Comment by solardev

Comment by solardev 2 days ago

Well, niche forums are kinda different when they manage to stay small and niche. Not just HN but car forums, LED forums, etc.

But if they ever include other topics, they risk becoming more mainstream and noisy. Even within adjacent fields (like the various Stacks) it gets pretty bad.

Maybe the trick is to stay within a single small sphere then and not become a general purpose discussion site? And to have a low enough volume of submissions where good moderation is still possible? (Thank you dang and HN staff)

squigz 2 days ago

I'm not entirely sure it's about content (while HN is certainly tech-focused, politics, health, philosophy all come up with regularity) or even content moderation, although they both certainly play a part (particularly the moderation around here. Thanks, staff!)

I wonder if it is more to do with the community itself. HN users tend to have very intelligent discussions on pretty much anything, and discourages shitty, unnuanced, one-line takes. This, coupled with a healthy moderation system, makes it hard for the lower quality discussion to break in and override the good stuff.

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nick3443 2 days ago

The car headlight forums seem to expose the weakness of small web though, in that a lot of the forums that show up in search are "sponsored" by one or two major brands and any open discussion or validation of off-brand solutions, AliExpress parts, etc are quickly shunned or banned.

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rovr138 2 days ago

Yes. That's the small web.

A good example of the generalization problem you discuss is reddit.

You have to unsubscribe from all the defaults and find the small, niche, communities about specific topics. If not, it's the same stuff, reposted, over and over, across different subs and/or social sites.

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