Other communities with responses as good as the submissions?

Question

A friend and I were discussing what it is about HN that maintains such a grip on our attention, and I realized something which is probably obvious to a lot of you: I often spend just as much time reading through and digesting the comments here as I do the original posts. It isn't uncommon for me to learn way more about the subject matter from comments than from the post itself.Are there other communities, online or off, with a similar balance between the quality of the original source material (whatever that means in context) and the responses to it? For example: an online forum dedicated to an esoteric interest; a book club or writing group; your local bicycle repair shop; etc.(A lot of workplaces probably exhibit this balance, but let's leave them out of the definition of "communities" for the purposes of this post.)

mtmail · Accepted Answer

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/ is heavy moderated, no anecdotes allowed, some threads have half the comments hidden/deleted.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians has high quality researched answers but sometimes the first answer comes after hours or days so you need to bookmark the interesting threads.
Related "Ask HN: Alternatives to HN for non-Hacker News?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25318880

rchaud · Answer

A community is only as good as the quality of the moderation. HN is unique in that it has very dedicated people who read every comment and take time to explain why a comment isn't productive to the conversation. That minimizes trolling/dunking, which has sunk countless other communities.I've also noticed that other message boards usually become "productized" once it has a large enough audience, and that tends to drive down the quality of conversation as well. Since the HN forum is an offshoot of YC, that hasn't happened. Well, I guess HN could technically be considered a job board for YC companies, but those postings are dwarfed by the regular posts.

Georgelemental · Answer

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ and a good portion of his blogroll

tboyd47 · Answer

Surprisingly, YouTube comments can have a high signal-to-noise ratio.

Kye · Answer

Sharing them is a catch-22 situation. If I tell you what they are, it might bring in more interesting people, but it also runs the risk of pushing it closer to an exponential growth curve that overwhelms the (usually volunteer) moderation.
What seems to keep HN from going too far off the deep end is:
1: A clear, minimal set of guidelines that covers all bases
2: A mod who seems to have a good sense of where to enforce it and, I hope, gets paid to do it
3: A community that mostly seems to check itself
4: A custom forum that allows experimentation with system-level experiments in moderation and someone to develop those features

spacechild1 · Answer

Public service announcement: there are many, many awful HN comments. They just hide behind an authoritative tone, so it is much harder to spot the bullshit. This becomes obvious when you read comments about topics that you are an expert in. Even then we still tend to fall for the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.That being said, there are indeed many experts around here and I find it interesting to read their opinions (if they fall in their area of expertise :-)

wodenokoto · Answer

> I often spend just as much time reading through and digesting the comments here as I do the original posts.I think most of us spend more time with comments than articles &hellip;

ozzythecat · Answer

For personal finance and investing topics, I recommend the BogleHeads community.https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php

xrayarx · Answer

I&lsquo;d like to point out stackexchange.comVariety of topics, highly competent answers, low noise

jasonpeacock · Answer

https://www.metafilter.com/ (and https://ask.metafilter.com/ ) has successfully maintained a high-quality community for decades through active, strong, and consistent moderation.

dorianmariefr · Answer

https://lobste.rs is pretty good

marto1 · Answer

I'd argue not only are responses good, but very often the discussions are much higher quality than the submission itself.

Other communities with responses as good as the submissions?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ and a good portion of his blogroll

Surprisingly, YouTube comments can have a high signal-to-noise ratio.

> I often spend just as much time reading through and digesting the comments here as I do the original posts.
I think most of us spend more time with comments than articles …

For personal finance and investing topics, I recommend the BogleHeads community.
https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php

I‘d like to point out stackexchange.com
Variety of topics, highly competent answers, low noise

https://www.metafilter.com/ (and https://ask.metafilter.com/ ) has successfully maintained a high-quality community for decades through active, strong, and consistent moderation.

https://lobste.rs is pretty good

I'd argue not only are responses good, but very often the discussions are much higher quality than the submission itself.