
Why Online Communities Decay Over Time - adbge
http://rs.io/2014/02/26/why-online-communities-decay-over-time.html
======
ignostic
> _" When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to
> interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty,
> mean, aggressive..."_

This is one of the most off-putting things about HN in my opinion. It's better
than bigger social sharing sites like Reddit in that tired jokes and posts
with little thought are usually voted down to the bottom, but posts that poke
holes in the original argument are often top comments.

A lot of technically-minded people take great pleasure in finding and fixing
bugs. The problem is that finding errors in human interaction leads to
pedantry, nitpicking, and cherry-picking. This is especially true as the
community grows and interactions with all but the most visible people becomes
rare. People have less incentive to give others the benefit of the doubt, and
more incentive to find the problems and point them out.

I'm worried about our once-little community, but I don't know how to prevent
the petty fault-finding from resurfacing in such a large and shifting
community.

~~~
Buttons840
Free idea: Build a social site that, even when it has many many users, breaks
people into smaller groups in such a way that it remains enjoyable to all. You
could analyze user behaviors and interests to do this. I've considered doing
this myself.

~~~
ColinDabritz
I've see this called the 'Warrens' model. Reddit does this with Sub-reddits.
Keep the niche small group feel available, while aggregating useful stuff
upwards.

~~~
zedadex
Any more context? I just searched that term and it seems to have come up
blank.

~~~
ColinDabritz
Unfortunately I'm unable to find the reference. It's probably a different
word, but the idea is the similar, and I specifically recall it referencing
Reddit and other communities with a similar "small group" branching model.
Warrens came to mind because of rabbit warrens, but that's probably not quite
it.

~~~
jcr
This is most likely the reference you were looking for:

[http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-...](http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/)

------
hendzen
The real problem with online communities is that the people who are upvoted
the most are the ones who spend the most time commenting.

Generally, very successful people don't spend large amounts of their time
commenting on online forums. In this manner, the biggest 'losers' in the real
world, with the most time to waste on the internet, become the biggest
'winners' in the online community.

The end result is that the cultural norms of the online community end up being
set by people who are the least qualified to create or enforce any kind of
healthy norm.

edit: just wanted to say that I recall reading something similar on a blog a
long time ago, although I cannot remember the name of the writer.

~~~
probably_wrong
> The real problem with online communities is that the people who are upvoted
> the most are the ones who spend the most time commenting.

I remember a claim of a similar but opposed problem: that low quality short
content is much more rewarding that long, thoughtful responses. See a funny
cat pic? I chuckled, upvote. See a long answer that doesn't quite fit your
opinion? Downvote, or ignore at best. Short and funny trumps long and
thoughtful.

This is not a problem in HN thanks to moderation, but it happens a lot in
other communities.

~~~
butmaybeifly
Too black and white. Why not be funny, short AND thoughtful? Why does everyone
here have such tunnel vision?

~~~
Mithaldu
Because often points cannot be made in a short manner and still be understood.
Just like in this very post some points need some explanation of their context
and the thought chain leading to them, or people will not understand how the
poster arrived there and simply voice their disagreement, instead of sitting
down for a while and thinking about the post and trying to recreate that chain
of thought on their own.

------
jasode
While the blog article mentions interesting points, I don't think its insights
have much to do with technical communities such as Hacker News or
Stackoverflow.

HN is mostly very civilized. (Granted, some of that is due to moderators.) So
the blog's bullet point about "trust" devalued because of one-time
transactions does not seem relevant. It's relevant for reddit/atheism but not
HN.

To me, the problem with HN, SO, etc is the voice of experts getting drowned
out by amateurs. The growth rate of new amateurs joining will always outpace
new experts and each year the signal-to-noise gets worse. I haven't seen a
clever self-governing mechanism that addresses this social dynamic. The
upvote/downvote/karma history is not enough to solve it.

~~~
jacquesm
Experts in one field are amateurs in all the rest of them. So even a community
of just experts in some field would have a much larger number of amateurs than
experts across all fields.

~~~
jasode
That's true but I'm not constricting "expert" to just domain expertise. An
expert in <whatever_technology> who has worked hard and invested time into
acquiring that expertise is often also an "expert" at not being a nuisance in
the fields that he's an amateur. He's able to ask quality questions (instead
of inviting snarky lmgtfy.com). He's an expert at being a non-expert.

Even if Paul Graham doesn't know Rust, I think it's safe to assume that any
questions he'd write in an online community would not be ridiculous (is Rust
slower than Bash?). Any amateurish observation he'd have, at minimum, would
have some intelligent thought behind it.

------
swombat
Whilst I agree with the general thesis of the article, this paragraph seemed
very distasteful to me:

> _There is no reason to trust people you will not interact with again in the
> future. There’s no incentive not to defect. At the end of my last
> relationship, our interactions became significantly less pleasant as it
> became more obvious that it was over – I would not have to deal with this
> person in the future, so why bother going through the motions of kindness?_

Without meaning to be rude or make an attack on the author's character, the
author does sound like a bit of an asshole there.

How about being nice to people because you're a nice person, rather than
because you want to get something out of it? If you could murder someone and
get away with it, would you? I wouldn't, because in abhor the idea of killing
people. Similarly, I would act decently towards another human being even when
I have no incentive to do so, simply because I am a decent human being and I
don't like the idea of causing unnecessary pain and suffering to others.

As they say, a gentleman remains a gentleman even in the gutter. If you need
to be surrounded by other decent human beings to be decent, if being
surrounded by jerks automatically reverts you to jerk behaviour, perhaps
you're not a decent human being after all, only a chameleon sort of person who
will do whatever they think they can get away with.

I hope a majority of people here would behave the same way as me - decently,
irrespective of the surroundings and likelihood of "getting caught". And
there's the rub I guess - a community composed mostly of decent human beings
will be less vulnerable to this effect than one composed mostly of selfish
people who only act decently when they can see a tangible payoff.

That may be another path to survival: find the assholes and keep them out, and
then perhaps you can deal with growth more easily.

~~~
salmonellaeater
Game theory is just an explanation; people don't use it explicitly to make
decisions, they just follow their gut, and evolution has caused our guts to
produce rational decisions most of the time. It's the same as the theories of
attractiveness based on symmetry and secondary sex characteristics: you don't
look at a potential partner and think, "He/she looks so symmetric, I bet if I
were to have kids with him/her they'd have a higher chance of survival." You
just intuitively find the person attractive.

~~~
Brakenshire
Lots of people use game theory to rationalize behaving in a selfish way.

This rhetoric of such-and-such an idea being natural, and therefore
inevitable, is always used as a core justification for any ideology, whether
feudalism, monarchy, communism or social darwinism. They are not all correct.

It's pretty obvious that humans are not exclusively rational machines designed
for 'winning', we have all sorts of other mechanisms which act to make us
function well as part of a unit, and these mechanisms have secondary
consequences which mean that we are perfectly capable of acting against our
own interests, or against the interests of our genes. We should be embracing
that, not trying to cut it out. We shouldn't attempt to use the evolutionary
process as a moral guide.

------
tunesmith
I forget the web page - I think from another HN reader - but they made the
point that these challenges are the exact challenges that distributed
computing wrestles with. For any problem set that a lot of resources are
working with, how do you properly surface the most valuable results, how do
you combine and summarize them, etc. There are a lot of discussion community
sites that just try to pull in their own homegrown algorithms ("let's have a
moderator!") but I suspect a lot of these experiences could be improved by
reading up on distributed computing algorithms.

------
ChrisNorstrom
This fits perfect with what PG said in a Tech Crunch Interview in 2013
[http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-
new...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-news/)

● "[Paul Graham] wanted to make Hacker News a place to recreate the way Reddit
felt in the good old days"

● "He explains that [Hacker News] was community of insiders in the hacker
world, and it has gradually been getting diluted."

● “That is what I spend all my time thinking about,” he says.

● He worries that Hacker News will become what he calls “an old crumbling
building.”

● “The community has been in a perpetual but slow decline because the site is
growing,” he says.

------
incision
_> 'The probability that I will interact with any one user ever again on a
site like YouTube tends toward zero. I have no real incentive to be polite or
to put much effort into anything I say.'_

My sense of a terrible 'community' like YouTube is a bit different. I've
always had the impression it's more about performing and the size of the
audience - more about votes and reactions than expected interactions.

No matter how nasty or inane your opinions are, you can share them on a
related YouTube video and receive anonymous validation from other people who
agree with you. When you're feeling bad about yourself and want to lash out,
you can post something vile and get a response.

I believe this was a source of a lot of complaints about changes to the
comment system. It hurt ones ability to receive instant gratification by
dropping a comment on the top of the stack.

In the bat analogy, upvotes/karma are a sort of secondary 'junk food' blood
supply that costs the giver nothing and some bats don't care for it as they
prefer real sustenance but others are addicted to it. The 'community' ends up
as a circus of votefiends bludgeoning each other for another hit.

------
gedrap
Regarding to HN, problem is that social proof takes a huge part in determining
what gets on the front page.

People check /new, see that some post already has 1 or 2 upvotes, checks it
instead of some without any upvotes. The upvoted one gets even more upvotes
(because more people are reading it), and it's on the homepage.

A bunch of my submissions made the homepage and from what I've noticed, the
threshold is about 7-10 upvotes in the first hour. So can we fairly say that a
dozen of people decide what's on the homepage? Maybe.

My suggestion: don't show upvotes in /new for 30mins after submission? As a
trade off, a little time might get wasted on low quality submissions but maybe
there would be more better quality submissions on the front page.

~~~
nkurz
This is a good idea. There is a "Feature Request" link at the bottom of each
page. Please resubmit this there so it is receives greater notice.

~~~
gedrap
Done! Thanks for your comment :)

------
jere
Daydreaming here... so how about a community that funnels users into buckets
automatically? Think of an HN where you only discuss an article with a pool of
~500 people instead of 80,000. When new users join, they're distributed to the
smallest groups. Nobody is overwhelmed with an influx of noobs. And you might
actually be able to start remembering the names of the active people in your
group. Perhaps you could see top comments from other groups, but not interact
with them directly.

~~~
RKoutnik
That's a rather interesting concept. My big issue is that I'd be missing the
best content from other buckets. Perhaps content can 'emerge' from a bucket
after garnering a certain % of support from the bucket?

~~~
NaNaN
To avoid the Matthew effect, the best users should be re-distributed, too. --
still nice?

~~~
RKoutnik
If that was the case, I'd worry about the buckets becoming like German
universities - the best minds can't get together, so we all lose out.

~~~
gwern
I don't think most HN users know anything at all about German universities,
much less any bucketing they might do, so that's probably not the most helpful
analogy.

~~~
RKoutnik
I learned about that particular situation from one of pg's essays (something I
figured I could assume was common knowledge around here).

~~~
gwern
I've read most/all of pg's essays as well, but I have no recollection of
anything like that, so...

~~~
lifeformed
Can someone explain the German university thing to me? It sounds interesting.

~~~
NaNaN
Well, I searched on HN and googled it, but nothing found easily. So this is
why I don't like slang sometimes.. :-$

------
malloreon
SomethingAwful is consistently high quality and has been for the 7.5 years
since I discovered it. 190,000 users now, I think 90K in 2006.

The secrets seem to be

a) charging people $10 one time to join/post and view more than a few pages of
a particular thread

b) segmenting into different subforums - over time they become different
communities within SA that have their own quirks.

c) ruthless moderation that can and often does lead to posting probations and
bans (requiring another $10 to reverse)

In particular, the politics/history, sports, video games, and arts discussions
are very good.

------
ChuckMcM
It is hard to appreciate the change in tenor the network experienced when AOL
gave its users access to Usenet. I have never considered it in the context of
the prisoner's dilemma as a one shot exercise but that certainly has an
intuitive appeal.

We see it here on HN of course, someone creates a new user account, makes a
single low value snarky comment and then off to oblivion.

An interesting counter example is twitter, which I've seen that as people
become more invested in the reputation of their 'handle' the less ill
considered their tweets seem to become. When that isn't the case that is also
interesting.

~~~
vacri
Twitter is a terrible place for conversation to take place. There is no
capacity for nuance or well-reasoned thought. It's a site for announcements,
not nuanced musing, as expected from a place where every comment has to be a
soundbite. Occasionally there might be a two-way conversation that works well,
but that's not the norm.

------
jacquesm
It took a while to find, this old kuro5hin article is a good read on the
subject:

[http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000](http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000)

Titled "Attacked from within" it details the problems in scaling a community
and community life-cycle very eloquently.

~~~
A_COMPUTER
Oh, I remember that. This is the best thing ever written on the subject, but I
think its conclusions are regularly ignored because people want to have their
cake and eat it too, with regard to fostering vanity. Everyone wants the
community but they still want to be the superstar in it.

------
probablyfiction
Another thing that seems to be the case is that new members are unable to
become assimilated into existing culture because the entrenched users quickly
become the minority and are unable to enforce cultural norms. The culture is
co-opted by the newcomers.

~~~
Havoc
>>The culture is co-opted by the newcomers.

I must admit I've not seen this yet. In the forums I frequent the old elite
rules...to the point where the admins trust the powerful members to manage it
to some extent. If 3 powerful people decide that a new user is undesirable
then said user is a dead man walking. Obviously not very democratic etc...but
its super effective in maintaining the peace....the powerful members provide a
base-line that absorbs most of the BS...the admins step in when something
dramatic happens.

~~~
chc
You're thinking of individuals. The point is that, even if the "old elite"
have the power to just say "Ban that newcomer" and the newcomer gets banned,
the "old elite" do not scale while the influx of newcomers certainly can. One,
two, three, even 20 bad actors can be dealt with by a small group of community
gardeners. But thousands of bad actors are just on a totally different scale
and cannot be dealt with in the same way.

This is similar to the situation of event security guards. They individually
hold more power than any member of the crowd, but if the crowd collectively
decides to rush the stage, they can't really stop it from happening because it
is physically impossible for 50 people to overpower 10000.

~~~
vostrocity
But when does this ever happen? Startups generally are not communities, and
communities generally don't see exponential growth.

------
TheEzEzz
A potential solution:

Implement a comment recommendation system. Based on comments you've liked and
disliked, the system will push comments you would like to the top.

The quality of the community you see is then completely up to you. If you like
poop jokes, you'll see poop jokes. If you like pedantic attacks, you'll see
pedantic attacks. And if you like insightful comments, you'll see insightful
comments. As you stabilize on a community you like, you can start responding
to their comments, and then they too will have the chance to vote on your
comments. If they like you they'll start seeing more of you, and a micro-
community will evolve naturally for free.

~~~
ewillbefull
If you think about it, it's pretty much the same thing as twitter, except the
social graph is built more implicitly. In exchange for a larger selection of
relevant content, you have to sift through more noise. But it probably feels
better to vote if you know your vote counts differently for some users. You're
no longer just one number in a statistic, but part of a much more complicated
ranking system. Best of all, your votes significantly affect your own
experience on the website.

A dynamic social graph like that would probably obviate the need for even
categorizing content, let alone "jumping ship" when the community decays.

There are some drawbacks though. If you implemented it in reddit/hacker news,
there would no longer be a "front page of x" to serve as a symbolic milestone
for your submission. Without context, "2000 upvotes" has ambiguous importance.
Also, a different ranking system exists for each cluster in your social graph,
which sounds like a fun engineering problem.

------
wmf
I found this recent article about online harassment and moderation much more
optimistic: [http://www.wired.com/2014/05/fighting-online-
harassment/](http://www.wired.com/2014/05/fighting-online-harassment/)
(Primary source: [http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-
Shaping-...](http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-
Player) ) Even with 67 million users, the developers of League of Legends have
apparently reduced misbehavior substantially using fairly simple (although
non-obvious) techniques.

------
tensafefrogs
I wrote a post a while back about how the design of your social tools can help
solve this problem:

[https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba](https://medium.com/i-m-
h-o/c4c4074591ba)

If you look at sites that are based on following users or categories they are
able to scale to much larger sizes without breaking down.

------
netcan
I think part of the reason it that the communities finish talking about
whatever it is they are talking about. When I started reading HN, a lot of the
ideas that are common fare were new and interesting. Now, some are borderline
cliche.

------
gojomo
Some other influential writing on this subject:

Clay Shirky: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"
[http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html)

Xianhang Zhang: "The Evaporative Cooling Effect"
[http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-...](http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/)

------
steve_benjamins
The solution (in so far as there is a solution) is to cultivate a culture.
Large communities remain civil through culture.

Last week I wrote a post called "How to Cultivate Culture" that received a
good amount of attention (outside of Hacker News) about this:
[http://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/6-ways-to-cultivate-
cu...](http://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/6-ways-to-cultivate-culture-on-a-
website)

------
cjslep
I agree with the general premise. However, I also believe there's probably a
way to shift the threshold depending on the culture and community.

When I was asked to be a moderator of brand-new (at the time) forums for a
very popular Minecraft mod pack, it was being flooded with quite a large
volume of people who would not adhere to some basic rules. The rules were
quite simple and straightforward, but that didn't stop me and the owners of
the site from straight banning large numbers of people.

The pure shock of forcing the "Yes we will see you again, you are not
anonymous, and your reputation matters" into the system caused a lot less
posting activity to take place on the forums, but the quality of each post was
well worth it. A lot of people got banned trying (and failing) to wrap their
brains around this concept.

The end result was I actually felt proud of helping shape an online community
that was large, effective, and constructive. As it grew, so did the number of
other moderators and that "critical point" kept shifting right, so we could
have more users and still maintain a quality community. However, this requires
a very proactive approach.

------
jds375
Great article. That being said, seeing some proposed solutions to this problem
would have been nice. One strategy that Reddit employs quite well is the
Subreddit system. This creates smaller sub-communities that aren't victims of
the 'large' community problem. Of course, overtime a subreddit becomes a
default or gets too many subscribers... but it's still a decent solution.

I think it'll be interesting to see how growth affects Hacker News. I'm still
very impressed with the quality of the articles and comments (yes, there are
some bad ones here and there, but compared to most sites HN is excellent)... I
think the downvote threshold for HN has actually been quite successful in
encouraging people to post useful comments. It gives a goal for people with
low-karma to strive for, thus encouraging them to post better content. I think
a more extensive reward system like this has potential for creating a better
community.

~~~
mcphage
> Of course, overtime a subreddit becomes a default or gets too many
> subscribers... but it's still a decent solution.

And then it spawns off one or more new subreddits, based on the desires of the
users. I feel that's a pretty good way to handle the situation.

------
YarnBall
I agree with the author's thesis but I think other reasons apply to other
communities.

Ideally, you would like to ensure the "greatest good for the greatest number"
in a community. Consequently, good or happiness in a community is measured
according to the preferences of the majority sometimes to the detriment of the
minority. That is why, relative to the number of more intellectually engaging
posts, you will see more LOLCats and animated gifs on the front page of
Reddit. As somebody on here mentioned many people go on the internet for
leisure, and intelligent/civilized discourse for them does not fall under that
header.

As far as I know, HN was started to foster startups-tech community and I am
optimistic because HN's subject matter is specific enough and the community
concerned with this subject matter is small enough, for it not to devolve into
another Reddit (meaning no offense to Reddit, I still visit there).

~~~
Relic22799
"* you will see more LOLCats and animated gifs on the front page of Reddit.*"

You'll see less of them these days. Reddit changed its default subreddit
system last week and one of the big ones that got the boot was
/r/AdviceAnimals.

------
socrates1998
I am not sure if this has ever been done, but what if an online community grew
to a certain size and then closed it's doors to new members?

Could that community avoid the pitfalls of what the article is describing?

I could see a place where enrollment closes at a certain point, then reopens
once a person leaves or becomes inactive.

I would actually like to see if this would work.

------
analog31
>>> These locusts were AOL users. In September of 1993, the company granted
Usenet access to their entire user base, which triggered an unending deluge of
noobs into the Usenet community.

Amusingly, I joined AOL in September of 1993. It was not long after I
graduated and lost my university log-in, along with the e-mail address that
came with it.

I chose AOL for a simple reason: I could dial up anywhere in the country and
keep the same e-mail address no matter where I lived. AOL also greatly
simplified the process of using the Internet. I ran a small business via my
AOL address.

Each update to AOL software came via some promotion or other -- an insert in a
magazine, or even a pile of AOL disks at the supermarket. At some point it
became possible for an AOL user to access the Internet without the AOL
software, e.g., by using mainstream e-mail and browser software.

------
slvv
> "When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to
> interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty,
> mean, aggressive..."

Wow. I can't say whether this is true or not, but how depressing. Instead of
counting on this behaviour, what if we tried to change it? Kindness, respect,
and general "give the other person the benefit of the doubt" attitudes could
make a huge difference. I just can't get around the idea that not interacting
with the same person means you can not care how you treat them... that's
crazy.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I just can't get around the idea that not interacting with the same person
> means you can not care how you treat them... that's crazy.

Its actually quite rational. It may be immoral -- or at least amoral -- but
its not _crazy_.

One of the purposes of collective mutual benefit organizations -- labor
unions, the state, etc. -- is to mitigate the effect of this by providing a
manner in which a group of people can act and be perceived as an entity with
which an actor _will_ have to interact with in the future even when they may
not have to do so with the particular individual.

------
adventured
"The development of trust and kindness between two people depends on the
probability that they will interact in the future."

Not true. Communities can - and should - use other incentive systems to
encourage good behavior. 1) Point systems 2) Public shaming 3) bans / hell
bans / abuse flagging / suspensions 4) various combinations

The threat of taking things from people that they've earned, even if it's as
silly as 'fake internet points,' can be an extremely powerful enforcer of
behavior, given the system is set up properly.

------
jusben1369
"Decay" is a loaded word reflecting the author's bias. All communities change
over time as they grow. Their culture then reflects the users. We may not like
that community but clearly a lot of people do (after all these are the largest
sub reddits we're talking about right?)

This is sort of the "This neighborhood was so great until all the
yuppy/hipsters moved in and the art stores were replaced with coffee shops
serving $6 lattes" argument.

~~~
tensafefrogs
Agreed. Saying that communities decay is the same as saying pop music sucks
because it appeals to the masses. Millions of people love that content and who
are you to say whether they should enjoy it or not?

We should be building better tools that can adapt and grow with the community.

I wrote about this a couple of years ago, with a possible set of solutions:
[https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba](https://medium.com/i-m-
h-o/c4c4074591ba)

------
orionblastar
Two online communities that I had to leave because they became really mean and
decayed over time was IWETHEY and KURO5HIN.

Even Slashdot decayed and when Dice bought them out it was more about
commercial stuff and less about technology and making cool stuff.

Reddit is over-run with trolls on various sub-reddits they started out in
/r/atheism as fake atheists trolling people and then spread to other sub-
reddits. Mostly 12 year old kids who think it is funny to grief people.

------
bowlofpetunias
Maybe it's just a lot simpler: size and success attracts douchebags and
morons. It's not limited to online communities. Cities, sports teams, rock
bands, movies, you name it, you see it happen again and again. Success
attracts the kind of people who act like a-holes in any context.

And yes, I'm aware of the great irony of posting this rather superficial
comment in this thread. But I'm not sure if I'm actually wrong...

------
andylei
> I have no real incentive to be polite or to put much effort into anything I
> say. Even my reputation will remain intact – who’s going to witness it?

> When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact
> in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean,
> aggressive, and to put little effort into their contributions.

If this is true, then HN should put users karma score next to their username
when they post.

~~~
iopq
Karma on HN doesn't work. I've been here 500 days, but because I only post
from time to time I only have 335 karma and I can't downvote. Since my karma
per post is just over 2, that means I've only made ~150 comments in that span,
one every three days.

So all the politics posts get upvotes from people who have enough karma to
upvote, but not enough downvotes because people like me can't downvote.

In this way you can post a liberally biased article and all the Democrats will
upvote it and the Republicans can't downvote it. So you get several hundred
upvotes on your submission.

There are enough new members that can't downvote who have the ability to
upvote to put any garbage article on the front page as long as it appeals to
enough of them to overpower the people who consider the article not to belong
on HN.

I could post some political garbage every day and get a huge karma/post score.
At least 10 per each link submission which is more than 4x what I'm getting
just commenting.

------
known
I'd say online communities "diverse", not diverge. E.g.
[http://i.imgur.com/4sftcoo.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/4sftcoo.jpg)

------
thereckoning
There's a simpler explanation. The average person is not especially bright,
funny, or articulate. The larger a community, the more it regresses to the
mean.

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api
I really like this for not defaulting to the standard, lazy, fallacy-of-self-
exclusion explanation of "most people are dumb."

The same effect seems to occur with large social movements. I've noted for
many years that once anything becomes a "movement," it becomes shallow,
trendy, and dishonest... even if the original seed of the movement had a good
point in the beginning. Once it becomes big there is no longer any incentive
for people not to abuse the movement as a marketing gimmick or a source of
political power.

------
suby
The author hasn't been to reddit in years if he thinks that r/atheism and
r/politics are still default subreddits.

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ChrisNorstrom
This is the most valuable article I've read on HN all week. The fact that it's
not on the front page is dissapointing. EDIT: It IS on the front page. Hurray!

Personally I feel HN itself is having this very problem with its community
right now. It's not only gotten too big but user "Probablyfiction" nailed it
on the head. Too many newcomers destroy the existing culture instead of
assimilating into it. The more I read about immigration problems in the USA,
Europe (mass influx of Arab immigrants), Africa (mass influx of Chinese
immigrants), Isreal (influx of African refugees) the more I notice this same
assimilation problem exists in real offline communities as well. [New] Growth
(too much too fast) can hurt communities by destroying the original
characteristics, culture, and qualities that made them successful in the first
place. Time and moderation needs to be given to ensure the new follows the
rules of the old when applicable.

~~~
harvestmoon
Well, to be fair, people have been concerned about HN getting too big and
losing its community for at least two years now, iirc.

~~~
rhizome
And ChrisNorstrom's account is about 3 years old, so that fits a stereotype of
those with the highest concern over a perceived drop in quality being the
newest old-timers.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
That's because newer members have no memory of how things once were. They have
no way of comparing the current quality of the community with the previous
quality of the community. Of course its older members who complain about this
problem.

~~~
rhizome
Heh, the crux of my point was the concept of "the newest older members."

------
hellbreakslose
Nice post, Well thats the cycle of life. Everything has an expiry date!

~~~
Theodores
It is the same with pop records or bands however the music industry
appreciates and understands that nothing is forever. People should apply this
thinking to community sites and expect a cycle of life. Instead we have
myspaces worth billions to then be worthless and Facebook where they don't see
it coming.

Much like pop records or bands there are some things that have a different
life cycle. People still by records by that outfit that called themselves 'The
Beatles' but there is no 'Beatlemania' any more.

