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Why Online Communities Decay Over Time

158 points by adbge 12y ago

ChrisNorstrom 12y ago
This is the most valuable article I've read on HN all week. The fact that it's not on the front page is dissapointing. EDIT: It IS on the front page. Hurray! Personally I feel HN itself is having this very problem with its community right now. It's not only gotten too big but user "Probablyfiction" nailed it on the head. Too many newcomers destroy the existing culture instead of assimilating into it. The more I read about immigration problems in the USA, Europe (mass influx of Arab immigrants), Africa (mass influx of Chinese immigrants), Isreal (influx of African refugees) the more I notice this same assimilation problem exists in real offline communities as well. [New] Growth (too much too fast) can hurt communities by destroying the original characteristics, culture, and qualities that made them successful in the first place. Time and moderation needs to be given to ensure the new follows the rules of the old when applicable.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  HN will probably end up as a case study for the maximum user threshold an online community can sustain, while still having an above-average discussion quality.
  - alephnil 12y ago
    Reddit has already been through that cycle. Reddit ca 2006, before subreddits, was not too unlike hacker news, in that it had inteligent posts with inteligent discussion. The seeds to what Reddit eventually became was certainly there, but they it did not yet dominate. I think subreddits actually made it worse, since the people interested in having online communities went to smaller and more specialized subreddits, and gave up on the default subreddits, not even trying to hold up the online community. On hacker news, there are no "sub hacker news", and it seems to me like hacker news is deteriorating at a slower rate than reddit did. My guess is that the fact that there only is one hacker news, and no subcommunities is a partial reason for that.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      That suggests that a very slow bifurcation my be a good solution to this problem. Not so fast that you end up with a ton of splinter groups that lose cohesion, not so slow that you end up diluting the community.
    - TillE 12y ago
      Reddit remained interesting right up until the Digg 4 migration in 2010. Not wonderful, but still a place where you could have a real discussion in a default subreddit. Where you would get actual answers in AskReddit, not just a stream of pathetic jokes.
    - im3w1l 12y ago
      I wasn't there in 2006, so I have to admit I don't know what was lost. But really like what it is right now: An extremely easy way to set up your own forum for free.
- bignaj 12y ago
  To add a counterpoint: I browse very frequently but rarely ever post. I actually think some of the older posters are worse than the newer ones. A lot of HN regulars seem to me to be so caught up in it that they can't see the big picture -> comments mired in pedantry and cynicism and negativity. Sometimes it's very hard to be able to step back for a moment and take a breath of fresh air. New thoughts and fresh perspective aren't always bad.
- harvestmoon 12y ago
  Well, to be fair, people have been concerned about HN getting too big and losing its community for at least two years now, iirc.
  - rhizome 12y ago
    And ChrisNorstrom's account is about 3 years old, so that fits a stereotype of those with the highest concern over a perceived drop in quality being the newest old-timers.
    - ChrisNorstrom 12y ago
      That's because newer members have no memory of how things once were. They have no way of comparing the current quality of the community with the previous quality of the community. Of course its older members who complain about this problem.
      - rhizome 12y ago
        Heh, the crux of my point was the concept of "the newest older members."
    - stonemetal 12y ago
      There is a bit of survivorship bias at play. People who complain and don't see things improve leave. The only ones left are the ones who didn't have a problem.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - im3w1l 12y ago
    I seem to recall the "don't claim hn is turning into reddit" already when I signed up 3 years ago. Sure enough, a little manual "webarchive blame", shows that that text appeared in 2009 already. [0] [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20090712034454/http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090712034454/http://ycombinato...
probablyfiction 12y ago
Another thing that seems to be the case is that new members are unable to become assimilated into existing culture because the entrenched users quickly become the minority and are unable to enforce cultural norms. The culture is co-opted by the newcomers.
- comrh 12y ago
  Exactly, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- Havoc 12y ago
  >>The culture is co-opted by the newcomers. I must admit I've not seen this yet. In the forums I frequent the old elite rules...to the point where the admins trust the powerful members to manage it to some extent. If 3 powerful people decide that a new user is undesirable then said user is a dead man walking. Obviously not very democratic etc...but its super effective in maintaining the peace....the powerful members provide a base-line that absorbs most of the BS...the admins step in when something dramatic happens.
  - Goronmon 12y ago
    I must admit I've not seen this yet. Generally that means that the forum just hasn't grown enough in popularity. There are exceptions of course, depending on how heavily moderated the forum is.
  - chc 12y ago
    You're thinking of individuals. The point is that, even if the "old elite" have the power to just say "Ban that newcomer" and the newcomer gets banned, the "old elite" do not scale while the influx of newcomers certainly can. One, two, three, even 20 bad actors can be dealt with by a small group of community gardeners. But thousands of bad actors are just on a totally different scale and cannot be dealt with in the same way. This is similar to the situation of event security guards. They individually hold more power than any member of the crowd, but if the crowd collectively decides to rush the stage, they can't really stop it from happening because it is physically impossible for 50 people to overpower 10000.
andylei 12y ago
> I have no real incentive to be polite or to put much effort into anything I say. Even my reputation will remain intact – who’s going to witness it? > When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, aggressive, and to put little effort into their contributions. If this is true, then HN should put users karma score next to their username when they post.
- iopq 12y ago
  Karma on HN doesn't work. I've been here 500 days, but because I only post from time to time I only have 335 karma and I can't downvote. Since my karma per post is just over 2, that means I've only made ~150 comments in that span, one every three days. So all the politics posts get upvotes from people who have enough karma to upvote, but not enough downvotes because people like me can't downvote. In this way you can post a liberally biased article and all the Democrats will upvote it and the Republicans can't downvote it. So you get several hundred upvotes on your submission. There are enough new members that can't downvote who have the ability to upvote to put any garbage article on the front page as long as it appeals to enough of them to overpower the people who consider the article not to belong on HN. I could post some political garbage every day and get a huge karma/post score. At least 10 per each link submission which is more than 4x what I'm getting just commenting.
- justinreeves 12y ago
  I think karma scores have a negative impact on sites, because they encourage people to post agreeable (or antagonistic), shallow content. Reddit is an easy example of this. There are 'karma whores', which just try to accumulate as many (or few) points as possible, on the site, which negatively impact actual discussion. Hacker News tracks average-karma-per-post, which if it was the only metric available to the user, might be a good fix for this problem. You'd still get feedback on how people perceive your comments overall, but it couldn't turn into a competition over points. Does anyone know of any websites that have implemented such a system?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ignostic 12y ago
> "When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, aggressive..." This is one of the most off-putting things about HN in my opinion. It's better than bigger social sharing sites like Reddit in that tired jokes and posts with little thought are usually voted down to the bottom, but posts that poke holes in the original argument are often top comments. A lot of technically-minded people take great pleasure in finding and fixing bugs. The problem is that finding errors in human interaction leads to pedantry, nitpicking, and cherry-picking. This is especially true as the community grows and interactions with all but the most visible people becomes rare. People have less incentive to give others the benefit of the doubt, and more incentive to find the problems and point them out. I'm worried about our once-little community, but I don't know how to prevent the petty fault-finding from resurfacing in such a large and shifting community.
- stcredzero 12y ago
  Pedantry, nitpicking, and pedantry are a step up from pure fluffiness. The question is how we can go the next step. I find a lot of HN commenters try to put words into one's mouth. They even seem to feel they are being clever, and they are indeed imitating the outward forms of clever commenting. Maybe that's as far as we can expect human society to go.
  - saraid216 12y ago
    Don't forget that a lot of people get on the internet for leisure.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      I used to work in a bicylce shop as a kid. In the workshop over the bench hung a sign that read "if you've got nothing to do, don't do it here". It was rude but quite effective. The next level up (for those that didn't get the hint) was that the guy running the shop would pretend to 'oil the spokes' (as if that was ever needed) causing several people to hastily depart the workshop area because they were being splashed with lube oil. He would pretend to see a lot less well and shake a lot more than he usually did during these episodes. Super nice guy by the way, long since deceased. One problem with internet websites is that it is not clearly separated into work or leisure, which leads to people in leisure mode disrupting other people's work mode. This is not an easy problem to solve and I'm sure that this is not a binary issue either, but some form of continuum.
jasode 12y ago
While the blog article mentions interesting points, I don't think its insights have much to do with technical communities such as Hacker News or Stackoverflow. HN is mostly very civilized. (Granted, some of that is due to moderators.) So the blog's bullet point about "trust" devalued because of one-time transactions does not seem relevant. It's relevant for reddit/atheism but not HN. To me, the problem with HN, SO, etc is the voice of experts getting drowned out by amateurs. The growth rate of new amateurs joining will always outpace new experts and each year the signal-to-noise gets worse. I haven't seen a clever self-governing mechanism that addresses this social dynamic. The upvote/downvote/karma history is not enough to solve it.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Experts in one field are amateurs in all the rest of them. So even a community of just experts in some field would have a much larger number of amateurs than experts across all fields.
  - jasode 12y ago
    That's true but I'm not constricting "expert" to just domain expertise. An expert in <whatever_technology> who has worked hard and invested time into acquiring that expertise is often also an "expert" at not being a nuisance in the fields that he's an amateur. He's able to ask quality questions (instead of inviting snarky lmgtfy.com). He's an expert at being a non-expert. Even if Paul Graham doesn't know Rust, I think it's safe to assume that any questions he'd write in an online community would not be ridiculous (is Rust slower than Bash?). Any amateurish observation he'd have, at minimum, would have some intelligent thought behind it.
hendzen 12y ago
The real problem with online communities is that the people who are upvoted the most are the ones who spend the most time commenting. Generally, very successful people don't spend large amounts of their time commenting on online forums. In this manner, the biggest 'losers' in the real world, with the most time to waste on the internet, become the biggest 'winners' in the online community. The end result is that the cultural norms of the online community end up being set by people who are the least qualified to create or enforce any kind of healthy norm. edit: just wanted to say that I recall reading something similar on a blog a long time ago, although I cannot remember the name of the writer.
- mattgreenrocks 12y ago
  Yeah. One imperfect step towards addressing this is having hard limits on the number of comments that can be made in a given time range. Of course, nobody wants to do this because then they would lose some of their traffic.
  - yaddayadda 12y ago
    Occasionally a user is particularly invested in an online conversation for really valid reason, e.g. area of expertise, Show HN, etc. So having a hard limit in a large scale (x comments in an hour or y comments in a day, as opposed to z comments in 60 seconds) may actually abruptly lock-out a particularly valuable contributor.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > The real problem with online communities is that the people who are upvoted the most are the ones who spend the most time commenting. To the extent that this is really an issue, its quite easily addressed by using the average net upvotes rather than total net upvotes for whatever weighting, if any, the comment display system gives to poster score/karma/etc.(If you want to also give some weight to engagement without encouraging post frequency, you could accumulate a score using the average in each day or week, so duration of regular engagement would be rewarded, but high frequency would not.) Of course -- I think that to the extent that excessive influence by frequent commenters is an issue, its more because most of the volume of comments is going to come from them, independently of any reward system.
slvv 12y ago
> "When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, aggressive..." Wow. I can't say whether this is true or not, but how depressing. Instead of counting on this behaviour, what if we tried to change it? Kindness, respect, and general "give the other person the benefit of the doubt" attitudes could make a huge difference. I just can't get around the idea that not interacting with the same person means you can not care how you treat them... that's crazy.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > I just can't get around the idea that not interacting with the same person means you can not care how you treat them... that's crazy. Its actually quite rational. It may be immoral -- or at least amoral -- but its not crazy. One of the purposes of collective mutual benefit organizations -- labor unions, the state, etc. -- is to mitigate the effect of this by providing a manner in which a group of people can act and be perceived as an entity with which an actor will have to interact with in the future even when they may not have to do so with the particular individual.
tunesmith 12y ago
I forget the web page - I think from another HN reader - but they made the point that these challenges are the exact challenges that distributed computing wrestles with. For any problem set that a lot of resources are working with, how do you properly surface the most valuable results, how do you combine and summarize them, etc. There are a lot of discussion community sites that just try to pull in their own homegrown algorithms ("let's have a moderator!") but I suspect a lot of these experiences could be improved by reading up on distributed computing algorithms.
netcan 12y ago
I think part of the reason it that the communities finish talking about whatever it is they are talking about. When I started reading HN, a lot of the ideas that are common fare were new and interesting. Now, some are borderline cliche.
cjslep 12y ago
I agree with the general premise. However, I also believe there's probably a way to shift the threshold depending on the culture and community. When I was asked to be a moderator of brand-new (at the time) forums for a very popular Minecraft mod pack, it was being flooded with quite a large volume of people who would not adhere to some basic rules. The rules were quite simple and straightforward, but that didn't stop me and the owners of the site from straight banning large numbers of people. The pure shock of forcing the "Yes we will see you again, you are not anonymous, and your reputation matters" into the system caused a lot less posting activity to take place on the forums, but the quality of each post was well worth it. A lot of people got banned trying (and failing) to wrap their brains around this concept. The end result was I actually felt proud of helping shape an online community that was large, effective, and constructive. As it grew, so did the number of other moderators and that "critical point" kept shifting right, so we could have more users and still maintain a quality community. However, this requires a very proactive approach.
hellbreakslose 12y ago
Nice post, Well thats the cycle of life. Everything has an expiry date!
- Theodores 12y ago
  It is the same with pop records or bands however the music industry appreciates and understands that nothing is forever. People should apply this thinking to community sites and expect a cycle of life. Instead we have myspaces worth billions to then be worthless and Facebook where they don't see it coming. Much like pop records or bands there are some things that have a different life cycle. People still by records by that outfit that called themselves 'The Beatles' but there is no 'Beatlemania' any more.
suby 12y ago
The author hasn't been to reddit in years if he thinks that r/atheism and r/politics are still default subreddits.
jere 12y ago
Daydreaming here... so how about a community that funnels users into buckets automatically? Think of an HN where you only discuss an article with a pool of ~500 people instead of 80,000. When new users join, they're distributed to the smallest groups. Nobody is overwhelmed with an influx of noobs. And you might actually be able to start remembering the names of the active people in your group. Perhaps you could see top comments from other groups, but not interact with them directly.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I've had some pretty extensive conversations around that theme with a bunch of other HN'ers (some of who have moved on in the meantime), and that's pretty much the solution we hit on. Keep only the +x and -x active users in view for you at any one time. One problem we foresaw with that approach is that it becomes hard not to have duplicate discussions or missing chunks of information. In the end we did not do anything with the idea but it was certainly interesting.
- RKoutnik 12y ago
  That's a rather interesting concept. My big issue is that I'd be missing the best content from other buckets. Perhaps content can 'emerge' from a bucket after garnering a certain % of support from the bucket?
  - NaNaN 12y ago
    To avoid the Matthew effect, the best users should be re-distributed, too. -- still nice?
    - RKoutnik 12y ago
      If that was the case, I'd worry about the buckets becoming like German universities - the best minds can't get together, so we all lose out.
      - gwern 12y ago
        I don't think most HN users know anything at all about German universities, much less any bucketing they might do, so that's probably not the most helpful analogy.
incision 12y ago
>'The probability that I will interact with any one user ever again on a site like YouTube tends toward zero. I have no real incentive to be polite or to put much effort into anything I say.' My sense of a terrible 'community' like YouTube is a bit different. I've always had the impression it's more about performing and the size of the audience - more about votes and reactions than expected interactions. No matter how nasty or inane your opinions are, you can share them on a related YouTube video and receive anonymous validation from other people who agree with you. When you're feeling bad about yourself and want to lash out, you can post something vile and get a response. I believe this was a source of a lot of complaints about changes to the comment system. It hurt ones ability to receive instant gratification by dropping a comment on the top of the stack. In the bat analogy, upvotes/karma are a sort of secondary 'junk food' blood supply that costs the giver nothing and some bats don't care for it as they prefer real sustenance but others are addicted to it. The 'community' ends up as a circus of votefiends bludgeoning each other for another hit.
jusben1369 12y ago
"Decay" is a loaded word reflecting the author's bias. All communities change over time as they grow. Their culture then reflects the users. We may not like that community but clearly a lot of people do (after all these are the largest sub reddits we're talking about right?) This is sort of the "This neighborhood was so great until all the yuppy/hipsters moved in and the art stores were replaced with coffee shops serving $6 lattes" argument.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  One persons decay is anothers gentrification.
- itsdevlin 12y ago
  Don't necessarily agree with this point. If the total interaction for the community decreases with the influx of new users, and community abandonment > recruitment, the community hits decay. I will give you the value argument as a bias. The idea that "it's not as cool anymore" absolutely holds true, and imo is a more apples-to-apples comparison to gentrification.
- tensafefrogs 12y ago
  Agreed. Saying that communities decay is the same as saying pop music sucks because it appeals to the masses. Millions of people love that content and who are you to say whether they should enjoy it or not? We should be building better tools that can adapt and grow with the community. I wrote about this a couple of years ago, with a possible set of solutions: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba
jacquesm 12y ago
It took a while to find, this old kuro5hin article is a good read on the subject: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000 Titled "Attacked from within" it details the problems in scaling a community and community life-cycle very eloquently.
- A_COMPUTER 12y ago
  Oh, I remember that. This is the best thing ever written on the subject, but I think its conclusions are regularly ignored because people want to have their cake and eat it too, with regard to fostering vanity. Everyone wants the community but they still want to be the superstar in it.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
It is hard to appreciate the change in tenor the network experienced when AOL gave its users access to Usenet. I have never considered it in the context of the prisoner's dilemma as a one shot exercise but that certainly has an intuitive appeal. We see it here on HN of course, someone creates a new user account, makes a single low value snarky comment and then off to oblivion. An interesting counter example is twitter, which I've seen that as people become more invested in the reputation of their 'handle' the less ill considered their tweets seem to become. When that isn't the case that is also interesting.
- protomyth 12y ago
  It was a pretty big change in tenor depending on what group you were looking at. I will say the some groups (comp.lang.objective-c) had some seriously nasty trolls already. I remember getting pretty liberal with my killfile. I am not sure that was a good thing thinking about it.
- vacri 12y ago
  Twitter is a terrible place for conversation to take place. There is no capacity for nuance or well-reasoned thought. It's a site for announcements, not nuanced musing, as expected from a place where every comment has to be a soundbite. Occasionally there might be a two-way conversation that works well, but that's not the norm.
jds375 12y ago
Great article. That being said, seeing some proposed solutions to this problem would have been nice. One strategy that Reddit employs quite well is the Subreddit system. This creates smaller sub-communities that aren't victims of the 'large' community problem. Of course, overtime a subreddit becomes a default or gets too many subscribers... but it's still a decent solution. I think it'll be interesting to see how growth affects Hacker News. I'm still very impressed with the quality of the articles and comments (yes, there are some bad ones here and there, but compared to most sites HN is excellent)... I think the downvote threshold for HN has actually been quite successful in encouraging people to post useful comments. It gives a goal for people with low-karma to strive for, thus encouraging them to post better content. I think a more extensive reward system like this has potential for creating a better community.
- mcphage 12y ago
  > Of course, overtime a subreddit becomes a default or gets too many subscribers... but it's still a decent solution. And then it spawns off one or more new subreddits, based on the desires of the users. I feel that's a pretty good way to handle the situation.
ChrisNorstrom 12y ago
This fits perfect with what PG said in a Tech Crunch Interview in 2013 http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-news/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-new... ● "[Paul Graham] wanted to make Hacker News a place to recreate the way Reddit felt in the good old days" ● "He explains that [Hacker News] was community of insiders in the hacker world, and it has gradually been getting diluted." ● “That is what I spend all my time thinking about,” he says. ● He worries that Hacker News will become what he calls “an old crumbling building.” ● “The community has been in a perpetual but slow decline because the site is growing,” he says.
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Maybe it's just a lot simpler: size and success attracts douchebags and morons. It's not limited to online communities. Cities, sports teams, rock bands, movies, you name it, you see it happen again and again. Success attracts the kind of people who act like a-holes in any context. And yes, I'm aware of the great irony of posting this rather superficial comment in this thread. But I'm not sure if I'm actually wrong...
YarnBall 12y ago
I agree with the author's thesis but I think other reasons apply to other communities. Ideally, you would like to ensure the "greatest good for the greatest number" in a community. Consequently, good or happiness in a community is measured according to the preferences of the majority sometimes to the detriment of the minority. That is why, relative to the number of more intellectually engaging posts, you will see more LOLCats and animated gifs on the front page of Reddit. As somebody on here mentioned many people go on the internet for leisure, and intelligent/civilized discourse for them does not fall under that header. As far as I know, HN was started to foster startups-tech community and I am optimistic because HN's subject matter is specific enough and the community concerned with this subject matter is small enough, for it not to devolve into another Reddit (meaning no offense to Reddit, I still visit there).
- Relic22799 12y ago
  "* you will see more LOLCats and animated gifs on the front page of Reddit.*" You'll see less of them these days. Reddit changed its default subreddit system last week and one of the big ones that got the boot was /r/AdviceAnimals.
steve_benjamins 12y ago
The solution (in so far as there is a solution) is to cultivate a culture. Large communities remain civil through culture. Last week I wrote a post called "How to Cultivate Culture" that received a good amount of attention (outside of Hacker News) about this: http://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/6-ways-to-cultivate-culture-on-a-website http://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/6-ways-to-cultivate-cu...
gedrap 12y ago
Regarding to HN, problem is that social proof takes a huge part in determining what gets on the front page. People check /new, see that some post already has 1 or 2 upvotes, checks it instead of some without any upvotes. The upvoted one gets even more upvotes (because more people are reading it), and it's on the homepage. A bunch of my submissions made the homepage and from what I've noticed, the threshold is about 7-10 upvotes in the first hour. So can we fairly say that a dozen of people decide what's on the homepage? Maybe. My suggestion: don't show upvotes in /new for 30mins after submission? As a trade off, a little time might get wasted on low quality submissions but maybe there would be more better quality submissions on the front page.
- nkurz 12y ago
  This is a good idea. There is a "Feature Request" link at the bottom of each page. Please resubmit this there so it is receives greater notice.
  - gedrap 12y ago
    Done! Thanks for your comment :)
malloreon 12y ago
SomethingAwful is consistently high quality and has been for the 7.5 years since I discovered it. 190,000 users now, I think 90K in 2006. The secrets seem to be a) charging people $10 one time to join/post and view more than a few pages of a particular thread b) segmenting into different subforums - over time they become different communities within SA that have their own quirks. c) ruthless moderation that can and often does lead to posting probations and bans (requiring another $10 to reverse) In particular, the politics/history, sports, video games, and arts discussions are very good.
swombat 12y ago
Whilst I agree with the general thesis of the article, this paragraph seemed very distasteful to me: > There is no reason to trust people you will not interact with again in the future. There’s no incentive not to defect. At the end of my last relationship, our interactions became significantly less pleasant as it became more obvious that it was over – I would not have to deal with this person in the future, so why bother going through the motions of kindness? Without meaning to be rude or make an attack on the author's character, the author does sound like a bit of an asshole there. How about being nice to people because you're a nice person, rather than because you want to get something out of it? If you could murder someone and get away with it, would you? I wouldn't, because in abhor the idea of killing people. Similarly, I would act decently towards another human being even when I have no incentive to do so, simply because I am a decent human being and I don't like the idea of causing unnecessary pain and suffering to others. As they say, a gentleman remains a gentleman even in the gutter. If you need to be surrounded by other decent human beings to be decent, if being surrounded by jerks automatically reverts you to jerk behaviour, perhaps you're not a decent human being after all, only a chameleon sort of person who will do whatever they think they can get away with. I hope a majority of people here would behave the same way as me - decently, irrespective of the surroundings and likelihood of "getting caught". And there's the rub I guess - a community composed mostly of decent human beings will be less vulnerable to this effect than one composed mostly of selfish people who only act decently when they can see a tangible payoff. That may be another path to survival: find the assholes and keep them out, and then perhaps you can deal with growth more easily.
- cortesoft 12y ago
  Yes, I also felt very strongly about that. In my own life, I find kindness and compassion to be an intrinsic good; I am not kind because I am using game theory to attempt to maximize the returned kindness, I am kind because I get more pleasure out of being kind than the alternative. Even if I never interact with the person again, I feel happier after being kind to someone than if I am a jerk. I do worry for people who feel like the author of this article. I can't imagine how miserable it must be to only feel joy when other people are kind to you, and not the other way around. I guess I am lucky in that way, that I feel so much happiness when I share my kindness with someone else, even more so than when someone is kind to me; I am actually in control of my own kindness, so I am therefore also in control of my own happiness.
wmf 12y ago
I found this recent article about online harassment and moderation much more optimistic: http://www.wired.com/2014/05/fighting-online-harassment/ http://www.wired.com/2014/05/fighting-online-harassment/ (Primary source: http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-Player http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-... ) Even with 67 million users, the developers of League of Legends have apparently reduced misbehavior substantially using fairly simple (although non-obvious) techniques.
api 12y ago
I really like this for not defaulting to the standard, lazy, fallacy-of-self-exclusion explanation of "most people are dumb." The same effect seems to occur with large social movements. I've noted for many years that once anything becomes a "movement," it becomes shallow, trendy, and dishonest... even if the original seed of the movement had a good point in the beginning. Once it becomes big there is no longer any incentive for people not to abuse the movement as a marketing gimmick or a source of political power.
adventured 12y ago
"The development of trust and kindness between two people depends on the probability that they will interact in the future." Not true. Communities can - and should - use other incentive systems to encourage good behavior. 1) Point systems 2) Public shaming 3) bans / hell bans / abuse flagging / suspensions 4) various combinations The threat of taking things from people that they've earned, even if it's as silly as 'fake internet points,' can be an extremely powerful enforcer of behavior, given the system is set up properly.
orionblastar 12y ago
Two online communities that I had to leave because they became really mean and decayed over time was IWETHEY and KURO5HIN. Even Slashdot decayed and when Dice bought them out it was more about commercial stuff and less about technology and making cool stuff. Reddit is over-run with trolls on various sub-reddits they started out in /r/atheism as fake atheists trolling people and then spread to other sub-reddits. Mostly 12 year old kids who think it is funny to grief people.
TheEzEzz 12y ago
A potential solution: Implement a comment recommendation system. Based on comments you've liked and disliked, the system will push comments you would like to the top. The quality of the community you see is then completely up to you. If you like poop jokes, you'll see poop jokes. If you like pedantic attacks, you'll see pedantic attacks. And if you like insightful comments, you'll see insightful comments. As you stabilize on a community you like, you can start responding to their comments, and then they too will have the chance to vote on your comments. If they like you they'll start seeing more of you, and a micro-community will evolve naturally for free.
- ewillbefull 12y ago
  If you think about it, it's pretty much the same thing as twitter, except the social graph is built more implicitly. In exchange for a larger selection of relevant content, you have to sift through more noise. But it probably feels better to vote if you know your vote counts differently for some users. You're no longer just one number in a statistic, but part of a much more complicated ranking system. Best of all, your votes significantly affect your own experience on the website. A dynamic social graph like that would probably obviate the need for even categorizing content, let alone "jumping ship" when the community decays. There are some drawbacks though. If you implemented it in reddit/hacker news, there would no longer be a "front page of x" to serve as a symbolic milestone for your submission. Without context, "2000 upvotes" has ambiguous importance. Also, a different ranking system exists for each cluster in your social graph, which sounds like a fun engineering problem.
tensafefrogs 12y ago
I wrote a post a while back about how the design of your social tools can help solve this problem: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba If you look at sites that are based on following users or categories they are able to scale to much larger sizes without breaking down.
analog31 12y ago
>>> These locusts were AOL users. In September of 1993, the company granted Usenet access to their entire user base, which triggered an unending deluge of noobs into the Usenet community. Amusingly, I joined AOL in September of 1993. It was not long after I graduated and lost my university log-in, along with the e-mail address that came with it. I chose AOL for a simple reason: I could dial up anywhere in the country and keep the same e-mail address no matter where I lived. AOL also greatly simplified the process of using the Internet. I ran a small business via my AOL address. Each update to AOL software came via some promotion or other -- an insert in a magazine, or even a pile of AOL disks at the supermarket. At some point it became possible for an AOL user to access the Internet without the AOL software, e.g., by using mainstream e-mail and browser software.
socrates1998 12y ago
I am not sure if this has ever been done, but what if an online community grew to a certain size and then closed it's doors to new members? Could that community avoid the pitfalls of what the article is describing? I could see a place where enrollment closes at a certain point, then reopens once a person leaves or becomes inactive. I would actually like to see if this would work.
gojomo 12y ago
Some other influential writing on this subject: Clay Shirky: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem... Xianhang Zhang: "The Evaporative Cooling Effect" http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...
thereckoning 12y ago
There's a simpler explanation. The average person is not especially bright, funny, or articulate. The larger a community, the more it regresses to the mean.
known 12y ago
I'd say online communities "diverse", not diverge. E.g. http://i.imgur.com/4sftcoo.jpg http://i.imgur.com/4sftcoo.jpg

158 points by adbge 12y ago

This is the most valuable article I've read on HN all week. The fact that it's not on the front page is dissapointing. EDIT: It IS on the front page. Hurray! Personally I feel HN itself is having this very problem with its community right now. It's not only gotten too big but user "Probablyfiction" nailed it on the head. Too many newcomers destroy the existing culture instead of assimilating into it. The more I read about immigration problems in the USA, Europe (mass influx of Arab immigrants), Africa (mass influx of Chinese immigrants), Isreal (influx of African refugees) the more I notice this same assimilation problem exists in real offline communities as well. [New] Growth (too much too fast) can hurt communities by destroying the original characteristics, culture, and qualities that made them successful in the first place. Time and moderation needs to be given to ensure the new follows the rules of the old when applicable.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago
HN will probably end up as a case study for the maximum user threshold an online community can sustain, while still having an above-average discussion quality.
- alephnil 12y ago
  Reddit has already been through that cycle. Reddit ca 2006, before subreddits, was not too unlike hacker news, in that it had inteligent posts with inteligent discussion. The seeds to what Reddit eventually became was certainly there, but they it did not yet dominate. I think subreddits actually made it worse, since the people interested in having online communities went to smaller and more specialized subreddits, and gave up on the default subreddits, not even trying to hold up the online community. On hacker news, there are no "sub hacker news", and it seems to me like hacker news is deteriorating at a slower rate than reddit did. My guess is that the fact that there only is one hacker news, and no subcommunities is a partial reason for that.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    That suggests that a very slow bifurcation my be a good solution to this problem. Not so fast that you end up with a ton of splinter groups that lose cohesion, not so slow that you end up diluting the community.
  - TillE 12y ago
    Reddit remained interesting right up until the Digg 4 migration in 2010. Not wonderful, but still a place where you could have a real discussion in a default subreddit. Where you would get actual answers in AskReddit, not just a stream of pathetic jokes.
  - im3w1l 12y ago
    I wasn't there in 2006, so I have to admit I don't know what was lost. But really like what it is right now: An extremely easy way to set up your own forum for free.
bignaj 12y ago
To add a counterpoint: I browse very frequently but rarely ever post. I actually think some of the older posters are worse than the newer ones. A lot of HN regulars seem to me to be so caught up in it that they can't see the big picture -> comments mired in pedantry and cynicism and negativity. Sometimes it's very hard to be able to step back for a moment and take a breath of fresh air. New thoughts and fresh perspective aren't always bad.
harvestmoon 12y ago
Well, to be fair, people have been concerned about HN getting too big and losing its community for at least two years now, iirc.
- rhizome 12y ago
  And ChrisNorstrom's account is about 3 years old, so that fits a stereotype of those with the highest concern over a perceived drop in quality being the newest old-timers.
  - ChrisNorstrom 12y ago
    That's because newer members have no memory of how things once were. They have no way of comparing the current quality of the community with the previous quality of the community. Of course its older members who complain about this problem.
    - rhizome 12y ago
      Heh, the crux of my point was the concept of "the newest older members."
  - stonemetal 12y ago
    There is a bit of survivorship bias at play. People who complain and don't see things improve leave. The only ones left are the ones who didn't have a problem.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- im3w1l 12y ago
  I seem to recall the "don't claim hn is turning into reddit" already when I signed up 3 years ago. Sure enough, a little manual "webarchive blame", shows that that text appeared in 2009 already. [0] [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20090712034454/http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090712034454/http://ycombinato...

probablyfiction 12y ago

Another thing that seems to be the case is that new members are unable to become assimilated into existing culture because the entrenched users quickly become the minority and are unable to enforce cultural norms. The culture is co-opted by the newcomers.

comrh 12y ago
Exactly, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Havoc 12y ago
>>The culture is co-opted by the newcomers. I must admit I've not seen this yet. In the forums I frequent the old elite rules...to the point where the admins trust the powerful members to manage it to some extent. If 3 powerful people decide that a new user is undesirable then said user is a dead man walking. Obviously not very democratic etc...but its super effective in maintaining the peace....the powerful members provide a base-line that absorbs most of the BS...the admins step in when something dramatic happens.
- Goronmon 12y ago
  I must admit I've not seen this yet. Generally that means that the forum just hasn't grown enough in popularity. There are exceptions of course, depending on how heavily moderated the forum is.
- chc 12y ago
  You're thinking of individuals. The point is that, even if the "old elite" have the power to just say "Ban that newcomer" and the newcomer gets banned, the "old elite" do not scale while the influx of newcomers certainly can. One, two, three, even 20 bad actors can be dealt with by a small group of community gardeners. But thousands of bad actors are just on a totally different scale and cannot be dealt with in the same way. This is similar to the situation of event security guards. They individually hold more power than any member of the crowd, but if the crowd collectively decides to rush the stage, they can't really stop it from happening because it is physically impossible for 50 people to overpower 10000.

andylei 12y ago

> I have no real incentive to be polite or to put much effort into anything I say. Even my reputation will remain intact – who’s going to witness it? > When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, aggressive, and to put little effort into their contributions. If this is true, then HN should put users karma score next to their username when they post.

iopq 12y ago
Karma on HN doesn't work. I've been here 500 days, but because I only post from time to time I only have 335 karma and I can't downvote. Since my karma per post is just over 2, that means I've only made ~150 comments in that span, one every three days. So all the politics posts get upvotes from people who have enough karma to upvote, but not enough downvotes because people like me can't downvote. In this way you can post a liberally biased article and all the Democrats will upvote it and the Republicans can't downvote it. So you get several hundred upvotes on your submission. There are enough new members that can't downvote who have the ability to upvote to put any garbage article on the front page as long as it appeals to enough of them to overpower the people who consider the article not to belong on HN. I could post some political garbage every day and get a huge karma/post score. At least 10 per each link submission which is more than 4x what I'm getting just commenting.
justinreeves 12y ago
I think karma scores have a negative impact on sites, because they encourage people to post agreeable (or antagonistic), shallow content. Reddit is an easy example of this. There are 'karma whores', which just try to accumulate as many (or few) points as possible, on the site, which negatively impact actual discussion. Hacker News tracks average-karma-per-post, which if it was the only metric available to the user, might be a good fix for this problem. You'd still get feedback on how people perceive your comments overall, but it couldn't turn into a competition over points. Does anyone know of any websites that have implemented such a system?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ignostic 12y ago

> "When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, aggressive..." This is one of the most off-putting things about HN in my opinion. It's better than bigger social sharing sites like Reddit in that tired jokes and posts with little thought are usually voted down to the bottom, but posts that poke holes in the original argument are often top comments. A lot of technically-minded people take great pleasure in finding and fixing bugs. The problem is that finding errors in human interaction leads to pedantry, nitpicking, and cherry-picking. This is especially true as the community grows and interactions with all but the most visible people becomes rare. People have less incentive to give others the benefit of the doubt, and more incentive to find the problems and point them out. I'm worried about our once-little community, but I don't know how to prevent the petty fault-finding from resurfacing in such a large and shifting community.

stcredzero 12y ago
Pedantry, nitpicking, and pedantry are a step up from pure fluffiness. The question is how we can go the next step. I find a lot of HN commenters try to put words into one's mouth. They even seem to feel they are being clever, and they are indeed imitating the outward forms of clever commenting. Maybe that's as far as we can expect human society to go.
- saraid216 12y ago
  Don't forget that a lot of people get on the internet for leisure.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I used to work in a bicylce shop as a kid. In the workshop over the bench hung a sign that read "if you've got nothing to do, don't do it here". It was rude but quite effective. The next level up (for those that didn't get the hint) was that the guy running the shop would pretend to 'oil the spokes' (as if that was ever needed) causing several people to hastily depart the workshop area because they were being splashed with lube oil. He would pretend to see a lot less well and shake a lot more than he usually did during these episodes. Super nice guy by the way, long since deceased. One problem with internet websites is that it is not clearly separated into work or leisure, which leads to people in leisure mode disrupting other people's work mode. This is not an easy problem to solve and I'm sure that this is not a binary issue either, but some form of continuum.

jasode 12y ago

While the blog article mentions interesting points, I don't think its insights have much to do with technical communities such as Hacker News or Stackoverflow. HN is mostly very civilized. (Granted, some of that is due to moderators.) So the blog's bullet point about "trust" devalued because of one-time transactions does not seem relevant. It's relevant for reddit/atheism but not HN. To me, the problem with HN, SO, etc is the voice of experts getting drowned out by amateurs. The growth rate of new amateurs joining will always outpace new experts and each year the signal-to-noise gets worse. I haven't seen a clever self-governing mechanism that addresses this social dynamic. The upvote/downvote/karma history is not enough to solve it.

jacquesm 12y ago
Experts in one field are amateurs in all the rest of them. So even a community of just experts in some field would have a much larger number of amateurs than experts across all fields.
- jasode 12y ago
  That's true but I'm not constricting "expert" to just domain expertise. An expert in <whatever_technology> who has worked hard and invested time into acquiring that expertise is often also an "expert" at not being a nuisance in the fields that he's an amateur. He's able to ask quality questions (instead of inviting snarky lmgtfy.com). He's an expert at being a non-expert. Even if Paul Graham doesn't know Rust, I think it's safe to assume that any questions he'd write in an online community would not be ridiculous (is Rust slower than Bash?). Any amateurish observation he'd have, at minimum, would have some intelligent thought behind it.

hendzen 12y ago

The real problem with online communities is that the people who are upvoted the most are the ones who spend the most time commenting. Generally, very successful people don't spend large amounts of their time commenting on online forums. In this manner, the biggest 'losers' in the real world, with the most time to waste on the internet, become the biggest 'winners' in the online community. The end result is that the cultural norms of the online community end up being set by people who are the least qualified to create or enforce any kind of healthy norm. edit: just wanted to say that I recall reading something similar on a blog a long time ago, although I cannot remember the name of the writer.

mattgreenrocks 12y ago
Yeah. One imperfect step towards addressing this is having hard limits on the number of comments that can be made in a given time range. Of course, nobody wants to do this because then they would lose some of their traffic.
- yaddayadda 12y ago
  Occasionally a user is particularly invested in an online conversation for really valid reason, e.g. area of expertise, Show HN, etc. So having a hard limit in a large scale (x comments in an hour or y comments in a day, as opposed to z comments in 60 seconds) may actually abruptly lock-out a particularly valuable contributor.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> The real problem with online communities is that the people who are upvoted the most are the ones who spend the most time commenting. To the extent that this is really an issue, its quite easily addressed by using the average net upvotes rather than total net upvotes for whatever weighting, if any, the comment display system gives to poster score/karma/etc.(If you want to also give some weight to engagement without encouraging post frequency, you could accumulate a score using the average in each day or week, so duration of regular engagement would be rewarded, but high frequency would not.) Of course -- I think that to the extent that excessive influence by frequent commenters is an issue, its more because most of the volume of comments is going to come from them, independently of any reward system.

slvv 12y ago

> "When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, aggressive..." Wow. I can't say whether this is true or not, but how depressing. Instead of counting on this behaviour, what if we tried to change it? Kindness, respect, and general "give the other person the benefit of the doubt" attitudes could make a huge difference. I just can't get around the idea that not interacting with the same person means you can not care how you treat them... that's crazy.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> I just can't get around the idea that not interacting with the same person means you can not care how you treat them... that's crazy. Its actually quite rational. It may be immoral -- or at least amoral -- but its not crazy. One of the purposes of collective mutual benefit organizations -- labor unions, the state, etc. -- is to mitigate the effect of this by providing a manner in which a group of people can act and be perceived as an entity with which an actor will have to interact with in the future even when they may not have to do so with the particular individual.

tunesmith 12y ago

I forget the web page - I think from another HN reader - but they made the point that these challenges are the exact challenges that distributed computing wrestles with. For any problem set that a lot of resources are working with, how do you properly surface the most valuable results, how do you combine and summarize them, etc. There are a lot of discussion community sites that just try to pull in their own homegrown algorithms ("let's have a moderator!") but I suspect a lot of these experiences could be improved by reading up on distributed computing algorithms.

netcan 12y ago

I think part of the reason it that the communities finish talking about whatever it is they are talking about. When I started reading HN, a lot of the ideas that are common fare were new and interesting. Now, some are borderline cliche.

cjslep 12y ago

I agree with the general premise. However, I also believe there's probably a way to shift the threshold depending on the culture and community. When I was asked to be a moderator of brand-new (at the time) forums for a very popular Minecraft mod pack, it was being flooded with quite a large volume of people who would not adhere to some basic rules. The rules were quite simple and straightforward, but that didn't stop me and the owners of the site from straight banning large numbers of people. The pure shock of forcing the "Yes we will see you again, you are not anonymous, and your reputation matters" into the system caused a lot less posting activity to take place on the forums, but the quality of each post was well worth it. A lot of people got banned trying (and failing) to wrap their brains around this concept. The end result was I actually felt proud of helping shape an online community that was large, effective, and constructive. As it grew, so did the number of other moderators and that "critical point" kept shifting right, so we could have more users and still maintain a quality community. However, this requires a very proactive approach.

hellbreakslose 12y ago

Nice post, Well thats the cycle of life. Everything has an expiry date!

Theodores 12y ago
It is the same with pop records or bands however the music industry appreciates and understands that nothing is forever. People should apply this thinking to community sites and expect a cycle of life. Instead we have myspaces worth billions to then be worthless and Facebook where they don't see it coming. Much like pop records or bands there are some things that have a different life cycle. People still by records by that outfit that called themselves 'The Beatles' but there is no 'Beatlemania' any more.

suby 12y ago

The author hasn't been to reddit in years if he thinks that r/atheism and r/politics are still default subreddits.

jere 12y ago

Daydreaming here... so how about a community that funnels users into buckets automatically? Think of an HN where you only discuss an article with a pool of ~500 people instead of 80,000. When new users join, they're distributed to the smallest groups. Nobody is overwhelmed with an influx of noobs. And you might actually be able to start remembering the names of the active people in your group. Perhaps you could see top comments from other groups, but not interact with them directly.

jacquesm 12y ago
I've had some pretty extensive conversations around that theme with a bunch of other HN'ers (some of who have moved on in the meantime), and that's pretty much the solution we hit on. Keep only the +x and -x active users in view for you at any one time. One problem we foresaw with that approach is that it becomes hard not to have duplicate discussions or missing chunks of information. In the end we did not do anything with the idea but it was certainly interesting.
RKoutnik 12y ago
That's a rather interesting concept. My big issue is that I'd be missing the best content from other buckets. Perhaps content can 'emerge' from a bucket after garnering a certain % of support from the bucket?
- NaNaN 12y ago
  To avoid the Matthew effect, the best users should be re-distributed, too. -- still nice?
  - RKoutnik 12y ago
    If that was the case, I'd worry about the buckets becoming like German universities - the best minds can't get together, so we all lose out.
    - gwern 12y ago
      I don't think most HN users know anything at all about German universities, much less any bucketing they might do, so that's probably not the most helpful analogy.

incision 12y ago

>'The probability that I will interact with any one user ever again on a site like YouTube tends toward zero. I have no real incentive to be polite or to put much effort into anything I say.' My sense of a terrible 'community' like YouTube is a bit different. I've always had the impression it's more about performing and the size of the audience - more about votes and reactions than expected interactions. No matter how nasty or inane your opinions are, you can share them on a related YouTube video and receive anonymous validation from other people who agree with you. When you're feeling bad about yourself and want to lash out, you can post something vile and get a response. I believe this was a source of a lot of complaints about changes to the comment system. It hurt ones ability to receive instant gratification by dropping a comment on the top of the stack. In the bat analogy, upvotes/karma are a sort of secondary 'junk food' blood supply that costs the giver nothing and some bats don't care for it as they prefer real sustenance but others are addicted to it. The 'community' ends up as a circus of votefiends bludgeoning each other for another hit.

jusben1369 12y ago

"Decay" is a loaded word reflecting the author's bias. All communities change over time as they grow. Their culture then reflects the users. We may not like that community but clearly a lot of people do (after all these are the largest sub reddits we're talking about right?) This is sort of the "This neighborhood was so great until all the yuppy/hipsters moved in and the art stores were replaced with coffee shops serving $6 lattes" argument.

jacquesm 12y ago
One persons decay is anothers gentrification.
itsdevlin 12y ago
Don't necessarily agree with this point. If the total interaction for the community decreases with the influx of new users, and community abandonment > recruitment, the community hits decay. I will give you the value argument as a bias. The idea that "it's not as cool anymore" absolutely holds true, and imo is a more apples-to-apples comparison to gentrification.
tensafefrogs 12y ago
Agreed. Saying that communities decay is the same as saying pop music sucks because it appeals to the masses. Millions of people love that content and who are you to say whether they should enjoy it or not? We should be building better tools that can adapt and grow with the community. I wrote about this a couple of years ago, with a possible set of solutions: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba

jacquesm 12y ago

It took a while to find, this old kuro5hin article is a good read on the subject: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000 Titled "Attacked from within" it details the problems in scaling a community and community life-cycle very eloquently.

A_COMPUTER 12y ago
Oh, I remember that. This is the best thing ever written on the subject, but I think its conclusions are regularly ignored because people want to have their cake and eat it too, with regard to fostering vanity. Everyone wants the community but they still want to be the superstar in it.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

It is hard to appreciate the change in tenor the network experienced when AOL gave its users access to Usenet. I have never considered it in the context of the prisoner's dilemma as a one shot exercise but that certainly has an intuitive appeal. We see it here on HN of course, someone creates a new user account, makes a single low value snarky comment and then off to oblivion. An interesting counter example is twitter, which I've seen that as people become more invested in the reputation of their 'handle' the less ill considered their tweets seem to become. When that isn't the case that is also interesting.

protomyth 12y ago
It was a pretty big change in tenor depending on what group you were looking at. I will say the some groups (comp.lang.objective-c) had some seriously nasty trolls already. I remember getting pretty liberal with my killfile. I am not sure that was a good thing thinking about it.
vacri 12y ago
Twitter is a terrible place for conversation to take place. There is no capacity for nuance or well-reasoned thought. It's a site for announcements, not nuanced musing, as expected from a place where every comment has to be a soundbite. Occasionally there might be a two-way conversation that works well, but that's not the norm.

jds375 12y ago

Great article. That being said, seeing some proposed solutions to this problem would have been nice. One strategy that Reddit employs quite well is the Subreddit system. This creates smaller sub-communities that aren't victims of the 'large' community problem. Of course, overtime a subreddit becomes a default or gets too many subscribers... but it's still a decent solution. I think it'll be interesting to see how growth affects Hacker News. I'm still very impressed with the quality of the articles and comments (yes, there are some bad ones here and there, but compared to most sites HN is excellent)... I think the downvote threshold for HN has actually been quite successful in encouraging people to post useful comments. It gives a goal for people with low-karma to strive for, thus encouraging them to post better content. I think a more extensive reward system like this has potential for creating a better community.

mcphage 12y ago
> Of course, overtime a subreddit becomes a default or gets too many subscribers... but it's still a decent solution. And then it spawns off one or more new subreddits, based on the desires of the users. I feel that's a pretty good way to handle the situation.

ChrisNorstrom 12y ago

This fits perfect with what PG said in a Tech Crunch Interview in 2013 http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-news/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-new... ● "[Paul Graham] wanted to make Hacker News a place to recreate the way Reddit felt in the good old days" ● "He explains that [Hacker News] was community of insiders in the hacker world, and it has gradually been getting diluted." ● “That is what I spend all my time thinking about,” he says. ● He worries that Hacker News will become what he calls “an old crumbling building.” ● “The community has been in a perpetual but slow decline because the site is growing,” he says.

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

Maybe it's just a lot simpler: size and success attracts douchebags and morons. It's not limited to online communities. Cities, sports teams, rock bands, movies, you name it, you see it happen again and again. Success attracts the kind of people who act like a-holes in any context. And yes, I'm aware of the great irony of posting this rather superficial comment in this thread. But I'm not sure if I'm actually wrong...

YarnBall 12y ago

I agree with the author's thesis but I think other reasons apply to other communities. Ideally, you would like to ensure the "greatest good for the greatest number" in a community. Consequently, good or happiness in a community is measured according to the preferences of the majority sometimes to the detriment of the minority. That is why, relative to the number of more intellectually engaging posts, you will see more LOLCats and animated gifs on the front page of Reddit. As somebody on here mentioned many people go on the internet for leisure, and intelligent/civilized discourse for them does not fall under that header. As far as I know, HN was started to foster startups-tech community and I am optimistic because HN's subject matter is specific enough and the community concerned with this subject matter is small enough, for it not to devolve into another Reddit (meaning no offense to Reddit, I still visit there).

Relic22799 12y ago
"* you will see more LOLCats and animated gifs on the front page of Reddit.*" You'll see less of them these days. Reddit changed its default subreddit system last week and one of the big ones that got the boot was /r/AdviceAnimals.

steve_benjamins 12y ago

The solution (in so far as there is a solution) is to cultivate a culture. Large communities remain civil through culture. Last week I wrote a post called "How to Cultivate Culture" that received a good amount of attention (outside of Hacker News) about this: http://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/6-ways-to-cultivate-culture-on-a-website http://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/6-ways-to-cultivate-cu...

gedrap 12y ago

Regarding to HN, problem is that social proof takes a huge part in determining what gets on the front page. People check /new, see that some post already has 1 or 2 upvotes, checks it instead of some without any upvotes. The upvoted one gets even more upvotes (because more people are reading it), and it's on the homepage. A bunch of my submissions made the homepage and from what I've noticed, the threshold is about 7-10 upvotes in the first hour. So can we fairly say that a dozen of people decide what's on the homepage? Maybe. My suggestion: don't show upvotes in /new for 30mins after submission? As a trade off, a little time might get wasted on low quality submissions but maybe there would be more better quality submissions on the front page.

nkurz 12y ago
This is a good idea. There is a "Feature Request" link at the bottom of each page. Please resubmit this there so it is receives greater notice.
- gedrap 12y ago
  Done! Thanks for your comment :)

malloreon 12y ago

SomethingAwful is consistently high quality and has been for the 7.5 years since I discovered it. 190,000 users now, I think 90K in 2006. The secrets seem to be a) charging people $10 one time to join/post and view more than a few pages of a particular thread b) segmenting into different subforums - over time they become different communities within SA that have their own quirks. c) ruthless moderation that can and often does lead to posting probations and bans (requiring another $10 to reverse) In particular, the politics/history, sports, video games, and arts discussions are very good.

swombat 12y ago

Whilst I agree with the general thesis of the article, this paragraph seemed very distasteful to me: > There is no reason to trust people you will not interact with again in the future. There’s no incentive not to defect. At the end of my last relationship, our interactions became significantly less pleasant as it became more obvious that it was over – I would not have to deal with this person in the future, so why bother going through the motions of kindness? Without meaning to be rude or make an attack on the author's character, the author does sound like a bit of an asshole there. How about being nice to people because you're a nice person, rather than because you want to get something out of it? If you could murder someone and get away with it, would you? I wouldn't, because in abhor the idea of killing people. Similarly, I would act decently towards another human being even when I have no incentive to do so, simply because I am a decent human being and I don't like the idea of causing unnecessary pain and suffering to others. As they say, a gentleman remains a gentleman even in the gutter. If you need to be surrounded by other decent human beings to be decent, if being surrounded by jerks automatically reverts you to jerk behaviour, perhaps you're not a decent human being after all, only a chameleon sort of person who will do whatever they think they can get away with. I hope a majority of people here would behave the same way as me - decently, irrespective of the surroundings and likelihood of "getting caught". And there's the rub I guess - a community composed mostly of decent human beings will be less vulnerable to this effect than one composed mostly of selfish people who only act decently when they can see a tangible payoff. That may be another path to survival: find the assholes and keep them out, and then perhaps you can deal with growth more easily.

cortesoft 12y ago
Yes, I also felt very strongly about that. In my own life, I find kindness and compassion to be an intrinsic good; I am not kind because I am using game theory to attempt to maximize the returned kindness, I am kind because I get more pleasure out of being kind than the alternative. Even if I never interact with the person again, I feel happier after being kind to someone than if I am a jerk. I do worry for people who feel like the author of this article. I can't imagine how miserable it must be to only feel joy when other people are kind to you, and not the other way around. I guess I am lucky in that way, that I feel so much happiness when I share my kindness with someone else, even more so than when someone is kind to me; I am actually in control of my own kindness, so I am therefore also in control of my own happiness.

wmf 12y ago

I found this recent article about online harassment and moderation much more optimistic: http://www.wired.com/2014/05/fighting-online-harassment/ http://www.wired.com/2014/05/fighting-online-harassment/ (Primary source: http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-Player http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-... ) Even with 67 million users, the developers of League of Legends have apparently reduced misbehavior substantially using fairly simple (although non-obvious) techniques.

api 12y ago

I really like this for not defaulting to the standard, lazy, fallacy-of-self-exclusion explanation of "most people are dumb." The same effect seems to occur with large social movements. I've noted for many years that once anything becomes a "movement," it becomes shallow, trendy, and dishonest... even if the original seed of the movement had a good point in the beginning. Once it becomes big there is no longer any incentive for people not to abuse the movement as a marketing gimmick or a source of political power.

adventured 12y ago

"The development of trust and kindness between two people depends on the probability that they will interact in the future." Not true. Communities can - and should - use other incentive systems to encourage good behavior. 1) Point systems 2) Public shaming 3) bans / hell bans / abuse flagging / suspensions 4) various combinations The threat of taking things from people that they've earned, even if it's as silly as 'fake internet points,' can be an extremely powerful enforcer of behavior, given the system is set up properly.

orionblastar 12y ago

Two online communities that I had to leave because they became really mean and decayed over time was IWETHEY and KURO5HIN. Even Slashdot decayed and when Dice bought them out it was more about commercial stuff and less about technology and making cool stuff. Reddit is over-run with trolls on various sub-reddits they started out in /r/atheism as fake atheists trolling people and then spread to other sub-reddits. Mostly 12 year old kids who think it is funny to grief people.

TheEzEzz 12y ago

A potential solution: Implement a comment recommendation system. Based on comments you've liked and disliked, the system will push comments you would like to the top. The quality of the community you see is then completely up to you. If you like poop jokes, you'll see poop jokes. If you like pedantic attacks, you'll see pedantic attacks. And if you like insightful comments, you'll see insightful comments. As you stabilize on a community you like, you can start responding to their comments, and then they too will have the chance to vote on your comments. If they like you they'll start seeing more of you, and a micro-community will evolve naturally for free.

ewillbefull 12y ago
If you think about it, it's pretty much the same thing as twitter, except the social graph is built more implicitly. In exchange for a larger selection of relevant content, you have to sift through more noise. But it probably feels better to vote if you know your vote counts differently for some users. You're no longer just one number in a statistic, but part of a much more complicated ranking system. Best of all, your votes significantly affect your own experience on the website. A dynamic social graph like that would probably obviate the need for even categorizing content, let alone "jumping ship" when the community decays. There are some drawbacks though. If you implemented it in reddit/hacker news, there would no longer be a "front page of x" to serve as a symbolic milestone for your submission. Without context, "2000 upvotes" has ambiguous importance. Also, a different ranking system exists for each cluster in your social graph, which sounds like a fun engineering problem.

tensafefrogs 12y ago

I wrote a post a while back about how the design of your social tools can help solve this problem: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba If you look at sites that are based on following users or categories they are able to scale to much larger sizes without breaking down.

analog31 12y ago

>>> These locusts were AOL users. In September of 1993, the company granted Usenet access to their entire user base, which triggered an unending deluge of noobs into the Usenet community. Amusingly, I joined AOL in September of 1993. It was not long after I graduated and lost my university log-in, along with the e-mail address that came with it. I chose AOL for a simple reason: I could dial up anywhere in the country and keep the same e-mail address no matter where I lived. AOL also greatly simplified the process of using the Internet. I ran a small business via my AOL address. Each update to AOL software came via some promotion or other -- an insert in a magazine, or even a pile of AOL disks at the supermarket. At some point it became possible for an AOL user to access the Internet without the AOL software, e.g., by using mainstream e-mail and browser software.

socrates1998 12y ago

I am not sure if this has ever been done, but what if an online community grew to a certain size and then closed it's doors to new members? Could that community avoid the pitfalls of what the article is describing? I could see a place where enrollment closes at a certain point, then reopens once a person leaves or becomes inactive. I would actually like to see if this would work.

gojomo 12y ago

Some other influential writing on this subject: Clay Shirky: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem... Xianhang Zhang: "The Evaporative Cooling Effect" http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...

thereckoning 12y ago

There's a simpler explanation. The average person is not especially bright, funny, or articulate. The larger a community, the more it regresses to the mean.

known 12y ago

I'd say online communities "diverse", not diverge. E.g. http://i.imgur.com/4sftcoo.jpg http://i.imgur.com/4sftcoo.jpg