Anyone Feel Reddit Style Forums Are Soulless?

Question

This is a weird thought I know, especially given Hacker News uses the same sort of format.But I feel like the format of forums like that really dehumanise the folks posting there, and feel almost nothing like a community due to their design.I suspect part of it is because the lack of identifiers for accounts make it hard to tell anyone apart, and the strict separation of 'communities' about a particular topic mean you never really get to know anyone in particular, they're just names that occasionally crop up when you're reading threads about something or another.It feels like a system designed to treat members like interchangable content producers, where no one would notice if any one user left or was kicked out.Anyone else feel this way?

OnionBlender · Accepted Answer

I feel the opposite. I hate discussions that show comments in a flat list in the order they were posted. I much prefer the tree structure that reddit and hacker news uses.
Examples:
The Ars Technical comments. People that want to reply to a comment have to quote the other comment, which makes following a discussion more trouble than it is worth.
The Steam forums are usually worse than a game's subreddit. Although that is also caused by poor moderation.

pmontra · Answer

I don't want to establish a relationship with someone on those forums. I usually don't even write there. I land in some random page following links from a search engine when I look for solutions to a problem. When I do write in a forum or the comments of a site I really don't care who's writing the other comments. There are too many people and I don't know any of them. Even here on HN after about 9 years I remember less than 5 nicks and that's not a problem.

skolskoly · Answer

The consequence of user-feedback ranking systems tends to be that content needs to be either novel and attention grabbing, or already popular amongst the user base. Discussion that is niche, or just mildly interesting, is often given less attention than spam and trolling, just because it isn't attention grabbing enough to rise above the noise. The most active users of HN, Reddit, etc. are homogeneous and interchangeable because that is what the environment selects for. More distinct posters and groups exist but regardless of their quality, they will not be able to become more visible (actively engaging with the community) without losing that quality. Obviously, this phenomenon applies to more than just web forums.

mixmastamyk · Answer

The drawback to that, where you "know all" about the people in the community, is the lack of privacy. As folks learn more about BigTech social media (with real-names&trade;), some of us are learning that perhaps the old-school anonymous chat handles were better in a number of ways.In other words, if the cost of community is having my life bought and sold without my knowledge or consent... well, I'll take an anonymous handle, and be happy with being a cog, thanks.

is_true · Answer

My 2 cents.I was part of my subreddit for a city/country between 2012-2016 and we started doing meetups a couple of times a year, and with a group of those people we meet almost every Saturday to play soccer.It felt like a group chat with a bunch of friends, then the subreddit became one of the "default" communities for new people that registered in reddit and it grew really fast and the community dissapeared.

cpach · Answer

I agree to some degree.Maybe it&rsquo;s because Reddit has so incredibly many subreddits&hellip;? Reddit as a whole is therefore, naturally, very fractured. Whereas on HN we all share the same frontpage, the same &lsquo;Ask Hn&rsquo;, and 'dang is the moderator of it all. HN also has quite generous profile pages, where you can write a lot, or nothing at all. And many of us who comment here work in the same industry.Perhaps these factors contribute to making HN more of a &lsquo;place&rsquo;?