Ditto.

On Reddit even a percieved differing opinion results in hate mail, insulting and shouting. It's one of the reasons I never signed up to Twitter.

Twitter has to be the worst major platform. It is a rollercoaster of misery, disgust, and annoyance.

And there isn’t even a proverbial nugget in the turd to make it worth it.

Nah, there's a lot of nuggets there. Keep away from the political trash and follow people who post interesting things that you like. For example, I like old video games, so I follow people who talk about old video games.

This guy posts cool, obscure Mario trivia: https://twitter.com/MarioBrothBlog

A wiki about cut content in old games retweets cool new finds: https://twitter.com/CuttingRoomWiki

This non-profit posts articles about classic gaming: https://twitter.com/GameHistoryOrg

Oh and the Homestar Runner guys started making content again, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/StrongBadActual

There's lots of nuggets. It's not even hard to find them among all the shit. If you're following someone whose content you don't like, just stop following them. One big tip I wish was more obvious is that you can turn off retweets from specific people you follow. So if someone posts cool content themselves, but also retweets a bunch of political trash, you can get the former without any of the latter.

Those are cool, but the problem is that Twitter shows you a load of turds for any nuggets. I just want it to click your link and read a thread, instead they minimize a thread and show me politics and celebrities below, and trending stuff on the right (desktop).

On the old reddit at least (stopped using after the new launch), if I went to /r/technology I’d only see /r/technology and that was pure nuggets. You could also unsub any default subreddits

The Twitter web client is trash, definitely agree with you there. I use a 3rd party mobile client (Twidere on Android). There are some clever uBlock rules you can use to make the web client a bit less shit (e.g. hide the "What's Happening" box), but it's hard to keep up with.

I got rid of twitter for exactly the reasons you mentioned and the for what it did to my inner well-being. There are some accounts that I've enjoyed following and even after leaving the platform I still use the RSS feed of nitter.net for these to browse these posts. No doubt that if I'd sign up again even with an intention not to post myself and only to lurk, I'd get sucked into toxic discussions within less than a week. nitter gives me the distance I need to consume the content (on my terms) without risking addiction or potentially contributing to the toxicity myself.

I prefer Twitter to Facebook. I still think there are threads on Twitter (daily!) where things can be learned in real time for later follow up/reflection. It isn’t a good medium for arguing though. This experience may be a reflection of my particular old school circle (I joined in 2006)

Facebook unfortunately doesn’t have vibe where people You trust can jump in and provide an insightful thread. It’s just stacked piles of trolling and baiting. Its only saving grace is keeping in touch with family and friends who don’t use any other platforms.

In my case, Facebook is for things like checking what my old aunt back in Italy is up to. Granted it’s not what I would describe as “insightful content” but at the same time, I’m never going to be upset for something my old aunt said. Twitter and Reddit on the other hand were having a really negative influence on my well-being. I’m sure you can use them in a “sanitised” way and avoid the trolling and hate, but it’s hard and requires a lot of self discipline. I’m not sure why I don’t get the “bad part” of Facebook, I’m starting to think that it’s cultural - Facebook is the only social network that I use, that still “thinks I’m Italian” and pushes me localised Italian content. On Twitter and Reddit on the other hand I exclusively follow content in English and/or related to Australia, the country where I now live.

But there is, as long as you stay within people with 5k to 50k followers, particularly in niche fields, and use mute words often.

I read Twitter for one thing: comments during a major disaster, but only for the first 24 hours or so of the event. It’s easy to filter the OMG posts and you get immediate relevant information.

I'm surprised people expected differently from a platform where every conversation is a shouting match by design.

I'm relatively new to HN but a reddit "senior", and one of the things I really appreciate about this place is the relative lack of toxicity. To me, it seems people really come here for civil discussion and default to asking questions instead of flaming. Well, that and more people source their claims.

From a 30 year view of communities, including Fido, Usenet, Reddit and many others, I’d attribute that to @dang’s and @pg’s benevolent dictatorship.

Many communities start out nice and well meaning, but at some point devolve into a Wild West. HN did not, and I think that’s thanks to dang’s moderation (and pg’s at an earlier time)

Also, “small” things like dropping the vote counts, and having canonical rules for titles (which are, as pg noted, a “commons” but treated in other platforms as a land grab) reduces competition and bragging rights. Doesn’t seem like much, but it’s part of what keeps the people looking for conversation here, and those looking mostly for signaling and gratification out.

As the great architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously said: “God is in the details.”

Mies’ work wasn’t without flaws or detractors, but then compare one of his subtle, perfected masterworks to the infinite cheap and nasty boxes that leveraged only the sketch outline of his style.

Now translate that into any field, absolutely including online community building. There’s no question where HN stands.

TBH that’s good moderation (And scalable algorithms to delegate such privilege) at work. there are plenty of flames and toxicity here, they’re just suppressed.

Also the really controversial topics tend to get flagged.

Moderation is relatively easy with a community like HN.

Facebook and Twitter desperately need moderation - but they're built completely differently and much larger. Moderation there will immediately be compared to censorship, which Twitter and FB are afraid of because it threatens their money.

We're so afraid of one good idea being hidden by moderation that we allow thousands of bad ideas - which eventually create a hive-mind and drive out the good ideas anyway.

Have been reading reddit since 5 or so years now, but pretty much only the frontpage. I like reddit but it has gotten so political and toxic. Many posts boil down to "haha look how stupid this person is". I sometimes skim the controversial comments to see what the hive mind disapproves of. Recently, on the mega threat of Trump being covid positive, the controversial comments were along the lines of "I don't like Trump but I hope he gets better, nobody deserves covid". So not wishing someone death is bad? Overall reddit is pretty toxic.

I think you absolutely must avoid the front page. Reddit seems to have a relatively young audience, and the front page just gets the guff that the average teenager likes (at best, puppies; at worst, self-righteous posturing and feeble jokes). If you look into the subforums, they can be very different. Something serious like r/statistics has little in common with a hilarious shitshow like r/wallstreetbets.

TBH on Hacker News it's also a problem. If you have a point of view that is consistent with the majority of users (or with the users who write lots of comments), then everything is fine. But if your point of view differs, then you're often downvoted into oblivion. This is often not a good place for discussing things.

Karma points are both a blessing and a curse. They are good as a form of gate-keeping but bad because I too have found myself deciding not to post a comment in case it got down-voted to oblivion. In fact I debated whether or not to post this comment for those same reasons.

I try to take down voted comments on the chin (and one of mine at -4 was absolutely warranted) but at other times it can be dis-heartening to see a comment being down-voted for no apparent reason.

I guess the answer is to not be too vain / overlly bothered about my Karma points but just as a highly upvoted comment feed the reward centres so do down votes in a whole different way.

Oh, and responsible and thoughtful use of down-voting rights please.

I hate it when I get downvoted to for asking a question, usually when someone posts a vague or unsubstantiated comment.

It's one thing to downvote an opinion, but downvoting anyone who questions an opinion, or clarification?!

I kind of think about it like the karma attained buys you the ability to occasionally say something that wrests the narrative back from the crowdmind a bit .. at least until it disappears due to the downvote pileon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's Hoping ;->

There are two/three groups of users on twitter:

- the "celebs" (anyone which is moderately famous)

- the "old school" (which usually forms tight groups and doesn't get as much hate mail)

- the newcomers (anyone that joined, let's say < 5yr ago). Those are mostly wallowing in a pit of sadness

I guess everybody has different experiences, but by and large, the subreddits I frequent are reasonable enough

Passively getting news that starts to include more political op-eds is a very different issue than actively participating in a toxic community though.

Not saying either of you are wrong. Just saying they are different issues.

Reddit have different moderation policies for the different sub-reddits.

For example r/AskHistorians have amazing quality content due to very strict moderation.

Are there any other examples folks know about? This is the only subreddit I see suggested as being well moderated when this comes up, unfortunately I'm not into the subject

Twitter is driven by engagement, which in turn is driven by controversy.

For the subreddits I track with RSS I've yet to encounter anything political or someone not arguing constructively. Is this something with the platform or each forum? I often don't mince words either. After a while in a community one tends to have "seen it all", so it'll be longer between nuggets produced.

How many users subscribe to those subreddits you've mentioned? I have made a similar the observation, I have a few subreddits that are very niche with only a few subscribers -- discussions are very much on point and civil. Usually, the quality and decency of discourse on a subreddit seems to be inversely related to the number of people engaging in it.

Good point. Larger averages and higher numbers will increase noise to signal by sheer mathematical outcomes. I'm on nothing extraordinary, so between 100k - 3M users per forum on reddit. They are heavily moderated, so anything less than on point, is for good and for worse removed / moved to other subreddits.

I do suspect many might be subscribing to forums that invite a bit wider discussions, and that this brings out more commenters but also less technically viable comments. I mainly use reddit / HN for RSS filtering, so is more interested in the news, but always check comments for interesting counterpoints and tips.

Why don't you just exclusively subscribe to the subreddits that interest you?

I'm using the web and it's crazy how much memory consumes this website. After a couple of clicks the browser starts to suffer.

You're answering to a comment about a people/platform problem at Reddit with a technical issue at Reddit. While both are maybe true, one is easy to fix (with the right organization) while the other there is no solution in sight, that works at global scale. Most communities keep their feeling by remaining smaller (like HN) and strict moderation, both of which goes against what Reddit is aiming for.