zlacker

>>lordna+(OP)
Has anyone ever seen an online community (with more than a handful of users) that focuses on more than cute puppy pictures and that is not described as "toxic" by "critics"? I'd say that HN does a great job at avoiding that. The article is titled "moderating hacker news" but fails to describe just how good a job the moderators and owners are doing. The moderators for moderation, and the owners for (as I perceive it) giving the moderators the freedom to try things that are best for the community (such as the politics-free experiment).

>>lucb1e+Ep
Metafilter certainly comes to mind. Though I believe it's well below HN in scale.

On Reddit, there are several immensely moderated subs with persistent high quality, and millions of subscribers, notably /r/AskScience and /r/AskHistorians (though also numerous others).

Smaller subreddits are relatively easy to maintain at quality, though sustaining engagement is hard (much of the Reddit dynamic actively works against this). Keeping large subs sane is exceptionally difficult. Getting "defaulted" (being added to the list of default-subscribed subreddits) was long seen as the kiss of death for smaller, quality, subreddits.

>>dredmo+ty
I've seen some extremely toxic political discussion on metafilter.

>>astrof+CL1
Are they commonplace, moreso than most / many other sites, and is MF otherwise restricted to cat pics?

Or are many discussions on MF generally constructive and productive?

My experience, dipping into it (I'm not a member/regular) is the latter. Backed by some quantitative/qualitative research:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...