maybe bring good old'school forums back. man, i miss those times.
One with a strong, mostly fresh take on mobile access would be super interesting.
I think if yc fell, communities may segregate a bit into different interest groups.
I’m sure there’s a few yc quality subreddit’s also, If you can stand the user hostile ux
I'd like to see a group like early $PLACE on something like IPFS or whatever to keep the bar high enough.
old.reddit.com is still available, which is only slightly user hostile. There's a setting to default to it if you're logged in, otherwise it's pretty trivial to either install an extension or write a userscript to automatically redirect you to that subdomain.
at least on mobile you can use Boost or Sync, but on desktop it's more difficult, really only old.reddit.com and experience is vastly inferior to mobile apps
Although that part of it also sucks a bit because you can't comment if you're not an invited member (which I'm not).
Many of the articles are found on HN first, but some are easier to see there because the front-page doesn't change as much as HN.
I find the quantity of comments on lobste.rs to be lacking compared to HN, they are much higher quality but there's not a lot of discussion for some reason.
I mean... this is directly related to accounts being invite only.
It's a bit of a catch-22, the less friction to comment, the lower the quality but the higher the quantity.
Generally (let me preface: I do like HN as a whole) I dislike vote based or algorithmically driven discussion platforms. Vote based eventually ends up with the site having a certain inherent 'culture', and any comment not fitting in will at most get mildly upvoted and usually just ends up downvoted and collapsed / greyed out. Algorithmically driven, the engagement factor eventually just crowds out any other metric for valuing comments.
I like the setup of image boards (discussion boards?) the most. By default, everyone comments anonymously. Votes don't exist. There is no way to gain reputation points. Your post or comment stands on its own merit. Boring or (most) bait interaction get ignored whilst high quality interaction gets bumped to the front page more often. (Don't let 4Chan's two most infamous boards color your opinion for most other boards)
My personal perfect platform would be the imageboard way for content valuation and Reddit's old UI / UX.
Not trying to be rude of course, I do this myself occasionally (my editing skills are bad on mobile in particular), but to me it’s obvious that fewer comments increases the signal-to-noise ratio.
Thanks!
