

Ask HN: Avoiding the "Eternal September" Effect? - Jarred

What's being done with Hacker News that will prevent the "Eternal September" effect to happen here?<p>I've seen it happen to a lot of communities and I'm genuinely curious how it might be avoidable, for both this community and many others.
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egiva
I can't speak about Hacker News, but Eternal September for me is synonymous
with the "Disruptive Newcomers" effect - so you reduce the ability of
newcomers to be disruptive by: 1\. suspending accounts (maybe too drastic) 2\.
Community Flagging (middle-of-the-road approach!) 3\. Progressively giving a
user more rights as they contribute more to the community (StackOverflow does
this well). 4\. Giving experienced users a community monitoring (admin)
position and the ability to edit or censure content according to your site's
rules (again, StackOverflow does this, and rewards Admins with points when
they edit new posts).

~~~
Jarred
But isn't penalizing people for being disruptive wrong? I'm saying that how
does one avoid a massive degradation of community culture when the community
becomes larger?

~~~
ggchappell
> But isn't penalizing people for being disruptive wrong?

I don't get that at all. Could you please explain why it would be "wrong" to
penalize people for being disruptive?

~~~
Jarred
Just because two people don't agree on something doesn't make it right to
penalize someone because they don't have the same opinion or rationale.

I'm saying that most of the time culture "degradation" occurs with more people
because these people aren't directly in that culture. They might not be part
of it because they don't understand it in the same way as everyone else does.
As a result a different interpretation can lead to a culture shift. This is
what happened in "Eternal September", where the original culture and focus of
the community was diluted with the growth of new individuals wanting to do
things differently. Most of the time the new ways of doing things aren't as
good as the old, simply because it needs to cater to a wider audience and to
less of the niche it started with. This is what Hacker News needs to avoid.

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JoshCole
Right now Hacker News combats eternal September systematically through hell
banning and a karma system. The karma system is actually set up in a way that
tries to select for the best possible material. A user's karma and their
post's karma are both factored into how far up the page a post will be
displayed. This leads to new users being exposed to the hacker news culture
more frequently. Post feedback is also set up in this way, because older users
are the only ones capable of downvoting.

\--

Eternal September is named the way it is because in the past online
communities only had to deal with influx when students got to college, but now
they have to deal with a constant influx. Given this, it seems obvious to me
how you go about countering Eternal September: remove the eternal.

This could be done in a few ways, but the core idea is having a period in
which registration has a barrier for most of the year and periods in which the
barrier is removed for the sake of growth.

I don't think PG would want to do that though, since it might have negatively
affect the number and quality of the applications YCombinator receives. Other
sites also avoid this option out of a desire for users. The incentive
structure makes my obvious solution fairly useless.

------
staunch
We flood the front page with stories about Erlang to bore them into leaving.

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Mz
I think "welcoming them warmly at the door" is a helpful technique. Seems to
me that the issue is not newcomers but lack of inculcation in the culture. If
you want them inculcated, it helps to a) give them motive to get inculcated
and b) give them opportunity to get inculcated.

Lots of online communities are really bad about being asshats to the newcomers
(or just ignoring them like they don't exist). This is not a way to inculcate
people with good manners. It is a good way to give them reason to be asshats
back or, in the case of ignoring them, making them feel like they can do
anything because no one cares or is paying attention to them anyway.

------
dstein

      user:	Jarred
      created: 51 days ago

~~~
sorbus
I believe that this is a reference to one of the guidelines: "If your account
is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is
turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

It's not a very good way to reference it, though, and in general comes off as
snobbish. There's also a distinction between complaining that HN is going
downhill (which the guideline discourages) and asking how to prevent it from
going downhill (which I see as a good topic of discussion). Of course, asking
what HN is doing to prevent it is one which might be more easily answered by
watching the site for a while.

Based on an extremely unscientific sampling (going back a bit over a million
items and then hopping around randomly between 300 and 386 days in the past),
while there is a slight decrease in the level of conversation - and a fair
amount of karma inflation - it's not too noticeable, and I expect that it
would be somewhat difficult to distinguish between a discussion thread now and
one from a year ago, if all temporal identification was stripped out. Maybe
the type of articles has changed a bit, and maybe really short comments tend
to be upvoted a bit more than they used to, but by and large HN is not going
downhill.

~~~
Jarred
I'm not specifically referring to Hacker News. I'm building something that has
a large community aspect to it and I wanted to know so I can avoid a potential
"Eternal September" later.

