If you haven't read Clay Shirky's essays on the difficulty of maintaining an online community, do it now ( http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http:

If you haven't read Clay Shirky's essays on the difficulty of maintaining an online community, do it now ( http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html and http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_user.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_user.html ). Actually, read all the source articles in Spolsky's Best Software Writing I ( http://brevity.org/misc/bestswi.html http://brevity.org/misc/bestswi.html ) Every online community, from the very beginning, has faced its own crisis of identity as it scales. Perpetual September is as inevitable as the second law of thermodynamics. I long considered HN to be a counterexample precisely because the group is not only self-selecting, but constitutionally disinclined to enjoy shallowness. A group of true geeks and entrepreneurs does not have to be coerced into expressing a love of Erlang internals and a hatred of celebrity gossip. But, inevitably, any given community will attract people with different interests. A war of sorts inevitably occurs as both subcultures clash and try to gain power. The result is one we've seen in every single online community that has ever been created. imho, the culture of HN is smart enough to either find a solution or at least a way to delay this process. There's a reason PG tells us not to complain about "redditization": such complaints are the very thing that dissolves a sense of community and shared values.