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It's the 'broken windows' metaphor: http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/software-entropy http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/
by joshsharp 17y ago
It's the 'broken windows' metaphor: http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/software-entropy http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/so...
Once you let something that is clearly wrong hang around, problems (spam) increase exponentially until it is no longer worth trying to fix.
- jacquesm 17y agoYep. HN seems to be doing a pretty good job of it though, hardly any spam ever makes it past the bottom of the new page without a [dead]. But for that to work you have to have an active community that values the resource more than they value the few seconds it takes to flag a bad submission. Absent such a community you have to do it yourself at least until such a community has formed. The funny thing is that the combination of 'flag', karma thresholds and community seem to be enough to let the 'submission' box sit there without any tricky stuff like captchas and so on.