I also loved usenet! It fell apart when all the spammers and trolls and idiots turned up. (I think the binary groups are a distraction, plenty of usenet servers just didn’t carry them. )
Those are just words for people whose opinions you’d rather not read, so we need some sort of moderation system.
Trusted moderators don’t have the time or energy to do that, and don’t scale, so we need some sort of group voting system.
Reddit was brilliant for a while, then Hacker News, then Less Wrong.
All three seem to have gone downhill in different ways. What can we learn from these three? (It’s actually possible that Hacker News is still excellent, but it no longer posts the sort of things that interest me often enough that I ever look anymore.)
Stack Overflow (and related sites) seem to have stayed consistently excellent for a long time now. They’re also laudably open. But Stack Overflow has a consistent problem with interesting questions getting deleted by fascist moderators, and it seems to only be good for Questions and Answers. It’s not a place to pontificate about fibromyalgia, for instance.
What can we learn from Stack Overflow? Can we make something like that, for people we like to post essays and comment on them, without driving our best away?
But Stack Overflow has a consistent problem with interesting questions getting deleted by fascist moderators, and it seems to only be good for Questions and Answers. It’s not a place to pontificate about fibromyalgia, for instance.
That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. SO was designed and restricted for a Q&A format; it deliberately omits features like comment trees. Its creators believe that it succeeded because it was restricted, since a more specific problem is easier to solve. They’ve gone on to try and solve the more general discussion forum “problem” with Discourse, but it’s still very lean on features—because it’s explicitly designed for mobile touch interfaces and for reading over writing.
Personally, I’m not convinced that SO—as a community—couldn’t have succeeded just as well, or better, with quite different software features. But that’s what they believe.
Stack Overflow is different from the other websites you mentioned, because it is, to some degree, timeless.
I suspect that the importance of time when posting on news sites contributes to the deterioration. Some people spend more time on the website, some people spend less. The people who spend more time get a bonus in the system.
Problem is that “spending a lot of time debating online” can correlate with some undesired traits, such as “doesn’t do research”, “writes without thinking”, “doesn’t read the whole article before commenting”, etc. If these traits are turned up to eleven, of course those people get banned. But within the acceptable range, those on the bad side of the range get an advantage, and the ‘Overton window’ will gradually shift in their favor.
I also loved usenet! It fell apart when all the spammers and trolls and idiots turned up. (I think the binary groups are a distraction, plenty of usenet servers just didn’t carry them. )
Those are just words for people whose opinions you’d rather not read, so we need some sort of moderation system.
Trusted moderators don’t have the time or energy to do that, and don’t scale, so we need some sort of group voting system.
Reddit was brilliant for a while, then Hacker News, then Less Wrong.
All three seem to have gone downhill in different ways. What can we learn from these three? (It’s actually possible that Hacker News is still excellent, but it no longer posts the sort of things that interest me often enough that I ever look anymore.)
Stack Overflow (and related sites) seem to have stayed consistently excellent for a long time now. They’re also laudably open. But Stack Overflow has a consistent problem with interesting questions getting deleted by fascist moderators, and it seems to only be good for Questions and Answers. It’s not a place to pontificate about fibromyalgia, for instance.
What can we learn from Stack Overflow? Can we make something like that, for people we like to post essays and comment on them, without driving our best away?
That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. SO was designed and restricted for a Q&A format; it deliberately omits features like comment trees. Its creators believe that it succeeded because it was restricted, since a more specific problem is easier to solve. They’ve gone on to try and solve the more general discussion forum “problem” with Discourse, but it’s still very lean on features—because it’s explicitly designed for mobile touch interfaces and for reading over writing.
Personally, I’m not convinced that SO—as a community—couldn’t have succeeded just as well, or better, with quite different software features. But that’s what they believe.
Stack Overflow is different from the other websites you mentioned, because it is, to some degree, timeless.
I suspect that the importance of time when posting on news sites contributes to the deterioration. Some people spend more time on the website, some people spend less. The people who spend more time get a bonus in the system.
Problem is that “spending a lot of time debating online” can correlate with some undesired traits, such as “doesn’t do research”, “writes without thinking”, “doesn’t read the whole article before commenting”, etc. If these traits are turned up to eleven, of course those people get banned. But within the acceptable range, those on the bad side of the range get an advantage, and the ‘Overton window’ will gradually shift in their favor.