Does IH need better filtering?
I've noticed lately that there's a lot of junk making it to the front-page of Top. Aside from outright spam, there appears to be a lot more content marketing as well.
Now, personally I'm not really interested in "We built 24 startups in 24 hours!" or generally "How to do X in Y" -type posts, but they're always visible, so I'm guessing someone do find them valuable and that's ok. Marketing diluting the actual community content, not so much.
What I would like though, is to see a way to filter or outright block, content marketers/product promoters, which seems to be infiltrating the community more and more. I don't want to @ anyone specifically or instigate a witch hunt, but rather hear what other members thinks about this issue?
I feel like the actual content and discussions that makes IH great, is being watered down quite a lot. So what to do?
There's no easy answer to this one! Every mechanism for addressing it has downsides.
For instance, moderators, for which you've already pointed out the potential for bias and bad decisions.
You could put in a feature where you subscribe to the tags you want and see those in a dedicated feed, but then you need to teach people to tag their stuff, and spammers invade tags anyway.
So you go for the social graph filtering approach, elevating stuff posted by people you follow. Since you never follow spammers you won't see garbage, but you're also risking not discovering new people that have useful stuff to post.
So then you try a Trusted User / Blue Check Mark approach, which comes with a bunch of overhead and isn't foolproof either. Plus, as Twitter learned, what starts out as a simple authentication mechanism turns into a badge that communicates shared values, and it fractures the community further.
So in desperation you try introducing payments. First, paid ads, which don't negate spammers trying to post stuff for free. Then paid accounts, which increase signup friction and encourages people to go elsewhere.
Finally you end up where Reddit did: Groups of self-selecting people that can moderate their own stuff within a larger platform, each subreddit having different values/rules/moderation despite sharing common infrastructure.
So I mean, you may as well cut straight to that :)
You're probably right, but then I guess, we might as well just use Reddit? :)
Relevant: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/ask-ih-founders-ee0447f6c8?commentId=-LTtaXDeek0wuBMxy1a5
Very! I think appointing moderators might be a good way to go, if you had to do it all yourself, that sounds like a ton of work to be honest.
I completely agree with you. I think honest discussions about new startups or services which might benefit members here are always welcome. But crypto-spam etc. should be filtered.
I suggest:
There should be a "flag" button for active users (account age + some minimum post number or whatever), i think that would help combined with a community moderator who goes through flagged posts and decides.
Moderation might be the answer yes. Seems to work pretty well for most subreddits e.g. That does introduce the question of trust/censorship/favouritism however.
Just use the report button....
This comment was deleted 8 years ago