10 ms·

I joined HN right around the time I thought reddit had become a dump. Apparently that was 10 years ago. Early reddit was a really fun place. Not sure how to ex

by fiblye 6y ago

I joined HN right around the time I thought reddit had become a dump. Apparently that was 10 years ago. Early reddit was a really fun place. Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community. Basically everyone was an engineer, programmer, or scientist of some sort, or so it seemed. Most of the front page was science, tech, and programming news, and the remaining bit was people posting about tech gadgets and other stuff they made. It seemed pretty similar to HN, but more active and with a less market-oriented crowd just making stuff for the hell of it (which HN still gets a decent amount of). Then people started posting pictures of cakes, political/religious discussions were everywhere, and it just felt weird. Digg was starting to decline and small waves of people started coming in, and once v4 launched and killed Digg, reddit's comment section completely changed, and the submitted content soon followed. Now I go and see avatars and people buying gifts and gold (someone actually took an old 4chan joke and turned it into a business idea) and endless fake videos and random images. It looks like an absolute circus now. People having been mentioning that finding niche subreddits is the answer, but in my experience, it's just a game of musical chairs. Virtually all of them get bad eventually.

ozi 6y ago
> Virtually all of them get bad eventually. Like pretty much everything on the internet.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  Eternal September: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- loudtieblahblah 6y ago
  Given enough people or money, everything goes to shit. On and offline.
msla 6y ago
> Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community. I think this is where everyone goes off the rails a bit, and I want to explain why: Reddit can't be a community. Reddit is too big to be a community. Reddit is too diverse to be a community. Where's the community between Old-School Runescape players and Lisp programmers? There might be some tiny Venn-diagram overlap, but there's no shared goal there, no spirit of common purpose. The two worlds aren't allied, they aren't opposed, they're simply sharing a common platform useful for allowing online discussions, and they don't cross paths otherwise. After all, what's a great white shark to a wolf? If you expect a platform-as-a-whole to be a community, you'll be driven off one platform after the other, time and time again, until you either find one so niche it's never going to grow, or you die unsatisfied. Hell, you might not even be satisfied with the niche platform, given that it'll be a stagnant backwater utterly ignored by the rest of the Internet. Reddit's solution is Usenet's solution: Subdivisions! Allow tons of smaller sub-platforms to proliferate, and allow them to be communities. Or not. There are some fairly community-like subreddits, and there are some clubby Usenet newsgroups.
- wyldfire 6y ago
  > I think this is where everyone goes off the rails a bit, and I want to explain why: Reddit can't be a community. Reddit is too big to be a community. Reddit is too diverse to be a community. Around 2004/5, it wasn't too big or too diverse. They didn't even have comments at first, much less subreddits. Once comments showed up , I figured "oh well -- now it's no different from slashdot." Of course I was so wrong. I enjoyed coming to the comments after reading the article and seeing lots of interesting commentary. Right you are that subreddits span quite a spectrum. I chuckle to myself when I overhear conversations about reddit pro/con. It's clear that some people judge reddit by the default front page and they have a very different experience from mine. I've had no thumbnails as the default for probably almost as long as the user preference was available. The combined difference in content and UI between "old" reddit-no-thumbnails-my-subscriptions and new reddit-popular is night and day. It's two vastly different sites. I can confess to being a part of the problem, though. I started the bad habit of reading the title then the comments and skipping the article. And once imgur appeared, I upvoted the onslaught of mindless memes while never taking the time to consider thoughtful articles. They are after all, the "it" that we have supposedly "redd". I'll put in a plug for /r/TrueReddit - there's often interesting content there.
tapland 6y ago
Around 2011, every start of the semester saw a huge user increase. I guess it was a combination of reddit being popularized and everyone getting smartphones. Rapid decline from there.
dabbernaught420 6y ago
Sounds about right to me. I started using reddit about nine years ago, and I remember thinking that I had missed out on "good reddit" at the time. Of course, it's gotten much worse still, since then.
terminalcommand 6y ago
As a recent newcomer into reddit, I feel the same way. The only thing I do differently is that I only subscribe to subs I like and live happily inside my filter bubble. I only browse through my own feed.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  This confuses me. People keep saying Reddit is blah blah. I usually only go to Reddit to find an answer / solution / review / commentary on something specific, and via internet search always land in some subreddit or another which seems like a fairly reasonable community.
  - prox 6y ago
    This, and if you keep the auto joined subs if you make a new account, you’re gonna have a bad time. Subreddits are very useful, I like r/opensource , r/datahoarders etc.
    - blaser-waffle 6y ago
      Gonna second this for emphasis. You gotta ditch the default subs. If you want to see whats percolating in the high-traffic subreddits, use r/all. I find it's worthwhile to check it no more than once a week, but it's useful for checking the pulse.
  - mitchdoogle 6y ago
    I've been using Reddit for 8 years and it seems mostly the same. Mind you, I have kept the old design in place this whole time and I have subreddit CSS turned off. I think people are committing the age old error of romanticizing the past
    - takeda 6y ago
      It changed a lot if you use the new design and create a new account (where they add you to the most popular subreddits)
mytailorisrich 6y ago
Every social platform will decay once it has reached a critical mass. I think this is the inevitable result of letting anyone post anything.
DrBazza 6y ago
> Basically everyone was an engineer, programmer, or scientist of some sort, or so it seemed. That's how the WWW felt when it first started, then the AOL lot turned up. Even Twitter was like that in the first 6 months or so.
- toyg 6y ago
  Every new technology is inevitably "full of technologists" when it starts, since they are the only ones who know how to operate it. As things get easier, inevitably non-technologists take over, since they outnumber technologists by orders of magnitude.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
  I'm starting to see a pattern here... Maybe I should launch a social site where uneducated people are not allowed to participate? Too bad that it probably lacks the 10000x growth potential VCs are looking for :/
  - Kye 6y ago
    What criteria would you use? I've met a lot of stupid people with education from well-regarded institutions and a lot of sharp people with no education past K-12, if that. Formal education seems like a poor measure.
    - indigochill 6y ago
      Just make it deliberately inconvenient for normal schlubs to use. CLI-only BBSes for life.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
        I know you are making a joke, but a barrier of entry is definitely part of the equation here. Right now, a good portion of the web development seems focused on removing friction as much as possible.
lloydatkinson 6y ago
I'm really hoping https://www.saidit.net/ https://www.saidit.net/ takes off, the recent subreddit ban wave was an attack on free speech and people are recommending this alternative.
- Ndymium 6y ago
  Looking at the content, it's mostly complaints about Reddit, conspiracy theories, and right wing politics. Doesn't look like a return to the Reddit that GP was reminiscing about.
  - compton 6y ago
    I'm hopeful for https://dev.lemmy.ml/ https://dev.lemmy.ml/ It's very young right now, I don't think it's been live much more than a month (?), so is a bit of a ghost town. Unlike the other Reddit clones that have popped up recently (ruqqus, saidit, voat) it is not overrun with right-wing trolls (yet). I think it's going for a distributed model, like Mastodon, where anyone can run their own instance with their own rules and whatnot.
    - stockavuryah 6y ago
      Seems the right way to go. Decentralize. It separates the "communities" even more, just allows people to host their virtual place.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    See also: Neutral vs Conservative: The Eternal Struggle https://web.archive.org/web/20200205183339/http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200205183339/http://slatestarc... "The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."
  - 6y ago
dingdingdang 6y ago
Honestly Digg can not be mentioned enough times here, what Reddit did with the re-design almost feels like opt-in/wilful self-destruction. Is there a point somewhere in there that once a platform becomes a powerhouse, in terms of democratic user behaviour & numbers, that platform is in turn basically forced into auto-destruct since the risks of having a sudden functional democracy the size of a small nation state is basically too disruptive to current world order/system?
- dbspin 6y ago
  Pretty sure a community that can be disrupted by dancing avatars and a page redesign is no threat to the stability of the international community. 'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.' Especially when founders leave.
  - cameronbrown 6y ago
    The problem with founder culture is companies become dependent on their founders. If Aaron was still around I think Reddit would look very different.
    - dreamcompiler 6y ago
      If Aaron was still around he would have invented something better than Reddit. Probably several times.
  - bandedetrappes 6y ago
    You're right in a sense that it does not threaten the international community, but the old design acted as a deterrent against the majority of "pictures, easy browsing and quick content" users, which have since drowned the original community. Most of the people I have been asking stayed away of reddit because of the interface, which is good because it retained only the people that were interested enough in the subject to dive into text-only pages.
- y7 6y ago
  Maybe it's that once a platform achieves a certain size then the potential of making real money comes into view, and that starts to be the objective to optimize for. That means employing typical short-sighted stock boosting strategies such as explicitly focusing on revenue (Digg), or targeting mass appeal. Only the masses do not produce very good content, and they overwhelm the initial users in numbers by an order of magnitude. So the quality of the platform goes to shit.
stepstop 6y ago
> Then people started posting pictures of cakes, political/religious discussions were everywhere, and it just felt weird. It wasn’t just random, I noticed a major shift leading up to the 2008 election. Reddit’s decision to lock some vocally awful subreddits (/r/politics /r/atheism /uspolitics etc) made the homepage a gaggle of Obama & anti-religious rhetoric rather than anything compelling.
- gibspaulding 6y ago
  > Reddit’s decision to lock some vocally awful subreddits (/r/politics /r/atheism /uspolitics etc) made the homepage a gaggle of Obama & anti-religious rhetoric rather than anything compelling. Now that's an interesting phenomenon I hadn't thought about before. There's been a lot of discussion recently about tech companies removing/blocking content they do not agree with. In most cases (racism, hate-speach, etc) this seems pretty well justified as it helps keep these people from rallying together, but I never thought about those boards being a sort of trap crop [1] for the internet, keeping the pests distracted and away from the areas the rest of us enjoy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_crop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_crop
  - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
    It wasn't about agreement or disagreement. The pendulum swung HARD the other way in 2016, and /r/the_donald dominated the front page for the year leading up to the election. This is why is should be clear that Reddit makes a lot of money by manipulating the front page feed. Trump just simply outspent Clinton on Reddit. They just binned /r/t_d entirely, and, in my opinion, that IS an agree/disagree decision. The same folks will be back with the same content under a different sub, but I doubt they spend enough to punch through again this time. I think, given their success last time around, that the price will be much higher. Then again, what do I know? I was a pretty avid user at one time. Now I block the whole site and everything related. At this point, there's very little useful content left. It's basically just a giant portal for porn, and with 2 young boys in the house, and no way to filter it, I don't want it on my network. If they'd offer a DNS-based "safe" mode, like search engines, I'd open it back up.
  - 6y ago
zeveb 6y ago
> Early reddit was a really fun place. Yup. I've had a reddit account since r/politics was relatively balanced! It was fun and awesome. And now I am seriously thinking of deleting my account altogether. It is just not worth it any longer.
xtracto 6y ago
I find it really interesting how a social network can shape your thoughts. Back in the day, I was an avid SlashDot reader, I even participated in the Sony Rootkit fiasco (I got my 10 minutes of Internet fame for compiling a list https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/398332-neowins-official-sony-drmrootkit-discussion/?do=findComment&comment=586816306 https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/398332-neowins-official-s... ) . At the end of that time, I remember briefly looking into Digg and been nauseated about it, looking into Reddit and just finding it weird (no story summaries?) and looking at HackerNews comments and thinking what a bunch of capitalists wannabe they were (I think with time the discourse in HackerNews has become more "leftist" leaning towards Open Source, freedom, and similar thoughts). I ended up coming more and more to HackerNews as the quality of the discourse in Slashdot went down, and because the quality of the discourse here in HackerNews became better. I also got into the "startup culture" around that time, so I am sure my perceptions changed. For some reason I also got more and more into reddit at that time, specific subreddits (mainly about my country while I was an expat, but also about US Politics which I find pretty entertaining to follow). One thing I have been seeing in HackerNews in the last years is that the "comment effort" has decreased. You see more people writing single line comments like "or so he said" that do not really contribute anything. Although the moderation team make their best to maintain a good amount to SNR in the site, I think something like a reminder each time you are commenting with the main guidelines (be civil, strongest plausible interpretation, good-fate, etc) would help as more an more new people join.

by fiblye 6y ago

ozi 6y ago

> Virtually all of them get bad eventually. Like pretty much everything on the internet.

IggleSniggle 6y ago
Eternal September: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
loudtieblahblah 6y ago
Given enough people or money, everything goes to shit. On and offline.

msla 6y ago

> Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community. I think this is where everyone goes off the rails a bit, and I want to explain why: Reddit can't be a community. Reddit is too big to be a community. Reddit is too diverse to be a community. Where's the community between Old-School Runescape players and Lisp programmers? There might be some tiny Venn-diagram overlap, but there's no shared goal there, no spirit of common purpose. The two worlds aren't allied, they aren't opposed, they're simply sharing a common platform useful for allowing online discussions, and they don't cross paths otherwise. After all, what's a great white shark to a wolf? If you expect a platform-as-a-whole to be a community, you'll be driven off one platform after the other, time and time again, until you either find one so niche it's never going to grow, or you die unsatisfied. Hell, you might not even be satisfied with the niche platform, given that it'll be a stagnant backwater utterly ignored by the rest of the Internet. Reddit's solution is Usenet's solution: Subdivisions! Allow tons of smaller sub-platforms to proliferate, and allow them to be communities. Or not. There are some fairly community-like subreddits, and there are some clubby Usenet newsgroups.

wyldfire 6y ago
> I think this is where everyone goes off the rails a bit, and I want to explain why: Reddit can't be a community. Reddit is too big to be a community. Reddit is too diverse to be a community. Around 2004/5, it wasn't too big or too diverse. They didn't even have comments at first, much less subreddits. Once comments showed up , I figured "oh well -- now it's no different from slashdot." Of course I was so wrong. I enjoyed coming to the comments after reading the article and seeing lots of interesting commentary. Right you are that subreddits span quite a spectrum. I chuckle to myself when I overhear conversations about reddit pro/con. It's clear that some people judge reddit by the default front page and they have a very different experience from mine. I've had no thumbnails as the default for probably almost as long as the user preference was available. The combined difference in content and UI between "old" reddit-no-thumbnails-my-subscriptions and new reddit-popular is night and day. It's two vastly different sites. I can confess to being a part of the problem, though. I started the bad habit of reading the title then the comments and skipping the article. And once imgur appeared, I upvoted the onslaught of mindless memes while never taking the time to consider thoughtful articles. They are after all, the "it" that we have supposedly "redd". I'll put in a plug for /r/TrueReddit - there's often interesting content there.

tapland 6y ago

Around 2011, every start of the semester saw a huge user increase. I guess it was a combination of reddit being popularized and everyone getting smartphones. Rapid decline from there.

dabbernaught420 6y ago

Sounds about right to me. I started using reddit about nine years ago, and I remember thinking that I had missed out on "good reddit" at the time. Of course, it's gotten much worse still, since then.

terminalcommand 6y ago

As a recent newcomer into reddit, I feel the same way. The only thing I do differently is that I only subscribe to subs I like and live happily inside my filter bubble. I only browse through my own feed.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
This confuses me. People keep saying Reddit is blah blah. I usually only go to Reddit to find an answer / solution / review / commentary on something specific, and via internet search always land in some subreddit or another which seems like a fairly reasonable community.
- prox 6y ago
  This, and if you keep the auto joined subs if you make a new account, you’re gonna have a bad time. Subreddits are very useful, I like r/opensource , r/datahoarders etc.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Gonna second this for emphasis. You gotta ditch the default subs. If you want to see whats percolating in the high-traffic subreddits, use r/all. I find it's worthwhile to check it no more than once a week, but it's useful for checking the pulse.
- mitchdoogle 6y ago
  I've been using Reddit for 8 years and it seems mostly the same. Mind you, I have kept the old design in place this whole time and I have subreddit CSS turned off. I think people are committing the age old error of romanticizing the past
  - takeda 6y ago
    It changed a lot if you use the new design and create a new account (where they add you to the most popular subreddits)

mytailorisrich 6y ago

Every social platform will decay once it has reached a critical mass. I think this is the inevitable result of letting anyone post anything.

DrBazza 6y ago

> Basically everyone was an engineer, programmer, or scientist of some sort, or so it seemed. That's how the WWW felt when it first started, then the AOL lot turned up. Even Twitter was like that in the first 6 months or so.

toyg 6y ago
Every new technology is inevitably "full of technologists" when it starts, since they are the only ones who know how to operate it. As things get easier, inevitably non-technologists take over, since they outnumber technologists by orders of magnitude.
layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
I'm starting to see a pattern here... Maybe I should launch a social site where uneducated people are not allowed to participate? Too bad that it probably lacks the 10000x growth potential VCs are looking for :/
- Kye 6y ago
  What criteria would you use? I've met a lot of stupid people with education from well-regarded institutions and a lot of sharp people with no education past K-12, if that. Formal education seems like a poor measure.
  - indigochill 6y ago
    Just make it deliberately inconvenient for normal schlubs to use. CLI-only BBSes for life.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
      I know you are making a joke, but a barrier of entry is definitely part of the equation here. Right now, a good portion of the web development seems focused on removing friction as much as possible.

lloydatkinson 6y ago

I'm really hoping https://www.saidit.net/ https://www.saidit.net/ takes off, the recent subreddit ban wave was an attack on free speech and people are recommending this alternative.

Ndymium 6y ago
Looking at the content, it's mostly complaints about Reddit, conspiracy theories, and right wing politics. Doesn't look like a return to the Reddit that GP was reminiscing about.
- compton 6y ago
  I'm hopeful for https://dev.lemmy.ml/ https://dev.lemmy.ml/ It's very young right now, I don't think it's been live much more than a month (?), so is a bit of a ghost town. Unlike the other Reddit clones that have popped up recently (ruqqus, saidit, voat) it is not overrun with right-wing trolls (yet). I think it's going for a distributed model, like Mastodon, where anyone can run their own instance with their own rules and whatnot.
  - stockavuryah 6y ago
    Seems the right way to go. Decentralize. It separates the "communities" even more, just allows people to host their virtual place.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  See also: Neutral vs Conservative: The Eternal Struggle https://web.archive.org/web/20200205183339/http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200205183339/http://slatestarc... "The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."
- 6y ago

dingdingdang 6y ago

Honestly Digg can not be mentioned enough times here, what Reddit did with the re-design almost feels like opt-in/wilful self-destruction. Is there a point somewhere in there that once a platform becomes a powerhouse, in terms of democratic user behaviour & numbers, that platform is in turn basically forced into auto-destruct since the risks of having a sudden functional democracy the size of a small nation state is basically too disruptive to current world order/system?

dbspin 6y ago
Pretty sure a community that can be disrupted by dancing avatars and a page redesign is no threat to the stability of the international community. 'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.' Especially when founders leave.
- cameronbrown 6y ago
  The problem with founder culture is companies become dependent on their founders. If Aaron was still around I think Reddit would look very different.
  - dreamcompiler 6y ago
    If Aaron was still around he would have invented something better than Reddit. Probably several times.
- bandedetrappes 6y ago
  You're right in a sense that it does not threaten the international community, but the old design acted as a deterrent against the majority of "pictures, easy browsing and quick content" users, which have since drowned the original community. Most of the people I have been asking stayed away of reddit because of the interface, which is good because it retained only the people that were interested enough in the subject to dive into text-only pages.
y7 6y ago
Maybe it's that once a platform achieves a certain size then the potential of making real money comes into view, and that starts to be the objective to optimize for. That means employing typical short-sighted stock boosting strategies such as explicitly focusing on revenue (Digg), or targeting mass appeal. Only the masses do not produce very good content, and they overwhelm the initial users in numbers by an order of magnitude. So the quality of the platform goes to shit.

stepstop 6y ago

> Then people started posting pictures of cakes, political/religious discussions were everywhere, and it just felt weird. It wasn’t just random, I noticed a major shift leading up to the 2008 election. Reddit’s decision to lock some vocally awful subreddits (/r/politics /r/atheism /uspolitics etc) made the homepage a gaggle of Obama & anti-religious rhetoric rather than anything compelling.

gibspaulding 6y ago
> Reddit’s decision to lock some vocally awful subreddits (/r/politics /r/atheism /uspolitics etc) made the homepage a gaggle of Obama & anti-religious rhetoric rather than anything compelling. Now that's an interesting phenomenon I hadn't thought about before. There's been a lot of discussion recently about tech companies removing/blocking content they do not agree with. In most cases (racism, hate-speach, etc) this seems pretty well justified as it helps keep these people from rallying together, but I never thought about those boards being a sort of trap crop [1] for the internet, keeping the pests distracted and away from the areas the rest of us enjoy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_crop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_crop
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  It wasn't about agreement or disagreement. The pendulum swung HARD the other way in 2016, and /r/the_donald dominated the front page for the year leading up to the election. This is why is should be clear that Reddit makes a lot of money by manipulating the front page feed. Trump just simply outspent Clinton on Reddit. They just binned /r/t_d entirely, and, in my opinion, that IS an agree/disagree decision. The same folks will be back with the same content under a different sub, but I doubt they spend enough to punch through again this time. I think, given their success last time around, that the price will be much higher. Then again, what do I know? I was a pretty avid user at one time. Now I block the whole site and everything related. At this point, there's very little useful content left. It's basically just a giant portal for porn, and with 2 young boys in the house, and no way to filter it, I don't want it on my network. If they'd offer a DNS-based "safe" mode, like search engines, I'd open it back up.
- 6y ago

zeveb 6y ago

> Early reddit was a really fun place. Yup. I've had a reddit account since r/politics was relatively balanced! It was fun and awesome. And now I am seriously thinking of deleting my account altogether. It is just not worth it any longer.

xtracto 6y ago

I find it really interesting how a social network can shape your thoughts. Back in the day, I was an avid SlashDot reader, I even participated in the Sony Rootkit fiasco (I got my 10 minutes of Internet fame for compiling a list https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/398332-neowins-official-sony-drmrootkit-discussion/?do=findComment&comment=586816306 https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/398332-neowins-official-s... ) . At the end of that time, I remember briefly looking into Digg and been nauseated about it, looking into Reddit and just finding it weird (no story summaries?) and looking at HackerNews comments and thinking what a bunch of capitalists wannabe they were (I think with time the discourse in HackerNews has become more "leftist" leaning towards Open Source, freedom, and similar thoughts). I ended up coming more and more to HackerNews as the quality of the discourse in Slashdot went down, and because the quality of the discourse here in HackerNews became better. I also got into the "startup culture" around that time, so I am sure my perceptions changed. For some reason I also got more and more into reddit at that time, specific subreddits (mainly about my country while I was an expat, but also about US Politics which I find pretty entertaining to follow). One thing I have been seeing in HackerNews in the last years is that the "comment effort" has decreased. You see more people writing single line comments like "or so he said" that do not really contribute anything. Although the moderation team make their best to maintain a good amount to SNR in the site, I think something like a reminder each time you are commenting with the main guidelines (be civil, strongest plausible interpretation, good-fate, etc) would help as more an more new people join.