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The more popular a community gets the more diluted its culture becomes. The communities become overrun with users who never have a chance to acclimate to the cu
by coderdude 14y ago
The more popular a community gets the more diluted its culture becomes. The communities become overrun with users who never have a chance to acclimate to the culture of the site because they see more new users like themselves than they do seasoned users. You see this effect taking hold on HN when you go to a thread and see a bunch of short joke comments and none of them are light gray. Eventually the core users leave for greener pastures or for a place that resembles why they joined the previous site to begin with. Every community is doomed to this fate if it continues to gain unchecked popularity. All things will eventually converge on pictures of cats.
When aging HN users get tired of the changing atmosphere they will splinter off.
What I'd like to see come next: A community for hacker+entrepreneur types with an HN-like policy on commenting and etiquette that doesn't pander to Silicon Valley and doesn't need to stay on the good side of tech rags. Bootstrapping, programming, running a company -- that's it. Nothing so vague as "gratifying one's intellectual curiosity."
- samspot 14y agoThat is where reddit shines... they can splinter off to subreddits.