
Ex-Reddit exec launches 'Imzy,' a warmer, fuzzier Reddit - Osiris30
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/04/22/fired-reddit-exec-quietly-launches-izzy-a-warmer-fuzzier-reddit/
======
JBReefer
I don't think reddit's problem is harassment, I think it's groupthink,
extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading. I wish that there
was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes,
local news, etc. Maybe that's just not possible?

I really love how self-enforcing the community is here towards snark and lazy
comments, which have absolutely destroyed Reddit. Edginess is much easier than
proper discussion.

~~~
tensor
While I definitely enjoy more nuanced and interesting discourse, I don't
actually think that reddit has any problem.

There is a self declared "elite" group of users on reddit who are always
echoing exactly your sentiments to the point that it's almost a chant:
groupthink, low quality comments, uniformed discourse! Of course, recognizing
that there is a need and desire by some for a place to have more detailed and
nuanced discussions is not bad in of itself. Arguably its' a very good thing.

Where it turns bad is in their approach to a solution. Instead of "hey, people
want a place where they can have more interesting discussions, let's go create
one, promote, and moderate it!", they think "hm, these people with their memes
and images, that's a problem. They shouldn't do that. We need to stop them and
show them the right way to run a subreddit!"

This latter thinking is incredibly intolerant, arrogant, and dangerous. It's
the same type of thing that leads to laws being passed based on a particular
religion or other philosophy that tries to ban thoughts different to theirs.

This is why I say that reddit doesn't have a "problem" with low quality
content. That's what a lot of people enjoy and they _should_ have a place they
can do that. If you want to change peoples minds, use words, not force.

All that being said, I recognize that you didn't actually advocate that reddit
be changed. More to your point, as others have said, one of the great things
about reddit is that people are free to start their own subreddit and make it
into whatever they wish. There are a lot of smaller more heavily moderated
subreddits that have great discussion. People who are upset with the bigger
subs should look for these or even create their own.

~~~
Houshalter
I upvoted you because for a moment I thought you were talking about the
political censorship that happens on reddit. Which I agree is awful and I hate
that. Mods censor opposing political opinions all the time and get away with
it.

But just standard moderation of content? That's absolutely necessary. Without
moderations subreddits degrade into memes and low effort comments. You only
need to look at web archive to see the quality of many subreddits vastly
decline as they got big.

As a mod of a default subreddit, we remove joke comments and image posts. And
it's not like it's a new thing, we have always done that. And the quality is
still far from perfect, but it's much better than other subs.

Sometimes I click on the comments of a reddit post looking to see more
discussion about it. And instead it's just a bunch of jokes. Often by a
handful of people that lurk in the rising posts, and make sure they get their
comments there first, and so beat all the other comments (reddit's comment
sorting algorithm is god awful and easily exploited like that.) Even if they
don't have anything to say, or any insight into the subject.

Another problem is there are two different types of users. "Serious" users,
for lack of a better name, and "entertainment" users. The users there for
entertainment upvote images, jokes, etc. Serious users are looking for
discussion and debate and whatever. These two categories aren't easily
separated and often mix. The users looking for entertainment often take over
subs about serious subjects, e.g. worldnews.

The top posts become whatever pleases the lowest common denominator, or
requires the least effort to read. Short articles are easier read the long
articles, and images are even easier, and provocative headlines even easier.
So image posts and headlines like "mildly important official says something
politically unpopular" take over entirely.

~~~
tensor
I'm not at all against moderation. I'm against the idea that subs that don't
moderate out memes and jokes and images are somehow "bad" and should be
removed. There have been more than one hostile takeovers of more popular subs,
driven by the idea that these subs need to change. To me, this behaviour is
wrong, these people should be making new subs instead.

In short, we should stop saying that "low quality content subs" are a problem.
They really are not. The problem is instead a lack of well moderated subs,
and/or a lack of promoting these or inability to discover them.

~~~
ikeboy
>inability to discover them.

As long as this is true, what's wrong with taking over a sub, if that's what
the people want? Making a new sub requires getting everyone to change.

You might as well ask those who wanted the old sub behavior to make their own
sub.

There's no inherently right decision as to what the default should be, and in
particular that decision isn't "just do what the original mods/creators want".

~~~
rndgermandude
Honest question: How do you (or whoever is doing the takeover) know "what
people want"?

After all we are talking about subreddits that somehow got popular with what
they were doing... So why does a popular subreddit have to change and why do
the people who made the subreddit into the popular thing it was have to find a
new place instead of whoever has a problem with how things are done making
their own and new place?

~~~
ikeboy
Well, democracy answers this by asking people directly. So one way to do it is
poll the sub's members. Or, you could see whether the stuff that gets deleted
was highly voted before it was deleted. If people don't like certain content,
it won't get voted up.

I'm not sure which cases of hostile takeovers they're referring to, so I don't
know what happened there, but presumably they either had a mod on their side,
or got an admin to step in. The mod's behavior must have been pretty bad if an
admin intervened.

~~~
anc84
If you pull the "the majority decides" card then there is no decision
necessary. Each subreddit is defined by the majority of its users. Simple as
that.

~~~
fineIllregister
Not necessarily. The algorithms that do the sorting might be biased toward
certain content (for instance, if it highly values quickly upvoted content, it
would be biased toward short memes and against long-form articles). Reddit
voting isn't just a straight majority vote.

------
A_COMPUTER
I don't know how to phrase this in an HN-approved positive way, but I think it
needs to be said: the graphics are disturbingly infantilizing if this site is
supposed to be for anyone over the age of 9.

~~~
kwgardner
We made something that makes us happy. Will it appeal to every single human
being? No, of course not, nor should it. And that's okay! Nothing on the
internet has that power. Not even cats.

We chose to go in this direction because it made all of us happy to go to work
every day, and whenever we showed people different versions of our site,
whether it was family and friends or in more formal user testing, people
tended to like it more with the dinosaurs than without. It's okay if you don't
like it, or even if a lot of different people don't like it.

Though, fwiw, once you got off that page it looks more like a regular site and
there aren't as many dinos.

~~~
morgante
Who is your target audience though?

If this is the Reddit for 9-year-olds, spot on! I also think there are some
other (older) demos who would be attracted to a space like this, but I'm
interested in who you think it is.

Also, I'm sorry for the negativity (some of it from me). While I largely agree
with the commentary here (that the world doesn't necessarily need a safe space
community), I know how hard it is to put anything new out there and commend
you for trying to improve upon Reddit. I genuinely wish an HN for "other
things" existed and hope you can succeed.

~~~
kwgardner
Thanks!

It sounds like there's definitely some stuff we could be doing to improve our
branding--we're new and we're learning, and the word "positive" seems to have
been misconstrued by everyone from what we meant it to be to who we are as a
company.

One thing, just as a note, is that we're not trying to be a "safe space"
community, and we're not trying to censor disagreement, remove negativity, or
even get rid of all hate and mean comments. Those all have a purpose, and
without them it becomes an empty echo chamber and there's no point in actually
talking.

Also, the fact that we're trying to take a stronger stance on harassment is
just a tiny, tiny bit of what we're doing differently. We're not trying to be
a safer Reddit, or even trying to be a direct Reddit competitor.

What we've built is in response to issues we've seen in all different
platforms--Reddit, sure, but also Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, and
more. We've tried to build a really broad, flexible platform that makes it so
communities can do all the things they want to in one place, with a developer
platform to make sure that's possible. We've built in a payments system. We've
designed it to be more user and mobile friendly instead of an outdated forum
style. Those are honestly the things that I care most about, and the
possibilities they open are what I think will have the biggest impact on
hopefully making Imzy a really viable community platform that I want to work
on, not the things that we're trying to prevent.

~~~
snurk
> we're trying to take a stronger stance on harassment

Do you believe it's possible for Anti-GG people as well as GG people to
harass?

I ask because the prevailing culture at Twitter and Github is that harassment
only comes from one direction: from white men. They don't want to act on
claims of "reverse-discrimination".

However, many other people like myself believe that there is an equal or
greater amount of harassment and threats from the Social Justice world.

I'm genuinely interested to know your attitude about this.

~~~
kwgardner
Yes, absolutely. Everyone can get too entrenched, and it's really easy for
anyone to divide it into an "us" and a "them," and once you do that, it's too
easy to really villainize the other side. Once you decide that the other side
has absolutely nothing positive to contribute, then communication breaks down
and it turns into snowball throwing that can escalate into grenade throwing.

It doesn't matter if it's GG or anything else. People tend to have valid
complaints on both sides, regardless of how small, and both tend to have some
guilt. People on both sides oversimplify the arguments of the other side and
overgeneralize their actions as all black people this, or all white people
this, or all men this, or all women this, or all... etc. And when that
happens, it's bad regardless of who the group is and which side they're on,
because it's guaranteed to be inaccurate about a vast number of people who are
being unfairly characterized as something they're not.

There's a reason the term "social justice warrior" has come into existence,
and it's because the people on what might generally be seen as the "good" or
"right" side of the issue can also become way to militant, and when you become
militant, you stop trying to work together to fix things, get people to see
your way, and bring the sides together and start just trying to kill off the
other side in order to win. (Now, I do think that term gets thrown around WAY
too loosely for anyone who does anything you don't like and is often not
accurate, but that goes back to the above paragraph.) Social justice is good.
Social justice warriors are not.

Sorry for lots of rambling. It's hard to talk about such a complex issue
concisely.

~~~
humanrebar
> Social justice is good

Honestly, I don't even think there is consensus on what social justice is. If
you asked ten people who _love_ social justice to define it, you'll get twelve
answers, especially if you ask about specific reforms and initiatives.

And you'll get glaring omissions. Complex tax codes and opaque regulations are
great for the powerful and awful for the little guy. Fixing them isn't
considered social justice for some reason, though.

------
Gratsby
I see "warmer, fuzzier" and then I go to the site, and the example thread
displayed in the mobile image has the following responses in it:

* "The best evuh"

* "hell yeah"

* "Speechless, it's F*cking beautiful"

It might be a more positive site, but it doesn't look like they are going for
high quality discussion.

------
kickme444
Just to put it out there, we never said anything about warmer or fuzzier. We
had no intention of having any press coverage for a few months, perhaps that
was a mistake for this reason exactly.

~~~
sixQuarks
Hey, don't let negative comments get to you. Always happens on HN. Best
example being DropBox launch, top comments said something along the lines of
"this will never work".

As a long-time reddit user, I like what I see so far. I submitted my email for
invite, how long does that usually take?

~~~
minimaxir
Citing an outlier event is not strong evidence against negative-comments-are-
always-wrong.

The complaints about Imzy on this submission are justified by the commenters
and, in my opinion, accurate.

~~~
sixQuarks
DropBox is certainly not an outlier on HN, it's just the largest example.

------
cm3
My biggest complaint with reddit and hn is that there is a down-vote button.
It serves no purpose the way I consume and participate in discussions. If I
don't agree or vehemently disagree with something I pass over it and that's
it. I've had the opportunity to downvote and even when I had a strong opinions
against what's stated in a comment I never once downvoted. In fact, I've never
used the downvoting link at all. Also, I find it enlightening to read opinions
of people who are on the opposite end of some belief spectrum. It broadens my
view and helps me better formulate what I think.

Hence, you either ban accounts for disturbing discussions repeatedly or just
let everyone say whatever they think. A voting system that tries to hide
comments is a bad idea.

I guess my issue is with what JBReefer calls groupthink and brigading. I
personally would have called stuff-people-don't-like-to-hear.

Slashdot's systems used to work very well, but it's fallen apart due to the
current occupants of their comment sections.

HN already is an echo chamber of sorts, so trying to filter that even more is
wrong.

~~~
john2x
What if downvotes were a limited resource (maybe time limited)? It could help
if downvoters had to think twice about pushing that button, in case something
else deserved their downvote more.

EDIT: or a downvote requires a comment of why the parent was downvoted and/or
a selection of pre-defined reasons e.g. factually incorrect, misleading,
trolling, spam, etc (similar to Dota2's report system).

~~~
b3b0p
My thought is downvote, but it will take away from your karma (-1 point). The
only way it wouldn't or you get that point back is if you left a comment,
possibly responding why you downvoted in the first place (factual, wrong, not
relevant to the discussion, etc). Quid pro quo.

~~~
john2x
I think putting "real" value to karma would be a bad idea. People already
karma whore even if it has no real value (although it has perceived value). I
imagine it would be worse if it has some actual (limited) value.

------
shrugger
Should people be striving to remove friction in discourse in the first place?
I mean, if something hurts to hear, surely that should sound the alarm that
it's worth confronting, rather than running away from, right?

Reddit already moderates discussions quite often, and the conversations there
don't often reach the level of those here at HN, but still I wonder if maybe
too much is too much when it comes to moderation.

I could say something totally offensive and uncalled for on HN, so long as I
back it up with why it _needs_ to be said. In other words, I'd argue that the
narrative isn't all that matters when it comes to discourse.

Somewhat offtopic, when I look at their material and theming, I think about
whether or not I think I'd find people there worth talking to, and that answer
is no. ycombinator's landing page, or hell, even Reddit's front page, looks
leagues more professional than the weird children's book graphics of Imzy.

I just don't understand what's to be gained in the utilitarian sense by
telling people what they can and cannot contribute to a discussion. I really
like the idea of just throwing it all out there and then gathering up and
working on whatever sticks. Maybe that's why Reddit is semi-appealing.

~~~
true_religion
> looks leagues more professional than the weird children's book graphics of
> Imzy.

Wait... isn't Imzy actually for children? Cutsy name, cutsy graphics, tight
moderation. I thought this is basically the second coming of Gaia online.

~~~
minimaxir
"Cutsy name, cutsy graphics" is the design for 99% of new startups.

I blame Snapchat.

------
nv-vn
The article doesn't really explain how anything is actually going to work in
practice. By 'warmier and fuzzier' do we mean it's targeted at kids (as the
graphics might suggest)? In that case, will they be moderating profanity and
whatever they deem inappropriate for children? Or is it just going to be based
on reducing harassment (as they mentioned in the article)? And in that case,
what would constitute harassment and how would it be dealt with? It seems like
the idea is very broad without an actual target at what it should be. I don't
think Reddit was the right model to base it off of for what they're attempting
to do.

~~~
kwgardner
Hi!

A few things.

1\. We're not trying to be "warmer and fuzzier"\--those are the author's
words.

2\. We're not trying to be a children's site--we just wanted to make something
that made us (and hopefully others) happy, and that included cute dinosaurs.

3\. We're not based on Reddit, nor are we trying to replace them.

(As a note, the author of this article didn't talk to us, and they haven't
actually seen any more of our site than you have.)

Here's what we ARE doing. We're building a community site based on issues
we've seen in all different platforms--Reddit, sure, but also Tumblr, Twitter,
Facebook, Patreon, and more. We've tried to build a really broad, flexible
platform that makes it so communities can do all the things they want to in
one place, with a developer platform to make sure that's possible. We've built
in a payments system. We've designed it to be more user and mobile friendly
instead of an outdated forum style. Those are honestly the things that I care
most about, and the possibilities they open are what I think will have the
biggest impact on hopefully making Imzy a really viable community platform
that I want to work on, not the things that we're trying to prevent.

Hope that helps explain our thinking. I'm happy to elaborate further if you
have any questions.

~~~
nv-vn
Thanks for reaching out to answer my questions. I was really confused visiting
the website after I read the article because barely anything matched up with
the descriptions they gave.

------
guscost
Here's the challenge: No community aggregator will ever be able to filter and
promote exactly the stuff you in particular want to see. Everyone has
different tastes and opinions and the only thing that can possibly come from
community-driven aggregation is list of the most popular stuff in that
community. You'll have to actually research and filter content yourself to get
any better results.

The best crowdsourced results seem to come from specialized communities (HN,
subreddits, maybe this new site).

For anything better you'll have to go through the volumes of unwanted content
yourself, or have a trusted curator do it for you.

------
dragonbonheur
That "get an invite" business is really annoying. Do they want people to join
or not? It's an antiquated way to get attention...

~~~
pbtflakes
Reason being it's a semi-private beta, not public release. Invite-only lets
them ease into managing a larger userbase and the associated content.

~~~
kickme444
It's true, this is the reason we are invite only right now.

------
StevePerkins
The highest-quality discussion that I've found on the Internet generally came
from "phpBB"-based website forums, built around specific interests or
communities.

Part of the reason for that is the common interest in a shared niche. However,
I believe that most important factor by far is the lack of up or down "voting"
buttons.

On any platform with voting, the "imaginary Internet points" tend to drive the
user experience. Upvotes trigger reward behavior, just like the social aspect
of Farmville-style mindless freemium games. Downvotes trigger social anxiety
and drive behavior also. Trolls relish it, while normal users are often
insecure about it. Even on an "elite" platform like Hacker News, how many
comments basically boil down to, "Hey guys, why did some of you downvote my
last comment???".

Basically, voting turns a discussion platform into an MMO video game for a
large portion of the userbase. It leads to groupthink, "brigades" and
manipulation, low-quality memes and running jokes, etc. I think its negative
impact on high-quality discussion easily matches or exceeds its positive
impact on self-moderation.

Ultimately, I think the ideal model of discussion platform governance is a
"benevolent dictatorship" of active mods, without user voting. It doesn't
scale very well, but it's the common denominator among the highest-quality
communities I've ever seen. The problem is since a micro-generation of
Internet users is now accustomed to the MMO model, online discussion without
voting is just... well... _boring_. Going back to that is like trading
processed corn syrup for organic vegetables. Most aren't going to do it.

Downvote if you disagree. :)

~~~
rustynails
This is a great comment. I'll expand it with a few other points that are along
similar lines to what you mention.

Most (if not all) platforms suffer from 2 extremes, open discussion involves
conflict which is seen as bad but can end up with insightful discussion and
robust conclusion. Secondly, forums suffer from prejudice of the moderators.
There was a good example recently of this in a HN posting on moderators. I'll
illustrate with a topical example for modern times.

Why do people use the term misogynist instead of sexist? It's to reinforce a
belief that sexism is a male behaviour, which, in itself is sexist. If you
read the recent article on moderation, sexism didn't rate a mention but
misogyny did. In other words, certain types of thinking are forbidden and some
forms of prejudice are encouraged.

When I read about this new spinoff, my first two thoughts were on avoidance of
robust discussion and the prejudice and politics of the founders and
moderators. Here's hoping they don't make the same politically correct but
prejudiced mistakes that most sites make.

------
tdyen
I find in some forums the issue is the group think enforced by moderators.

The StackOverflow forums suffer from this as they are community moderated and
many questions get closed as Off Topic which basically are chats about
something tangential to the area or opinion but are valuable none the less or
I wouldn't have gone to the page to begin with. Effectively moderators promote
group think.

Some bizarre things Ive seen in its computer science forum are questions being
closed when about things like "what are the current areas of research in
blah?". Somehow its gathered a bunch of crap mods and computer science doesn't
really get discussed there.

If its truly out of forum then these forums need to allow some kind of "Open
Discussion" tag or move to another forum ability.

------
lowglow
We're building a similar type of experience over at baqqer for organic
communities to exist for people to talk about the things they love. We could
use some feedback from the community if you have some time.
[https://baqqer.com/explore/tags/startups](https://baqqer.com/explore/tags/startups)

This url might move to
[https://baqqer.com/groups/startups](https://baqqer.com/groups/startups) or
[https://baqqer.com/communities/startups](https://baqqer.com/communities/startups)
because I'm currently actively working on the codebase.

~~~
bpchaps
Really odd critique. You might get a lot of confusion from people seeing it as
an underlined URL and mentally think "bagger" initially. Especially since the
a and the first q kind of continue where the next letter's curl ends. Part of
the problem might just be that two Qs in a row don't really mentally parse
well when read - for me, at least.

~~~
deelowe
This is exactly what I though "bagger? Is that a low rider website?

~~~
lowglow
Yeah, I see what you're saying. I wonder what would help? An entirely new
name? It's been on my mind quite a bit, thinking about what can simultaneously
convey community, prototyping, making, and growing. It's difficult.

------
pessimizer
There have always been heavily moderated forums for users to interact with
representatives of media corporations. That's why Reddit and 4chan got so huge
and influential (not being that.) I can't tell what the secret sauce is
supposed to be from this article.

------
cookiecaper
Someone is going to get the mix right on news aggregators one day and it's
going to be big. Definitely a category of applications to keep a pulse on.

~~~
rhapsodic
I disagree that there's such a thing as THE right mix. Some people will prefer
the wild west, and others will prefer heavily moderated forums. From the looks
of the cartoon characters on the home page, Imzy looks like it's targeting the
infant-to-toddler demographic.

~~~
egypturnash
I read it as more "taking the cute Reddit alien and running with it". YMMV
obviously.

~~~
kickme444
I have spent a good amount of my last 6 years or so trying to be happy and
helping others online to be happy. What we wanted with our mascot was
something that evoked happiness. Admittedly it's a fine line to walk between
cute/happy/childish and we need to find the right mix.

~~~
rhapsodic
The home page looks like a scene from the Teletubbies TV show. It does not
look like something designed to appeal to well-adjusted adults.

~~~
calibraxis
Fine to me. Better to "err" on that side, as a signal to hate groups who
fester on reddit. Furthermore, you can take it as self-mocking irony, if you
prefer...

~~~
rhapsodic
I prefer to take it as I perceive it, to wit, as a dumb business decision that
will likely be re-thought and re-done at some point.

------
DanBC
That "avoid undue negativty" stuff went out the window, eh?

------
rayalez
Who wants to try it out - come join our startup community on Imzy:

[https://www.imzy.com/startup](https://www.imzy.com/startup)

------
stegosaurus
Isn't the actual issue that every discussion seems to descend into politics?

Could you create a platform without that?

I can't say I've noticed issues on cat photo subreddits, or /r/unixporn, or
whatever else.

There seems to be this slow and inevitable descent into discussing politics at
every available opportunity, and not in a humourous sense.

If you create a subreddit about some social issue, then the social issue will
be discussed there.

------
gallonofmilk
How did an ex-exec create a competing platform? did reddit not have him sign a
non-compete or does it just not matter in CA?

------
randommodnar
My big question: how do you deal with community leadership and moderation? Is
the first person to create a particular community that community's dictator
for life? How can large communities, with populations larger than many
nations, achieve practical, representative, and accountable self-governance?

------
ryanlol
I think this screenshot I took from their site sums up how this is going to
end up. [https://i.imgur.com/X7z4OnF.png](https://i.imgur.com/X7z4OnF.png)

I can't imagine "This is the best evuh!!!!" being a positive contribution to
_any_ conversation.

------
StanislavPetrov
For one I'm glad that this guy is offering a "safe" place for discussion.
Hopefully all the people who need to be shielded from "offensive" ideas will
gravitate to this website. In a truly ideal world, sterilization would be part
of the enrollment process.

------
chippy
What every social network effect platform or application ignores is group
psychology.

All conflicts on these services can be boiled down to how human groups work.

If these services addressed group psychology up front and at the forefront of
their solution, then we could see people being more aware of their group and
groups and where they stand as individuals.

I'd like to see an attempt to reduce conflict and increase collaboration
between groups, peoples, ideologies, for example.

The "problems" that all these sites are labeled with all boil down to a mass
of different people clashing against each other. They are not problems, they
are symptoms of how groups are behaving on the internet, many for the first
time, and people within their groups do not have the tools to deal with other
groups properly.

------
romanovcode
So the "safer" means more group-think and getting banned if you disagree with
someone?

------
kinkdr
Cool interface. I would love to read about the back end details.

What stack do they use? What database? Cache-engine?

~~~
anjc
Why would you want to know/ask about their cache engine when it's not clear
they have one, or even have a single user?

Did you, by any chance, configure the site's cache engine... :)

~~~
kinkdr
Because I am curious. I love to read about what stack each company chooses to
use and why. And even more so for brand new companies that start from scratch
and have so many options.

For example, did they use RethinkDB for the real time features? Or something
more conservative like RabbitMQ?

How about their primary data store? Postgres? MySQL? Or something more trendy?

What about the language? Python? Node.js? Something more adventurous, like go?
Why?

No, I am not affiliated in anyway with them. If you google my username you
will see my project, which has nothing to do with them, and is a bit too
Xrated for HN.

------
stesch
I'm a long time Reddit user. Somehow I missed this information.

------
ForFreedom
Why do they have Teletubbies, that look like the head of the alien logo with 3
horns

------
raverbashing
"Positive, healthy, diverse"

Looks like fun. And by fun I mean more toxic than tumblr in echoing the same
"positive" thoughts and certainly criticism against those who don't share the
same opinions

~~~
Snargorf
"Healthy, positive communities" is an oxymoron.

A healthy community has healthy and sometimes necessarily intense disagreement
in its discourse (just as a healthy mind questions itself).

A "positive" community has no disagreement at all - or at least none that go
deep enough to resolve really serious differences.

The only way to maintain a "positive" community the way they mean is to simply
ban everyone with views outside a narrow opinion corridor. But _whose_
opinions will define that allowed opinion corridor? From the euphemistically
fuzzy language and focus on good emotions, I think I know.

~~~
CM30
I don't know. A lot of small communities about very esoteric subjects tend to
be both healthy and pretty much entirely positive. My secondary forum about
the Wario series has a very upbeat atmosphere without too much in the way of
disagreement, but that's only a thing because the subject itself only appeals
to a limited amount of people. Same sort of thing with the forums I've seen
based on the Super Mario Bros movie and the Mario RPG games.

But that's always going to be impossible if a community has a mainstream
appeal, since large communities will inevitably have different groups with
different interests and opinions, and Dunbar's Number means people can only
retain super close relationships with between 100 and 250 people.

~~~
duncanawoods
I'll give you an "I don't know" back. IMHO the best communities are those that
retain bitter rivals. The worst are the ones that have a high churn of
beginners parroting received wisdom in an echo chamber without any of the
necessary experience.

I love nothing more than when high level participants who have fundamentally
irreconcilable differences have explosive but on-topic fights. Even better
when they surprise themselves and agree. These are special experiences you can
learn so much from.

~~~
nv-vn
Definitely. One of my favorite IRC channels is pretty much exactly this.
Everyone disagrees about what their favorite technology is or what their
political views are on said channel, but arguments are encouraged and often
last hours at a time. Since all users (including moderators) are displayed as
+v (voice), it helps create a sense of comfort disagreeing with people because
there's no perceived risk to disagreeing with moderators/"power users" and in
turn basically any discussion or opinion is welcome to be voiced. In a way,
the friendships formed there are nicer than on other channels because you're
comfortable bringing anything that comes to mind up without tarnishing your
relationship and just arguing it out (+ maybe even changing your mind). This
should be what online communities are designed to be like.

------
mccr8
"Quietly" should really get added to a list of semi-clickbaity words that get
excised from Hacker News titles.

[https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.c...](https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+quietly)

~~~
dang
I'm not sure it's quite that bad, but we'll take it out of the HN title for
you.

------
user10001
Reddit seems pretty adolescent in general. What comes to my mind when I think
of it is cartoons/comics, video games, celebrities and mainstream news. So
does warm and fuzzy mean they are catering to a more mature audience or what?

------
atomical
You created an account just to post this? Are you affiliated with them?

~~~
johansch
This is a pattern for new sites/services that suddenly get press and then get
noticed in random aggregators (like HN).

Since the site is new, it doesn't get _that_ much attention from the
aggregator's core audience, and any negative comments are swiftly downvoted
after 10-20 employees register and downvote them via central command. This has
happened to me on HN before; I guess because I take a perverse kind of
enjoyment out of sabotaging astroturfing attempts.

All of this makes perfect business sense; I would probably do it too if I were
in this kind of position.

It also makes sense for HN to build better defenses against attacks like this.

~~~
dang
Only established users can downvote. It takes 500 karma. That's the highest
threshold we have.

~~~
johansch
Ah. That's good.

I guess that's why it has taken a couple of hours for my comments to heavily
downvoted (comments that were initially quite heavily upvoted) in my previous
attempts at smashing obvious astroturfs - their @all-employees mail needs to
get to the employees who happen to have that amount of HN karma.

I do realize that going further than this in terms of defenses would be quite
a complicated thing.

~~~
striking
Or perhaps there are people who disagree with you, and are not affiliated with
that company. People who think that accusations of astroturfing are actually
pretty mean, and shouldn't be made without evidence.

People like me.

~~~
DanBC
I also downvote accusations of shilling. As I understand it people should send
those to the email address, and not dump them in the thread.

I don't know if accusations of shilling are the kind of thing I should be
flagging though.

~~~
pvg
Without evidence beyond 'I don't like this person's views', which is just
about all of them, I think they're reliably flagworthy.

------
ben_jones
Anyone else get reminded of Eugenics when hearing about stuff like this? It's
not entirely a history of violence, but of keeping the "undesirables" out and
congregating people with attributes they agree with in order to strengthen
those attributes in the general population.

I'm just saying slippery slope and all..

------
nathancahill
4chan raid in 3.. 2..

