this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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This is just another way of saying "having mods enforcing super strict rules", which then leads to an ossified culture and a bunch of mods high on their power trip. This was also seen on Reddit and StackOverflow.
Unfortunately, the way to avoid "lowest common denominator" issues that you mention is by going to the places where the denominator is relatively small, but big enough to have network effects in its favor. My experience was that all subreddits between 25k to 500k subscribers worked really well without excessive policing. Between 500k and 1M it could still go by, depending on the moderators. After crossing that mark, things started to deteriorate fast.
If we were to scale that to Lemmy, it means that all communities with a subscriber count >= 1% of the total network will fall into "deteriorate fast" territory.
Editing post titles does not count as quality control, in the same ways that some of reddits have such strict rules to the point that mods delete anything that is not exactly within the lines.
HN mods (dang, especifically) don't care about power trips, because they have actual power
HN is not a single-topic community, like a Lemmy group. If you create a /c/technology and say it is a place to post "Anything that good hackers would find interesting", it would quickly derail into a constant meta-discussion.
The discussion started because OP wants to have "more hard tech" and less "tech biz news". How do you think you'd enforce that, and how would you avoid splitting the ones that do not agree with that direction?
On HN, it's easy to avoid splittering the community because there is no "sub-HN". The ones that are not interested or oppose the guidelines have no other option but to leave.
On Reddit or Lemmy, it's quite easy to "fork" a community or simply creating another for the more specific niches. So you don't end up with a single /c/technology, but instead we get a "popular" /c/technology (for the lowest denominator) and the more specific "/c/hard_tech" or "/c/true_tech".
Right, but that will also mean that the community will no longer be "big". That's my point.
If mods started going as far as deleting threads on the basis of "this discussion is already beaten to death and is not bringing anything new", you can bet that this will be taken as an act of "censorship" and will cause everyone to leave to form their own factions - except maybe the ones that are aligned with the mods enough to understand the principles behind the decision.
I think ask_historians is in itself a community with such an specific goal that it makes it hard to be subdivided, but I see your point. The bigger question is how this could be replicated for other communities, if at all.
are they paid ?