In favor of much higher discoverability (I'd argue); having a common UI and platform helps. Similar to how in a previous age, having vBulletin like a lot of the other online communities helps with familiarity. Reddit adds that you don't need a separate account to interact with a community.
>In favor of much higher discoverability (I'd argue)
That is the trade-off isn't it? The downside, though, is that Reddit's interaction design privileges low-effort, easily digestible, and sharable content at the expense of everything else. Especially the kind of off-topic personal discussion that builds durable "communities" that go deeper than just sharing content about a particular topic.
> Reddit's interaction design privileges low-effort, easily digestible, and sharable content at the expense of everything else
Along those lines, Reddit's format (and indeed, HN's format, because it's nearly identical) makes holding conversations very cumbersome. It's like the difference between a directory holding a bunch of files, and directory holding a single file & another directory, which holds the next file & another directory, etc, etc.
Yeah. This has been my frustration with the development of social media in general (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
The old conversational style on Usenet/IRC/BBS felt like a group of people talking together. Possibly having parallel conversations with multiple groups of people at a time.
The social media model feels more like having a bunch of individual one-on-one conversations in parallel. It's good for broadcasting a thought or idea, but terrible for actually having a discussion.
There are pros and cons to both, but the latter is a lot more cognitively intensive and makes it really hard to have the kind of conversation/discussion where you learn something new. If you have a controversial opinion it feels like you get dogpiled by 1,000 people all saying the same thing. It's hard to even know where to start and it doesn't feel like people are giving you feedback on your point, it just feels like everyone is trying to attack you. When you're speaking with a group people usually let one or two people make the points and just add on as they feel is needed.
It's a way more manageable conversational flow, and one that's more likely to encourage people to actually talk to each other rather than talking to the caricature of whatever they imagine someone who would say something like that to be. Instead you just get long discussion threads that inevitably devolve into 2 people slinging downvotes and variations on "You're a doodyhead" at each other. In an IRC chat, even if the moderator doesn't shut that down, the rest of the group will tell you to STFU and move on.
In favor of much higher discoverability (I'd argue); having a common UI and platform helps. Similar to how in a previous age, having vBulletin like a lot of the other online communities helps with familiarity. Reddit adds that you don't need a separate account to interact with a community.