I'm curious about the exact mechanism for this. Is it typically a single short-duration event that has lasting effects that destroys the community (e.g. a news article that drives traffic 100x what's normal to the site)? A permanent change in the environment (eternal September)? Or just the steady, accelerating accretion of new members, which at some point overwhelms the ability of the community to incorporate them to existing norms?
Or is it more that once a community gets to a certain size, it's subject to a kind of broadcast storm?
I wonder if a technical solution could mitigate against those risks. You could limit the number of public access tokens that can be issued at any one time, and have strategies in place to allow more long-lived tokens and registration for regular visitors.
I’ve been on HN since it was around 500 active users. Probably earlier than that.
Quality decreased as numbers increased. Pg spent much time worrying about this.
Ultimately bookface is where the interesting discussions are now, I would imagine. Not that HN isn’t interesting — it is — but it’s different than it was. I think few people would argue the opposite (partly because there are few people left from those early days).
It’s no coincidence that you have to be a founder to access bookface. One YC founder commented with surprise when he saw me on HN, saying it looked exactly like bookface. Presumably he spends his time there and not here.
There's something ironic about a forum closing down because the author's pseudonymity was threatened, endangering his IRL business dealings; and as an alternative people talking about a forum you can only get into with specific IRL business dealings, and without pseudonymity...
-> people with no prior experience with X join (X is cool now and they want to learn)
-> people who care more about the community than about X join
The problem is that the lowest common denominator keeps getting lower as you increase the size of the community. If you want a tight knit community then you need some kind of entrance criteria or at least ensure that new users are moderated (basically impossible with open registration).
I've heard this hypothesis that groups tend to go down in quality for this reason --
1. Group has an average quality.
2. People who have a much higher quality tend to avoid the group (e.g. that discussion is fallacious)
3. People who have lower quality are incentivized to join the group.
4. Eventually, the best performers of the group have less incentive to stay in that community
lobste.rs is a site similar to HN where users must be invited by another user and the public tree of invites is kept as a sort of reputation map. Might be similar to what you’re envisioning.
Or is it more that once a community gets to a certain size, it's subject to a kind of broadcast storm?
I wonder if a technical solution could mitigate against those risks. You could limit the number of public access tokens that can be issued at any one time, and have strategies in place to allow more long-lived tokens and registration for regular visitors.