There's this perception, and I saw it on Slashdot, Plastic.com, Kuro5hin and plenty of other sites back in the day, that sites should stay how they are. It doe

There's this perception, and I saw it on Slashdot, Plastic.com, Kuro5hin and plenty of other sites back in the day, that sites should stay how they are. It doesn't happen. Even if you stopped having new members here, people change. It's a community site. It serves the community, but as the community changes, so will the site. Don't try to make Hacker News serve your own needs by trying to restrict aspects to old hands. I've seen it tried, and it works, but the more restrictions, the quicker the community moves on to somewhere else. Instead, find ways the site can help you even as it changes, and try to make it better, instead of keeping it good. If something else can help you more, find it, or build it (your a hacker, after all). I will say that I do know one thing that seems to have worked fairly well in terms of keeping a site working, but that may be more because of the nature of the site, and the nature of the people, and less because of the restriction. Metafilter charges a one time fee for new members.