3 ms·

I've always felt like one of the most important factors of sites like Reddit and HackerNews is that it takes very little effort to "contribute". It's almost par

I've always felt like one of the most important factors of sites like Reddit and HackerNews is that it takes very little effort to "contribute". It's almost part of reading/lurking to upvote an article or comment, and that lower barrier to entry means a lot more action and a lot more data to determine which content is the best. The founders of Twitter were right. When a thought is on the top of my mind, writing a blog post about it is hard. Sending a <=140 character message about it is easy. Lowering the barriers to entry can be a great strategy for something, especially something that requires a lot of participation to work correctly, to gain traction.

unfamiliar 13y ago
Lowering the barrier to entry is also a double edged sword. Just look at youtube comments pre-Google+.
- DanBC 13y ago
  I haven't seen much difference after Google +. Other examples include Xbox online which is horrific.
Bahamut 13y ago
By that token, wouldn't Facebook have come beforehand with status updates, and other compabies before FB? Twitter succeeded for various reasons in combination, not just the <= 140 characters aspect.
bane 13y ago
> When a thought is on the top of my mind, writing a blog post about it is hard. Sending a <=140 character message about it is easy. Now that you know this, why not write short, 1 or 2 sentence blog posts? There's nothing preventing that.
dredmorbius 13y ago
It's a mixed blessing. Contributed content without the ability to select for the best or most appropriate content just becomes so much mud to wade through. Depending on the forum and behavior of participants, I find that the best discussions are relatively small. With the right people, a small handful of participants, often as few as 2-3. More adds to the mix, but you pretty quickly run into the trolls, me-too's, derailers, and others, and the costs that they impose (by both discouraging and obscuring quality content) increase rapidly. What Metcalfe's law fails to take into account (especially for forum discussions) isn't just that not all contributions are equal, but many are negative. I've seen well-designed systems scale to a few thousand participants, though this generally requires a great deal of reserve from many. At those scales, keeping track of who's who is hard, and Dunbar's number seems to be pretty well established. Roughly 150 active participants (which is to say, 1,500 - 15,000 members, with an allowance above and below that) seems to be the maximum manageable size barring some pretty fancy tricks and very methodical moderation. I've seen subreddits scale to 100,000 - 1,000,000 users, and retain decorum, but I also wouldn't exactly call what's happening in them conversation.
aaron695 13y ago
> Lowering the barriers to entry can be a great strategy for something It's considered that Wikipedia works because the barriers are high to contribute. (Learning mark up)
- DanBC 13y ago
  The barrier to wikipedia are the arseholes who revert good faith edits to a page while doing nothing to fix the rest ofthe errors on that page. They drive away new people while leaving bad pages in lousy condition. Mark up is not a high barrier to entry.

unfamiliar 13y ago

Lowering the barrier to entry is also a double edged sword. Just look at youtube comments pre-Google+.

DanBC 13y ago
I haven't seen much difference after Google +. Other examples include Xbox online which is horrific.

Bahamut 13y ago

By that token, wouldn't Facebook have come beforehand with status updates, and other compabies before FB? Twitter succeeded for various reasons in combination, not just the <= 140 characters aspect.

bane 13y ago

> When a thought is on the top of my mind, writing a blog post about it is hard. Sending a <=140 character message about it is easy. Now that you know this, why not write short, 1 or 2 sentence blog posts? There's nothing preventing that.

dredmorbius 13y ago

It's a mixed blessing. Contributed content without the ability to select for the best or most appropriate content just becomes so much mud to wade through. Depending on the forum and behavior of participants, I find that the best discussions are relatively small. With the right people, a small handful of participants, often as few as 2-3. More adds to the mix, but you pretty quickly run into the trolls, me-too's, derailers, and others, and the costs that they impose (by both discouraging and obscuring quality content) increase rapidly. What Metcalfe's law fails to take into account (especially for forum discussions) isn't just that not all contributions are equal, but many are negative. I've seen well-designed systems scale to a few thousand participants, though this generally requires a great deal of reserve from many. At those scales, keeping track of who's who is hard, and Dunbar's number seems to be pretty well established. Roughly 150 active participants (which is to say, 1,500 - 15,000 members, with an allowance above and below that) seems to be the maximum manageable size barring some pretty fancy tricks and very methodical moderation. I've seen subreddits scale to 100,000 - 1,000,000 users, and retain decorum, but I also wouldn't exactly call what's happening in them conversation.

aaron695 13y ago

> Lowering the barriers to entry can be a great strategy for something It's considered that Wikipedia works because the barriers are high to contribute. (Learning mark up)

DanBC 13y ago
The barrier to wikipedia are the arseholes who revert good faith edits to a page while doing nothing to fix the rest ofthe errors on that page. They drive away new people while leaving bad pages in lousy condition. Mark up is not a high barrier to entry.