Comment by marvin
18 years ago
Posting good stories and comments won't help if the quality of the community at large is going downhill. And what else would the falling quality of the stories and comments be a symptom of? No amount of "following the guidelines" or "only posting interesting stories" by the regular community will help if there is a swarm of other users who don't give a fuck.
If this development persists, history dictates that the old regulars won't hang around for long, which is really sad.
It's such a pain in the ass to drift around the internet like nomads, leaving for new territory when the locusts come to consume the places you know and love..
For the record, I do my best: I submit new stories when I find them and produce (presumably) useful commentary. And it works, for now, but I'm not very hopeful as to what HN will look like in a year.
That seems to suggest the next system should be designed to expressly counter this effect. Perhaps, allow groups to form and close themselves off, while still remaining on the site? Move to a different subsite (instead of a whole new site)? This might be a little more successful than trying to filter submissions in some way for some nebulous "quality".
The "funny" thing is that all these problems are not new. They are all manifestation of Eternal September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September Even the Eternal September itself was a reflection of a problem that happened earlier when USENET has grown beyond size where most people knew each other and quality of conversation went down. Alas I am not able to find the links for it, it would be really nice to find those complains.
The other funny thing is that there is a well-known way to preserve the comunity - maintain very strict set of rules and punish all deviations by a singular authority (THE Moderator) and his minions. Fidonet used to work that way and it worked very well. It only fails when The Moderator loosens the grip for even short time - the place gets overrun and can not be taken back. The problem is that any moderator will have a moment of weakness and so Fidonet got entirely overrun in the end.
The more things change the more they stay the same.