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As a self-described "average user of SE", I find this drama pretty similar to drama I've seen circling around the Quora "community" for the last 6 months or so:

As a self-described "average user of SE", I find this drama pretty similar to drama I've seen circling around the Quora "community" for the last 6 months or so: confusing. I use both SE and Quora to get answers, especially to extremely-niche questions. I understand that some people do use them for community and that people do interact and know each other on both platforms, but it's hard to understand complaints about a subpar community when the goal of the site doesn't seem to revolve around a community at all. To me, SE is a Q&A site. It exists to let people ask questions and get those questions answered. If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful? This probably comes off a bit flippant to the situation, but it's meant to illustrate that you're right: I'd say I'm a pretty average user of SE (in that I just use it to get answers, and occasionally write my own answers when I can, and so far it's worked perfectly well for me) and I don't care one bit about community-based drama.

solidasparagus 7y ago
> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful? My suspicion is that the answer is yes. You'd have to have actual data to be sure, but based on my experience with internet communities, there are probably a small number of people who bring in the vast majority of the value (i.e. answer the most questions, clean up/flag/categorize questions and answers). Those people spend a lot of time on the site and the community aspect (relationships, reputation, etc) is a big part of what motivates them to consistently return and add value.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I concur. You can see the same thing on HN, if you look closely. For a new or infrequent user, all comment threads are randos talking to other randos. For a frequent commenter who's been here for a while now, it's a community with a lot of transient commenters, but also a lot of regulars, who recognize each other's handles and sometimes carry discussions across time and multiple comment threads - and it's a big part of the value of this place. If HN was to suddenly replace all usernames with their SHA-1 hashes, being here would get much less interesting.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I’ve been here for four or five years, and I only recognize two or three people by their username. I don’t pay attention to the people - only the comments.
    - solidasparagus 7y ago
      Compared to other communities, HN is particularly minimalistic when it comes to associating posts with authors.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I pay attention to comments first, too, but I can't help but remember the handles - especially if I had a back-and-forth with someone over the course of a day, and had to verify that I'm still replying to the same commenter. Like, I recognize your handle, I think we've been replying to each other on some thread some weeks ago. (Then again, maybe I'm projecting, assuming more community in this place than there really is. I'm a HN addict after all.)
    - LocalH 7y ago
      I've been here for just under three years, and I'm in the same boat, except I don't really even have but one username that I'm specifically familiar with due to HN (and that'd be dang). I've recognized familiar usernames from other places (such as when byuu occasionally shows up to talk shop about emulation), but that's a bit different. I honestly think that's one of HN's strengths. Too often, in general discourse, who is talking becomes as important, if not more important, than what is being said. I feel that the lack of prominence of a poster/commenter's name is a plus - it invites the reader to focus on the message being written, rather than the source.
  - drusepth 7y ago
    I'd actually argue that that that context-heavy communication (carrying discussions across time and multiple comment threads) often makes the conversation worse from the point of view of those transient commenters (which, I'd guess, is a majority of HN? You probably know better than me on that, though). I'd classify myself as a transient commenter here since I don't recognize names even though I've been on HN since 2011. I admit it probably makes the site more enjoyable for those regulars, though, and can sometimes also generate "good" conversation that wouldn't otherwise exist that is beneficial to transient commenters also. I actually spent a long time lobbying Quora to make content anonymous by default for exactly this reason. It's really frustrating when I come into a comment thread and don't understand some context outside of what's actually being said. This isn't nearly as much of a problem on HN than it is on Quora (or even SE), but if I ask an intentionally-generic question I don't want people looking at who asked it and needlessly scoping their answers to the kind of answers they think I want. I also understand there are some psychological benefits to the opposite though (people wanting to know more about who asked a question to put a face to who they think they're helping), but IMO what little benefit it offers the OP dwarfs potentially unfortunate specificity for anyone else with that question in the future that might put them in a weird mix of "duplicate question" and "oh, but this one little thing is different for me".
JanisL 7y ago
> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful? The whole platform is based around the users creating questions and answers. The site puts much of the effort for curation and moderation on to the community, if you visit the chat rooms on there you'll find that there's groups of people who congregate there who do a disproportionate amount of that work of keeping things running smoothly. So I think there is a risk of the site quality sliding substantially if the currently highly engage segment of the community there disengages.
mwexler 7y ago
One of the fascinating aspects of any user-generated-and-shared experience is that community forms. From original forums hoping to foster community to blog posts where folks live in comments to the rise of wikis and the the communities there, to the current optimization of "social networks", what makes the content good is the community who is willing to contribute to it. Just a pure "look for questions and answer them" will fail, and has over and over again, even with payment/bounties for answers, unless a community can form that takes pride in sharing knowledge, keeping things accurate, and trying to help. And once it declines, as these things can, into arguments from the louder voices, then the community suffers... and so does the quality of content moving forward. So, without community, you wouldn't have the answers, and without the answers, folks stop asking the questions.
dxbydt 7y ago
> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful? so for a while, due to strange quirk of circumstance, i had the inside track of a profitable adult website. it was your standard “streaming adult videos, no ads, charge hefty subscription” model. one morning the ceo says let’s do community. everyone’s going social. lets have blogs, message board, the whole shebang. Announcement made with much fanfare. The idiot audience thought community means they could talk to their favorite pornstar :) once the ceo clarifies that no, community doesn’t mean that, they turn on him like a pack of wolves. what do you mean, you want us to talk to each other ?! like random perv from oklahoma should message arbitrary perv from cleveland about which vid gets him off ? wtf ?!! the poor ceo’s got his back to a wall. he says, we’ll be the world’s largest adult community. the peeps are like, dude, largest community of pervs ? fbi will have a ball. half of us are scared our employer or our spouse or worse, teenage son hacks into our account. now you want us to have wacky avatars & actually talk to each other on a messageboard so whatever we say persists for posterity ? it quickly went downhill from there. they brought in a moderator, sort of like dang. he was supposed to police the crowds & tamp down on contentious disagreement. but hardly anybody participated, so they had to broaden dang’s role. so now everytime a video was posted, poor dang would have to watch the whole video and make insightful comments like “lady featured in this clip at 7:15 is the same lady in that other clip at 9:20” and so on. soon he became an encyclopedia of porn trivia. people actually started showing up on the community board just to poke fun of his wide acumen. Around that time i quit. But it was quite the experience. Community can be a major hassle.
- throwaway413 7y ago
  Dang, dang.
- mekane8 7y ago
  This was an interesting read. If you wrote more of these stories out into a longer blog format I'd totally read it!
- theflyinghorse 7y ago
  So you're telling me there's a dude named Dang out there with an incredible wealth of porn knowledge? That's really cool in the weirdest way and I bet you he can't even tell anyone about it for the rest of his life
codyb 7y ago
I have a feeling this is like asking if you could take the community out of Little Italy in NYC. For the tourist coming in, looking through the windows, having a canoli, does the community really matter? Are they even visible in the throngs of the crowd? But for the people who live there day in and day out, the expulsion of a popular shop owner from their midst might be quite perturbing and a big stir. At the end of the day, without those shop owners who come back every day, Little Italy probably would not be the same pleasant experience for the tourists. I imagine it’s similar for the largely invisible to the end user stack exchange community.

solidasparagus 7y ago

> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful? My suspicion is that the answer is yes. You'd have to have actual data to be sure, but based on my experience with internet communities, there are probably a small number of people who bring in the vast majority of the value (i.e. answer the most questions, clean up/flag/categorize questions and answers). Those people spend a lot of time on the site and the community aspect (relationships, reputation, etc) is a big part of what motivates them to consistently return and add value.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
I concur. You can see the same thing on HN, if you look closely. For a new or infrequent user, all comment threads are randos talking to other randos. For a frequent commenter who's been here for a while now, it's a community with a lot of transient commenters, but also a lot of regulars, who recognize each other's handles and sometimes carry discussions across time and multiple comment threads - and it's a big part of the value of this place. If HN was to suddenly replace all usernames with their SHA-1 hashes, being here would get much less interesting.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I’ve been here for four or five years, and I only recognize two or three people by their username. I don’t pay attention to the people - only the comments.
  - solidasparagus 7y ago
    Compared to other communities, HN is particularly minimalistic when it comes to associating posts with authors.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I pay attention to comments first, too, but I can't help but remember the handles - especially if I had a back-and-forth with someone over the course of a day, and had to verify that I'm still replying to the same commenter. Like, I recognize your handle, I think we've been replying to each other on some thread some weeks ago. (Then again, maybe I'm projecting, assuming more community in this place than there really is. I'm a HN addict after all.)
  - LocalH 7y ago
    I've been here for just under three years, and I'm in the same boat, except I don't really even have but one username that I'm specifically familiar with due to HN (and that'd be dang). I've recognized familiar usernames from other places (such as when byuu occasionally shows up to talk shop about emulation), but that's a bit different. I honestly think that's one of HN's strengths. Too often, in general discourse, who is talking becomes as important, if not more important, than what is being said. I feel that the lack of prominence of a poster/commenter's name is a plus - it invites the reader to focus on the message being written, rather than the source.
- drusepth 7y ago
  I'd actually argue that that that context-heavy communication (carrying discussions across time and multiple comment threads) often makes the conversation worse from the point of view of those transient commenters (which, I'd guess, is a majority of HN? You probably know better than me on that, though). I'd classify myself as a transient commenter here since I don't recognize names even though I've been on HN since 2011. I admit it probably makes the site more enjoyable for those regulars, though, and can sometimes also generate "good" conversation that wouldn't otherwise exist that is beneficial to transient commenters also. I actually spent a long time lobbying Quora to make content anonymous by default for exactly this reason. It's really frustrating when I come into a comment thread and don't understand some context outside of what's actually being said. This isn't nearly as much of a problem on HN than it is on Quora (or even SE), but if I ask an intentionally-generic question I don't want people looking at who asked it and needlessly scoping their answers to the kind of answers they think I want. I also understand there are some psychological benefits to the opposite though (people wanting to know more about who asked a question to put a face to who they think they're helping), but IMO what little benefit it offers the OP dwarfs potentially unfortunate specificity for anyone else with that question in the future that might put them in a weird mix of "duplicate question" and "oh, but this one little thing is different for me".

JanisL 7y ago

> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful? The whole platform is based around the users creating questions and answers. The site puts much of the effort for curation and moderation on to the community, if you visit the chat rooms on there you'll find that there's groups of people who congregate there who do a disproportionate amount of that work of keeping things running smoothly. So I think there is a risk of the site quality sliding substantially if the currently highly engage segment of the community there disengages.

mwexler 7y ago

One of the fascinating aspects of any user-generated-and-shared experience is that community forms. From original forums hoping to foster community to blog posts where folks live in comments to the rise of wikis and the the communities there, to the current optimization of "social networks", what makes the content good is the community who is willing to contribute to it. Just a pure "look for questions and answer them" will fail, and has over and over again, even with payment/bounties for answers, unless a community can form that takes pride in sharing knowledge, keeping things accurate, and trying to help. And once it declines, as these things can, into arguments from the louder voices, then the community suffers... and so does the quality of content moving forward. So, without community, you wouldn't have the answers, and without the answers, folks stop asking the questions.

dxbydt 7y ago

> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful? so for a while, due to strange quirk of circumstance, i had the inside track of a profitable adult website. it was your standard “streaming adult videos, no ads, charge hefty subscription” model. one morning the ceo says let’s do community. everyone’s going social. lets have blogs, message board, the whole shebang. Announcement made with much fanfare. The idiot audience thought community means they could talk to their favorite pornstar :) once the ceo clarifies that no, community doesn’t mean that, they turn on him like a pack of wolves. what do you mean, you want us to talk to each other ?! like random perv from oklahoma should message arbitrary perv from cleveland about which vid gets him off ? wtf ?!! the poor ceo’s got his back to a wall. he says, we’ll be the world’s largest adult community. the peeps are like, dude, largest community of pervs ? fbi will have a ball. half of us are scared our employer or our spouse or worse, teenage son hacks into our account. now you want us to have wacky avatars & actually talk to each other on a messageboard so whatever we say persists for posterity ? it quickly went downhill from there. they brought in a moderator, sort of like dang. he was supposed to police the crowds & tamp down on contentious disagreement. but hardly anybody participated, so they had to broaden dang’s role. so now everytime a video was posted, poor dang would have to watch the whole video and make insightful comments like “lady featured in this clip at 7:15 is the same lady in that other clip at 9:20” and so on. soon he became an encyclopedia of porn trivia. people actually started showing up on the community board just to poke fun of his wide acumen. Around that time i quit. But it was quite the experience. Community can be a major hassle.

throwaway413 7y ago
Dang, dang.
mekane8 7y ago
This was an interesting read. If you wrote more of these stories out into a longer blog format I'd totally read it!
theflyinghorse 7y ago
So you're telling me there's a dude named Dang out there with an incredible wealth of porn knowledge? That's really cool in the weirdest way and I bet you he can't even tell anyone about it for the rest of his life

codyb 7y ago

I have a feeling this is like asking if you could take the community out of Little Italy in NYC. For the tourist coming in, looking through the windows, having a canoli, does the community really matter? Are they even visible in the throngs of the crowd? But for the people who live there day in and day out, the expulsion of a popular shop owner from their midst might be quite perturbing and a big stir. At the end of the day, without those shop owners who come back every day, Little Italy probably would not be the same pleasant experience for the tourists. I imagine it’s similar for the largely invisible to the end user stack exchange community.