This kind of topic worries me because from my experience when a community starts worrying about "cohesion", "trolls" and like, this is usually the first sign of

This kind of topic worries me because from my experience when a community starts worrying about "cohesion", "trolls" and like, this is usually the first sign of it's fall down. The real problem is what most of us would call a fall down today, that will be called tommorow (and interpreted as) a rise up from other people (thus the extreme difficulty to create efficient moderating systems based on quantitative data). You know your community is irreversibly "corrupted" when this kind of people becomes the majority, and this usually happen surprisingly quickly with the faster growth of visitors. For some reason I have some hope for HN because of PG being behind it, he kinda knows what he wants and certainly knows what he doesn't want. Still, this might be one of the thoughest challenge he'll be faced with if HN keeps growing. I've known no community that escaped this syndrom yet.