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I wouldn't attribute this to the upvoting system - HN is highly moderated and somewhat specialised as a community. This can't scale to a platform as large and a

• TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > This can't scale to a platform as large and as broad as Twitter. I think this is the answer to the whole conversation about building communities on-line. That is: quality communities don't scale. As I elaborated on here[0], I think the factor that enables high-quality on-line communities is active moderation - and that doesn't scale. The workload grows in proportion to the userbase / discussion volume. So, if we want a high-quality platform "as large and as broad as Twitter", we'll have to do it the hard way, and employ proportionate level of active moderation. On a tangent: looking from this angle, the failure of big on-line platforms is just another example of the modus operandi of big tech companies: they do the easy 80% of the work, ignore the remaining 20% that's hard and most important, and then defend themselves by claiming "scale is hard". Other well-known examples of this phenomenon include counterfeiting problems on Amazon and Google's nonexistent customer support. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917125