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?
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it’s because Reddit has so incredibly many subreddits…? Reddit as a whole is therefore, naturally, very fractured. Whereas on HN we all share the same frontpage, the same ‘Ask Hn’, 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 ‘place’?