

Ask HN: The future of HN - richardw

Since (at least) the beginning of the Internet, a pattern has repeated: A group forms and has a culture. Over time, others join and the culture drifts to encompass the larger group. Some original members resent the drift. This happened when the net grew outside of universities and government and when AOL 'newbies' joined who didn't understand netiquette. It's happening now with HN, evidenced by a wider range of stories, more aggressive comments and periodic discussions about what to do about it.<p>The forces seem to be:<p>1) A growing community will increasingly post (and upvote) stories about a wider array of interests.<p>2) The new non-hacker visitor will increasingly enjoy front-page stories and become part of the community, to post and upvote.<p>3) This has to result in a dilution of the site focus to 'general interest' with a slight hacker tinge.<p>Counterforces could include an aggressive policing of stories and aggression. This would have a diluted effect over time as new users outnumber the old, unless the votes of older members count more. It's also counter to the spirit of the net to police too aggressively.<p>The site could be categorised into hacker/business/general interest/etc.<p>The hacker community (or YC-funded core) could up-and-move to another site, possibly with an invite-only rule to block TC.<p>What say you? What other scenarios are there?
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alxross
Agreed about there being more aggressive comments, etc. One possibility would
be to move to another site and _not_ lock it down. Moving to another site may
be enough of a switching cost and I think there are many like myself who are
not YC-funded but enjoy the original spirit of this site...

"It's also counter to the spirit of the net to police too aggressively." I
also agree that it's against the original spirit of the net, but at some point
in scale it becomes a requirement. I worked on a community site for a major TV
presence which had gone awry. There were millions of community members and,
unfortunately, some would be posting death threats about others or about
celebs.

I had hoped that there were "self-regulating" solutions but we had to ban the
hell out of people. Not that HN is anywhere near that level of ugliness... :)

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richardw
I've been reading <http://buildingreputation.com/> a lot - partly because I
want to build in some reputation concepts into a site I'm working on. It has
great ideas about how to run points systems - what causes what behaviour. Very
powerful.

