Social media has been a fascinating experiment in human behaviour. We’ve long had discussion forums built around technical topics, from the early days of Usenet, through the likes of Slashdot and Digg, the arrival of Stack Overflow, and today the popularity of Reddit and some smaller sites like HN. Each has developed its own culture. Each has dealt with the need to prioritise the most valuable contributions and reduce the visibility of negative ones in its own way. And yet there have been some recurring themes.

On the positive side, all of the above have attracted many people to their communities who have contributed useful or interesting points. We all give away our thoughts and experience for free while participating in these discussions, but we gain in return from the freely shared knowledge and experiences of others. I also appreciate those who take the time to vote/moderate so that the best contributions stand out. Overall I find these online discussions extremely valuable and I’m sure others do as well.

On the negative side, there are some common failure modes. There have always been the trolls who will post offensive or misleading comments, and even when it’s a small minority, they can be disproportionately disruptive. There have always been the Dunning-Kruger contributors who would insist they were correct even as others tried to explain why they weren’t, and then the people who do know what they’re doing feel obliged to waste time repeatedly setting the record straight so no-one comes along later and gets misled by the incorrect or misleading contributions. I will never understand the current fascination with getting AI bots to contribute mediocre or just plain wrong comments in these discussions. But the worst recurring pathology by far, IMHO, is when there is some form of community moderation but that goes off the rails. It killed SO by deterring good contributors for petty reasons. It has killed many a promising subreddit; I have recently given up participating in several myself that used to be interesting, because their moderators started killing entire posts retrospectively, which repeatedly cut off discussions where some contributors had already taken the time to write up good solutions to someone’s problem or share their relevant experiences.

I’m not sure anyone has really got this right at scale yet. On smaller sites like HN, the moderation can be very good, but that relies on the fact that it can be managed by a small number of decent people. If your community is big enough that it needs to be more self-policing then the time-honoured question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is as relevant as ever. I strongly suspect that the only real answer to this is some kind of hierarchy where the operators of a forum set culture from the top, then just as a few negative contributors can spoil things for everyone and so some form of moderation is introduced, so a few negative moderators can spoil things for everyone and so some ability to guide or if necessary remove the use of moderation privileges is needed.