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I agreed with him up until his solution. Because "controlling input" is also unsustainable when a community grows. Who is going to control input? If you're talk

I agreed with him up until his solution. Because "controlling input" is also unsustainable when a community grows. Who is going to control input? If you're talking about HN, even Paul Graham tried to control input and it's not working. Or maybe he's not doing it enough. Listen to the Mixergy.com interview with Paul Graham. At exactly 49:40 Paul says, "[hacker news] was originally called startup news but after 6 months we changed it to hacker news cause we got sick of reading about nothing but startup stuff." And yet here we are again, HN is nothing but startup news, I just gave up and joined in, no use swimming against the current. The sad part was that HN was originally a much better nursery to startups because all startups begin their life as a project, a hack, a mod, a solution. HN was all about code back then, which put off a lot of people who couldn't code (myself included) and slowly it turned into more startup news to allow for a larger audience. The question is which came first? Was it necessarily a bad thing? How can PG / Should PG force the community back into more of a hacker culture than a startup culture? I came up with an idea to control who the members of a community are by means of crowd-sourcing (http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/invention-creating-and-maintaining-exclusive-communities-through-crowdsourcing/ http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/invention-creating-and-...) but still, how can one control the hive-mind of the community to prevent it from wandering away from its original intent? We've seen what happens when one doesn't control the community. Maybe its time to play secret-dictator?

JumpCrisscross 14y ago
Federating that power of censorship, e.g. by weighting down-votes by karma (for HN), could help the community scale. Then one just needs to keep an eye on the most powerful censors and ensure they (a) aren't abusing their privilege, and, (b) are effectively policing along the right metrics.
- lmm 14y ago
  You've just suggested solving the problem of positive feedback loops by adding a massive positive feedback loop in the moderation system. That's not going to work.
  - JumpCrisscross 14y ago
    Positive feedback loops are heterogenous - there are sensible discussion and down-vote taunts and reciprocation. If people can be reliably categorized as promoting desirable loops and/or dampening undesirable ones, selectively amplifying their voices will promote quality. Instead of modulating input, which is not scalable, I'm suggesting modulating the dampening power (and potentially amplification power, e.g. upvotes from high-karma users counting for more) of a select and active minority.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago

Federating that power of censorship, e.g. by weighting down-votes by karma (for HN), could help the community scale. Then one just needs to keep an eye on the most powerful censors and ensure they (a) aren't abusing their privilege, and, (b) are effectively policing along the right metrics.

lmm 14y ago
You've just suggested solving the problem of positive feedback loops by adding a massive positive feedback loop in the moderation system. That's not going to work.
- JumpCrisscross 14y ago
  Positive feedback loops are heterogenous - there are sensible discussion and down-vote taunts and reciprocation. If people can be reliably categorized as promoting desirable loops and/or dampening undesirable ones, selectively amplifying their voices will promote quality. Instead of modulating input, which is not scalable, I'm suggesting modulating the dampening power (and potentially amplification power, e.g. upvotes from high-karma users counting for more) of a select and active minority.