I’ve been working on a little forum project with a friend. We’re experimenting with how UX can affect the kind of discussion that is encouraged. We want to make it feel more like having a bunch of interesting pen-pals rather than falling into a sewer full of angry mutants. Community obviously matters most, but the best community can still get drowned in sewage by the wrong incentives. So we’ve been thinking about ways to tilt the gradient in the right direction […]

There is one big puzzle for which I don’t yet have any ideas. For any given niche, there are far more clueless people than there are experts. So voting systems for comments often result in the clueless outvoting the experts. The most entertaining/satisfying comments rise to the top rather than the correct ones. Removing voting actually improves this somewhat, and active moderation / peer pressure can raise the floor by removing / discouraging the obviously terrible comments. But it doesn’t feel like enough.

Context collapse feels like part of the problem. In real conversation, you are talking to a recognizable face with a memorable track record. If they’re full of shit then you’ll find that out pretty quickly and ignore them in the future. But online communities tend to be much bigger and have fewer cues for memory.

— Jamie Brandon, 0055: consulting, sql needed structure, slow forum, on the line, out of thin air, papers, other stuff, 2025