth.

The Steam forums are usually worse than a game's subreddit. Although that is also caused by poor moderation.

CM30
That's fair, it's definitely a matter of preference which you prefer. I'd say both have their upsides and downsides.

> Although that is also caused by poor moderation.

And sadly poor moderation is kinda the default online in general now. Going on many forums and social media sites makes you miss Dang and his work here.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos
Tree comments would be good without reordering from upvotes or whatever. The first child is the first one posted. Since I want posts to be ordered by recent activity maybe comment trees should be too.
djellybeans
Some of the oldest web forums (circa '98) I've been to use the nested comment format you see on Reddit or on here. The flat timeline format because much more popular from what I've seen.

Reddit style forums are not great for posts intended to log something in progress (like a computer build) because they require the user to make a new thread multiple times instead of making a new comment that automatically brings the thread back to the first page. But flat list threads are great for that.

They usually try to compromise with comment replies shown in "comment pyramids" but they can get unwieldy quick. It's a reasonable tradeoff for the flat chronological layout.

mixmastamyk
The drawback to that, where you "know all" about the people in the community, is the lack of privacy. As folks learn more about BigTech social media (with real-names™), some of us are learning that perhaps the old-school anonymous chat handles were better in a number of ways.

In other words, if the cost of community is having my life bought and sold without my knowledge or consent... well, I'll take an anonymous handle, and be happy with being a cog, thanks.

skolskoly
The consequence of user-feedback ranking systems tends to be that content needs to be either novel and attention grabbing, or already popular amongst the user base. Discussion that is niche, or just mildly interesting, is often given less attention than spam and trolling, just because it isn't attention grabbing enough to rise above the noise. The most active users of HN, Reddit, etc. are homogeneous and interchangeable because that is what the environment selects for. More distinct posters and groups exist but regardless of their quality, they will not be able to become more visible (actively engaging with the community) without losing that quality. Obviously, this phenomenon applies to more than just web forums.
is_true
My 2 cents.

I was part of my subreddit for a city/country between 2012-2016 and we started doing meetups a couple of times a year, and with a group of those people we meet almost every Saturday to play soccer.

It felt like a group chat with a bunch of friends, then the subreddit became one of the "default" communities for new people that registered in reddit and it grew really fast and the community dissapeared.

cpach
I agree to some degree.

Maybe it’s because Reddit has so incredibly many subreddits…? Reddit as a whole is therefore, naturally, very fractured. Whereas on HN we all share the same frontpage, the same ‘Ask Hn’, and 'dang is the moderator of it all. HN also has quite generous profile pages, where you can write a lot, or nothing at all. And many of us who comment here work in the same industry.

Perhaps these factors contribute to making HN more of a ‘place’?

CM30
This is 100% why Hacker News has more of a community feel to me. Everyone sees the same content, and discussions aren't heavily segregated by topic the way they are on Reddit. So we get to see the same people share opinions on a multitude of topics, which makes them seem more human than on Reddit, where you're likely to only encounter certain people in certain subreddits.
swah
Yes. When I open some old style forums (say https://forum.obsidian.md/t/todays-date-are-not-following-th...) I feel that that format is friendly, cozy, small world, old web feel, we lost something, etc.

IMO Twitter/Reddit promotes lurking much more. A few folks get all the attention.

CM30
The fact comments from latecomers are usually buried by the highly upvoted ones posted earlier probably contributes to this in my opinion. There's very much a need to be 'early' if you want to do well on Reddit, and that rewards people who have hours to spend every day posting on the same subreddits and hovering over the new posts list.
phendrenad2
Reddit was founded on the idea of people discussing news stories, and that's what it's best at. If you want forums, join a forum.
solardev
As silly as this sounds, I miss having easily-identified avatars that represent users. HN is a sea of greys, and it's hard to even notice anyone's usernames (much less recognize them again later).

I don't know if we need to go full-on forum mode with like huge titles and colored levels or anything like that, but just something that helps people stay identifiable would be nice. One of HN's strengths is that it's not supposed to be just a cesspool of anons yelling at each other, but civilized -- relatively, anyway -- discourse between wizened old professionals. Or something like that :)

There is another forum I used to frequent with similarly awesome people: https://boards.straightdope.com/

Minimal trolling there, smart and interesting people talking about varied topics... and you'd actually get to know certain users by name & avatar after a while (the correlation helps).