I still miss what reddit used to be before everything went bad. I can sense that hubski is on the right path to recreating that sort of community where creativity can flourish, and hopefully do so without succumbing to a hivemind mentality. Many of us have been around long enough to see the rise and fall of one or more of our favorite internet communities, and have gained some sense of social intuition as to how communities develop and prosper (or crumble).
Will that intuition be enough to establish a set of social norms to protect us from Eternal September? Two decades after the era of AOL taking the internet out of academia and techie circles and into the living rooms of "the common folk", we've seen internet culture go truly mainstream. What's left? What's next?
I wish words could convey how frustrating it was to chat with one community manager after another, listing the same psychologists, the same social experts, the same theoreticians and saying "you really need to make this thing more human for the sake of the Internet" over and over again only to hear "hmm, yeah, you're right, we'll get right on that" and then have nothing change. They don't care. They never did. And "they" is basically Alexis and Steve now, and they never did. There was a sweet spot where Reddit attracted interesting people and repelled the Youtube commenters. 2008, 2009 maybe. The LimeyDid you ever dream about a place you never really recall being to before? A place that maybe only exists in your imagination? Some place far away, half remembered when you wake up. When you were there, though, you knew the language. You knew your way around. That was the sixties.
[pause]
Terry Valentine: No. It wasn't that either. It was just '66 and early '67. That's all there was.
Yeah, I've seen the same thing with Digg and before that, with several forums I used to frequent, like the awesome forum of Pythonline.
The "revolution" in the article and my title refers to the period of time and process by which reddit went to shit. They make an analogy to how creative expression flourished during and immediately after the communist revolution in Russia, but was suppressed once the revolution was over. In the analogy, the reddit "revolution" is reddit post 2011, when it went mainstream, and not reddit pre-2010, when it was "amazing."
Every last community that I've been a part of that has fallen into disrepair, there's always been a commercial aspect behind it. It's the little no-name guys that seem to keep chugging along until the people that run them get bored and close them down. The thing is, they might have changed a bit here and there over the years, but they never jumped the shark. It's enough to make you think for a minute.
I second this. It feels like the Internet is, to investors right now, nothing much than a farm; websites are calves. A calf grows big enough, it becomes a money cow. And a money cow that can't produce enough money because it's not attractive enough is either... rectified, or put down and the meat sold.
Thanks for the link - it is entirely relevant (and it provided me a place to share an idea) and interesting. I most certainly hope that the general feeling that I understand from this thread will keep on going... Hubski could definitely break the mold with hosts like that.
I'm wondering whether it's something that's being done by moderators or by the community. I actually don't know anything about how voting/moderation works on HN. I just read it and avoid the comments on anything except technical articles. Except when my friends link comments which are particularly scoffworthy. I kind of want to make a tag where I just repost stuff from HN on hubski, filtered by my sensibilities. That adds value, right?
HN removes posts they deem off-topic, including most political posts. They let things that are going to be discussed regardless slide usually, so right after they happened the first Snowden releases, Aaron Swartz's suicide and Donglegate got a pass, but for the most part anything political is going to get removed. That the politics of technology and the techie community is not deemed on-topic on Hacker News, but the business of technology is, makes me more uncomfortable using the word "hacker" than outsiders thinking all hackers were criminals ever did, but I don't think they're inconsistent about it.
Sure. "Off topic." In the top ten right now are articles about the Trans-Pacific Partnership and how to smuggle $1000 into North Korea. For the people wondering who removes posts about how ugly the actual tech industry can be for women, I believe it is the flagging mechanism.
It would get in the way of all Shit You've Read a Dozen Times Already [2001], Show HN: Our New Startup That Connects You To Poor People Who Will Iron Your Underwear For You Just Like Mommy Used To, and Implementation Of A Completely Trivial Thing In This Week's Sexy Language posts.