>The problem is only more complicated models can improve it and the moment you do that you potentially lose customers, but at the same time you potentially don'

>The problem is only more complicated models can improve it and the moment you do that you potentially lose customers, but at the same time you potentially don't want those customers either. Therein lies the key paradox. Statistically, content quality usually has the shape of the the lognormal distribution, with community size on the horizontal axis and quality on the vertical. Content below a certain margin of popularity is usually unpopular for a reason--the ideas of the community are not very good! When content quality is high, the popularity of a community rises because the ideas are good! After a critical threshold though quality goes down. Once you've reached that threshold, number of users is inversely proportional to quality. I really like HN vetting process for voting: you have to have spent enough time on the site, and commented in a way that gained sufficient approval from the existing community in order to get the right to vote in that community. Keeping barriers to entry high is critical to this, but marketing people can only see $/user. Reddit has become increasingly intolerable for me except for a few niche subreddits.