Also I thank that moderating a popular forum is dang hard.

Idk if dang was in charge back in the day, but I remember HN used to shut off sign-ups whenever Reddit went down (very frequently like 10 years ago) so they didn’t get a flood of users looking for a low-effort Reddit like experience. Those are the kinds of things I’d never think about but are also what has kept HN so great. Genuinely glad this bit of internet has been so well maintained over the years.

So the secret to "hn for X" is "dang for X"

Now we need to make dang as a service.

I see what you did there, well played! :o)

Do you think your considering HN a clear exception to being “Reddit with a sense of grandeur” might have more to do with your vantage point than your ability to gauge the value of online communities?

> might have more to do with your vantage point

It has everything to do with the simple fact that HN was launched in '07, when Reddit wasn't that mainstream.

And it hasn't really changed since '07 (and I say this in a very positive way).

Yes, honestly i think this is the largest contribution to HNs successful place in its niche. Every other website turned from articles to images to infinite scroll politics and gifs. They all did that because it sells more ads. HN has never made a design change that prioritizes anything over articles. And even when it does conform to the greater trends of most people reading comments over articles (increasing bubblifiation of popular beliefs) the comments are much huge quality here because we're all the kind of people who like a site with articles, and thus more people actually read the articles, and the feedback does not include the internet ubiquitous "social credit score" seen on numerical stats around every comment on nearly every other website.

I mean that referring to "HN for X" is like (more than a decade ago) "Facebook for X".

I consider HN a clean exception to most (all?) online communities in which I have been participaing; in all other cases, the quality tanked, they became ghost towns, or they just changed from their original goal.

Sure, there are many wonderful forums and special interest groups, and it is good that new ones have been created. Just HN is not something you start at, it is something you become.

It’s not about self hosting, it’s about how community building is hard.

Building a community focused on something isn't hard, you grab a few people you know with shared interest, and they grab and invite their friends. Small game development communities everywhere thrive, I've never been a part of one that wasn't doing well.

Building a large community not focused on anything is much harder.

Dead subreddits, dead forums and abandoned meetups might disagree with that assessment. Building a community is far from easy and there's a lot of effort involved to keep it going as an organizer or moderator. Setting it up initially is easy, keeping it going for many years is hard.

I've set up, moderated forums, irc servers and organized a regular meetup for many years and I've seen that all the time.

Well you said it yourself. the beginning and short term is easy.

maintaing is very, very, hard. As a website, you fight for attention against decades of algorithms, SEOS, trillions of dollars of ad revenue, and you still gotta be picky to not pick up trolls. IRL, you're fighting for time in a person's schedule to travel and incentivizing them to keep coming in person while people are more overworked and less compensated than ever. Even the most benevolent, well mattered communities that attract high quality participants will decay naturally. So maintaning is a never ending, thankless job.

You might be kind of young, so there was this time when "Facebook for health" and "amazon for X" were used as legitimate pitch items as a way to frame the potential of whatever CRUD app someone was selling as a billion dollar visionary idea. It was very tiring. The modern equivalent is something like a "DALL-E 0llamma MLA is all you need" post about a random arvix article about ML

That's not how I read it at all.. It's the "HN for..." part that is the sense of grandeur.. Not the idea of self-hosting vs. using Reddit or Discord.

HN has been around for 15 years, it has earned its place as a quality community through time and much effort (i.e. moderation).

So to call yourself "HN for..." as a brand new thing is like opening up a brand new coffee shop in your town and saying "we're the next Starbucks"...

What if such feeling is justified? Everything else equal, I'd rather have a community not belong to Reddit, and I'd be horrified if HN somehow "migrated" to being a sub, the difference between communities is enormous.

and yet, because social networks degrade in quality over time (popularity brings about the riff raff), it's essential to start net social networks to maintain quality discourse.